Beauchamp’s Career

by George Meredith


Contents

 CHAPTER I. THE CHAMPION OF HIS COUNTRY
 CHAPTER II. UNCLE, NEPHEW, AND ANOTHER
 CHAPTER III. CONTAINS BARONIAL VIEWS OF THE PRESENT TIME
 CHAPTER IV. A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION
 CHAPTER V. RENÉE
 CHAPTER VI. LOVE IN VENICE
 CHAPTER VII. AN AWAKENING FOR BOTH
 CHAPTER VIII. A NIGHT ON THE ADRIATIC
 CHAPTER IX. MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS
 CHAPTER X. A SINGULAR COUNCIL
 CHAPTER XI. CAPTAIN BASKELETT
 CHAPTER XII. AN INTERVIEW WITH THE INFAMOUS DR. SHRAPNEL
 CHAPTER XIII. A SUPERFINE CONSCIENCE
 CHAPTER XIV. THE LEADING ARTICLE AND MR. TIMOTHY TURBOT
 CHAPTER XV. CECILIA HALKETT
 CHAPTER XVI. A PARTIAL DISPLAY OF BEAUCHAMP IN HIS COLOURS
 CHAPTER XVII. HIS FRIEND AND FOE
 CHAPTER XVIII. CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING
 CHAPTER XIX. LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS OF BEVISHAM
 CHAPTER XX. A DAY AT ITCHINCOPE
 CHAPTER XXI. THE QUESTION AS TO THE EXAMINATION OF THE WHIGS, AND THE
              FINE BLOW STRUCK BY MR. EVERARD ROMFREY
 CHAPTER XXII. THE DRIVE INTO BEVISHAM
 CHAPTER XXIII. TOURDESTELLE
 CHAPTER XXIV. HIS HOLIDAY
 CHAPTER XXV. THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOAT
 CHAPTER XXVI. MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM
 CHAPTER XXVII. A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION
 CHAPTER XXVIII. TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY’S HEART AND HER INTELLECT
 CHAPTER XXIX. THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP
 CHAPTER XXX. THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL
 CHAPTER XXXI. SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION
 CHAPTER XXXII. AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP’S FASHION
 CHAPTER XXXIII. THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM
 CHAPTER XXXIV. THE FACE OF RENÉE
 CHAPTER XXXV. THE RIDE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
 CHAPTER XXXVI. PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF MR. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
 CHAPTER XXXVII. CECILIA CONQUERED
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. LORD AVONLEY
 CHAPTER XXXIX. BETWEEN BEAUCHAMP AND CECILIA
 CHAPTER XL. A TRIAL OF HIM
 CHAPTER XLI. A LAME VICTORY
 CHAPTER XLII. THE TWO PASSIONS 
 CHAPTER XLIII. THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS
 CHAPTER XLIV. THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE
               TWO PASSIONS IN BEAUCHAMP
 CHAPTER XLV. A LITTLE PLOT AGAINST CECILIA
 CHAPTER XLVI. AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN
 CHAPTER XLVII. THE REFUSAL OF HIM
 CHAPTER XLVIII. OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY
 CHAPTER XLIX. A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLES
 CHAPTER L. AT THE COTTAGE ON THE COMMON
 CHAPTER LI. IN THE NIGHT
 CHAPTER LII. QUESTION OF A PILGRIMAGE AND AN ACT OF PENANCE
 CHAPTER LIII. THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
 CHAPTER LIV. THE FRUITS OF THE APOLOGY
 CHAPTER LV. WITHOUT LOVE
 CHAPTER LVI. THE LAST OF NEVIL BEAUCHAMP




CHAPTER I.
THE CHAMPION OF HIS COUNTRY


When young Nevil Beauchamp was throwing off his midshipman’s jacket for
a holiday in the garb of peace, we had across Channel a host of
dreadful military officers flashing swords at us for some critical
observations of ours upon their sovereign, threatening Afric’s fires
and savagery. The case occurred in old days now and again, sometimes,
upon imagined provocation, more furiously than at others. We were
unarmed, and the spectacle was distressing. We had done nothing except
to speak our minds according to the habit of the free, and such an
explosion appeared as irrational and excessive as that of a
powder-magazine in reply to nothing more than the light of a spark. It
was known that a valorous General of the Algerian wars proposed to make
a clean march to the capital of the British Empire at the head of ten
thousand men; which seems a small quantity to think much about, but
they wore wide red breeches blown out by Fame, big as her cheeks, and a
ten thousand of that sort would never think of retreating. Their
spectral advance on quaking London through Kentish hopgardens, Sussex
corn-fields, or by the pleasant hills of Surrey, after a gymnastic leap
over the riband of salt water, haunted many pillows. And now those
horrid shouts of the legions of Caesar, crying to the inheritor of an
invading name to lead them against us, as the origin of his title had
led the army of Gaul of old gloriously, scared sweet sleep. We saw them
in imagination lining the opposite shore; eagle and standard-bearers,
and _gallifers_, brandishing their fowls and their banners in a manner
to frighten the decorum of the universe. Where were our men?

The returns of the census of our population were oppressively
satisfactory, and so was the condition of our youth. We could row and
ride and fish and shoot, and breed largely: we were athletes with a
fine history and a full purse: we had first-rate sporting guns,
unrivalled park-hacks and hunters, promising babies to carry on the
renown of England to the next generation, and a wonderful Press, and a
Constitution the highest reach of practical human sagacity. But where
were our armed men? where our great artillery? where our proved
captains, to resist a sudden sharp trial of the national mettle? Where
was the first line of England’s defence, her navy? These were
questions, and Ministers were called upon to answer them. The Press
answered them boldly, with the appalling statement that we had no navy
and no army. At the most we could muster a few old ships, a couple of
experimental vessels of war, and twenty-five thousand soldiers
indifferently weaponed.

We were in fact as naked to the Imperial foe as the merely painted
Britons.

This being apprehended, by the aid of our own shortness of figures and
the agitated images of the red-breeched only waiting the signal to jump
and be at us, there ensued a curious exhibition that would be termed,
in simple language, writing to the newspapers, for it took the outward
form of letters: in reality, it was the deliberate saddling of our
ancient nightmare of Invasion, putting the postillion on her, and
trotting her along the high-road with a winding horn to rouse old
Panic. Panic we will, for the sake of convenience, assume to be of the
feminine gender, and a spinster, though properly she should be classed
with the large mixed race of mental and moral neuters which are the
bulk of comfortable nations. She turned in her bed at first like the
sluggard of the venerable hymnist: but once fairly awakened, she
directed a stare toward the terrific foreign contortionists, and became
in an instant all stormy nightcap and fingers starving for the
bell-rope. Forthwith she burst into a series of shrieks, howls, and
high piercing notes that caused even the parliamentary Opposition, in
the heat of an assault on a parsimonious Government, to abandon its
temporary advantage and be still awhile. Yet she likewise performed her
part with a certain deliberation and method, as if aware that it was a
part she had to play in the composition of a singular people. She did a
little mischief by dropping on the stock-markets; in other respects she
was harmless, and, inasmuch as she established a subject for
conversation, useful.

Then, lest she should have been taken too seriously, the Press, which
had kindled, proceeded to extinguish her with the formidable engines
called leading articles, which fling fire or water, as the occasion may
require. It turned out that we had ships ready for launching, and
certain regiments coming home from India; hedges we had, and a spirited
body of yeomanry; and we had pluck and patriotism, the father and
mother of volunteers innumerable. Things were not so bad.

Panic, however, sent up a plaintive whine. What country had anything
like our treasures to defend? countless riches, beautiful women, an
inviolate soil! True, and it must be done. Ministers were
authoritatively summoned to set to work immediately. They replied that
they had been at work all the time, and were at work now. They could
assure the country, that though they flourished no trumpets, they
positively guaranteed the safety of our virgins and coffers.

Then the people, rather ashamed, abused the Press for unreasonably
disturbing them. The Press attacked old Panic and stripped her naked.
Panic, with a desolate scream, arraigned the parliamentary Opposition
for having inflated her to serve base party purposes. The Opposition
challenged the allegations of Government, pointed to the trimness of
army and navy during its term of office, and proclaimed itself
watch-dog of the country, which is at all events an office of a kind.
Hereupon the ambassador of yonder ireful soldiery let fall a word,
saying, by the faith of his Master, there was no necessity for
watch-dogs to bark; an ardent and a reverent army had but fancied its
beloved chosen Chief insulted; the Chief and chosen held them in; he,
despite obloquy, discerned our merits and esteemed us.

So, then, Panic, or what remained of her, was put to bed again. The
Opposition retired into its kennel growling. The People coughed like a
man of two minds, doubting whether he has been divinely inspired or has
cut a ridiculous figure. The Press interpreted the cough as a warning
to Government; and Government launched a big ship with hurrahs, and
ordered the recruiting-sergeant to be seen conspicuously.

And thus we obtained a moderate reinforcement of our arms.

It was not arrived at by connivance all round, though there was a look
of it. Certainly it did not come of accident, though there was a look
of that as well. Nor do we explain much of the secret by attributing it
to the working of a complex machinery. The housewife’s remedy of a good
shaking for the invalid who will not arise and dance away his gout,
partly illustrates the action of the Press upon the country: and
perhaps the country shaken may suffer a comparison with the family
chariot of the last century, built in a previous one, commodious,
furnished agreeably, being all that the inside occupants could require
of a conveyance, until the report of horsemen crossing the heath at a
gallop sets it dishonourably creaking and complaining in rapid motion,
and the squire curses his miserly purse that would not hire a guard,
and his dame says, I told you so!—Foolhardy man, to suppose, because we
have constables in the streets of big cities, we have dismissed the
highwayman to limbo. And here he is, and he will cost you fifty times
the sum you would have laid out to keep him at a mile’s respectful
distance! But see, the wretch is bowing: he smiles at our carriage, and
tells the coachman that he remembers he has been our guest, and really
thinks we need not go so fast. He leaves word for you, sir, on your
peril to denounce him on another occasion from the magisterial Bench,
for that albeit he is a gentleman of the road, he has a mission to
right society, and succeeds legitimately to that bold Good Robin Hood
who fed the poor.—Fresh from this polite encounter, the squire vows
money for his personal protection: and he determines to speak his
opinion of Sherwood’s latest captain as loudly as ever. That he will, I
do not say. It might involve a large sum per annum.

Similes are very well in their way. None can be sufficient in this case
without levelling a finger at the taxpayer—nay, directly mentioning
him. He is the key of our ingenuity. He pays his dues; he will not pay
the additional penny or two wanted of him, that we may be a step or two
ahead of the day we live in, unless he is frightened. But scarcely
anything less than the wild alarum of a tocsin will frighten him.
Consequently the tocsin has to be sounded; and the effect is woeful
past measure: his hugging of his army, his kneeling on the shore to his
navy, his implorations of his yeomanry and his hedges, are sad to note.
His bursts of pot-valiancy (the male side of the maiden Panic within
his bosom) are awful to his friends. Particular care must be taken
after he has begun to cool and calculate his chances of security, that
he do not gather to him a curtain of volunteers and go to sleep again
behind them; for they cost little in proportion to the much they
pretend to be to him. Patriotic taxpayers doubtless exist: prophetic
ones, provident ones, do not. At least we show that we are wanting in
them. The taxpayer of a free land taxes himself, and his disinclination
for the bitter task, save under circumstances of screaming urgency—as
when the night-gear and bed-linen of old convulsed Panic are like the
churned Channel sea in the track of two hundred hostile steamboats, let
me say—is of the kind the gentle schoolboy feels when death or an
expedition has relieved him of his tyrant, and he is entreated
notwithstanding to go to his books.

Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and
bleeding is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity comes of native
sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct
labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others,
I cannot express an opinion. I give you the position of the country
undisturbed by any moralizings of mine. The youth I introduce to you
will rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that he was born with
so extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he thought all
things else of mean importance in comparison: and our union is one in
which, following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint
for you what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this
life, and even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough,
when unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction
at a single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the
ideas of men, which are—it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms—are
actually the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites:
these are my theme; and may it be my fortune to keep them at bloodheat,
and myself calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate Egypt! He sits there
waiting for the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical than you
think. I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the
sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you
have an image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it
good to aim at, if at the same time I may keep my characters at
blood-heat. I shoot my arrows at a mark that is pretty certain to
return them to me. And as to perfect success, I should be like the
panic-stricken shopkeepers in my alarm at it; for I should believe that
genii of the air fly above our tree-tops between us and the
incognizable spheres, catching those ambitious shafts they deem it a
promise of fun to play pranks with.

Young Mr. Beauchamp at that period of the panic had not the slightest
feeling for the taxpayer. He was therefore unable to penetrate the
mystery of our roundabout way of enlivening him. He pored over the
journals in perplexity, and talked of his indignation nightly to his
pretty partners at balls, who knew not they were lesser Andromedas of
his dear Andromeda country, but danced and chatted and were gay, and
said they were sure he would defend them. The men he addressed were
civil. They listened to him, sometimes with smiles and sometimes with
laughter, but approvingly, liking the lad’s quick spirit. They were
accustomed to the machinery employed to give our land a shudder and to
soothe it, and generally remarked that it meant nothing. His uncle
Everard, and his uncle’s friend Stukely Culbrett, expounded the nature
of Frenchmen to him, saying that they were uneasy when not periodically
thrashed; it would be cruel to deny them their crow beforehand; and so
the pair of gentlemen pooh-poohed the affair; agreeing with him,
however, that we had no great reason to be proud of our appearance, and
the grounds they assigned for this were the activity and the prevalence
of the ignoble doctrines of Manchester—a power whose very existence was
unknown to Mr. Beauchamp. He would by no means allow the burden of our
national disgrace to be cast on one part of the nation. We were
insulted, and all in a poultry-flutter, yet no one seemed to feel it
but himself! Outside the Press and Parliament, which must necessarily
be the face we show to the foreigner, absolute indifference reigned.
Navy men and red-coats were willing to join him or anybody in sneers at
a clipping and paring miserly Government, but they were insensible to
the insult, the panic, the startled-poultry show, the shame of our
exhibition of ourselves in Europe. It looked as if the blustering
French Guard were to have it all their own way. And what would they,
what could they but, think of us! He sat down to write them a
challenge.

He is not the only Englishman who has been impelled by a youthful
chivalry to do that. He is perhaps the youngest who ever did it, and
consequently there were various difficulties to be overcome. As regards
his qualifications for addressing Frenchmen, a year of his
prae-neptunal time had been spent in their capital city for the purpose
of acquiring French of Paris, its latest refinements of pronunciation
and polish, and the art of conversing. He had read the French tragic
poets and Molière; he could even relish the Gallic-classic—“Qu’il
mourut!” and he spoke French passably, being quite beyond the Bullish
treatment of the tongue. Writing a letter in French was a different
undertaking. The one he projected bore no resemblance to an ordinary
letter. The briefer the better, of course; but a tone of dignity was
imperative, and the tone must be individual, distinctive, Nevil
Beauchamp’s, though not in his native language. First he tried his
letter in French, and lost sight of himself completely. “Messieurs de
la Garde Française,” was a good beginning; the remainder gave him a
false air of a masquerader, most uncomfortable to see; it was Nevil
Beauchamp in moustache and imperial, and bagbreeches badly fitting. He
tried English, which was really himself, and all that heart could
desire, supposing he addressed a body of midshipmen just a little
loftily. But the English, when translated, was bald and blunt to the
verge of offensiveness.

“GENTLEMEN OF THE FRENCH GUARD,
    “I take up the glove you have tossed us. I am an Englishman. That
    will do for a reason.”

This might possibly pass with the gentlemen of the English Guard. But
read:

“MESSIEURS DE LA GARDE FRANÇAISE,
    “J’accepte votre gant. Je suis Anglais. La raison est suffisante.”

And imagine French Guardsmen reading it!

Mr. Beauchamp knew the virtue of punctiliousness in epithets and
phrases of courtesy toward a formal people, and as the officers of the
French Guard were gentlemen of birth, he would have them to perceive in
him their equal at a glance. On the other hand, a bare excess of
phrasing distorted him to a likeness of Mascarille playing Marquis. How
to be English and think French! The business was as laborious as if he
had started on the rough sea of the Channel to get at them in an open
boat.

The lady governing his uncle Everard’s house, Mrs. Rosamund Culling,
entered his room and found him writing with knitted brows. She was
young, that is, she was not in her middleage; and they were the dearest
of friends; each had given the other proof of it. Nevil looked up and
beheld her lifted finger.

“You are composing a love-letter, Nevil!” The accusation sounded like
irony.

“No,” said he, puffing; “I wish I were.”

“What can it be, then?”

He thrust pen and paper a hand’s length on the table, and gazed at her.

“My dear Nevil, is it really anything serious?” said she.

“I am writing French, ma’am.”

“Then I may help you. It must be very absorbing, for you did not hear
my knock at your door.”

Now, could he trust her? The widow of a British officer killed nobly
fighting for his country in India, was a person to be relied on for
active and burning sympathy in a matter that touched the country’s
honour. She was a woman, and a woman of spirit. Men had not pleased him
of late. Something might be hoped from a woman.

He stated his occupation, saying that if she would assist him in his
French she would oblige him; the letter must be written and must go.
This was uttered so positively that she bowed her head, amused by the
funny semi-tone of defiance to the person to whom he confided the
secret. She had humour, and was ravished by his English boyishness,
with the novel blush of the heroical-nonsensical in it.

Mrs. Culling promised him demurely that she would listen, objecting
nothing to his plan, only to his French.

“Messieurs de la Garde Française!” he commenced.

Her criticism followed swiftly.

“I think you are writing to the Garde Impériale.”

He admitted his error, and thanked her warmly.

“Messieurs de la Garde Impériale!”

“Does not that,” she said, “include the non-commissioned officers, the
privates, and the cooks, of all the regiments?”

He could scarcely think that, but thought it provoking the French had
no distinctive working title corresponding to gentlemen, and suggested
“Messieurs les Officiers”: which might, Mrs. Culling assured him,
comprise the barbers. He frowned, and she prescribed his writing,
“Messieurs les Colonels de la Garde Impériale.” This he set down. The
point was that a stand must be made against the flood of sarcasms and
bullyings to which the country was exposed in increasing degrees, under
a belief that we would fight neither in the mass nor individually.
Possibly, if it became known that the colonels refused to meet a
midshipman, the gentlemen of our Household troops would advance a step.

Mrs. Culling’s adroit efforts to weary him out of his project were
unsuccessful. He was too much on fire to know the taste of absurdity.

Nevil repeated what he had written in French, and next the English of
what he intended to say.

The lady conscientiously did her utmost to reconcile the two languages.
She softened his downrightness, passed with approval his compliments to
France and the ancient high reputation of her army, and, seeing that a
loophole was left for them to apologize, asked how many French colonels
he wanted to fight.

“I do not _want_, ma’am,” said Nevil.

He had simply taken up the glove they had again flung at our feet: and
he had done it to stop the incessant revilings, little short of
positive contempt, which we in our indolence exposed ourselves to from
the foreigner, particularly from Frenchmen, whom he liked; and
precisely because he liked them he insisted on forcing them to respect
us. Let his challenge be accepted, and he would find backers. He knew
the stuff of Englishmen: they only required an example.

“French officers are skilful swordsmen,” said Mrs. Culling. “My husband
has told me they will spend hours of the day thrusting and parrying.
They are used to duelling.”

“We,” Nevil answered, “don’t get apprenticed to the shambles to learn
our duty on the field. Duelling is, I know, sickening folly. We go too
far in pretending to despise every insult pitched at us. A man may do
for his country what he wouldn’t do for himself.”

Mrs. Culling gravely said she hoped that bloodshed would be avoided,
and Mr. Beauchamp nodded.

She left him hard at work.

He was a popular boy, a favourite of women, and therefore full of
engagements to Balls and dinners. And he was a modest boy, though his
uncle encouraged him to deliver his opinions freely and argue with men.
The little drummer attached to wheeling columns thinks not more of
himself because his short legs perform the same strides as the
grenadiers’; he is happy to be able to keep the step; and so was Nevil;
and if ever he contradicted a senior, it was in the interests of the
country. Veneration of heroes, living and dead, kept down his conceit.
He worshipped devotedly. From an early age he exacted of his flattering
ladies that they must love his hero. Not to love his hero was to be
strangely in error, to be in need of conversion, and he proselytized
with the ardour of the Moslem. His uncle Everard was proud of his good
looks, fire, and nonsense, during the boy’s extreme youth. He traced
him by cousinships back to the great Earl Beauchamp of Froissart, and
would have it so; and he would have spoilt him had not the young
fellow’s mind been possessed by his reverence for men of deeds. How
could he think of himself, who had done nothing, accomplished nothing,
so long as he brooded on the images of signal Englishmen whose names
were historic for daring, and the strong arm, and artfulness, all given
to the service of the country?—men of a magnanimity overcast with
simplicity, which Nevil held to be pure insular English; our type of
splendid manhood, not discoverable elsewhere. A method of enraging him
was to distinguish one or other of them as Irish, Scottish, or
Cambrian. He considered it a dismemberment of the country. And
notwithstanding the pleasure he had in uniting in his person the strong
red blood of the chivalrous Lord Beauchamp with the hard and tenacious
Romfrey blood, he hated the title of Norman. We are English—British, he
said. A family resting its pride on mere ancestry provoked his
contempt, if it did not show him one of his men. He had also a
disposition to esteem lightly the family which, having produced a man,
settled down after that effort for generations to enjoy the country’s
pay. Boys are unjust; but Nevil thought of the country mainly, arguing
that we should not accept the country’s money for what we do not
ourselves perform. These traits of his were regarded as characteristics
hopeful rather than the reverse; none of his friends and relatives
foresaw danger in them. He was a capital boy for his elders to trot out
and banter.

Mrs. Rosamund Culling usually went to his room to see him and doat on
him before he started on his rounds of an evening. She suspected that
his necessary attention to his toilet would barely have allowed him
time to finish his copy of the letter. Certain phrases had bothered
him. The thrice recurrence of “ma patrie” jarred on his ear.
“Sentiments” afflicted his acute sense of the declamatory twice. “C’est
avec les sentiments du plus profond regret” : and again, “Je suis bien
sûr que vous comprendrez mes sentiments, et m’accorderez l’honneur que
je réclame au nom de ma patrie outragée.” The word “patrie” was
broadcast over the letter, and “honneur” appeared four times, and a
more delicate word to harp on than the others!

“Not to Frenchmen,” said his friend Rosamund. “I would put ‘Je suis
convaincu’: it is not so familiar.”

“But I have written out the fair copy, ma’am, and that alteration seems
a trifle.”

“I would copy it again and again, Nevil, to get it right.”

“No: I’d rather see it off than have it right,” said Nevil, and he
folded the letter.

How the deuce to address it, and what direction to write on it, were
further difficulties. He had half a mind to remain at home to conquer
them by excogitation.

Rosamund urged him not to break his engagement to dine at the
Halketts’, where perhaps from his friend Colonel Halkett, who would
never imagine the reason for the inquiry, he might learn how a letter
to a crack French regiment should be addressed and directed.

This proved persuasive, and as the hour was late Nevil had to act on
her advice in a hurry.

His uncle Everard enjoyed a perusal of the manuscript in his absence.




CHAPTER II.
UNCLE, NEPHEW, AND ANOTHER


The Honourable Everard Romfrey came of a race of fighting earls,
toughest of men, whose high, stout, Western castle had weathered our
cyclone periods of history without changeing hands more than once, and
then but for a short year or two, as if to teach the original
possessors the wisdom of inclining to the stronger side. They had a
queen’s chamber in it, and a king’s; and they stood well up against the
charge of having dealt darkly with the king. He died among them—how has
not been told. We will not discuss the conjectures here. A savour of
North Sea foam and ballad pirates hangs about the early chronicles of
the family. Indications of an ancestry that had lived between the wave
and the cloud were discernible in their notions of right and wrong. But
a settlement on solid earth has its influences. They were chivalrous
knights bannerets, and leaders in the tented field, paying and taking
fair ransom for captures; and they were good landlords, good masters
blithely followed to the wars. Sing an old battle of Normandy, Picardy,
Gascony, and you celebrate deeds of theirs. At home they were vexatious
neighbours to a town of burghers claiming privileges: nor was it
unreasonable that the Earl should flout the pretensions of the town to
read things for themselves, documents, titleships, rights, and the
rest. As well might the flat plain boast of seeing as far as the
pillar. Earl and town fought the fight of Barons and Commons in
epitome. The Earl gave way; the Barons gave way. Mighty men may thrash
numbers for a time; in the end the numbers will be thrashed into the
art of beating their teachers. It is bad policy to fight the odds inch
by inch. Those primitive school masters of the million liked it, and
took their pleasure in that way. The Romfreys did not breed warriors
for a parade at Court; wars, though frequent, were not constant, and
they wanted occupation: they may even have felt that they were bound in
no common degree to the pursuit of an answer to what may be called the
parent question of humanity: Am I thy master, or thou mine? They put it
to lords of other castles, to town corporations, and sometimes brother
to brother: and notwithstanding that the answer often unseated and once
discastled them, they swam back to their places, as born warriors,
urged by a passion for land, are almost sure to do; are indeed quite
sure, so long as they multiply sturdily, and will never take no from
Fortune. A family passion for land, that survives a generation, is as
effective as genius in producing the object it conceives; and through
marriages and conflicts, the seizure of lands, and brides bearing land,
these sharp-feeding eagle-eyed earls of Romfrey spied few spots within
their top tower’s wide circle of the heavens not their own.

It is therefore manifest that they had the root qualities, the prime
active elements, of men in perfection, and notably that appetite to
flourish at the cost of the weaker, which is the blessed
exemplification of strength, and has been man’s cheerfulest
encouragement to fight on since his comparative subjugation (on the
whole, it seems complete) of the animal world. By-and-by the struggle
is transferred to higher ground, and we begin to perceive how much we
are indebted to the fighting spirit. Strength is the brute form of
truth. No conspicuously great man was born of the Romfreys, who were
better served by a succession of able sons. They sent undistinguished
able men to army and navy—lieutenants given to be critics of their
captains, but trustworthy for their work. In the later life of the
family, they preferred the provincial state of splendid squires to
Court and political honours. They were renowned shots, long-limbed
stalking sportsmen in field and bower, fast friends, intemperate
enemies, handsome to feminine eyes, resembling one another in build,
and mostly of the Northern colour, or betwixt the tints, with an
hereditary nose and mouth that cried Romfrey from faces thrice diluted
in cousinships.

The Hon. Everard (Stephen Denely Craven Romfrey), third son of the late
Earl, had some hopes of the title, and was in person a noticeable
gentleman, in mind a mediaeval baron, in politics a crotchety
unintelligible Whig. He inherited the estate of Holdesbury, on the
borders of Hampshire and Wilts, and espoused that of Steynham in
Sussex, where he generally resided. His favourite in the family had
been the Lady Emily, his eldest sister, who, contrary to the advice of
her other brothers and sisters, had yielded her hand to his not wealthy
friend, Colonel Richard Beauchamp. After the death of Nevil’s parents,
he adopted the boy, being himself childless, and a widower.
Childlessness was the affliction of the family. Everard, having no son,
could hardly hope that his brother the Earl, and Craven, Lord Avonley,
would have one, for he loved the prospect of the title. Yet, as there
were no cousins of the male branch extant, the lack of an heir was a
serious omission, and to become the Earl of Romfrey, and be the last
Earl of Romfrey, was a melancholy thought, however brilliant. So sinks
the sun: but he could not desire the end of a great day. At one time he
was a hot Parliamentarian, calling himself a Whig, called by the Whigs
a Radical, called by the Radicals a Tory, and very happy in fighting
them all round. This was during the decay of his party, before the
Liberals were defined. A Liberal deprived him of the seat he had held
for fifteen years, and the clearness of his understanding was obscured
by that black vision of popular ingratitude which afflicts the free
fighting man yet more than the malleable public servant. The latter has
a clerkly humility attached to him like a second nature, from his habit
of doing as others bid him: the former smacks a voluntarily sweating
forehead and throbbing wounds for witness of his claim upon your
palpable thankfulness. It is an insult to tell him that he fought for
his own satisfaction. Mr. Romfrey still called himself a Whig, though
it was Whig mean vengeance on account of his erratic vote and voice on
two or three occasions that denied him a peerage and a seat in haven.
Thither let your good sheep go, your echoes, your wag-tail dogs, your
wealthy pursy manufacturers! He decried the attractions of the sublimer
House, and laughed at the transparent Whiggery of his party in
replenishing it from the upper shoots of the commonalty: “Dragging it
down to prop it up! swamping it to keep it swimming!” he said.

He was nevertheless a vehement supporter of that House. He stood for
King, Lords, and Commons, in spite of his personal grievances, harping
the triad as vigorously as bard of old Britain. Commons he added out of
courtesy, or from usage or policy, or for emphasis, or for the sake of
the Constitutional number of the Estates of the realm, or it was
because he had an intuition of the folly of omitting them; the same, to
some extent, that builders have regarding bricks when they plan a
fabric. Thus, although King and Lords prove the existence of Commons in
days of the political deluge almost syllogistically, the example of not
including one of the Estates might be imitated, and Commons and King do
not necessitate the conception of an intermediate third, while Lords
and Commons suggest the decapitation of the leading figure. The united
three, however, no longer cast reflections on one another, and were an
assurance to this acute politician that his birds were safe. He
preserved game rigorously, and the deduction was the work of instinct
with him. To his mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and
of a man’s right to hold his own; and so delicately did he think the
country poised, that an attack on them threatened the structure of
justice. The three conjoined Estates were therefore his head
gamekeepers; their duty was to back him against the poacher, if they
would not see the country tumble. As to his under-gamekeepers, he was
their intimate and their friend, saying, with none of the misanthropy
which proclaims the virtues of the faithful dog to the confusion of
humankind, he liked their company better than that of his equals, and
learnt more from them. They also listened deferentially to their
instructor.

The conversation he delighted in most might have been going on in any
century since the Conquest. Grant him his not unreasonable argument
upon his property in game, he was a liberal landlord. No tenants were
forced to take his farms. He dragged none by the collar. He gave them
liberty to go to Australia, Canada, the Americas, if they liked. He
asked in return to have the liberty to shoot on his own grounds, and
rear the marks for his shot, treating the question of indemnification
as a gentleman should. Still there were grumbling tenants. He swarmed
with game, and, though he was liberal, his hares and his birds were
immensely destructive: computation could not fix the damage done by
them. Probably the farmers expected them not to eat. “There are two
parties to a bargain,” said Everard, “and one gets the worst of it. But
if he was never obliged to make it, where’s his right to complain?” Men
of sense rarely obtain satisfactory answers: they are provoked to
despise their kind. But the poacher was another kind of vermin than the
stupid tenant. Everard did him the honour to hate him, and twice in a
fray had he collared his ruffian, and subsequently sat in condemnation
of the wretch: for he who can attest a villany is best qualified to
punish it. Gangs from the metropolis found him too determined and alert
for their sport. It was the factiousness of here and there an unbroken
young scoundrelly colt poacher of the neighbourhood, a born thief, a
fellow damned in an inveterate taste for game, which gave him
annoyance. One night he took Master Nevil out with him, and they hunted
down a couple of sinners that showed fight against odds. Nevil
attempted to beg them off because of their boldness. “I don’t set my
traps for nothing,” said his uncle, silencing him. But the boy
reflected that his uncle was perpetually lamenting the cowed spirit of
the common English-formerly such fresh and merry men! He touched
Rosamund Culling’s heart with his description of their attitudes when
they stood resisting and bawling to the keepers, “Come on we’ll die for
it.” They did not die. Everard explained to the boy that he could have
killed them, and was contented to have sent them to gaol for a few
weeks. Nevil gaped at the empty magnanimity which his uncle presented
to him as a remarkably big morsel. At the age of fourteen he was
despatched to sea.

He went unwillingly; not so much from an objection to a naval life as
from a wish, incomprehensible to grown men and boys, and especially to
his cousin, Cecil Baskelett, that he might remain at school and learn.
“The fellow would like to be a parson!” Everard said in disgust. No
parson had ever been known of in the Romfrey family, or in the
Beauchamp. A legend of a parson that had been a tutor in one of the
Romfrey houses, and had talked and sung blandly to a damsel of the
blood—degenerate maid—to receive a handsome trouncing for his pains,
instead of the holy marriage-tie he aimed at, was the only connection
of the Romfreys with the parsonry, as Everard called them. He
attributed the boy’s feeling to the influence of his great-aunt
Beauchamp, who would, he said, infallibly have made a parson of him.
“I’d rather enlist for a soldier,” Nevil said, and he ceased to dream
of rebellion, and of his little property of a few thousand pounds in
the funds to aid him in it. He confessed to his dear friend Rosamund
Culling that he thought the parsons happy in having time to read
history. And oh, to feel for certain _which_ side was the wrong side in
our Civil War, so that one should not hesitate in choosing! Such
puzzles are never, he seemed to be aware, solved in a midshipman’s
mess. He hated bloodshed, and was guilty of the “cotton-spinners’
babble,” abhorred of Everard, in alluding to it. Rosamund liked him for
his humanity; but she, too, feared he was a slack Romfrey when she
heard him speak in precocious contempt of glory. Somewhere, somehow, he
had got hold of Manchester sarcasms concerning glory: a weedy word of
the newspapers had been sown in his bosom perhaps. He said: “I don’t
care to win glory; I know all about that; I’ve seen an old hat in the
Louvre.” And he would have had her to suppose that he had looked on the
campaigning head-cover of Napoleon simply as a shocking bad, bald,
brown-rubbed old _tricorne_ rather than as the nod of extinction to
thousands, the great orb of darkness, the still-trembling gloomy
quiver—the brain of the lightnings of battles.

Now this boy nursed no secret presumptuous belief that he was fitted
for the walks of the higher intellect; he was not having his impudent
boy’s fling at superiority over the superior, as here and there a
subtle-minded vain juvenile will; nor was he a parrot repeating a line
from some Lancastrian pamphlet. He really disliked war and the sword;
and scorning the prospect of an idle life, confessing that his
abilities barely adapted him for a sailor’s, he was opposed to the
career opened to him almost to the extreme of shrinking and terror. Or
that was the impression conveyed to a not unsympathetic hearer by his
forlorn efforts to make himself understood, which were like the
tappings of the stick of a blind man mystified by his sense of touch at
wrong corners. His bewilderment and speechlessness were a comic
display, tragic to him.

Just as his uncle Everard predicted, he came home from his first voyage
a pleasant sailor lad. His features, more than handsome to a woman, so
mobile they were, shone of sea and spirit, the chance lights of the
sea, and the spirit breathing out of it. As to war and bloodshed, a
man’s first thought must be his country, young Jacket remarked, and
_Ich dien_ was the best motto afloat. Rosamund noticed the peculiarity
of the books he selected for his private reading. They were not boys’
books, books of adventure and the like. His favourite author was one
writing of Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either
early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed;
a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an
appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements
running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall,
learned dictionary words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents
falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the
pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical
agitation in the mind and the joints. This was its effect on the lady.
To her the incomprehensible was the abominable, for she had our
country’s high critical feeling; but he, while admitting that he could
not quite master it, liked it. He had dug the book out of a
bookseller’s shop in Malta, captivated by its title, and had, since the
day of his purchase, gone at it again and again, getting nibbles of
golden meaning by instalments, as with a solitary pick in a very dark
mine, until the illumination of an idea struck him that there was a
great deal more in the book than there was in himself. This was
sufficient to secure the devoted attachment of young Mr. Beauchamp.
Rosamund sighed with apprehension to think of his unlikeness to boys
and men among his countrymen in some things. Why should he hug a book
he owned he could not quite comprehend? He said he liked a bone in his
mouth; and it was natural wisdom, though unappreciated by women. A bone
in a boy’s mind for him to gnaw and worry, corrects the vagrancies and
promotes the healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or not.
Supposing it furnishes only dramatic entertainment in that usually
vacant tenement, or powder-shell, it will be of service.

Nevil proposed to her that her next present should be the entire list
of his beloved Incomprehensible’s published works, and she promised,
and was not sorry to keep her promise dangling at the skirts of memory,
to drop away in time. For that fire-and-smoke writer dedicated volumes
to the praise of a regicide. Nice reading for her dear boy! Some weeks
after Nevil was off again, she abused herself for her half-hearted love
of him, and would have given him anything—the last word in favour of
the Country versus the royal Martyr, for example, had he insisted on
it. She gathered, bit by bit, that he had dashed at his big blustering
cousin Cecil to vindicate her good name. The direful youths fought in
the Steynham stables, overheard by the grooms. Everard received a fine
account of the tussle from these latter, and Rosamund, knowing him to
be of the order of gentlemen who, whatsoever their sins, will at all
costs protect a woman’s delicacy, and a dependant’s, man or woman, did
not fear to have her ears shocked in probing him on the subject.

Everard was led to say that Nevil’s cousins were bedevilled with
womanfolk.

From which Rosamund perceived that women had been at work; and if so,
it was upon the business of the scandal-monger; and if so, Nevil fought
his cousin to protect her good name from a babbler of the family
gossip.

She spoke to Stukely Culbrett, her dead husband’s friend, to whose
recommendation she was indebted for her place in Everard Romfrey’s
household.

“Nevil behaved like a knight, I hear.”

“Your beauty was disputed,” said he, “and Nevil knocked the blind man
down for not being able to see.”

She thought, “Not my beauty! Nevil struck his cousin on behalf of the
only fair thing I have left to me!”

This was a moment with her when many sensations rush together and form
a knot in sensitive natures. She had been very good-looking. She was
good-looking still, but she remembered the bloom of her looks in her
husband’s days (the tragedy of the mirror is one for a woman to write:
I am ashamed to find myself smiling while the poor lady weeps), she
remembered his praises, her pride; his death in battle, her anguish:
then, on her strange entry to this house, her bitter wish to be older;
and then, the oppressive calm of her recognition of her wish’s
fulfilment, the heavy drop to dead earth, when she could say, or
pretend to think she could say—I look old enough: will they tattle of
me now? Nevil’s championship of her good name brought her history
spinning about her head, and threw a finger of light on her real
position. In that she saw the slenderness of her hold on respect, as
well as felt her personal stainlessness. The boy warmed her chill
widowhood. It was written that her, second love should be of the
pattern of mother’s love. She loved him hungrily and jealously, always
in fear for him when he was absent, even anxiously when she had him
near. For some cause, born, one may fancy, of the hour of her love’s
conception, his image in her heart was steeped in tears. She was not,
happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling, and humour
preserved her from excesses of sentiment.




CHAPTER III.
CONTAINS BARONIAL VIEWS OF THE PRESENT TIME


Upon the word of honour of Rosamund, the letter to the officers of the
French Guard was posted.

“Post it, post it,” Everard said, on her consulting him, with the
letter in her hand. “Let the fellow stand his luck.” It was addressed
to the Colonel of the First Regiment of the Imperial Guard, Paris. That
superscription had been suggested by Colonel Halkett. Rosamund was in
favour of addressing it to Versailles, Nevil to the Tuileries; but
Paris could hardly fail to hit the mark, and Nevil waited for the
reply, half expecting an appointment on the French sands: for the act
of posting a letter, though it be to little short of the Pleiades even,
will stamp an incredible proceeding as a matter of business, so ready
is the ardent mind to take footing on the last thing done. The flight
of Mr. Beauchamp’s letter placed it in the common order of occurrences
for the youthful author of it. Jack Wilmore, a messmate, offered to
second him, though he should be dismissed the service for it. Another
second would easily be found somewhere; for, as Nevil observed, you
have only to set these affairs going, and British blood rises: we are
not the people you see on the surface. Wilmore’s father was a parson,
for instance. What did he do? He could not help himself: he supplied
the army and navy with recruits! One son was in a marching regiment,
the other was Jack, and three girls had vowed never to quit the rectory
save as brides of officers. Nevil thought that seemed encouraging; we
were evidently not a nation of shopkeepers at heart; and he quoted
sayings of Mr. Stukely Culbrett’s, in which neither his ear nor
Wilmore’s detected the under-ring Stukely was famous for: as that
England had saddled herself with India for the express purpose of
better obeying the Commandments in Europe; and that it would be a
lamentable thing for the Continent and our doctrines if ever beef
should fail the Briton, and such like. “Depend upon it we’re a fighting
nation naturally, Jack,” said Nevil. “How can we submit!... however, I
shall not be impatient. I dislike duelling, and hate war, but I will
have the country respected.” They planned a defence of the country,
drawing their strategy from magazine articles by military pens,
reverberations of the extinct voices of the daily and weekly journals,
customary after a panic, and making bloody stands on spots of extreme
pastoral beauty, which they visited by coach and rail, looking back on
unfortified London with particular melancholy.

Rosamund’s word may be trusted that she dropped the letter into a
London post-office in pursuance of her promise to Nevil. The singular
fact was that no answer to it ever arrived. Nevil, without a doubt of
her honesty, proposed an expedition to Paris; he was ordered to join
his ship, and he lay moored across the water in the port of Bevisham,
panting for notice to be taken of him. The slight of the total
disregard of his letter now affected him personally; it took him some
time to get over this indignity put upon him, especially because of his
being under the impression that the country suffered, not he at all.
The letter had served its object: ever since the transmission of it the
menaces and insults had ceased.

But they might be renewed, and he desired to stop them altogether. His
last feeling was one of genuine regret that Frenchmen should have
behaved unworthily of the high estimation he held them in. With which
he dismissed the affair.

He was rallied about it when he next sat at his uncle’s table, and had
to pardon Rosamund for telling.

Nevil replied modestly: “I dare say you think me half a fool, sir. All
I know is, I waited for my betters to speak first. I have no dislike of
Frenchmen.”

Everard shook his head to signify, “not _half_.” But he was gentle
enough in his observations. “There’s a motto, Ex pede Herculem. You
stepped out for the dogs to judge better of us. It’s an infernally
tripping motto for a composite structure like the kingdom of Great
Britain and Manchester, boy Nevil. We can fight foreigners when the
time comes.” He directed Nevil to look home, and cast an eye on the
cotton-spinners, with the remark that they were binding us hand and
foot to sell us to the biggest buyer, and were not Englishmen but
“Germans and Jews, and quakers and hybrids, diligent clerks and
speculators, and commercial travellers, who have raised a fortune from
foisting drugged goods on an idiot population.”

He loathed them for the curse they were to the country. And he was one
of the few who spoke out. The fashion was to pet them. We stood against
them; were halfhearted, and were beaten; and then we petted them, and
bit by bit our privileges were torn away. We made lords of them to
catch them, and they grocers of us by way of a return. “Already,” said
Everard, “they have knocked the nation’s head off, and dry-rotted the
bone of the people.”

“Don’t they,” Nevil asked, “belong to the Liberal party?”

“I’ll tell you,” Everard replied, “they belong to any party that upsets
the party above them. They belong to the GEORGE FOXE party, and my
poultry-roosts are the mark they aim at. You shall have a glance at the
manufacturing district some day. You shall see the machines they work
with. You shall see the miserable lank-jawed half-stewed pantaloons
they’ve managed to make of Englishmen there. My blood’s past boiling.
They work young children in their factories from morning to night.
Their manufactories are spreading like the webs of the devil to suck
the blood of the country. In that district of theirs an epidemic levels
men like a disease in sheep. Skeletons can’t make a stand. On the top
of it all they sing Sunday tunes!”

This behaviour of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an
hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret. Nevil lashed
his head for the clear idea which objurgation insists upon implanting,
but batters to pieces in the act.

“Manchester’s the belly of this country!” Everard continued. “So long
as Manchester flourishes, we’re a country governed and led by the
belly. The head and the legs of the country are sound still; I don’t
guarantee it for long, but the middle’s rapacious and corrupt. Take it
on a question of foreign affairs, it’s an alderman after a feast. Bring
it upon home politics, you meet a wolf.”

The faithful Whig veteran spoke with jolly admiration of the speech of
a famous Tory chief.

“That was the way to talk to them! Denounce them traitors! Up whip, and
set the ruffians capering! Hit them facers! Our men are always for the
too-clever trick. They pluck the sprouts and eat them, as if the loss
of a sprout or two thinned Manchester! Your policy of absorption is
good enough when you’re dealing with fragments. It’s a devilish unlucky
thing to attempt with a concrete mass. You might as well ask your head
to absorb a wall by running at it like a pugnacious nigger. I don’t
want you to go into Parliament ever. You’re a fitter man out of it; but
if ever you’re bitten—and it’s the curse of our country to have
politics as well as the other diseases—don’t follow a flag, be
independent, keep a free vote; remember how I’ve been tied, and hold
foot against Manchester. Do it blindfold; you don’t want counselling,
you’re sure to be right. I’ll lay you a blood-brood mare to a cabstand
skeleton, you’ll have an easy conscience and deserve the thanks of the
country.”

Nevil listened gravely. The soundness of the head and legs of the
country he took for granted. The inflated state of the unchivalrous
middle, denominated Manchester, terrified him. Could it be true that
England was betraying signs of decay? and signs how ignoble!
Half-a-dozen crescent lines cunningly turned, sketched her figure
before the world, and the reflection for one ready to die upholding her
was that the portrait was no caricature. Such an emblematic
presentation of the land of his filial affection haunted him with
hideous mockeries. Surely the foreigner hearing our boasts of her must
compare us to showmen bawling the attractions of a Fat Lady at a fair!

Swoln Manchester bore the blame of it. Everard exulted to hear his
young echo attack the cotton-spinners. But Nevil was for a plan, a
system, immediate action; the descending among the people, and taking
an initiative, LEADING them, insisting on their following, not standing
aloof and shrugging.

“We lead them in war,” said he; “why not in peace? There’s a front for
peace as well as war, and that’s our place rightly. We’re pushed aside;
why, it seems to me we’re treated like old-fashioned ornaments! The
fault must be ours. Shrugging and sneering is about as honourable as
blazing fireworks over your own defeat. Back we have to go! that’s the
point, sir. And as for jeering the cotton-spinners, I can’t while
they’ve the lead of us. We let them have it! And we have thrice the
stake in the country. I don’t mean properties and titles.”

“Deuce you don’t,” said his uncle.

“I mean our names, our histories; I mean our duties. As for titles, the
way to defend them is to be worthy of them.”

“Damned fine speech,” remarked Everard. “Now you get out of that trick
of prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir; it’s all to your own
nose! You’re talking to me, not to a gallery. ‘Worthy of them!’ Caesar
wraps his head in his robe: he gets his dig in the ribs for all his
attitudinizing. It’s very well for a man to talk like that who owns no
more than his barebodkin life, poor devil. Tall talk’s his jewelry: he
must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better.
Property and titles are worth having, whether you are ‘worthy of them’
or a disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep
a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your fore-foot back more
than enough.”

“Please propose something to be done,” said Nevil, depressed by the
recommendation of that attitude.

Everard proposed a fight for every privilege his class possessed. “They
say,” he said, “a nobleman fighting the odds is a sight for the gods:
and I wouldn’t yield an inch of ground. It’s no use calling things by
fine names—the country’s ruined by cowardice. Poursuivez! I cry. Haro!
at them! The biggest hart wins in the end. I haven’t a doubt about
that. And I haven’t a doubt we carry the tonnage.”

“There’s the people,” sighed Nevil, entangled in his uncle’s haziness.

“What people?”

“I suppose the people of Great Britain count, sir.”

“Of course they do; when the battle’s done, the fight lost and won.”

“Do you expect the people to look on, sir?”

“The people always wait for the winner, boy Nevil.”

The young fellow exclaimed despondingly, “If it were a race!”

“It’s like a race, and we’re confoundedly out of training,” said
Everard.

There he rested. A mediaeval gentleman with the docile notions of the
twelfth century, complacently driving them to grass and wattling them
in the nineteenth, could be of no use to a boy trying to think, though
he could set the youngster galloping. Nevil wandered about the woods of
Steynham, disinclined to shoot and lend a hand to country sports. The
popping of the guns of his uncle and guests hung about his ears much
like their speech, which was unobjectionable in itself, but not
sufficient; a little hard, he thought, a little idle. He wanted
something, and wanted them to give their time and energy to something,
that was not to be had in a market. The nobles, he felt sure, might
resume their natural alliance with the people, and lead them, as they
did of old, to the battle-field. How might they? A comely Sussex lass
could not well tell him how. Sarcastic reports of the troublesome
questioner represented him applying to a nymph of the country for
enlightenment. He thrilled surprisingly under the charm of feminine
beauty. “The fellow’s sound at bottom,” his uncle said, hearing of his
having really been seen walking in the complete form proper to his
budding age, that is, in two halves. Nevil showed that he had gained an
acquaintance with the struggles of the neighbouring agricultural poor
to live and rear their children. His uncle’s table roared at his
enumeration of the sickly little beings, consumptive or bandy-legged,
within a radius of five miles of Steynham. Action was what he wanted,
Everard said. Nevil perhaps thought the same, for he dashed out of his
mooning with a wave of the Tory standard, delighting the ladies, though
in that conflict of the Lion and the Unicorn (which was a Tory song) he
seemed rather to wish to goad the dear lion than crush the one-horned
intrusive upstart. His calling on the crack corps of Peers to enrol
themselves forthwith in the front ranks, and to anticipate opposition
by initiating measures, and so cut out that funny old crazy old
galleon, the People, from under the batteries of the enemy, highly
amused the gentlemen.

Before rejoining his ship, Nevil paid his customary short visit of
ceremony to his great-aunt Beauchamp—a venerable lady past eighty,
hitherto divided from him in sympathy by her dislike of his uncle
Everard, who had once been his living hero. That was when he was in
frocks, and still the tenacious fellow could not bear to hear his uncle
spoken ill of.

“All the men of that family are heartless, and he is a man of wood, my
dear, and a bad man,” the old lady said. “He should have kept you at
school, and sent you to college. You want reading and teaching and
talking to. Such a house as that is should never be a home for you.”
She hinted at Rosamund. Nevil defended the persecuted woman, but with
no better success than from the attacks of the Romfrey ladies; with
this difference, however, that these decried the woman’s vicious arts,
and Mistress Elizabeth Mary Beauchamp put all the sin upon the man.
Such a man! she said. “Let me hear that he has married her, I will not
utter another word.” Nevil echoed, “Married!” in a different key.

“I am as much of an aristocrat as any of you, only I rank morality
higher,” said Mrs. Beauchamp. “When you were a child I offered to take
you and make you my heir, and _I_ would have educated you. You shall
see a great-nephew of mine that I did educate; he is eating his dinners
for the bar in London, and comes to me every Sunday. I shall marry him
to a good girl, and I shall show your uncle what my kind of man-making
is.”

Nevil had no desire to meet the other great-nephew, especially when he
was aware of the extraordinary circumstance that a Beauchamp
great-niece, having no money, had bestowed her hand on a Manchester man
defunct, whereof this young Blackburn Tuckham, the lawyer, was issue.
He took his leave of Mrs. Elizabeth Beauchamp, respecting her for her
constitutional health and brightness, and regretting for the sake of
the country that she had not married to give England men and women
resembling her. On the whole he considered her wiser in her
prescription for the malady besetting him than his uncle. He knew that
action was but a temporary remedy. College would have been his chronic
medicine, and the old lady’s acuteness in seeing it impressed him
forcibly. She had given him a peaceable two days on the Upper Thames,
in an atmosphere of plain good sense and just-mindedness. He wrote to
thank her, saying:

“My England at sea will be your parlour-window looking down the grass
to the river and rushes; and when you do me the honour to write, please
tell me the names of those wildflowers growing along the banks in
Summer.” The old lady replied immediately, enclosing a cheque for fifty
pounds: “Colonel Halkett informs me you are under a cloud at Steynham,
and I have thought you may be in want of pocket-money. The wild-flowers
are willowherb, meadow-sweet, and loosestrife. I shall be glad when you
are here in Summer to see them.”

Nevil despatched the following: “I thank you, but I shall not cash the
cheque. The Steynham tale is this:

I happened to be out at night, and stopped the keepers in chase of a
young fellow trespassing. I caught him myself, but recognized him as
one of a family I take an interest in, and let him run before they came
up. My uncle heard a gun; I sent the head gamekeeper word in the
morning to out with it all. Uncle E. was annoyed, and we had a rough
parting. If you are rewarding me for this, I have no right to it.”

Mrs. Beauchamp rejoined: “Your profession should teach you
subordination, if it does nothing else that is valuable to a Christian
gentleman. You will receive from the publisher the ‘Life and Letters of
Lord Collingwood,’ whom I have it in my mind that a young midshipman
should task himself to imitate. Spend the money as you think fit.”

Nevil’s ship, commanded by Captain Robert Hall (a most gallant officer,
one of his heroes, and of Lancashire origin, strangely!), flew to the
South American station, in and about Lord Cochrane’s waters; then as
swiftly back. For, like the frail Norwegian bark on the edge of the
maelstrom, liker to a country of conflicting interests and passions,
that is not mentally on a level with its good fortune, England was
drifting into foreign complications. A paralyzed Minister proclaimed
it. The governing people, which is looked to for direction in grave
dilemmas by its representatives and reflectors, shouted that it had
been accused of pusillanimity. No one had any desire for war, only we
really had (and it was perfectly true) been talking gigantic nonsense
of peace, and of the everlastingness of the exchange of fruits for
money, with angels waving raw-groceries of Eden in joy of the
commercial picture. Therefore, to correct the excesses of that fit, we
held the standing by the Moslem, on behalf of the Mediterranean (and
the Moslem is one of our customers, bearing an excellent reputation for
the payment of debts), to be good, granting the necessity. We deplored
the necessity. The Press wept over it. That, however, was not the
politic tone for us while the Imperial berg of Polar ice watched us
keenly; and the Press proceeded to remind us that we had once been
bull-dogs. Was there not an animal within us having a right to a turn
now and then? And was it not (Falstaff, on a calm world, was quoted)
for the benefit of our constitutions now and then to loosen the animal?
Granting the necessity, of course. By dint of incessantly speaking of
the necessity we granted it unknowingly. The lighter hearts regarded
our period of monotonously lyrical prosperity as a man sensible of
fresh morning air looks back on the snoring bolster. Many of the graver
were glad of a change. After all that maundering over the blessed peace
which brings the raisin and the currant for the pudding, and shuts up
the cannon with a sheep’s head, it became a principle of popular taste
to descant on the vivifying virtues of war; even as, after ten months
of money-mongering in smoky London, the citizen hails the sea-breeze
and an immersion in unruly brine, despite the cost, that breeze and
brine may make a man of him, according to the doctor’s prescription:
sweet is home, but health is sweeter! Then was there another curious
exhibition of us. Gentlemen, to the exact number of the Graces, dressed
in drab of an ancient cut, made a pilgrimage to the icy despot, and
besought him to give way for Piety’s sake. He, courteous, colossal, and
immoveable, waved them homeward. They returned and were hooted for
belying the bellicose by their mission, and interpreting too well the
peaceful. They were the unparalyzed Ministers of the occasion, but
helpless.

And now came war, the purifier and the pestilence.

The cry of the English people for war was pretty general, as far as the
criers went. They put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration
of war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in
committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is
limited. If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain
for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial
communities as rivals are to kings.

The cry for war was absolutely unanimous, and a supremely national cry,
Everard Romfrey said, for it excluded the cotton-spinners.

He smacked his hands, crowing at the vociferations of disgust of those
negrophiles and sweaters of Christians, whose isolated clamour amid the
popular uproar sounded of gagged mouths.

One of the half-stifled cotton-spinners, a notorious one, a spouter of
rank sedition and hater of aristocracy, a political poacher, managed to
make himself heard. He was tossed to the Press for morsel, and tossed
back to the people in strips. Everard had a sharp return of appetite in
reading the daily and weekly journals. They printed logic, they printed
sense; they abused the treasonable barking cur unmercifully. They
printed almost as much as he would have uttered, excepting the strong
salt of his similes, likening that rascal and his crew to the American
weed in our waters, to the rotting wild bees’ nest in our trees, to the
worm in our ships’ timbers, and to lamentable afflictions of the human
frame, and of sheep, oxen, honest hounds. Manchester was in eclipse.
The world of England discovered that the peace-party which opposed was
the actual cause of the war: never was indication clearer. But my
business is with Mr. Beauchamp, to know whom, and partly understand his
conduct in after-days, it will be as well to take a bird’seye glance at
him through the war.

“Now,” said Everard, “we shall see what staff there is in that fellow
Nevil.”

He expected, as you may imagine, a true young Beauchamp-Romfrey to be
straining his collar like a leash-hound.




CHAPTER IV.
A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION


The young gentleman to whom Everard Romfrey transferred his combative
spirit despatched a letter from the Dardanelles, requesting his uncle
not to ask him for a spark of enthusiasm. He despised our Moslem
allies, he said, and thought with pity of the miserable herds of men in
regiments marching across the steppes at the bidding of a despot that
we were helping to popularize. He certainly wrote in the tone of a
jejune politician; pardonable stuff to seniors entertaining similar
opinions, but most exasperating when it runs counter to them: though
one question put by Nevil was not easily answerable. He wished to know
whether the English people would be so anxious to be at it if their man
stood on the opposite shore and talked of trying conclusions on their
green fields. And he suggested that they had become so ready for war
because of their having grown rather ashamed of themselves, and for the
special reason that they could have it at a distance.

“The rascal’s liver’s out of order,” Everard said.

Coming to the sentence: “Who speaks out in this crisis? There is one,
and I am with him”; Mr. Romfrey’s compassionate sentiments veered round
to irate amazement. For the person alluded to was indeed the infamous
miauling cotton-spinner. Nevil admired him. He said so bluntly. He
pointed to that traitorous George-Foxite as the one heroical Englishman
of his day, declaring that he felt bound in honour to make known his
admiration for the man; and he hoped his uncle would excuse him. “If we
differ, I am sorry, sir; but I should be a coward to withhold what I
think of him when he has all England against him, and he is in the
right, as England will discover. I maintain he speaks wisely—I don’t
mind saying, like a prophet; and he speaks on behalf of the poor as
well as of the country. He appears to me the only public man who looks
to the state of the poor—I mean, their interests. They pay for war, and
if we are to have peace at home and strength for a really national war,
the only war we can ever call necessary, the poor must be contented. He
sees that. I shall not run the risk of angering you by writing to
defend him, unless I hear of his being shamefully mishandled, and the
bearer of an old name can be of service to him. I cannot say less, and
will say no more.”

Everard apostrophized his absent nephew: “You jackass!”

I am reminded by Mr. Romfrey’s profound disappointment in the youth,
that it will be repeatedly shared by many others: and I am bound to
forewarn readers of this history that there is no plot in it. The hero
is chargeable with the official disqualification of constantly
offending prejudices, never seeking to please; and all the while it is
upon him the narrative hangs. To be a public favourite is his last
thought. Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to
stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and
rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind
of posturing. For Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn
its absence; melodious lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien
to him. His faith is in working and fighting. With every inducement to
offer himself for a romantic figure, he despises the pomades and
curling-irons of modern romance, its shears and its labels: in fine,
every one of those positive things by whose aid, and by some adroit
flourishing of them, the nimbus known as a mysterious halo is produced
about a gentleman’s head. And a highly alluring adornment it is! We are
all given to lose our solidity and fly at it; although the faithful
mirror of fiction has been showing us latterly that a too superhuman
beauty has disturbed popular belief in the bare beginnings of the
existence of heroes: but this, very likely, is nothing more than a fit
of Republicanism in the nursery, and a deposition of the leading doll
for lack of variety in him. That conqueror of circumstances will, the
dullest soul may begin predicting, return on his cockhorse to favour
and authority. Meantime the exhibition of a hero whom circumstances
overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear, who continually
forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own fortunes, must
run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum. Nursery
Legitimists will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise, after a
queer sniff at his pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I have so
little command over him, that in spite of my nursery tastes, he drags
me whither he lists. It is artless art and monstrous innovation to
present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a striking fable for
him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it would be
only a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live
in such an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved
his country, and for another and a broader love, growing out of his
first passion, fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no
giant of the Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull,
pummelled the obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic.
His indifferent England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The
greater power of the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does
not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp’s career
the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts
besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of
our hero’s character in the domestic circle; perhaps a faintly-outlined
circle or two beyond it. But this does not forbid him to be ranked as
one of the most distinguishing of her children of the day he lived in.
Blame the victrix if you think he should have been livelier.

Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war
was actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what
surrounded him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of
stilts, gravely resigned the gift of motion. Our dauntless Lancastrian
thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded. Our worthy
people, consenting to the doctrine that war is a scourge, contracted
the habit of thinking it, in this case, the dire necessity which is the
sole excuse for giving way to an irritated pugnacity, and sucked the
comforting caramel of an alliance with their troublesome next-door
neighbour, profuse in comfits as in scorpions. Nevil detected that
politic element of their promptitude for war. His recollections of
dissatisfaction in former days assisted him to perceive the nature of
it, but he was too young to hold his own against the hubbub of a noisy
people, much too young to remain sceptical of a modern people’s
enthusiasm for war while journals were testifying to it down the length
of their columns, and letters from home palpitated with it, and
shipmates yawned wearily for the signal, and shiploads of red coats and
blue, infantry, cavalry, artillery, were singing farewell to the girl
at home, and hurrah for anything in foreign waters. He joined the
stream with a cordial spirit. Since it must be so! The wind of that
haughty proceeding of the Great Bear in putting a paw over the neutral
brook brushed his cheek unpleasantly. He clapped hands for the fezzy
defenders of the border fortress, and when the order came for the fleet
to enter the old romantic sea of storms and fables, he wrote home a
letter fit for his uncle Everard to read. Then there was the sailing
and the landing, and the march up the heights, which Nevil was
condemned to look at. To his joy he obtained an appointment on shore,
and after that Everard heard of him from other channels. The two were
of a mind when the savage winter advanced which froze the attack of the
city, and might be imaged as the hoar god of hostile elements pointing
a hand to the line reached, and menacing at one farther step. Both
blamed the Government, but they divided as to the origin of
governmental inefficiency; Nevil accusing the Lords guilty of foulest
sloth, Everard the Quakers of dry-rotting the country. He passed with a
shrug Nevil’s puling outcry for the enemy as well as our own poor
fellows: “At his steppes again!” And he had to be forgiving when
reports came of his nephew’s turn for overdoing his duty:
“show-fighting,” as he termed it.

“Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it,” he wrote
very rationally. “Stick to your line. Don’t go out of it till you are
ordered out. Remember that we want _soldiers_ and _sailors_, we don’t
want _suicides_.” He condescended to these italics, considering
impressiveness to be urgent. In his heart, notwithstanding his
implacably clear judgement, he was passably well pleased with the
congratulations encompassing him on account of his nephew’s gallantry
at a period of dejection in Britain: for the winter was dreadful; every
kind heart that went to bed with cold feet felt acutely for our
soldiers on the frozen heights, and thoughts of heroes were as good as
warming-pans. Heroes we would have. It happens in war as in wit, that
all the birds of wonder fly to a flaring reputation. He that has done
one wild thing must necessarily have done the other; so Nevil found
himself standing in the thick of a fame that blew rank eulogies on him
for acts he had not performed. The Earl of Romfrey forwarded hampers
and a letter of praise. “They tell me that while you were facing the
enemy, temporarily attaching yourself to one of the regiments—I forget
which, though I have heard it named—you sprang out under fire on an
eagle clawing a hare. I like that. I hope you had the benefit of the
hare. She is our property, and I have issued an injunction that she
shall not go into the newspapers.” Everard was entirely of a contrary
opinion concerning the episode of eagle and hare, though it was a case
of a bird of prey interfering with an object of the chase. Nevil wrote
home most entreatingly and imperatively, like one wincing, begging him
to contradict that and certain other stories, and prescribing the form
of a public renunciation of his proclaimed part in them. “The hare,” he
sent word, “is the property of young Michell of the _Rodney_, and he is
the humanest and the gallantest fellow in the service. I have written
to my Lord. Pray help to rid me of burdens that make me feel like a
robber and impostor.”

Everard replied:

“I have a letter from your captain, informing me that I am unlikely to
see you home unless you learn to hold yourself in. I wish you were in
another battery than Robert Hall’s. He forgets the force of example,
however much of a dab he may be at precept. But there you are, and
please clap a hundredweight on your appetite for figuring, will you. Do
you think there is any good in helping to Frenchify our army? I loathe
a fellow who shoots at a medal. I wager he is easy enough to be caught
by circumvention—put me in the open with him. Tom Biggot, the boxer,
went over to Paris, and stood in the ring with one of their dancing
pugilists, and the first round he got a crack on the chin from the
rogue’s foot; the second round he caught him by the lifted leg, and
punished him till pec was all he could say of peccavi. Fight the
straightforward fight. Hang flan! Battle is a game of give and take,
and if our men get elanned, we shall see them refusing to come up to
time. This new crossing and medalling is the devil’s own notion for
upsetting a solid British line, and tempting fellows to get invalided
that they may blaze it before the shopkeepers and their wives in the
city. Give us an army!—none of your caperers. Here are lots of circusy
heroes coming home to rest after their fatigues. One was spouting at a
public dinner yesterday night. He went into it upright, and he ran out
of it upright—at the head of his men!—and here he is feasted by the
citizens and making a speech upright, and my boy fronting the enemy!”

Everard’s involuntary break-down from his veteran’s roughness to a
touch of feeling thrilled Nevil, who began to perceive what his uncle
was driving at when he rebuked the coxcombry of the field, and spoke of
the description of compliment your hero was paying Englishmen in
affecting to give them examples of bravery and preternatural coolness.
Nevil sent home humble confessions of guilt in this respect, with fresh
praises of young Michell: for though Everard, as Nevil recognized it,
was perfectly right in the abstract, and generally right, there are
times when an example is needed by brave men—times when the fiery
furnace of death’s dragon-jaw is not inviting even to Englishmen
receiving the word that duty bids them advance, and they require a
leader of the way. A national coxcombry that pretends to an
independence of human sensations, and makes a motto of our dandiacal
courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that of a
few heroes. It is this coxcombry which has too often caused disdain of
the wise chief’s maxim of calculation for winners, namely, to have
always the odds on your side, and which has bled, shattered, and
occasionally disgraced us. Young Michell’s carrying powder-bags to the
assault, and when ordered to retire, bearing them on his back, and
helping a wounded soldier on the way, did surely well; nor did Mr.
Beauchamp himself behave so badly on an occasion when the sailors of
his battery caught him out of a fire of shell that raised jets of dust
and smoke like a range of geysers over the open, and hugged him as
loving women do at a meeting or a parting. He was penitent before his
uncle, admitting, first, that the men were not in want of an example of
the contempt of death, and secondly, that he doubted whether it was
contempt of death on his part so much as pride—a hatred of being seen
running.

“I don’t like the fellow to be drawing it so fine,” said Everard. It
sounded to him a trifle parsonical. But his heart was won by Nevil’s
determination to wear out the campaign rather than be invalided or
entrusted with a holiday duty.

“I see with shame (admiration of _them_) old infantry captains and
colonels of no position beyond their rank in the army, sticking to
their post,” said Nevil, “and a lord and a lord and a lord slipping off
as though the stuff of the man in him had melted. I shall go through
with it.” Everard approved him. Colonel Halkett wrote that the youth
was a skeleton. Still Everard encouraged him to persevere, and said of
him:

“I like him for holding to his work _after_ the strain’s over. That
tells the man.”

He observed at his table, in reply to commendations of his nephew:

“Nevil’s leak is his political craze, and that seems to be going: I
hope it is. You can’t rear a man on politics. When I was of his age I
never looked at the newspapers, except to read the divorce cases. I
came to politics with a ripe judgement. He shines in action, and he’ll
find that out, and leave others the palavering.”

It was upon the close of the war that Nevil drove his uncle to avow a
downright undisguised indignation with him. He caught a fever in the
French camp, where he was dispensing vivers and provends out of English
hampers.

“Those French fellows are every man of them trained up to
snapping-point,” said Everard. “You’re sure to have them if you hold
out long against them. And greedy dogs too: they’re for half our
hampers, and all the glory. And there’s Nevil down on his back in the
thick of them! Will anybody tell me why the devil he must be poking
into the French camp? They were ready enough to run to him and beg
potatoes. It’s all for humanity he does it—mark that. Never was a word
fitter for a quack’s mouth than ‘humanity.’ Two syllables more, and the
parsons would be riding it to sawdust. Humanity! Humanitomtity! It’s
the best word of the two for half the things done in the name of it.”

A tremendously bracing epistle, excellent for an access of fever, was
despatched to humanity’s curate, and Everard sat expecting a hot
rejoinder, or else a black sealed letter, but neither one nor the other
arrived.

Suddenly, to his disgust, came rumours of peace between the mighty
belligerents.

The silver trumpets of peace were nowhere hearkened to with
satisfaction by the bull-dogs, though triumph rang sonorously through
the music, for they had been severely mangled, as usual at the outset,
and they had at last got their grip, and were in high condition for
fighting.

The most expansive panegyrists of our deeds did not dare affirm of the
most famous of them, that England had embarked her costly cavalry to
offer it for a mark of artillery-balls on three sides of a square: and
the belief was universal that we could do more business-like deeds and
play the great game of blunders with an ability refined by experience.
Everard Romfrey was one of those who thought themselves justified in
insisting upon the continuation of the war, in contempt of our allies.
His favourite saying that constitution beats the world, was being
splendidly manifested by our bearing. He was very uneasy; he would not
hear of peace; and not only that, the imperial gentleman soberly
committed the naïveté of sending word to Nevil to let him know
immediately the opinion of the camp concerning it, as perchance an old
Roman knight may have written to some young aquilifer of the
Praetorians.

Allies, however, are of the description of twins joined by a membrane,
and supposing that one of them determines to sit down, the other will
act wisely in bending his knees at once, and doing the same: he cannot
but be extremely uncomfortable left standing. Besides, there was the
Ottoman cleverly poised again; the Muscovite was battered; fresh guilt
was added to the military glory of the Gaul. English grumblers might
well be asked what they had fought for, if they were not contented.

Colonel Halkett mentioned a report that Nevil had received a slight
thigh-wound of small importance. At any rate, something was the matter
with him, and it was naturally imagined that he would have double cause
to write home; and still more so for the reason, his uncle confessed,
that he had foreseen the folly of a war conducted by milky
cotton-spinners and their adjuncts, in partnership with a throned
gambler, who had won his stake, and now snapped his fingers at them.
Everard expected, he had prepared himself for, the young naval
politician’s crow, and he meant to admit frankly that he had been wrong
in wishing to fight anybody without having first crushed the cotton
faction. But Nevil continued silent.

“Dead in hospital or a Turk hotel!” sighed Everard; “and no more to the
scoundrels over there than a body to be shovelled into slack lime.”

Rosamund Culling was the only witness of his remarkable betrayal of
grief.




CHAPTER V.
RENÉE


At last, one morning, arrived a letter from a French gentleman signing
himself Comte Cresnes de Croisnel, in which Everard was informed that
his nephew had accompanied the son of the writer, Captain de Croisnel,
on board an Austrian boat out of the East, and was lying in Venice
under a return-attack of fever,—not, the count stated pointedly, in the
hands of an Italian physician. He had brought his own with him to meet
his son, who was likewise disabled.

Everard was assured by M. de Croisnel that every attention and
affectionate care were being rendered to his gallant and adored
nephew—“vrai type de tout ce qu’il y a de noble et de chevaleresque
dans la vieille Angleterre”—from a family bound to him by the tenderest
obligations, personal and national; one as dear to every member of it
as the brother, the son, they welcomed with thankful hearts to the
Divine interposition restoring him to them. In conclusion, the count
proposed something like the embrace of a fraternal friendship should
Everard think fit to act upon the spontaneous sentiments of a loving
relative, and join them in Venice to watch over his nephew’s recovery.
Already M. Nevil was stronger. The gondola was a medicine in itself,
the count said.

Everard knitted his mouth to intensify a peculiar subdued form of
laughter through the nose, in hopeless ridicule of a Frenchman’s
notions of an Englishman’s occupations—presumed across Channel to allow
of his breaking loose from shooting engagements at a minute’s notice,
to rush off to a fetid foreign city notorious for mud and mosquitoes,
and commence capering and grimacing, pouring forth a jugful of
ready-made extravagances, with _mon fils! mon cher neveu! Dieu!_ and
similar fiddlededee. These were matters for women to do, if they chose:
women and Frenchmen were much of a pattern. Moreover, he knew the hotel
this Comte de Croisnel was staying at. He gasped at the name of it: he
had rather encounter a grisly bear than a mosquito any night of his
life, for no stretch of cunning outwits a mosquito; and enlarging on
the qualities of the terrific insect, he vowed it was damnation without
trial or judgement.

Eventually, Mrs. Culling’s departure was permitted. He argued, “Why go?
the fellow’s comfortable, getting himself together, and you say the
French are good nurses.” But her entreaties to go were vehement, though
Venice had no happy place in her recollections, and he withheld his
objections to her going. For him, the fields forbade it. He sent hearty
messages to Nevil, and that was enough, considering that the young dog
of “humanity” had clearly been running out of his way to catch a
jaundice, and was bereaving his houses of the matronly government,
deprived of which they were all of them likely soon to be at sixes and
sevens with disorderly lacqueys, peccant maids, and cooks in hysterics.

Now if the master of his fortunes had come to Venice!—Nevil started the
supposition in his mind often after hope had sunk.—Everard would have
seen a young sailor and a soldier the thinner for wear, reclining in a
gondola half the day, fanned by a brunette of the fine lineaments of
the good blood of France. She chattered snatches of Venetian caught
from the gondoliers, she was like a delicate cup of crystal brimming
with the beauty of the place, and making one of them drink in all his
impressions through her. Her features had the soft irregularities which
run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes,
brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly;
thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over
them like night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew,
thought followed: her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French.

Her name was Renée. She was the only daughter of the Comte de Croisnel.
Her brother Roland owed his life to Nevil, this Englishman proud of a
French name—Nevil Beauchamp. If there was any warm feeling below the
unruffled surface of the girl’s deliberate eyes while gazing on him, it
was that he who had saved her brother must be nearly brother himself,
yet was not quite, yet must be loved, yet not approached. He was her
brother’s brother-in-arms, brother-in-heart, not hers, yet hers through
her brother. His French name rescued him from foreignness. He spoke her
language with a piquant accent, unlike the pitiable English. Unlike
them, he was gracious, and could be soft and quick. The battle-scarlet,
battle-black, Roland’s tales of him threw round him in her imagination,
made his gentleness a surprise. If, then, he was hers through her
brother, what was she to him? The question did not spring clearly
within her, though she was alive to every gradual change of manner
toward the convalescent necessitated by the laws overawing her sex.

Venice was the French girl’s dream. She was realizing it hungrily,
revelling in it, anatomizing it, picking it to pieces, reviewing it,
comparing her work with the original, and the original with her first
conception, until beautiful sad Venice threatened to be no more her
dream, and in dread of disenchantment she tried to take impressions
humbly, really tasked herself not to analyze, not to dictate from a
French footing, not to scorn. Not to be petulant with objects
disappointing her, was an impossible task. She could not consent to a
compromise with the people, the merchandize, the odours of the city.
Gliding in the gondola through the narrow canals at low tide, she
leaned back simulating stupor, with one word—“Venezia!” Her brother was
commanded to smoke: “Fumez, fumez, Roland!” As soon as the
steel-crested prow had pushed into her Paradise of the Canal Grande,
she quietly shrouded her hair from tobacco, and called upon rapture to
recompense her for her sufferings. The black gondola was unendurable to
her. She had accompanied her father to the Accademia, and mused on the
golden Venetian streets of Carpaccio: she must have an open gondola to
decorate in his manner, gaily, splendidly, and mock at her efforts—a
warning to all that might hope to improve the prevailing gloom and
squalor by levying contributions upon the Merceria! Her most constant
admiration was for the English lord who used once to ride on the Lido
sands and visit the Armenian convent—a lord and a poet. [Lord Byron
D.W.]

This was to be infinitely more than a naval lieutenant. But Nevil
claimed her as little personally as he allowed her to be claimed by
another. The graces of her freaks of petulance and airy whims, her
sprightly jets of wilfulness, fleeting frowns of contempt, imperious
decisions, were all beautiful, like silver-shifting waves, in this
lustrous planet of her pure freedom; and if you will seize the divine
conception of Artemis, and own the goddess French, you will understand
his feelings.

But though he admired fervently, and danced obediently to her tunes,
Nevil could not hear injustice done to a people or historic poetic city
without trying hard to right the mind guilty of it. A newspaper
correspondent, a Mr. John Holles, lingering on his road home from the
army, put him on the track of an Englishman’s books—touching the spirit
as well as the stones of Venice, and Nevil thanked him when he had
turned some of the leaves.

The study of the books to school Renée was pursued, like the
Bianchina’s sleep, in gondoletta, and was not unlike it at intervals. A
translated sentence was the key to a reverie. Renée leaned back,
meditating; he forward, the book on his knee: Roland left them to
themselves, and spied for the Bianchina behind the window-bars. The
count was in the churches or the Galleries. Renée thought she began to
comprehend the spirit of Venice, and chided her rebelliousness.

“But our Venice was the Venice of the decadence, then!” she said,
complaining. Nevil read on, distrustful of the perspicuity of his own
ideas.

“Ah, but,” said she, “when these Venetians were rough men, chanting
like our Huguenots, how cold it must have been here!”

She hoped she was not very wrong in preferring the times of the great
Venetian painters and martial doges to that period of faith and
stone-cutting. What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was
monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre,
insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours
and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the
Rii to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks;
the times of Venice in full flower. She reasoned against the hard
eloquent Englishman of the books. “But we are known by our fruits, are
we not? and the Venice I admire was surely the fruit of these
stonecutters chanting hymns of faith; it could not but be: and if it
deserved, as he says, to die disgraced, I think we should go back to
them and ask them whether their minds were as pure and holy as he
supposes.” Her French wits would not be subdued. Nevil pointed to the
palaces. “Pride,” said she. He argued that the original Venetians were
not responsible for their offspring. “You say it?” she cried, “you, of
an old race? Oh, no; you do not feel it!” and the trembling fervour of
her voice convinced him that he did not, could not.

Renée said: “I know my ancestors are bound up in me, by my sentiments
to them; and so do you, M. Nevil. We shame them if we fail in courage
and honour. Is it not so? If we break a single pledged word we cast
shame on them. Why, that makes us what we are; that is our distinction:
we dare not be weak if we would. And therefore when Venice is
reproached with avarice and luxury, I choose to say—what do we hear of
the children of misers? and I say I am certain that those old cold
Huguenot stonecutters were proud and grasping. I am sure they were, and
they _shall_ share the blame.”

Nevil plunged into his volume.

He called on Roland for an opinion.

“Friend,” said Roland, “opinions may differ: mine is, considering the
defences of the windows, that the only way into these houses or out of
them bodily was the doorway.”

Roland complimented his sister and friend on the prosecution of their
studies: he could not understand a word of the subject, and yawning, he
begged permission to be allowed to land and join the gondola at a
distant quarter. The gallant officer was in haste to go.

Renée stared at her brother. He saw nothing; he said a word to the
gondoliers, and quitted the boat. Mars was in pursuit. She resigned
herself, and ceased then to be a girl.




CHAPTER VI.
LOVE IN VENICE


The air flashed like heaven descending for Nevil alone with Renée. They
had never been alone before. Such happiness belonged to the avenue of
wishes leading to golden mists beyond imagination, and seemed, coming
on him suddenly, miraculous. He leaned toward her like one who has
broken a current of speech, and waits to resume it. She was all
unsuspecting indolence, with gravely shadowed eyes.

“I throw the book down,” he said.

She objected. “No; continue: I like it.”

Both of them divined that the book was there to do duty for Roland.

He closed it, keeping a finger among the leaves; a kind of anchorage in
case of indiscretion.

“Permit me to tell you, M. Nevil, you are inclined to play truant
to-day.”

“I am.”

“Now is the very time to read; for my poor Roland is at sea when we
discuss our questions, and the book has driven him away.”

“But we have plenty of time to read. We miss the scenes.”

“The scenes are green shutters, wet steps, barcaroli, brown women,
striped posts, a scarlet night-cap, a sick fig-tree, an old shawl,
faded spots of colour, peeling walls. They might be figured by a
trodden melon. They all resemble one another, and so do the days here.”

“That’s the charm. I wish I could look on you and think the same. You,
as you are, for ever.”

“Would you not let me live my life?”

“I would not have you alter.”

“Please to be pathetic on that subject after I am wrinkled, monsieur.”

“You want commanding, mademoiselle.”

Renée nestled her chin, and gazed forward through her eyelashes.

“Venice is like a melancholy face of a former beauty who has ceased to
rouge, or wipe away traces of her old arts,” she said, straining for
common talk, and showing the strain.

“Wait; now we are rounding,” said he; “now you have three of what you
call your theatre-bridges in sight. The people mount and drop, mount
and drop; I see them laugh. They are full of fun and good-temper. Look
on living Venice.”

“Provided that my papa is not crossing when we go under.”

“Would he not trust you to me?”

“Yes.”

“He would? And you?”

“I do believe they are improvizing an operetta on the second bridge.”

“You trust yourself willingly?”

“As to my second brother. You hear them? How delightfully quick and
spontaneous they are! Ah, silly creatures! they have stopped. They
might have held it on for us while we were passing.”

“Where would the naturalness have been then?”

“Perhaps, M. Nevil, I do want commanding. I am wilful. Half my days
will be spent in fits of remorse, I begin to think.”

“Come to me to be forgiven.”

“Shall I? I should be forgiven too readily.”

“I am not so sure of that.”

“Can you be harsh? No, not even with enemies. Least of all with... with
us.”

Oh for the black gondola!—the little gliding dusky chamber for two;
instead of this open, flaunting, gold and crimson cotton-work, which
exacted discretion on his part and that of the mannerly gondoliers, and
exposed him to window, balcony, bridge, and borderway.

They slipped on beneath a red balcony where a girl leaned on her folded
arms, and eyed them coming and going by with Egyptian gravity.

“How strange a power of looking these people have,” said Renée, whose
vivacity was fascinated to a steady sparkle by the girl. “Tell me, is
she glancing round at us?”

Nevil turned and reported that she was not. She had exhausted them
while they were in transit; she had no minor curiosity.

“Let us fancy she is looking for her lover,” he said.

Renée added: “Let us hope she will not escape being seen.”

“I give her my benediction,” said Nevil.

“And I,” said Renée; “and adieu to her, if you please. Look for
Roland.”

“You remind me; I have but a few instants.”

“M. Nevil, you are a preux of the times of my brother’s patronymic. And
there is my Roland awaiting us. Is he not handsome?”

“How glad you are to have him to relieve guard!”

Renée bent on Nevil one of her singular looks of raillery. She had
hitherto been fencing at a serious disadvantage.

“Not so very glad,” she said, “if that deprived me of the presence of
his friend.”

Roland was her tower. But Roland was not yet on board. She had peeped
from her citadel too rashly. Nevil had time to spring the flood of
crimson in her cheeks, bright as the awning she reclined under.

“Would you have me with you always?”

“Assuredly,” said she, feeling the hawk in him, and trying to baffle
him by fluttering.

“Always? forever? and—listen—give me a title?”

Renée sang out to Roland like a bird in distress, and had some trouble
not to appear too providentially rescued. Roland on board, she resumed
the attack.

“M. Nevil vows he is a better brother to me than you, who dart away on
an impulse and leave us threading all Venice till we do not know where
we are, naughty brother!”

“My little sister, the spot where you are,” rejoined Roland, “is
precisely the spot where I left you, and I defy you to say you have
gone on without me. This is the identical riva I stepped out on to buy
you a packet of Venetian ballads.”

They recognized the spot, and for a confirmation of the surprising
statement, Roland unrolled several sheets of printed blotting-paper,
and rapidly read part of a Canzonetta concerning Una Giovine who
reproved her lover for his extreme addiction to wine:

“Ma sè, ma sè,
Cotanto bevè,
Mi nò, mi nò,
No ve sposerò.”

“This astounding vagabond preferred Nostrani to his heart’s mistress. I
tasted some of their Nostrani to see if it could be possible for a
Frenchman to exonerate him.”

Roland’s wry face at the mention of Nostrani brought out the chief
gondolier, who delivered himself:

“Signore, there be hereditary qualifications. One must be born Italian
to appreciate the merits of Nostrani!”

Roland laughed. He had covered his delinquency in leaving his sister,
and was full of an adventure to relate to Nevil, a story promising well
for him.




CHAPTER VII.
AN AWAKENING FOR BOTH


Renée was downcast. Had she not coquetted? The dear young Englishman
had reduced her to defend herself, the which fair ladies, like besieged
garrisons, cannot always do successfully without an attack at times,
which, when the pursuer is ardent, is followed by a retreat, which is a
provocation; and these things are coquettry. Her still fresh
convent-conscience accused her of it pitilessly. She could not forgive
her brother, and yet she dared not reproach him, for that would have
inculpated Nevil. She stepped on to the Piazzetta thoughtfully. Her
father was at Florian’s, perusing letters from France. “We are to have
the marquis here in a week, my child,” he said. Renée nodded.
Involuntarily she looked at Nevil. He caught the look, with a lover’s
quick sense of misfortune in it.

She heard her brother reply to him: “Who? the Marquis de Rouaillout? It
is a jolly gaillard of fifty who spoils no fun.”

“You mistake his age, Roland,” she said.

“Forty-nine, then, my sister.”

“He is not that.”

“He looks it.”

“You have been absent.”

“Probably, my arithmetical sister, he has employed the interval to grow
younger. They say it is the way with green gentlemen of a certain age.
They advance and they retire. They perform the first steps of a
quadrille ceremoniously, and we admire them.”

“What’s that?” exclaimed the Comte de Croisnel. “You talk nonsense,
Roland. M. le marquis is hardly past forty. He is in his prime.”

“Without question, mon pere. For me, I was merely offering proof that
he can preserve his prime unlimitedly.”

“He is not a subject for mockery, Roland.”

“Quite the contrary; for reverence!”

“Another than you, my boy, and he would march you out.”

“I am to imagine, then, that his hand continues firm?”

“Imagine to the extent of your capacity; but remember that respect is
always owing to your own family, and deliberate before you draw on
yourself such a chastisement as mercy from an accepted member of it.”

Roland bowed and drummed on his knee.

The conversation had been originated by Renée for the enlightenment of
Nevil and as a future protection to herself. Now that it had disclosed
its burden she could look at him no more, and when her father addressed
her significantly: “Marquise, you did me the honour to consent to
accompany me to the Church of the Frari this afternoon?” she felt her
self-accusation of coquettry biting under her bosom like a thing alive.

Roland explained the situation to Nevil.

“It is the mania with us, my dear Nevil, to marry our girls young to
established men. Your established man carries usually all the signs,
visible to the multitude or not, of the stages leading to that
eminence. We cannot, I believe, unless we have the good fortune to
boast the paternity of Hercules, disconnect ourselves from the steps we
have mounted; not even, the priests inform us, if we are ascending to
heaven; we carry them beyond the grave. However, it seems that our
excellent marquis contrives to keep them concealed, and he is ready to
face marriage—the Grandest Inquisitor, next to Death. Two furious
matchmakers—our country, beautiful France, abounds in them—met one day;
they were a comtesse and a baronne, and they settled the alliance. The
bell was rung, and Renée came out of school. There is this to be said:
she has no mother; the sooner a girl without a mother has a husband the
better. That we are all agreed upon. I have no personal objection to
the marquis; he has never been in any great scandals. He is Norman, and
has estates in Normandy, Dauphiny, Touraine; he is hospitable,
luxurious. Renée will have a fine hôtel in Paris. But I am eccentric: I
have read in our old Fabliaux of December and May. Say the marquis is
November, say October; he is still some distance removed from the plump
Spring month. And we in our family have wits and passions. In fine, a
bud of a rose in an old gentleman’s button-hole! it is a challenge to
the whole world of youth; and if the bud should leap? Enough of this
matter, friend Nevil; but sometimes a friend must allow himself to be
bothered. I have perfect confidence in my sister, you see; I simply
protest against her being exposed to... You know men. I protest, that
is, in the privacy of my cigar-case, for I have no chance elsewhere.
The affair is on wheels. The very respectable matchmakers have kindled
the marquis on the one hand, and my father on the other, and Renée
passes obediently from the latter to the former. In India they
sacrifice the widows, in France the virgins.”

Roland proceeded to relate his adventure. Nevil’s inattention piqued
him to salt and salt it wonderfully, until the old story of He and She
had an exciting savour in its introductory chapter; but his friend was
flying through the circles of the Inferno, and the babble of an
ephemeral upper world simply affected him by its contrast with the
overpowering horrors, repugnances, despairs, pities, rushing at him,
surcharging his senses. Those that live much by the heart in their
youth have sharp foretastes of the issues imaged for the soul. St.
Mark’s was in a minute struck black for him. He neither felt the
sunlight nor understood why column and campanile rose, nor why the
islands basked, and boats and people moved. All were as remote little
bits of mechanism.

Nevil escaped, and walked in the direction of the Frari down calle and
campiello. Only to see her—to compare her with the Renée of the past
hour! But _that_ Renée had been all the while a feast of delusion; she
could never be resuscitated in the shape he had known, not even clearly
visioned. Not a day of her, not an hour, not a single look had been his
own. She had been sold when he first beheld her, and should, he
muttered austerely, have been ticketed the property of a middle-aged
man, a worn-out French marquis, whom she had agreed to marry, unwooed,
without love—the creature of a transaction. But she was innocent, she
was unaware of the sin residing in a loveless marriage; and this
restored her to him somewhat as a drowned body is given back to
mourners.

After aimless walking he found himself on the Zattere, where the lonely
Giudecca lies in front, covering mud and marsh and lagune-flames of
later afternoon, and you have sight of the high mainland hills which
seem to fling forth one over other to a golden sea-cape.

Midway on this unadorned Zattere, with its young trees and spots of
shade, he was met by Renée and her father. Their gondola was below,
close to the riva, and the count said, “She is tired of standing gazing
at pictures. There is a Veronese in one of the churches of the Giudecca
opposite. Will you, M. Nevil, act as parade-escort to her here for half
an hour, while I go over? Renée complains that she loses the vulgar art
of walking in her complaisant attention to the fine Arts. I weary my
poor child.”

Renée protested in a rapid chatter.

“Must I avow it?” said the count; “she damps my enthusiasm a little.”

Nevil mutely accepted the office.

Twice that day was she surrendered to him: once in his ignorance, when
time appeared an expanse of many sunny fields. On this occasion it
puffed steam; yet, after seeing the count embark, he commenced the
parade in silence.

“This is a nice walk,” said Renée; “we have not the steps of the Riva
dei Schiavoni. It is rather melancholy though. How did you discover it?
I persuaded my papa to send the gondola round, and walk till we came to
the water. Tell me about the Giudecca.”

“The Giudecca was a place kept apart for the Jews, I believe. You have
seen their burial-ground on the Lido. Those are, I think, the Euganean
hills. You are fond of Petrarch.”

“M. Nevil, omitting the allusion to the poet, you have, permit me to
remark, the brevity without the precision of an accredited guide to
notabilities.”

“I tell you what I know,” said Nevil, brooding on the finished tone and
womanly aplomb of her language. It made him forget that she was a girl
entrusted to his guardianship. His heart came out.

“Renée, if you loved him, I, on my honour, would not utter a word for
myself. Your heart’s inclinations are sacred for me. I would stand by,
and be your friend and his. If he were young, that I might see a chance
of it!”

She murmured, “You should not have listened to Roland.”

“Roland should have warned me. How could I be near you and not... But I
am nothing. Forget me; do not think I speak interestedly, except to
save the dearest I have ever known from certain wretchedness. To yield
yourself hand and foot for life! I warn you that it must end miserably.
Your countrywomen... You have the habit in France; but like what are
you treated? You! none like you in the whole world! You consent to be
extinguished. And I have to look on! Listen to me now.”

Renée glanced at the gondola conveying her father. And he has not yet
landed! she thought, and said, “Do you pretend to judge of my welfare
better than my papa?”

“Yes; in this. He follows a fashion. You submit to it. His anxiety is
to provide for you. But I know the system is cursed by nature, and that
means by heaven.”

“Because it is not English?”

“O Renée, my beloved for ever! Well, then, tell me, tell me you can say
with pride and happiness that the Marquis de Rouaillout is to be
your—there’s the word—husband!”

Renée looked across the water.

“Friend, if my father knew you were asking me!”

“I will speak to him.”

“Useless.”

“He is generous, he loves you.”

“He cannot break an engagement binding his honour.”

“Would you, Renée, would you—it must be said—consent to have it known
to him—I beg for more than life—that your are not averse... that you
support me?”

His failing breath softened the bluntness.

She replied, “I would not have him ever break an engagement binding his
honour.”

“You stretch the point of honour.”

“It is our way. Dear friend, we are French. And I presume to think that
our French system is not always wrong, for if my father had not broken
it by treating you as one of us and leaving me with you, should I have
heard...?”

“I have displeased you.”

“Do not suppose that. But, I mean, a mother would not have left me.”

“You wished to avoid it.”

“Do not blame me. I had some instinct; you were very pale.”

“You knew I loved you.”

“No.”

“Yes; for this morning...”

“This morning it seemed to me, and I regretted my fancy, that you were
inclined to trifle, as, they say, young men do.”

“With Renée?”

“With your friend Renée. And those are the hills of Petrarch’s tomb?
They are mountains.”

They were purple beneath a large brooding cloud that hung against the
sun, waiting for him to enfold him, and Nevil thought that a tomb there
would be a welcome end, if he might lift Renée in one wild flight over
the chasm gaping for her. He had no language for thoughts of such a
kind, only tumultuous feeling.

She was immoveable, in perfect armour.

He said despairingly, “Can you have realized what you are consenting
to?”

She answered, “It is my duty.”

“Your duty! it’s like taking up a dice-box, and flinging once, to
certain ruin!”

“I must oppose my father to you, friend. Do you not understand duty to
parents? They say the English are full of the idea of duty.”

“Duty to country, duty to oaths and obligations; but with us the heart
is free to choose.”

“Free to choose, and when it is most ignorant?”

“The heart? ask it. Nothing is surer.”

“That is not what we are taught. We are taught that the heart deceives
itself. The heart throws your dicebox; not prudent parents.”

She talked like a woman, to plead the cause of her obedience as a girl,
and now silenced in the same manner that she had previously excited
him.

“Then you are lost to me,” he said.

They saw the gondola returning.

“How swiftly it comes home; it loitered when it went,” said Renée.
“There sits my father, brimming with his picture; he has seen one more!
We will congratulate him. This little boulevard is not much to speak
of. The hills are lovely. Friend,” she dropped her voice on the
gondola’s approach, “we have conversed on common subjects.”

Nevil had her hand in his, to place her in the gondola.

She seemed thankful that he should prefer to go round on foot. At
least, she did not join in her father’s invitation to him. She leaned
back, nestling her chin and half closing her eyes, suffering herself to
be divided from him, borne away by forces she acquiesced in.

Roland was not visible till near midnight on the Piazza. The
promenaders, chiefly military of the garrison, were few at that period
of social protestation, and he could declare his disappointment aloud,
ringingly, as he strolled up to Nevil, looking as if the cigar in his
mouth and the fists entrenched in his wide trowsers-pockets were
mortally at feud. His adventure had not pursued its course luminously.
He had expected romance, and had met merchandize, and his vanity was
offended. To pacify him, Nevil related how he had heard that since the
Venetian rising of “49, Venetian ladies had issued from the ordeal of
fire and famine of another pattern than the famous old Benzon one, in
which they touched earthiest earth. He praised Republicanism for that.
The spirit of the new and short-lived Republic wrought that change in
Venice.

“Oh, if they’re republican as well as utterly decayed,” said Roland, “I
give them up; let them die virtuous.”

Nevil told Roland that he had spoken to Renée. He won sympathy, but
Roland could not give him encouragement. They crossed and recrossed the
shadow of the great campanile, on the warm-white stones of the square,
Nevil admitting the weight of whatsoever Roland pointed to him in
favour of the arrangement according to French notions, and indeed, of
aristocratic notions everywhere, saving that it was imperative for
Renée to be disposed of in marriage early. Why rob her of her young
springtime!

“French girls,” replied Roland, confused by the nature of the
explication in his head—“well, they’re not English; they want a hand to
shape them, otherwise they grow all awry. My father will not have one
of her aunts to live with him, so there she is. But, my dear Nevil, I
owe my life to you, and I was no party to this affair. I would do
anything to help you. What says Renée?”

“She obeys.”

“Exactly. You see! Our girls are chess-pieces until they’re married.
Then they have life and character sometimes too much.”

“She is not like them, Roland; she is like none. When I spoke to her
first, she affected no astonishment; never was there a creature so
nobly sincere. She’s a girl in heart, not in mind. Think of her
sacrificed to this man thrice her age!”

“She differs from other girls only on the surface, Nevil. As for the
man, I wish she were going to marry a younger. I wish, yes, my friend,”
Roland squeezed Nevil’s hand, “I wish! I’m afraid it’s hopeless. She
did not tell you to hope?”

“Not by one single sign,” said Nevil.

“You see, my friend!”

“For that reason,” Nevil rejoined, with the calm fanaticism of the
passion of love, “I hope all the more... because I will not believe
that she, so pure and good, can be sacrificed. Put me aside—I am
nothing. I hope to save her from that.”

“We have now,” said Roland, “struck the current of duplicity. You are
really in love, my poor fellow.”

Lover and friend came to no conclusion, except that so lovely a night
was not given for slumber. A small round brilliant moon hung almost
globed in the depths of heaven, and the image of it fell deep between
San Giorgio and the Dogana.

Renée had the scene from her window, like a dream given out of sleep.
She lay with both arms thrown up beneath her head on the pillow, her
eyelids wide open, and her visage set and stern. Her bosom rose and
sank regularly but heavily. The fluctuations of a night stormy for her,
hitherto unknown, had sunk her to this trance, in which she lay like a
creature flung on shore by the waves. She heard her brother’s voice and
Nevil’s, and the pacing of their feet. She saw the long shaft of
moonlight broken to zigzags of mellow lightning, and wavering back to
steadiness; dark San Giorgio, and the sheen of the Dogana’s front. But
the visible beauty belonged to a night that had shivered repose,
humiliated and wounded her, destroyed her confident happy half-infancy
of heart, and she had flown for a refuge to hard feelings. Her
predominant sentiment was anger; an anger that touched all and
enveloped none, for it was quite fictitious, though she felt it, and
suffered from it. She turned it on Nevil, as against an enemy, and
became the victim in his place. Tears for him filled in her eyes, and
ran over; she disdained to notice them, and blinked offendedly to have
her sight clear of the weakness; but these interceding tears would
flow; it was dangerous to blame him, harshly. She let them roll down,
figuring to herself with quiet simplicity of mind that her spirit was
independent of them as long as she restrained her hands from being
accomplices by brushing them away, as weeping girls do that cry for
comfort. Nevil had saved her brother’s life, and had succoured her
countrymen; he loved her, and was a hero. He should not have said he
loved her; that was wrong; and it was shameful that he should have
urged her to disobey her father. But this hero’s love of her might
plead excuses she did not know of; and if he was to be excused, he,
unhappy that he was, had a claim on her for more than tears. She wept
resentfully. Forces above her own swayed and hurried her like a
lifeless body dragged by flying wheels: they could not unnerve her
will, or rather, what it really was, her sense of submission to a
destiny. Looked at from the height of the palm-waving cherubs over the
fallen martyr in the picture, she seemed as nerveless as a dreamy girl.
The raised arms and bent elbows were an illusion of indifference. Her
shape was rigid from hands to feet, as if to keep in a knot the
resolution of her mind; for the second and in that young season the
stronger nature grafted by her education fixed her to the religious
duty of obeying and pleasing her father, in contempt, almost in
abhorrence, of personal inclinations tending to thwart him and imperil
his pledged word. She knew she had inclinations to be tender. Her hands
released, how promptly might she not have been confiding her
innumerable perplexities of sentiment and emotion to paper, undermining
self-governance; self-respect, perhaps! Further than that, she did not
understand the feelings she struggled with; nor had she any impulse to
gaze on him, the cause of her trouble, who walked beside her brother
below, talking betweenwhiles in the night’s grave undertones. Her
trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her too mysteriously,
coming on her solitariness without warning in the first watch of the
night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to sudden
flame. A thought of Nevil and a regret had done it.




CHAPTER VIII.
A NIGHT ON THE ADRIATIC


The lovers met after Roland had spoken to his sister—not exactly to
advocate the cause of Nevil, though he was under the influence of that
grave night’s walk with him, but to sound her and see whether she at
all shared Nevil’s view of her situation. Roland felt the awfulness of
a French family arrangement of a marriage, and the impertinence of a
foreign Cupid’s intrusion, too keenly to plead for his friend: at the
same time he loved his friend and his sister, and would have been very
ready to smile blessings on them if favourable circumstances had raised
a signal; if, for example, apoplexy or any other cordial ex machina
intervention had removed the middle-aged marquis; and, perhaps, if
Renée had shown the repugnance to her engagement which Nevil declared
she must have in her heart, he would have done more than smile; he
would have laid the case deferentially before his father. His own
opinion was that young unmarried women were incapable of the passion of
love, being, as it were, but half-feathered in that state, and unable
to fly; and Renée confirmed it. The suspicion of an advocacy on Nevil’s
behalf steeled her. His tentative observations were checked at the
outset.

“Can such things be spoken of to me, Roland? I am plighted. You know
it.”

He shrugged, said a word of pity for Nevil, and went forth to let his
friend know that it was as he had predicted: Renée was obedience in
person, like a rightly educated French girl. He strongly advised his
friend to banish all hope of her from his mind. But the mind he
addressed was of a curious order; far-shooting, tough, persistent, and
when acted on by the spell of devotion, indomitable. Nevil put hope
aside, or rather, he clad it in other garments, in which it was hardly
to be recognized by himself, and said to Roland: “You must bear this
from me; you must let me follow you to the end, and if she wavers she
will find me near.”

Roland could not avoid asking the use of it, considering that Renée,
however much she admired and liked, was not in love with him.

Nevil resigned himself to admit that she was not: and therefore, said
he, “you won’t object to my remaining.”

Renée greeted Nevil with as clear a conventional air as a woman could
assume.

She was going, she said, to attend High Mass in the church of S. Moise,
and she waved her devoutest Roman Catholicism to show the breadth of
the division between them. He proposed to go likewise. She was mute.
After some discourse she contrived to say inoffensively that people who
strolled into her churches for the music, or out of curiosity, played
the barbarian.

“Well, I will not go,” said Nevil.

“But I do not wish to number you among them,” she said.

“Then,” said Nevil, “I will go, for it cannot be barbarous to try to be
with you.”

“No, that is wickedness,” said Renée.

She was sensible that conversation betrayed her, and Nevil’s apparently
deliberate pursuit signified to her that he must be aware of his
mastery, and she resented it, and stumbled into pitfalls whenever she
opened her lips. It seemed to be denied to them to utter what she
meant, if indeed she had a meaning in speaking, save to hurt herself
cruelly by wounding the man who had caught her in the toils: and so
long as she could imagine that she was the only one hurt, she was the
braver and the harsher for it; but at the sight of Nevil in pain her
heart relented and shifted, and discovering it to be so weak as to be
almost at his mercy, she defended it with an aggressive unkindness, for
which, in charity to her sweeter nature, she had to ask his pardon, and
then had to fib to give reasons for her conduct, and then to pretend to
herself that her pride was humbled by him; a most humiliating round,
constantly recurring; the worse for the reflection that she created it.
She attempted silence. Nevil spoke, and was like the magical piper: she
was compelled to follow him and dance the round again, with the
wretched thought that it must resemble coquettry. Nevil did not think
so, but a very attentive observer now upon the scene, and possessed of
his half of the secret, did, and warned him. Rosamund Culling added
that the French girl might be only an unconscious coquette, for she was
young. The critic would not undertake to pronounce on her suggestion,
whether the candour apparent in merely coquettish instincts was not
more dangerous than a battery of the arts of the sex. She had heard
Nevil’s frank confession, and seen Renée twice, when she tried in his
service, though not greatly wishing for success, to stir the sensitive
girl for an answer to his attachment. Probably she went to work
transparently, after the insular fashion of opening a spiritual mystery
with the lancet. Renée suffered herself to be probed here and there,
and revealed nothing of the pain of the operation. She said to Nevil,
in Rosamund’s hearing:

“Have you the sense of honour acute in your country?” Nevil inquired
for the apropos.

“None,” said she.

Such pointed insolence disposed Rosamund to an irritable antagonism,
without reminding her that she had given some cause for it.

Renée said to her presently: “He saved my brother’s life”; the àpropos
being as little perceptible as before.

Her voice dropped to her sweetest deep tones, and there was a
supplicating beam in her eyes, unintelligible to the direct
Englishwoman, except under the heading of a power of witchery fearful
to think of in one so young, and loved by Nevil.

The look was turned upon her, not upon her hero, and Rosamund thought,
“Does she want to entangle me as well?”

It was, in truth, a look of entreaty from woman to woman, signifying
need of womanly help. Renée would have made a confidante of her, if she
had not known her to be Nevil’s, and devoted to him. “I would speak to
you, but that I feel you would betray me,” her eyes had said. The
strong sincerity dwelling amid multiform complexities might have made
itself comprehensible to the English lady for a moment or so, had Renée
spoken words to her ears; but belief in it would hardly have survived
the girl’s next convolutions. “She is intensely French,” Rosamund said
to Nevil—a volume of insular criticism in a sentence.

“You do not know her, ma’am,” said Nevil. “You think her older than she
is, and that is the error I fell into. She is a child.”

“A serpent in the egg is none the less a serpent, Nevil. Forgive me;
but when she tells you the case is hopeless!”

“No case is hopeless till a man consents to think it is; and I shall
stay.”

“But then again, Nevil, you have not consulted your uncle.”

“Let him see her! let him only see her!”

Rosamund Culling reserved her opinion compassionately. His uncle would
soon be calling to have him home: society panted for him to make much
of him and here he was, cursed by one of his notions of duty, in
attendance on a captious “young French beauty, who was the less to be
excused for not dismissing him peremptorily, if she cared for him at
all. His career, which promised to be so brilliant, was spoiling at the
outset. Rosamund thought of Renée almost with detestation, as a species
of sorceress that had dug a trench in her hero’s road, and unhorsed and
fast fettered him.

The marquis was expected immediately. Renée sent up a little note to
Mrs. Calling’s chamber early in the morning, and it was with an air of
one-day-more-to-ourselves, that, meeting her, she entreated the English
lady to join the expedition mentioned in her note. Roland had hired a
big Chioggian fishing-boat to sail into the gulf at night, and return
at dawn, and have sight of Venice rising from the sea. Her father had
declined; but M. Nevil wished to be one of the party, and in that
case.... Renée threw herself beseechingly into the mute interrogation,
keeping both of Rosamund’s hands. They could slip away only by deciding
to, and this rare Englishwoman had no taste for the petty overt
hostilities. “If I can be of use to you,” she said.

“If you can bear sea-pitching and tossing for the sake of the loveliest
sight in the whole world,” said Renée.

“I know it well,” Rosamund replied.

Renée rippled her eyebrows. She divined a something behind that remark,
and as she was aware of the grief of Rosamund’s life, her quick
intuition whispered that it might be connected with the gallant officer
dead on the battle-field.

“Madame, if you know it too well...” she said.

“No; it is always worth seeing,” said Rosamund, “and I think,
mademoiselle, with your permission, I should accompany you.”

“It is only a whim of mine, madame. I can stay on shore.”

“Not when it is unnecessary to forego a pleasure.”

“Say, my last day of freedom.”

Renée kissed her hand.

She is terribly winning, Rosamund avowed. Renée was in debate whether
the woman devoted to Nevil would hear her and help.

Just then Roland and Nevil returned from their boat, where they had
left carpenters and upholsterers at work, and the delicate chance for
an understanding between the ladies passed by.

The young men were like waves of ocean overwhelming it, they were so
full of their boat, and the scouring and cleaning out of it, and
provisioning, and making it worthy of its freight. Nevil was surprised
that Mrs. Culling should have consented to come, and asked her if she
really wished it—really; and “Really,” said Rosamund; “certainly.”

“Without dubitation,” cried Roland. “And now my little Renée has no
more shore-qualms; she is smoothly chaperoned, and madame will present
us tea on board. All the etcæteras of life are there, and a mariner’s
eye in me spies a breeze at sunset to waft us out of Malamocco.”

The count listened to the recital of their preparations with his usual
absent interest in everything not turning upon Art, politics, or social
intrigue. He said, “Yes, good, good,” at the proper intervals, and
walked down the riva to look at the busy boat, said to Nevil, “You are
a sailor; I confide my family to you,” and prudently counselled Renée
to put on the dresses she could toss to the deep without regrets. Mrs.
Culling he thanked fervently for a wonderful stretch of generosity in
lending her presence to the madcaps.

Altogether the day was a reanimation of external Venice. But there was
a thunderbolt in it; for about an hour before sunset, when the ladies
were superintending and trying not to criticize the ingenious efforts
to produce a make-believe of comfort on board for them, word was
brought down to the boat by the count’s valet that the Marquis de
Rouaillout had arrived. Renée turned her face to her brother
superciliously. Roland shrugged. “Note this, my sister,” he said; “an
anticipation of dates in paying visits precludes the ripeness of the
sentiment of welcome. It is, however, true that the marquis has less
time to spare than others.”

“We have started; we are on the open sea. How can we put back?” said
Renée.

“You hear, François; we are on the open sea,” Roland addressed the
valet.

“Monsieur has cut loose his communications with land,” François
responded, and bowed from the landing.

Nevil hastened to make this a true report; but they had to wait for
tide as well as breeze, and pilot through intricate mud-channels before
they could see the outside of the Lido, and meanwhile the sun lay like
a golden altarplatter on mud-banks made bare by the ebb, and curled in
drowsy yellow links along the currents. All they could do was to push
off and hang loose, bumping to right and left in the midst of volleys
and countervolleys of fishy Venetian, Chioggian, and Dalmatian, quite
as strong as anything ever heard down the Canalaggio. The
representatives of these dialects trotted the decks and hung their
bodies half over the sides of the vessels to deliver fire, flashed eyes
and snapped fingers, not a whit less fierce than hostile crews in the
old wars hurling an interchange of stink-pots, and then resumed the
trot, apparently in search of fresh ammunition. An Austrian sentinel
looked on passively, and a police inspector peeringly. They were used
to it. Happily, the combustible import of the language was unknown to
the ladies, and Nevil’s attempts to keep his crew quiet, contrasting
with Roland’s phlegm, which a Frenchman can assume so philosophically
when his tongue is tied, amused them. During the clamour, Renée saw her
father beckoning from the riva. She signified that she was no longer in
command of circumstances; the vessel was off. But the count stamped his
foot, and nodded imperatively. Thereupon Roland repeated the eloquent
demonstrations of Renée, and the count lost patience, and Roland
shouted, “For the love of heaven, don’t join this babel; we’re nearly
bursting.” The rage of the babel was allayed by degrees, though not
appeased, for the boat was behaving wantonly, as the police officer
pointed out to the count.

Renée stood up to bend her head. It was in reply to a salute from the
Marquis de Rouaillout, and Nevil beheld his rival.

“M. le Marquis, seeing it is out of the question that we can come to
you, will you come to us?” cried Roland.

The marquis gesticulated “With alacrity” in every limb.

“We will bring you back on to-morrow midnight’s tide, safe, we promise
you.”

The marquis advanced a foot, and withdrew it. Could he have heard
correctly? They were to be out a whole night at sea! The count
dejectedly confessed his incapability to restrain them: the young
desperadoes were ready for anything. He had tried the voice of
authority, and was laughed at. As to Renée, an English lady was with
her.

“The English lady must be as mad as the rest,” said the marquis.

“The English are mad,” said the count; “but their women are strict upon
the proprieties.”

“Possibly, my dear count; but what room is there for the proprieties on
board a fishing-boat?”

“It is even as you say, my dear marquis.”

“You allow it?”

“Can I help myself? Look at them. They tell me they have given the boat
the fittings of a yacht.”

“And the young man?”

“That is the M. Beauchamp of whom I have spoken to you, the very pick
of his country, fresh, lively, original; and he can converse. You will
like him.”

“I hope so,” said the marquis, and roused a doleful laugh. “It would
seem that one does not arrive by hastening!”

“Oh! but my dear marquis, you have paid the compliment; you are like
Spring thrusting in a bunch of lilac while the winds of winter blow. If
you were not expected, your expeditiousness is appreciated, be sure.”

Roland fortunately did not hear the marquis compared to Spring. He was
saying: “I wonder what those two elderly gentlemen are talking about”;
and Nevil confused his senses by trying to realize that one of them was
destined to be the husband of his now speechless Renée. The marquis was
clad in a white silken suit, and a dash of red round the neck set off
his black beard; but when he lifted his broad straw hat, a baldness of
sconce shone. There was elegance in his gestures; he looked a
gentleman, though an ultra-Gallican one, that is, too scrupulously
finished for our taste, smelling of the valet. He had the habit of
balancing his body on the hips, as if to emphasize a juvenile vigour,
and his general attitude suggested an idea that he had an oration for
you. Seen from a distance, his baldness and strong nasal projection
were not winning features; the youthful standard he had evidently
prescribed to himself in his dress and his ready jerks of acquiescence
and delivery might lead a forlorn rival to conceive him something of an
ogre straining at an Adonis. It could not be disputed that he bore his
disappointment remarkably well; the more laudably, because his position
was within a step of the ridiculous, for he had shot himself to the
mark, despising sleep, heat, dust, dirt, diet, and lo, that charming
object was deliberately slipping out of reach, proving his headlong
journey an absurdity.

As he stood declining to participate in the lunatic voyage, and bidding
them perforce good speed off the tips of his fingers, Renée turned her
eyes on him, and away. She felt a little smart of pity, arising partly
from her antagonism to Roland’s covert laughter: but it was the colder
kind of feminine pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness.
She sat still, placid outwardly, in fear of herself, so strange she
found it to be borne out to sea by her sailor lover under the eyes of
her betrothed. She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations,
none of them of a very healthy kind, coming as it were from an unlocked
chamber of her bosom, hitherto of unimagined contents; and the marquis
being now on the spot to defend his own, she no longer blamed Nevil: it
was otherwise utterly. All the sweeter side of pity was for him.

He was at first amazed by the sudden exquisite transition. Tenderness
breathed from her, in voice, in look, in touch; for she accepted his
help that he might lead her to the stern of the vessel, to gaze well on
setting Venice, and sent lightnings up his veins; she leaned beside him
over the vessel’s rails, not separated from him by the breadth of a
fluttering riband. Like him, she scarcely heard her brother when for an
instant he intervened, and with Nevil she said adieu to Venice, where
the faint red Doge’s palace was like the fading of another sunset
north-westward of the glory along the hills. Venice dropped lower and
lower, breasting the waters, until it was a thin line in air. The line
was broken, and ran in dots, with here and there a pillar standing on
opal sky. At last the topmost campanile sank.

Renée looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged city.

“It is gone!” she said, as though a marvel had been worked; and
swiftly: “we have one night!”

She breathed it half like a question, like a petition, catching her
breath. The adieu to Venice was her assurance of liberty, but Venice
hidden rolled on her the sense of the return and plucked shrewdly at
her tether of bondage.

They set their eyes toward the dark gulf ahead. The night was growing
starry. The softly ruffled Adriatic tossed no foam.

“One night?” said Nevil; “one? Why only one?”

Renée shuddered. “Oh! do not speak.”

“Then, give me your hand.”

“There, my friend.”

He pressed a hand that was like a quivering chord. She gave it as
though it had been his own to claim. But that it meant no more than a
hand he knew by the very frankness of her compliance, in the manner
natural to her; and this was the charm, it filled him with her peculiar
image and spirit, and while he held it he was subdued.

Lying on the deck at midnight, wrapt in his cloak and a coil of rope
for a pillow, considerably apart from jesting Roland, the recollection
of that little sanguine spot of time when Renée’s life-blood ran with
his, began to heave under him like a swelling sea. For Nevil the
starred black night was Renée. Half his heart was in it: but the
combative division flew to the morning and the deadly iniquity of the
marriage, from which he resolved to save her; in pure devotedness, he
believed. And so he closed his eyes. She, a girl, with a heart
fluttering open and fearing, felt only that she had lost herself
somewhere, and she had neither sleep nor symbols, nothing but a sense
of infinite strangeness, as though she were borne superhumanly through
space.




CHAPTER IX.
MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS


The breeze blew steadily, enough to swell the sails and sweep the
vessel on smoothly. The night air dropped no moisture on deck.

Nevil Beauchamp dozed for an hour. He was awakened by light on his
eyelids, and starting up beheld the many pinnacles of grey and red
rocks and shadowy high white regions at the head of the gulf waiting
for the sun; and the sun struck them. One by one they came out in
crimson flame, till the vivid host appeared to have stepped forward.
The shadows on the snow-fields deepened to purple below an irradiation
of rose and pink and dazzling silver. There of all the world you might
imagine Gods to sit. A crowd of mountains endless in range, erect, or
flowing, shattered and arid, or leaning in smooth lustre, hangs above
the gulf. The mountains are sovereign Alps, and the sea is beneath
them. The whole gigantic body keeps the sea, as with a hand, to right
and left.

Nevil’s personal rapture craved for Renée with the second long breath
he drew; and now the curtain of her tent-cabin parted, and greeting him
with a half smile, she looked out. The Adriatic was dark, the Alps had
heaven to themselves. Crescents and hollows, rosy mounds, white
shelves, shining ledges, domes and peaks, all the towering heights were
in illumination from Friuli into farthest Tyrol; beyond earth to the
stricken senses of the gazers. Colour was stedfast on the massive front
ranks: it wavered in the remoteness, and was quick and dim as though it
fell on beating wings; but there too divine colour seized and shaped
forth solid forms, and thence away to others in uttermost distances
where the incredible flickering gleam of new heights arose, that
soared, or stretched their white uncertain curves in sky like wings
traversing infinity.

It seemed unlike morning to the lovers, but as if night had broken with
a revelation of the kingdom in the heart of night. While the broad
smooth waters rolled unlighted beneath that transfigured upper sphere,
it was possible to think the scene might vanish like a view caught out
of darkness by lightning. Alp over burning Alp, and around them a
hueless dawn! The two exulted they threw off the load of wonderment,
and in looking they had the delicious sensation of flight in their
veins.

Renée stole toward Nevil. She was mystically shaken and at his mercy;
and had he said then, “Over to the other land, away from Venice!” she
would have bent her head.

She asked his permission to rouse her brother and madame, so that they
should not miss the scene.

Roland lay in the folds of his military greatcoat, too completely happy
to be disturbed, Nevil Beauchamp chose to think; and Rosamund Culling,
he told Renée, had been separated from her husband last on these
waters.

“Ah! to be unhappy here,” sighed Renée. “I fancied it when I begged her
to join us. It was in her voice.”

The impressionable girl trembled. He knew he was dear to her, and for
that reason, judging of her by himself, he forbore to urge his
advantage, conceiving it base to fear that loving him she could yield
her hand to another; and it was the critical instant. She was almost in
his grasp. A word of sharp entreaty would have swung her round to see
her situation with his eyes, and detest and shrink from it. He
committed the capital fault of treating her as his equal in passion and
courage, not as metal ready to run into the mould under temporary
stress of fire.

Even later in the morning, when she was cooler and he had come to
speak, more than her own strength was needed to resist him. The
struggle was hard. The boat’s head had been put about for Venice, and
they were among the dusky-red Chioggian sails in fishing quarters,
expecting momently a campanile to signal the sea-city over the level.
Renée waited for it in suspense. To her it stood for the implacable key
of a close and stifling chamber, so different from this brilliant
boundless region of air, that she sickened with the apprehension; but
she knew it must appear, and soon, and therewith the contraction and
the gloom it indicated to her mind. He talked of the beauty. She
fretted at it, and was her petulant self again in an epigrammatic note
of discord.

He let that pass.

“Last night you said ‘one night,’” he whispered. “We will have another
sail before we leave Venice.”

“One night, and in a little time one hour! and next one minute! and
there’s the end,” said Renée.

Her tone alarmed him. “Have you forgotten that you gave me your hand?”

“I gave my hand to my friend.”

“You gave it to me for good.”

“No; I dared not; it is not mine.”

“It is mine,” said Beauchamp.

Renée pointed to the dots and severed lines and isolated columns of the
rising city, black over bright sea.

“Mine there as well as here,” said Beauchamp, and looked at her with
the fiery zeal of eyes intent on minutest signs for a confirmation, to
shake that sad negation of her face.

“Renée, you cannot break the pledge of the hand you gave me last
night.”

“You tell me how weak a creature I am.”

“You are me, myself; more, better than me. And say, would you not
rather coast here and keep the city under water?”

She could not refrain from confessing that she would be glad never to
land there.

“So, when you land, go straight to your father,” said Beauchamp, to
whose conception it was a simple act resulting from the avowal.

“Oh! you torture me,” she cried. Her eyelashes were heavy with tears.
“I cannot do it. Think what you will of me! And, my friend, help me.
Should you not help me? I have not once actually disobeyed my father,
and he has indulged me, but he has been sure of me as a dutiful girl.
That is my source of self-respect. My friend can always be my friend.”

“Yes, while it’s not too late,” said Beauchamp.

She observed a sudden stringing of his features. He called to the chief
boatman, made his command intelligible to that portly capitano, and
went on to Roland, who was puffing his after-breakfast cigarette in
conversation with the tolerant English lady.

“You condescend to notice us, Signor Beauchamp,” said Roland. “The
vessel is up to some manœuvre?”

“We have decided not to land,” replied Beauchamp. “And Roland,” he
checked the Frenchman’s shout of laughter, “I think of making for
Trieste. Let me speak to you, to both. Renée is in misery. She must not
go back.”

Roland sprang to his feet, stared, and walked over to Renée.

“Nevil,” said Rosamund Culling, “do you know what you are doing?”

“Perfectly,” said he. “Come to her. She is a girl, and I must think and
act for her.”

Roland met them.

“My dear Nevil, are you in a state of delusion? Renée denies...”

“There’s no delusion, Roland. I am determined to stop a catastrophe. I
see it as plainly as those Alps. There is only one way, and that’s the
one I have chosen.”

“Chosen! my friend. But allow me to remind you that you have others to
consult. And Renée herself...”

“She is a girl. She loves me, and I speak for her.”

“She has said it?”

“She has more than said it.”

“You strike me to the deck, Nevil. Either you are downright mad—which
seems the likeliest, or we are all in a nightmare. Can you suppose I
will let my sister be carried away the deuce knows where, while her
father is expecting her, and to fulfil an engagement affecting his
pledged word?”

Beauchamp simply replied:

“Come to her.”




CHAPTER X.
A SINGULAR COUNCIL


The four sat together under the shadow of the helmsman, by whom they
were regarded as voyagers in debate upon the question of some hours
further on salt water. “No bora,” he threw in at intervals, to assure
them that the obnoxious wind of the Adriatic need not disturb their
calculations.

It was an extraordinary sitting, but none of the parties to it thought
of it so when Nevil Beauchamp had plunged them into it. He compelled
them, even Renée—and she would have flown had there been wings on her
shoulders—to feel something of the life and death issues present to his
soul, and submit to the discussion, in plain language of the
market-place, of the most delicate of human subjects for her, for him,
and hardly less for the other two. An overmastering fervour can do
this. It upsets the vessel we float in, and we have to swim our way out
of deep waters by the directest use of the natural faculties, without
much reflection on the change in our habits. To others not under such
an influence the position seems impossible. This discussion occurred.
Beauchamp opened the case in a couple of sentences, and when the turn
came for Renée to speak, and she shrank from the task in manifest pain,
he spoke for her, and no one heard her contradiction. She would have
wished the fearful impetuous youth to succeed if she could have slept
through the storm he was rousing.

Roland appealed to her. “You! my sister! it is you that consent to this
wild freak, enough to break your father’s heart?”

He had really forgotten his knowledge of her character—what much he
knew—in the dust of the desperation flung about her by Nevil Beauchamp.

She shook her head; she had not consented.

“The man she loves is her voice and her will,” said Beauchamp. “She
gives me her hand and I lead her.”

Roland questioned her. It could not be denied that she had given her
hand, and her bewildered senses made her think that it had been with an
entire abandonment; and in the heat of her conflict of feelings, the
deliciousness of yielding to him curled round and enclosed her, as in a
cool humming sea-shell.

“Renée!” said Roland.

“Brother!” she cried.

“You see that I cannot suffer you to be borne away.”

“No; do not!”

But the boat was flying fast from Venice, and she could have fallen at
his feet and kissed them for not countermanding it.

“You are in my charge, my sister.”

“Yes.”

“And now, Nevil, between us two,” said Roland.

Beauchamp required no challenge. He seemed, to Rosamund Culling, twice
older than he was, strangely adept, yet more strangely wise of worldly
matters, and eloquent too. But it was the eloquence of frenzy, madness,
in Roland’s ear. The arrogation of a terrible foresight that harped on
present and future to persuade him of the righteousness of this
headlong proceeding advocated by his friend, vexed his natural
equanimity. The argument was out of the domain of logic. He could
hardly sit to listen, and tore at his moustache at each end.
Nevertheless his sister listened. The mad Englishman accomplished the
miracle of making her listen, and appear to consent.

Roland laughed scornfully. “Why Trieste? I ask you, why Trieste? You
can’t have a Catholic priest at your bidding, without her father’s
sanction.”

“We leave Renée at Trieste, under the care of madame,” said Beauchamp,
“and we return to Venice, and I go to your father. This method protects
Renée from annoyance.”

“It strikes me that if she arrives at any determination she must take
the consequences.”

“She does. She is brave enough for that. But she is a girl; she has to
fight the battle of her life in a day, and I am her lover, and she
leaves it to me.”

“Is my sister such a coward?” said Roland.

Renée could only call out his name.

“It will never do, my dear Nevil”; Roland tried to deal with his
unreasonable friend affectionately. “I am responsible for her. It’s
your own fault—if you had not saved my life I should not have been in
your way. Here I am, and your proposal can’t be heard of. Do as you
will, both of you, when you step ashore in Venice.”

“If she goes back she is lost,” said Beauchamp, and he attacked Roland
on the side of his love for Renée, and for him.

Roland was inflexible. Seeing which, Renée said, “To Venice, quickly,
my brother!” and now she almost sighed with relief to think that she
was escaping from this hurricane of a youth, who swept her off her feet
and wrapt her whole being in a delirium.

“We were in sight of the city just now!” cried Roland, staring and
frowning. “What’s this?”

Beauchamp answered him calmly, “The boat’s under my orders.”

“Talk madness, but don’t act it,” said Roland. “Round with the boat at
once. Hundred devils! you haven’t your wits.”

To his amazement, Beauchamp refused to alter the boat’s present course.

“You heard my sister?” said Roland.

“You frighten her,” said Beauchamp.

“You heard her wish to return to Venice, I say.”

“She has no wish that is not mine.”

It came to Roland’s shouting his command to the men, while Beauchamp
pointed the course on for them.

“You will make this a ghastly pleasantry,” said Roland.

“I do what I know to be right,” said Beauchamp.

“You want an altercation before these fellows?”

“There won’t be one; they obey me.”

Roland blinked rapidly in wrath and doubt of mind.

“Madame,” he stooped to Rosamund Culling, with a happy inspiration,
“convince him; you have known him longer than I, and I desire not to
lose my friend. And tell me, madame—I can trust you to be truth itself,
and you can see it is actually the time for truth to be spoken—is he
justified in taking my sister’s hand? You perceive that I am obliged to
appeal to you. Is he not dependent on his uncle? And is he not,
therefore, in your opinion, bound in reason as well as in honour to
wait for his uncle’s approbation before he undertakes to speak for my
sister? And, since the occasion is urgent, let me ask you one thing
more: whether, by your knowledge of his position, you think him
entitled to presume to decide upon my sister’s destiny? She, you are
aware, is not so young but that she can speak for herself...”

“There you are wrong, Roland,” said Beauchamp; “she can neither speak
nor think for herself: you lead her blindfolded.”

“And you, my friend, suppose that you are wiser than any of us. It is
understood. I venture to appeal to madame on the point in question.”

The poor lady’s heart beat dismally. She was constrained to answer, and
said, “His uncle is one who must be consulted.”

“You hear that, Nevil,” said Roland.

Beauchamp looked at her sharply; angrily, Rosamund feared. She had
struck his hot brain with the vision of Everard Romfrey as with a bar
of iron. If Rosamund had inclined to the view that he was sure of his
uncle’s support, it would have seemed to him a simple confirmation of
his sentiments, but he was not of the same temper now as when he
exclaimed, “Let him see her!” and could imagine, give him only Renée’s
love, the world of men subservient to his wishes.

Then he was dreaming; he was now in fiery earnest, for that reason
accessible to facts presented to him; and Rosamund’s reluctantly spoken
words brought his stubborn uncle before his eyes, inflicting a sense of
helplessness of the bitterest kind.

They were all silent. Beauchamp stared at the lines of the deck-planks.

His scheme to rescue Renée was right and good; but was he the man that
should do it? And was she, moreover, he thought—speculating on her bent
head—the woman to be forced to brave the world with him, and poverty?
She gave him no sign. He was assuredly not the man to pretend to powers
he did not feel himself to possess, and though from a personal, and
still more from a lover’s, inability to see all round him at one time
and accurately to weigh the forces at his disposal, he had gone far, he
was not a wilful dreamer nor so very selfish a lover. The instant his
consciousness of a superior strength failed him he acknowledged it.

Renée did not look up. She had none of those lightnings of primitive
energy, nor the noble rashness and reliance on her lover, which his
imagination had filled her with; none. That was plain. She could not
even venture to second him. Had she done so he would have held out. He
walked to the head of the boat without replying.

Soon after this the boat was set for Venice again.

When he rejoined his companions he kissed Rosamund’s hand, and Renée,
despite a confused feeling of humiliation and anger, loved him for it.

Glittering Venice was now in sight; the dome of Sta. Maria Salute
shining like a globe of salt.

Roland flung his arm round his friend’s neck, and said, “Forgive me.”

“You do what you think right,” said Beauchamp.

“You are a perfect man of honour, my friend, and a woman would adore
you. Girls are straws. It’s part of Renée’s religion to obey her
father. That’s why I was astonished!... I owe you my life, and I would
willingly give you my sister in part payment, if I had the giving of
her; most willingly. The case is, that she’s a child, and you?”

“Yes, I’m dependent,” Beauchamp assented. “I can’t act; I see it. That
scheme wants two to carry it out: she has no courage. I feel that I
could carry the day with my uncle, but I can’t subject her to the
risks, since she dreads them; I see it. Yes, I see that! I should have
done well, I believe; I should have saved her.”

“Run to England, get your uncle’s consent, and then try.”

“No; I shall go to her father.”

“My dear Nevil, and supposing you have Renée to back you—supposing it,
I say—won’t you be falling on exactly the same bayonet-point?”

“If I leave her!” Beauchamp interjected. He perceived the quality of
Renée’s unformed character which he could not express.

“But we are to suppose that she loves you?”

“She is a girl.”

“You return, my friend, to the place you started from, as you did on
the canal without knowing it. In my opinion, frankly, she is best
married. And I think so all the more after this morning’s lesson. You
understand plainly that if you leave her she will soon be pliant to the
legitimate authorities; and why not?”

“Listen to me, Roland. I tell you she loves me. I am bound to her, and
when—if ever I see her unhappy, I will not stand by and look on
quietly.”

Roland shrugged. “The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain
from baptizing it. For me, less privileged than my fellows, I have
never seen the future. Consequently I am not in love with it, and to
declare myself candidly I do not care for it one snap of the fingers.
Let us follow our usages, and attend to the future at the hour of its
delivery. I prefer the sage-femme to the prophet. From my heart, Nevil,
I wish I could help you. We have charged great guns together, but a
family arrangement is something different from a hostile battery.
There’s Venice! and, as soon as you land, my responsibility’s ended.
Reflect, I pray you, on what I have said about girls. Upon my word, I
discover myself talking wisdom to you. Girls are precious fragilities.
Marriage is the mould for them; they get shape, substance, solidity:
that is to say, sense, passion, a will of their own: and grace and
tenderness, delicacy; all out of the rude, raw, quaking creatures we
call girls. Paris! my dear Nevil. Paris! It’s the book of women.”

The grandeur of the decayed sea-city, where folly had danced Parisianly
of old, spread brooding along the waters in morning light; beautiful;
but with that inner light of history seen through the beauty Venice was
like a lowered banner. The great white dome and the campanili watching
above her were still brave emblems. Would Paris leave signs of an
ancient vigour standing to vindicate dignity when her fall came? Nevil
thought of Renée in Paris.

She avoided him. She had retired behind her tent-curtains, and
reappeared only when her father’s voice hailed the boat from a gondola.
The count and the marquis were sitting together, and there was a spare
gondola for the voyagers, so that they should not have to encounter
another babel of the riva. Salutes were performed with lifted hats,
nods, and bows.

“Well, my dear child, it has all been very wonderful and
uncomfortable?” said the count.

“Wonderful, papa; splendid.”

“No qualms of any kind?”

“None, I assure you.”

“And madame?”

“Madame will confirm it, if you find a seat for her.”

Rosamund Culling was received in the count’s gondola, cordially
thanked, and placed beside the marquis.

“I stay on board and pay these fellows,” said Roland.

Renée was told by her father to follow madame. He had jumped into the
spare gondola and offered a seat to Beauchamp.

“No,” cried Renée, arresting Beauchamp, “it is I who mean to sit with
papa.”

Up sprang the marquis with an entreating, “Mademoiselle!”

“M. Beauchamp will entertain you, M. le Marquis.”

“I want him here,” said the count; and Beauchamp showed that his wish
was to enter the count’s gondola, but Renée had recovered her aplomb,
and decisively said “No,” and Beauchamp had to yield.

That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a
formal asking of leave. She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.

Renée took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father’s
arms, murmuring:

“Do nothing—nothing! until you hear from me.”




CHAPTER XI.
CAPTAIN BASKELETT


Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war,
counting the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and
soothing the taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of
course, the first to come home had the cream of the praises. She hugged
them in a manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must
be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty,
too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should
not protest overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were
such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did
cordially reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most
naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to
have stuck to their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the
Spartans, who were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical
conduct, and rewarded none save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort
seems to betray the sense of poverty in the article. Our England does
nothing like it. All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want
of them. Besides, she has to please the taxpayer. You may track a
shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her
domestic history: either it is the forethought finding it necessary to
stir up an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the
afterthought: policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly.
How can she manage an enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other
than a little clumsily? The managing of it at all is the wonder. And
not only has she to stupefy the taxpayer by a timely display of
feastings and fireworks, she has to stop all that nonsense (to quote a
satiated man lightened in his purse) at the right moment, about the
hour when the old standfasts, who have simply been doing duty, return,
poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto or two is the utmost
she can present to them. On the other hand, it is true she gives her
first loves, those early birds, fully to understand that a change has
come in their island mother’s mind. If there is a balance to be
righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be the season
for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less; and if
no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally toss a
leaf of laurel on a name or two: thus in the exercise of grumbling
doing good.

With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp’s heroes received the motto
instead of the sweetmeat. England expected them to do their duty; they
did it, and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be. Beauchamp, at
a distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning
the unjust measure dealt to his favourites: Captain Hardist, of the
_Diomed_, twenty years a captain, still a captain! Young Michell denied
the cross! Colonel Evans Cuff, on the heights from first to last, and
not advanced a step! But Prancer, and Plunger, and Lammakin were
thoroughly _well taken care of_, this critic of the war wrote savagely,
reviving an echo of a queer small circumstance occurring in the midst
of the high dolour and anxiety of the whole nation, and which a politic
country preferred to forget, as we will do, for it was but an instance
of strong family feeling in high quarters; and is not the unity of the
country founded on the integrity of the family sentiment? Is it not
certain, which the master tells us, that a line is but a continuation
of a number of dots? Nevil Beauchamp was for insisting that great
Government officers had paid more attention to a dot or two than to the
line. He appeared to be at war with his country after the peace. So far
he had a lively ally in his uncle Everard; but these remarks of his
were a portion of a letter, whose chief burden was the request that
Everard Romfrey would back him in proposing for the hand of a young
French lady, she being, Beauchamp smoothly acknowledged, engaged to a
wealthy French marquis, under the approbation of her family. Could
mortal folly outstrip a petition of that sort? And apparently,
according to the wording and emphasis of the letter, it was the mature
age of the marquis which made Mr. Beauchamp so particularly desirous to
stop the projected marriage and take the girl himself. He appealed to
his uncle on the subject in a “really—really” remonstrative tone, quite
overwhelming to read. “It ought not to be permitted: by all the laws of
chivalry, I should write to the girl’s father to interdict it: I really
am particeps criminis in a sin against nature if I don’t!” Mr. Romfrey
interjected in burlesque of his ridiculous nephew, with collapsing
laughter. But he expressed an indignant surprise at Nevil for allowing
Rosamund to travel alone.

“I can take very good care of myself,” Rosamund protested.

“You can do hundreds of things you should never be obliged to do while
he’s at hand, or I, ma’am,” said Mr. Romfrey. “The fellow’s insane. He
forgets a gentleman’s duty. Here’s his ‘humanity’ dogging a French
frock, and pooh!—the age of the marquis! Fifty? A man’s beginning his
prime at fifty, or there never was much man in him. It’s the mark of a
fool to take everybody for a bigger fool than himself—or he wouldn’t
have written this letter to me. He can’t come home yet, not yet, and he
doesn’t know when he can! Has he thrown up the service? I am to
preserve the alliance between England and France by getting this French
girl for him in the teeth of her marquis, at my peril if I refuse!”

Rosamund asked, “Will you let me see where Nevil says that, sir?”

Mr. Romfrey tore the letter to strips. “He’s one of your fellows who
cock their eyes when they mean to be cunning. He sends you to do the
wheedling, that’s plain. I don’t say he has hit on a bad advocate; but
tell him I back him in no mortal marriage till he shows a pair of
epaulettes on his shoulders. Tell him lieutenants are fledglings—he’s
not marriageable at present. It’s a very pretty sacrifice of himself he
intends for the sake of the alliance, tell him that, but a lieutenant’s
not quite big enough to establish it. You will know what to tell him,
ma’am. And say, it’s the fellow’s best friend that advises him to be
out of it and home quick. If he makes one of a French trio, he’s
dished. He’s too late for his luck in England. Have him out of that
mire, we can’t hope for more now.”

Rosamund postponed her mission to plead. Her heart was with Nevil; her
understanding was easily led to side against him, and for better
reasons than Mr. Romfrey could be aware of: so she was assured by her
experience of the character of Mademoiselle de Croisnel. A certain
belief in her personal arts of persuasion had stopped her from writing
on her homeward journey to inform him that Nevil was not accompanying
her, and when she drove over Steynham Common, triumphal arches and the
odour of a roasting ox richly browning to celebrate the hero’s return
afflicted her mind with all the solid arguments of a common-sense
country in contravention of a wild lover’s vaporous extravagances. Why
had he not come with her? The disappointed ox put the question in a
wavering drop of the cheers of the villagers at the sight of the
carriage without their bleeding hero. Mr. Romfrey, at his hall-doors,
merely screwed his eyebrows; for it was the quality of this gentleman
to foresee most human events, and his capacity to stifle astonishment
when they trifled with his prognostics. Rosamund had left Nevil fast
bound in the meshes of the young French sorceress, no longer leading,
but submissively following, expecting blindly, seeing strange new
virtues in the lurid indication of what appeared to border on the
reverse. How could she plead for her infatuated darling to one who was
common sense in person?

Everard’s pointed interrogations reduced her to speak defensively,
instead of attacking and claiming his aid for the poor enamoured young
man. She dared not say that Nevil continued to be absent because he was
now encouraged by the girl to remain in attendance on her, and was more
than half inspired to hope, and too artfully assisted to deceive the
count and the marquis under the guise of simple friendship. Letters
passed between them in books given into one another’s hands with an
audacious openness of the saddest augury for the future of the pair,
and Nevil could be so lost to reason as to glory in Renée’s
intrepidity, which he justified by their mutual situation, and
cherished for a proof that she was getting courage. In fine, Rosamund
abandoned her task of pleading. Nevil’s communications gave the case a
worse and worse aspect: Renée was prepared to speak to her father; she
delayed it; then the two were to part; they were unable to perform the
terrible sacrifice and slay their last hope; and then Nevil wrote of
destiny—language hitherto unknown to him, evidently the tongue of
Renée. He slipped on from Italy to France. His uncle was besieged by a
series of letters, and his cousin, Cecil Baskelett, a captain in
England’s grand reserve force—her Horse Guards, of the Blue
division—helped Everard Romfrey to laugh over them.

It was not difficult, alack! Letters of a lover in an extremity of
love, crying for help, are as curious to cool strong men as the
contortions of the proved heterodox tied to a stake must have been to
their chastening ecclesiastical judges. Why go to the fire when a
recantation will save you from it? Why not break the excruciating
faggot-bands, and escape, when you have only to decide to do it? We
naturally ask why. Those martyrs of love or religion are madmen.
Altogether, Nevil’s adjurations and supplications, his threats of wrath
and appeals to reason, were an odd mixture. “He won’t lose a chance
while there’s breath in his body,” Everard said, quite good-humouredly,
though he deplored that the chance for the fellow to make his
hero-parade in society, and haply catch an heiress, was waning. There
was an heiress at Steynham, on her way with her father to Italy, very
anxious to see her old friend Nevil—Cecilia Halkett—and very
inquisitive this young lady of sixteen was to know the cause of his
absence. She heard of it from Cecil.

“And one morning last week mademoiselle was running away with him, and
the next morning she was married to her marquis!”

Cecil was able to tell her that.

“I used to be so fond of him,” said the ingenuous young lady. She had
to thank Nevil for a Circassian dress and pearls, which he had sent to
her by the hands of Mrs. Culling—a pretty present to a girl in the
nursery, she thought, and in fact she chose to be a little wounded by
the cause of his absence.

“He’s a good creature-really,” Cecil spoke on his cousin’s behalf.
“Mad; he always will be mad. A dear old savage; always amuses me. He
does! I get half my entertainment from him.”

Captain Baskelett was gifted with the art, which is a fine and a
precious one, of priceless value in society, and not wanting a
benediction upon it in our elegant literature, namely, the art of
stripping his fellow-man and so posturing him as to make every movement
of the comical wretch puppet-like, constrained, stiff, and foolish. He
could present you heroical actions in that fashion; for example:

“A long-shanked trooper, bearing the name of John Thomas Drew, was
crawling along under fire of the batteries. Out pops old Nevil, tries
to get the man on his back. It won’t do. Nevil insists that it’s
exactly one of the cases that ought to be, and they remain arguing
about it like a pair of nine-pins while the Muscovites are at work with
the bowls. Very well. Let me tell you my story. It’s perfectly true, I
give you my word. So Nevil tries to horse Drew, and Drew proposes to
horse Nevil, as at school. Then Drew offers a compromise. He would much
rather have crawled on, you know, and allowed the shot to pass over his
head; but he’s a Briton, old Nevil the same; but old Nevil’s
peculiarity is that, as you are aware, he hates a compromise—won’t have
it—retro Sathanas! and Drew’s proposal to take his arm instead of being
carried pickaback disgusts old Nevil. Still it won’t do to stop where
they are, like the cocoa-nut and the pincushion of our friends, the
gipsies, on the downs: so they take arms and commence the journey home,
resembling the best of friends on the evening of a holiday in our
native clime—two steps to the right, half-a-dozen to the left,
etcætera.”

Thus, with scarce a variation from the facts, with but a flowery
chaplet cast on a truthful narrative, as it were, Captain Baskelett
could render ludicrous that which in other quarters had obtained
honourable mention. Nevil and Drew being knocked down by the wind of a
ball near the battery, “Confound it!” cries Nevil, jumping on his feet,
“it’s because I consented to a compromise!”—a transparent piece of
fiction this, but so in harmony with the character stripped naked for
us that it is accepted. Imagine Nevil’s love-affair in such hands!
Recovering from a fever, Nevil sees a pretty French girl in a gondola,
and immediately thinks, “By jingo, I’m marriageable.” He hears she is
engaged. “By jingo, she’s marriageable too.” He goes through a sum in
addition, and the total is a couple; so he determines on a marriage.
“You can’t get it out of his head; he must be married instantly, and to
her, because she is going to marry somebody else. Sticks to her,
follows her, will have her, in spite of her father, her marquis, her
brother, aunts, cousins, religion, country, and the young woman
herself. I assure you, a perfect model of male fidelity! She is
married. He is on her track. He knows his time will come; he has only
to be handy. You see, old Nevil believes in Providence, is perfectly
sure he will one day hear it cry out, ‘Where’s Beauchamp?’—‘Here I
am!’—‘And here’s your marquise!’—‘I knew I should have her at last,’
says Nevil, calm as Mont Blanc on a reduced scale.”

The secret of Captain Baskelett’s art would seem to be to show the
automatic human creature at loggerheads with a necessity that winks at
remarkable pretensions, while condemning it perpetually to doll-like
action. You look on men from your own elevation as upon a quantity of
our little wooden images, unto whom you affix puny characteristics,
under restrictions from which they shall not escape, though they
attempt it with the enterprising vigour of an extended leg, or a pair
of raised arms, or a head awry, or a trick of jumping; and some of them
are extraordinarily addicted to these feats; but for all they do the
end is the same, for necessity rules, that exactly so, under stress of
activity must the doll Nevil, the doll Everard, or the dolliest of
dolls, fair woman, behave. The automatic creature is subject to the
laws of its construction, you perceive. It can this, it can that, but
it cannot leap out of its mechanism. One definition of the art is,
humour made easy, and that may be why Cecil Baskelett indulged in it,
and why it is popular with those whose humour consists of a readiness
to laugh.

The fun between Cecil Baskelett and Mr. Romfrey over the doll Nevil
threatened an intimacy and community of sentiment that alarmed Rosamund
on behalf of her darling’s material prospects. She wrote to him,
entreating him to come to Steynham. Nevil Beauchamp replied to her both
frankly and shrewdly: “I shall not pretend that I forgive my uncle
Everard, and therefore it is best for me to keep away. Have no fear.
The baron likes a man of his own tastes: they may laugh together, if it
suits them; he never could be guilty of treachery, and to disinherit me
would be that. If I were to become his open enemy to-morrow, I should
look on the estates as mine—unless I did anything to make him
disrespect me. You will not suppose it likely. I foresee I shall want
money. As for Cecil, I give him as much rope as he cares to have. I
know very well Everard Romfrey will see where the point of likeness
between them stops. I apply for a ship the moment I land.”

To test Nevil’s judgement of his uncle, Rosamund ventured on showing
this letter to Mr. Romfrey. He read it, and said nothing, but
subsequently asked, from time to time, “Has he got his ship yet?” It
assured her that Nevil was not wrong, and dispelled her notion of the
vulgar imbroglio of a rich uncle and two thirsty nephews. She was
hardly less relieved in reflecting that he could read men so soberly
and accurately. The desperation of the youth in love had rendered her
one little bit doubtful of the orderliness of his wits. After this she
smiled on Cecil’s assiduities. Nevil obtained his appointment to a ship
bound for the coast of Africa to spy for slavers. He called on his
uncle in London, and spent the greater part of the hour’s visit with
Rosamund; seemed cured of his passion, devoid of rancour, glad of the
prospect of a run among the slaving hulls. He and his uncle shook hands
manfully, at the full outstretch of their arms, in a way so like them,
to Rosamund’s thinking—that is, in a way so unlike any other possible
couple of men so situated—that the humour of the sight eclipsed all the
pleasantries of Captain Baskelett. “Good-bye, sir,” Nevil said
heartily; and Everard Romfrey was not behind-hand with the cordial ring
of his “Good-bye, Nevil”; and upon that they separated. Rosamund would
have been willing to speak to her beloved of his false Renée—the
Frenchwoman, she termed her, _i.e._ generically false, needless to
name; and one question quivered on her tongue’s tip: “How, when she had
promised to fly with you, _how could she_ the very next day step to the
altar with him now her husband?” And, if she had spoken it, she would
have added, “Your uncle could not have set his face against you, had
you brought her to England.” She felt strongly the mastery Nevil
Beauchamp could exercise even over his uncle Everard. But when he was
gone, unquestioned, merely caressed, it came to her mind that he had
all through insisted on his possession of this particular power, and
she accused herself of having wantonly helped to ruin his hope—a matter
to be rejoiced at in the abstract; but what suffering she had inflicted
on him! To quiet her heart, she persuaded herself that for the future
she would never fail to believe in him and second him blindly, as true
love should; and contemplating one so brave, far-sighted, and
self-assured, her determination seemed to impose the lightest of tasks.

Practically humane though he was, and especially toward cattle and all
kinds of beasts, Mr. Romfrey entertained no profound fellow-feeling for
the negro, and, except as the representative of a certain amount of
working power commonly requiring the whip to wind it up, he inclined to
despise that black spot in the creation, with which our civilization
should never have had anything to do. So he pronounced his mind, and
the long habit of listening to oracles might grow us ears to hear and
discover a meaning in it. Nevil’s captures and releases of the grinning
freights amused him for awhile. He compared them to strings of bananas,
and presently put the vision of the whole business aside by talking of
Nevil’s banana-wreath. He desired to have Nevil out of it. He and Cecil
handed Nevil in his banana-wreath about to their friends. Nevil, in his
banana-wreath, was set preaching “humanitomtity.” At any rate, they
contrived to keep the remembrance of Nevil Beauchamp alive during the
period of his disappearance from the world, and in so doing they did
him a service.

There is a pause between the descent of a diver and his return to the
surface, when those who would not have him forgotten by the better
world above him do rightly to relate anecdotes of him, if they can, and
to provoke laughter at him. The encouragement of the humane sense of
superiority over an object of interest, which laughter gives, is good
for the object; and besides, if you begin to tell sly stories of one in
the deeps who is holding his breath to fetch a pearl or two for you
all, you divert a particular sympathetic oppression of the chest, that
the extremely sensitive are apt to suffer from, and you dispose the
larger number to keep in mind a person they no longer see. Otherwise it
is likely that he will, very shortly after he has made his plunge,
fatigue the contemplative brains above, and be shuffled off them, even
as great ocean smoothes away the dear vanished man’s immediate circle
of foam, and rapidly confounds the rippling memory of him with its
other agitations. And in such a case the apparition of his head upon
our common level once more will almost certainly cause a disagreeable
shock; nor is it improbable that his first natural snorts in his native
element, though they be simply to obtain his share of the breath of
life, will draw down on him condemnation for eccentric behaviour and
unmannerly; and this in spite of the jewel he brings, unless it be an
exceedingly splendid one. The reason is, that our brave world cannot
pardon a breach of continuity for any petty bribe.

Thus it chanced, owing to the prolonged efforts of Mr. Romfrey and
Cecil Baskelett to get fun out of him, at the cost of considerable
inventiveness, that the electoral Address of the candidate, signing
himself “R. C. S. Nevil Beauchamp,” to the borough of Bevisham, did not
issue from an altogether unremembered man.

He had been cruising in the Mediterranean, commanding the _Ariadne_,
the smartest corvette in the service. He had, it was widely made known,
met his marquise in Palermo. It was presumed that he was dancing the
round with her still, when this amazing Address appeared on Bevisham’s
walls, in anticipation of the general Election. The Address, moreover,
was ultra-Radical: museums to be opened on Sundays; ominous references
to the Land question, etc.; no smooth passing mention of Reform, such
as the Liberal, become stately, adopts in speaking of that property of
his, but swinging blows on the heads of many a denounced iniquity.

Cecil forwarded the Address to Everard Romfrey without comment.

Next day the following letter, dated from Itchincope, the house of Mr.
Grancey Lespel, on the borders of Bevisham, arrived at Steynham:

“I have despatched you the proclamation, folded neatly. The electors of
Bevisham are summoned, like a town at the sword’s point, to yield him
their votes. Proclamation is the word. I am your born representative! I
have completed my political education on salt water, and I tackle you
on the Land question. I am the heir of your votes, gentlemen!—I forgot,
and I apologize; he calls them fellow-men. Fraternal, and not so risky.
Here at Lespel’s we read the thing with shouts. It hangs in the
smoking-room. We throw open the curacoa to the intelligence and
industry of the assembled guests; we carry the right of the multitude
to our host’s cigars by a majority. C’est un farceur que notre bon
petit cousin. Lespel says it is sailorlike to do something of this sort
after a cruise. Nevil’s Radicalism would have been clever anywhere out
of Bevisham. Of all boroughs! Grancey Lespel knows it. He and his
family were Bevisham’s Whig M.P.“s before the day of Manchester. In
Bevisham an election is an arrangement made by Providence to square the
accounts of the voters, and settle arrears. They reckon up the health
of their two members and the chances of an appeal to the country when
they fix the rents and leases. You have them pointed out to you in the
street, with their figures attached to them like titles. Mr. Tomkins,
the twenty-pound man; an elector of uncommon purity. I saw the ruffian
yesterday. He has an extra breadth to his hat. He has never been known
to listen to a member under £20, and is respected enormously—like the
lady of the Mythology, who was an intolerable Tartar of virtue, because
her price was nothing less than a god, and money down. Nevil will have
to come down on Bevisham in the Jupiter style. Bevisham is downright
the dearest of boroughs—‘vaulting-boards,’ as Stukely Culbrett calls
them—in the kingdom. I assume we still say ‘kingdom.’

“He dashed into the Radical trap exactly two hours after landing. I
believe he was on his way to the Halketts at Mount Laurels. A notorious
old rascal revolutionist retired from his licenced business of
slaughterer—one of your _gratis_ doctors—met him on the high-road, and
told him he was the man. Up went Nevil’s enthusiasm like a bottle rid
of the cork. You will see a great deal about faith in the proclamation;
‘faith in the future,’ and ‘my faith in you.’ When you become a Radical
you have faith in any quantity, just as an alderman gets turtle soup.
It is your badge, like a livery-servant’s cockade or a corporal’s
sleeve stripes—your badge and your bellyful. Calculations were gone
through at the Liberal newspaper-office, old Nevil adding up hard, and
he was informed that he was elected by something like a topping eight
or nine hundred and some fractions. I am sure that a fellow who can let
himself be gulled by a pile of figures trumped up in a Radical
newspaper-office must have great faith in the fractions. Out came
Nevil’s proclamation.

“I have not met him, and I would rather not. I shall not pretend to
offer you advice, for I have the habit of thinking your judgement can
stand by itself. We shall all find this affair a nuisance. Nevil will
pay through the nose. We shall have the ridicule spattered on the
family. It would be a safer thing for him to invest his money on the
Turf, and I shall advise his doing it if I come across him.

“Perhaps the best course would be to telegraph for the marquise!”

This was from Cecil Baskelett. He added a postscript:

“Seriously, the ‘mad commander’ has not an ace of a chance. Grancey and
I saw some Working Men (you have to write them in capitals, king and
queen small); they were reading the Address on a board carried by a
red-nosed man, and shrugging. They are not such fools.

“By the way, I am informed Shrapnel has a young female relative living
with him, said to be a sparkler. I bet you, sir, she is not a Radical.
Do you take me?”

Rosamund Culling drove to the railway station on her way to Bevisham
within an hour after Mr. Romfrey’s eyebrows had made acute play over
this communication.




CHAPTER XII.
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE INFAMOUS DR. SHRAPNEL


In the High street of the ancient and famous town and port of Bevisham,
Rosamund met the military governor of a neighbouring fortress, General
Sherwin, once colonel of her husband’s regiment in India; and by him,
as it happened, she was assisted in finding the whereabout of the young
Liberal candidate, without the degrading recourse of an application at
the newspaper-office of his party. The General was leisurely walking to
a place of appointment to fetch his daughter home from a visit to an
old school-friend, a Miss Jenny Denham, no other than a ward, or a
niece, or an adoption of Dr. Shrapnel’s: “A nice girl; a great
favourite of mine,” the General said. Shrapnel he knew by reputation
only as a wrong-headed politician; but he spoke of Miss Denham
pleasantly two or three times, praising her accomplishments and her
winning manners. His hearer suspected that it might be done to
dissociate the idea of her from the ruffling agitator. “Is she pretty?”
was a question that sprang from Rosamund’s intimate reflections. The
answer was, “Yes.”

“Very pretty?”

“I think very pretty,” said the General.

“Captivatingly?”

“Clara thinks she is perfect; she is tall and slim, and dresses well.
The girls were with a French Madam in Paris. But, if you are interested
about her, you can come on with me, and we shall meet them somewhere
near the head of the street. I don’t,” the General hesitated and
hummed—“I don’t call at Shrapnel’s.”

“I have never heard her name before to-day,” said Rosamund.

“Exactly,” said the General, crowing at the aimlessness of a woman’s
curiosity.

The young ladies were seen approaching, and Rosamund had to ask herself
whether the first sight of a person like Miss Denham would be of a kind
to exercise a lively influence over the political and other sentiments
of a dreamy sailor just released from ship-service. In an ordinary case
she would have said no, for Nevil enjoyed a range of society where
faces charming as Miss Denham’s were plentiful as roses in the
rose-garden. But, supposing him free of his bondage to the foreign
woman, there was, she thought and feared, a possibility that a girl of
this description might capture a young man’s vacant heart sighing for a
new mistress. And if so, further observation assured her Miss Denham
was likely to be dangerous far more than professedly attractive
persons, enchantresses and the rest. Rosamund watchfully gathered all
the superficial indications which incite women to judge of character
profoundly. This new object of alarm was, as the General had said of
her, tall and slim, a friend of neatness, plainly dressed, but
exquisitely fitted, in the manner of Frenchwomen. She spoke very
readily, not too much, and had the rare gift of being able to speak
fluently with a smile on the mouth. Vulgar archness imitates it. She
won and retained the eyes of her hearer sympathetically, it seemed.
Rosamund thought her as little conscious as a woman could be. She
coloured at times quickly, but without confusion. When that name, the
key of Rosamund’s meditations, chanced to be mentioned, a flush swept
over Miss Denham’s face. The candour of it was unchanged as she gazed
at Rosamund, with a look that asked, “Do you know him?”

Rosamund said, “I am an old friend of his.”

“He is here now, in this town.”

“I wish to see him very much.”

General Sherwin interposed: “We won’t talk about political characters
just for the present.”

“I wish you knew him, papa, and would advise him,” his daughter said.

The General nodded hastily. “By-and-by, by-and-by.”

They had in fact taken seats at a table of mutton pies in a
pastrycook’s shop, where dashing military men were restrained solely by
their presence from a too noisy display of fascinations before the
fashionable waiting-women.

Rosamund looked at Miss Denham. As soon as they were in the street the
latter said, “If you will be good enough to come with me, madam...?”
Rosamund bowed, thankful to have been comprehended. The two young
ladies kissed cheeks and parted. General Sherwin raised his hat, and
was astonished to see Mrs. Culling join Miss Denham in accepting the
salute, for they had not been introduced, and what could they have in
common? It was another of the oddities of female nature.

“My name is Mrs. Culling, and I will tell you how it is that I am
interested in Captain Beauchamp,” Rosamund addressed her companion. “I
am his uncle’s housekeeper. I have known him and loved him since he was
a boy. I am in great fear that he is acting rashly.”

“You honour me, madam, by speaking to me so frankly,” Miss Denham
answered.

“He is quite bent upon this Election?”

“Yes, madam. I am not, as you can suppose, in his confidence, but I
hear of him from Dr. Shrapnel.”

“Your uncle?”

“I call him uncle: he is my guardian, madam.”

It is perhaps excuseable that this communication did not cause the
doctor to shine with added lustre in Rosamund’s thoughts, or ennoble
the young lady.

“You are not relatives, then?” she said.

“No, unless love can make us so.”

“Not blood-relatives?”

“No.”

“Is he not very... extreme?”

“He is very sincere.”

“I presume you are a politician?”

Miss Denham smiled. “Could you pardon me, madam, if I said that I was?”
The counter-question was a fair retort enfolding a gentler irony.
Rosamund felt that she had to do with wits as well as with vivid
feminine intuitions in the person of this Miss Denham.

She said, “I really am of opinion that our sex might abstain from
politics.”

“We find it difficult to do justice to both parties,” Miss Denham
followed. “It seems to be a kind of clanship with women; hardly even
that.”

Rosamund was inattentive to the conversational slipshod, and launched
one of the heavy affirmatives which are in dialogue full stops. She
could not have said why she was sensible of anger, but the sentiment of
anger, or spite (if that be a lesser degree of the same affliction),
became stirred in her bosom when she listened to the ward of Dr.
Shrapnel. A silly pretty puss of a girl would not have excited it, nor
an avowed blood-relative of the demagogue.

Nevil’s hotel was pointed out to Rosamund, and she left her card there.
He had been absent since eight in the morning. There was the
probability that he might be at Dr. Shrapnel’s, so Rosamund walked on.

“Captain Beauchamp gives himself no rest,” Miss Denham said.

“Oh! I know him, when once his mind is set on anything,” said Rosamund.

“Is it not too early to begin to—canvass, I think, is the word?”

“He is studying whatever the town can teach him of its wants; that is,
how he may serve it.”

“Indeed! But if the town will not have him to serve it?”

“He imagines that he cannot do better, until that has been decided,
than to fit himself for the post.”

“Acting upon your advice? I mean, of course, your uncle’s; that is, Dr.
Shrapnel’s.”

“Dr. Shrapnel thinks it will not be loss of time for Captain Beauchamp
to grow familiar with the place, and observe as well as read.”

“It sounds almost as if Captain Beauchamp had submitted to be Dr.
Shrapnel’s pupil.”

“It is natural, madam, that Dr. Shrapnel should know more of political
ways at present than Captain Beauchamp.”

“To Captain Beauchamp’s friends and relatives it appears very strange
that he should have decided to contest this election so suddenly. May I
inquire whether he and Dr. Shrapnel are old acquaintances?”

“No, madam, they are not. They had never met before Captain Beauchamp
landed, the other day.”

“I am surprised, I confess. I cannot understand the nature of an
influence that induces him to abandon a profession he loves and shines
in, for politics, at a moment’s notice.”

Miss Denham was silent, and then said:

“I will tell you, madam, how it occurred, as far as circumstances
explain it. Dr. Shrapnel is accustomed to give a little country feast
to the children I teach, and their parents if they choose to come, and
they generally do. They are driven to Northeden Heath, where we set up
a booth for them, and try with cakes and tea and games to make them
spend one of their happy afternoons and evenings. We succeed, I know,
for the little creatures talk of it and look forward to the day. When
they are at their last romp, Dr. Shrapnel speaks to the parents.”

“Can he obtain a hearing?” Rosamund asked.

“He has not so very large a crowd to address, madam, and he is much
beloved by those that come.”

“He speaks to them of politics on those occasions?”

“_Adouci à leur intention_. It is not a political speech, but Dr.
Shrapnel thinks, that in a so-called free country seeking to be really
free, men of the lowest class should be educated in forming a political
judgement.”

“And women too?”

“And women, yes. Indeed, madam, we notice that the women listen very
creditably.”

“They can put on the air.”

“I am afraid, not more than the men do. To get them to listen is
something. They suffer like the men, and must depend on their
intelligence to win their way out of it.”

Rosamund’s meditation was exclamatory: What can be the age of this
pretentious girl?

An afterthought turned her more conciliatorily toward the person, but
less to the subject. She was sure that she was lending ear to the echo
of the dangerous doctor, and rather pitied Miss Denham for awhile,
reflecting that a young woman stuffed with such ideas would find it
hard to get a husband. Mention of Nevil revived her feeling of
hostility.

“We had seen a gentleman standing near and listening attentively,” Miss
Denham resumed, “and when Dr. Shrapnel concluded a card was handed to
him. He read it and gave it to me, and said, ‘You know that name.’ It
was a name we had often talked about during the war.

“He went to Captain Beauchamp and shook his hand. He does not pay many
compliments, and he does not like to receive them, but it was
impossible for him not to be moved by Captain Beauchamp’s warmth in
thanking him for the words he had spoken. I saw that Dr. Shrapnel
became interested in Captain Beauchamp the longer they conversed. We
walked home together. Captain Beauchamp supped with us. I left them at
half-past eleven at night, and in the morning I found them walking in
the garden. They had not gone to bed at all. Captain Beauchamp has
remained in Bevisham ever since. He soon came to the decision to be a
candidate for the borough.”

Rosamund checked her lips from uttering: To be a puppet of Dr.
Shrapnel’s!

She remarked, “He is very eloquent—Dr. Shrapnel?”

Miss Denham held some debate with herself upon the term.

“Perhaps it is not eloquence; he often... no, he is not an orator.”

Rosamund suggested that he was persuasive, possibly.

Again the young lady deliberately weighed the word, as though the
nicest measure of her uncle or adoptor’s quality in this or that
direction were in requisition and of importance—an instance of a want
of delicacy of perception Rosamund was not sorry to detect. For
good-looking, refined-looking, quick-witted girls can be grown; but the
nimble sense of fitness, ineffable lightning-footed tact, comes of race
and breeding, and she was sure Nevil was a man soon to feel the absence
of that.

“Dr. Shrapnel is persuasive to those who go partly with him, or whose
condition of mind calls on him for great patience,” Miss Denham said at
last.

“I am only trying to comprehend how it was that he should so rapidly
have won Captain Beauchamp to his views,” Rosamund explained; and the
young lady did not reply.

Dr. Shrapnel’s house was about a mile beyond the town, on a common of
thorn and gorse, through which the fir-bordered highway ran. A fence
waist-high enclosed its plot of meadow and garden, so that the doctor,
while protecting his own, might see and be seen of the world, as was
the case when Rosamund approached. He was pacing at long slow strides
along the gravel walk, with his head bent and bare, and his hands
behind his back, accompanied by a gentleman who could be no other than
Nevil, Rosamund presumed to think; but drawing nearer she found she was
mistaken.

“That is not Captain Beauchamp’s figure,” she said.

“No, it is not he,” said Miss Denham.

Rosamund saw that her companion was pale. She warmed to her at once; by
no means on account of the pallor in itself.

“I have walked too fast for you, I fear.”

“Oh no; I am accused of being a fast walker.”

Rosamund was unwilling to pass through the demagogue’s gate. On second
thoughts, she reflected that she could hardly stipulate to have news of
Nevil tossed to her over the spikes, and she entered.

While receiving Dr. Shrapnel’s welcome to a friend of Captain
Beauchamp, she observed the greeting between Miss Denham and the
younger gentleman. It reassured her. They met like two that have a
secret.

The dreaded doctor was an immoderately tall man, lean and wiry,
carelessly clad in a long loose coat of no colour, loose trowsers, and
huge shoes.

He stooped from his height to speak, or rather swing the stiff upper
half of his body down to his hearer’s level and back again, like a
ship’s mast on a billowy sea. He was neither rough nor abrupt, nor did
he roar bullmouthedly as demagogues are expected to do, though his
voice was deep. He was actually, after his fashion, courteous, it could
be said of him, except that his mind was too visibly possessed by
distant matters for Rosamund’s taste, she being accustomed to
drawing-room and hunting and military gentlemen, who can be all in the
words they utter. Nevertheless he came out of his lizard-like look with
the down-dropped eyelids quick at a resumption of the dialogue;
sometimes gesturing, sweeping his arm round. A stubborn tuft of
iron-grey hair fell across his forehead, and it was apparently one of
his life’s labours to get it to lie amid the mass, for his hand rarely
ceased to be in motion without an impulsive stroke at the refractory
forelock. He peered through his eyelashes ordinarily, but from no
infirmity of sight. The truth was, that the man’s nature counteracted
his spirit’s intenser eagerness and restlessness by alternating a state
of repose that resembled dormancy, and so preserved him. Rosamund was
obliged to give him credit for straightforward eyes when they did look
out and flash. Their filmy blue, half overflown with grey by age, was
poignant while the fire in them lasted. Her antipathy attributed
something electrical to the light they shot.

Dr. Shrapnel’s account of Nevil stated him to have gone to call on
Colonel Halkett, a new resident at Mount Laurels, on the Otley river.
He offered the welcome of his house to the lady who was Captain
Beauchamp’s friend, saying, with extraordinary fatuity (so it sounded
in Rosamund’s ears), that Captain Beauchamp would certainly not let an
evening pass without coming to him. Rosamund suggested that he might
stay late at Mount Laurels.

“Then he will arrive here after nightfall,” said the doctor. “A bed is
at your service, ma’am.”

The offer was declined. “I should like to have seen him to-day; but he
will be home shortly.”

“He will not quit Bevisham till this Election’s decided unless to hunt
a stray borough vote, ma’am.”

“He goes to Mount Laurels.”

“For that purpose.”

“I do not think he will persuade Colonel Halkett to vote in the Radical
interest.”

“That is the probability with a landed proprietor, ma’am. We must
knock, whether the door opens or not. Like,” the doctor laughed to
himself up aloft, “like a watchman in the night to say that he smells
smoke on the premises.”

“Surely we may expect Captain Beauchamp to consult his family about so
serious a step as this he is taking,” Rosamund said, with an effort to
be civil.

“Why should he?” asked the impending doctor.

His head continued in the interrogative position when it had resumed
its elevation. The challenge for a definite reply to so outrageous a
question irritated Rosamund’s nerves, and, loth though she was to admit
him to the subject, she could not forbear from saying, “Why? Surely his
family have the first claim on him!”

“Surely not, ma’am. There is no first claim. A man’s wife and children
have a claim on him for bread. A man’s parents have a claim on him for
obedience while he is a child. A man’s uncles, aunts, and cousins have
no claim on him at all, except for help in necessity, which he can
grant and they require. None—wife, children, parents, relatives—none
has a claim to bar his judgement and his actions. Sound the conscience,
and sink the family! With a clear conscience, it is best to leave the
family to its own debates. No man ever did brave work who held counsel
with his family. The family view of a man’s fit conduct is the weak
point of the country. It is no other view than, ‘Better thy condition
for our sakes.’ Ha! In this way we breed sheep, fatten oxen: men are
dying off. Resolution taken, consult the family means—waste your time!
Those who go to it want an excuse for altering their minds. The family
view is everlastingly the shopkeeper’s! Purse, pence, ease, increase of
worldly goods, personal importance—the pound, the English pound! Dare
do that, and you forfeit your share of Port wine in this world; you
won’t be dubbed with a title; you’ll be fingered at! Lord, Lord! is it
the region inside a man, or out, that gives him peace? _Out_, they say;
for they have lost faith in the existence of an inner. They haven’t it.
Air-sucker, blood-pump, cooking machinery, and a battery of trained
instincts, aptitudes, fill up their vacuum. I repeat, ma’am, why should
young Captain Beauchamp spend an hour consulting his family? They won’t
approve him; he knows it. They may annoy him; and what is the gain of
that? They can’t move him; on that I let my right hand burn. So it
would be useless on both sides. He thinks so. So do I. He is one of the
men to serve his country on the best field we can choose for him. In a
ship’s cabin he is thrown away. Ay, ay, War, and he may go aboard. But
now we must have him ashore. Too few of such as he!”

“It is matter of opinion,” said Rosamund, very tightly compressed;
scarcely knowing what she said.

How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken
of by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess
him! A stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas! A terribly strong
inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have
won such a mastery over Nevil?

Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the
force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in
her head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at
the same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an
enormous army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in
advance. This very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in
dialectics, heightened Rosamund’s disgust by causing her to suppose
that Nevil had been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished,
captured, ruined; and he dwindled in her estimation for a moment or
two. She felt that among a sisterhood of gossips she would soon have
found her voice, and struck down the demagogue’s audacious sophisms:
not that they affected her in the slightest degree for her own sake.

Shrapnel might think what he liked, and say what he liked, as far as
she was concerned, apart from the man she loved. Rosamund went through
these emotions altogether on Nevil’s behalf, and longed for her
affirmatizing inspiring sisterhood until the thought of them threw
another shade on him.

What champion was she to look to? To whom but to Mr. Everard Romfrey?

It was with a spasm of delighted reflection that she hit on Mr.
Romfrey. He was like a discovery to her. With his strength and skill,
his robust common sense and rough shrewd wit, his prompt comparisons,
his chivalry, his love of combat, his old knightly blood, was not he a
match, and an overmatch, for the ramping Radical who had tangled Nevil
in his rough snares? She ran her mind over Mr. Romfrey’s virtues, down
even to his towering height and breadth. Could she but once draw these
two giants into collision in Nevil’s presence, she was sure it would
save him. The method of doing it she did not stop to consider: she
enjoyed her triumph in the idea.

Meantime she had passed from Dr. Shrapnel to Miss Denham, and carried
on a conversation becomingly.

Tea had been made in the garden, and she had politely sipped half a
cup, which involved no step inside the guilty house, and therefore no
distress to her antagonism. The sun descended. She heard the doctor
reciting. Could it be poetry? In her imagination the sombre hues
surrounding an incendiary opposed that bright spirit. She listened,
smiling incredulously. Miss Denham could interpret looks, and said,
“Dr. Shrapnel is very fond of those verses.”

Rosamund’s astonishment caused her to say, “Are they his own?”—a piece
of satiric innocency at which Miss Denham laughed softly as she
answered, “No.”

Rosamund pleaded that she had not heard them with any distinctness.

“Are they written by the gentleman at his side?”

“Mr. Lydiard? No. He writes, but the verses are not his.”

“Does he know—has he met Captain Beauchamp?”

“Yes, once. Captain Beauchamp has taken a great liking to his works.”

Rosamund closed her eyes, feeling that she was in a nest that had
determined to appropriate Nevil. But at any rate there was the hope and
the probability that this Mr. Lydiard of the pen had taken a long start
of Nevil in the heart of Miss Denham: and struggling to be candid, to
ensure some meditative satisfaction, Rosamund admitted to herself that
the girl did not appear to be one of the wanton giddy-pated pusses who
play two gentlemen or more on their line. Appearances, however, could
be deceptive: never pretend to know a girl by her face, was one of
Rosamund’s maxims.

She was next informed of Dr. Shrapnel’s partiality for music toward the
hour of sunset. Miss Denham mentioned it, and the doctor, presently
sauntering up, invited Rosamund to a seat on a bench near the open
window of the drawing-room. He nodded to his ward to go in.

“I am a fire-worshipper, ma’am,” he said. “The God of day is the father
of poetry, medicine, music: our best friend. See him there! My Jenny
will spin a thread from us to him over the millions of miles, with one
touch of the chords, as quick as he shoots a beam on us. Ay! on her
wretched tinkler called a piano, which tries at the whole orchestra and
murders every instrument in the attempt. But it’s convenient, like our
modern civilization—a taming and a diminishing of individuals for an
insipid harmony!”

“You surely do not object to the organ?—I fear I cannot wait, though,”
said Rosamund.

Miss Denham entreated her. “Oh! do, madam. Not to hear me—I am not so
perfect a player that I should wish it—but to see him. Captain
Beauchamp may now be coming at any instant.”

Mr. Lydiard added, “I have an appointment with him here for this
evening.”

“You build a cathedral of sound in the organ,” said Dr. Shrapnel,
casting out a league of leg as he sat beside his only half-persuaded
fretful guest. “You subject the winds to serve you; that’s a gain. You
do actually accomplish a resonant imitation of the various instruments;
they sing out as your two hands command them—trumpet, flute, dulcimer,
hautboy, drum, storm, earthquake, ethereal quire; you have them at your
option. But tell me of an organ in the open air? The sublimity would
vanish, ma’am, both from the notes and from the structure, because
accessories and circumstances produce its chief effects. Say that an
organ is a despotism, just as your piano is the Constitutional
bourgeois. Match them with the trained orchestral band of skilled
individual performers, indoors or out, where each grasps his
instrument, and each relies on his fellow with confidence, and an
unrivalled concord comes of it. That is our republic each one to his
work; all in union! There’s the motto for us! _Then_ you have music,
harmony, the highest, fullest, finest! Educate your men to form a band,
you shame dexterous trickery and imitation sounds. _Then_ for the
difference of real instruments from clever shams! Oh, ay, _one_ will
set your organ going; that is, one in front, with his couple of panting
air-pumpers behind—his ministers!” Dr. Shrapnel laughed at some
undefined mental image, apparently careless of any laughing
companionship. “_One_ will do it for you, especially if he’s born to do
it. Born!” A slap of the knee reported what seemed to be an immensely
contemptuous sentiment. “But free mouths blowing into brass and wood,
ma’am, beat your bellows and your whifflers; your artificial
choruses—crash, crash! your unanimous plebiscitums! Beat them? There’s
no contest: we’re in another world; we’re in the sun’s world,—yonder!”

Miss Denham’s opening notes on the despised piano put a curb on the
doctor. She began a Mass of Mozart’s, without the usual preliminary
rattle of the keys, as of a crier announcing a performance, straight to
her task, for which Rosamund thanked her, liking that kind of composed
simplicity: she thanked her more for cutting short the doctor’s
fanatical nonsense. It was perceptible to her that a species of mad
metaphor had been wriggling and tearing its passage through a
thorn-bush in his discourse, with the furious urgency of a sheep in a
panic; but where the ostensible subject ended and the metaphor
commenced, and which was which at the conclusion, she found it
difficult to discern—much as the sheep would, be when he had left his
fleece behind him. She could now have said, “Silly old man!”

Dr. Shrapnel appeared most placable. He was gazing at his Authority in
the heavens, tangled among gold clouds and purple; his head bent
acutely on one side, and his eyes upturned in dim speculation. His
great feet planted on their heels faced him, suggesting the stocks; his
arms hung loose. Full many a hero of the alehouse, anciently amenable
to leg-and-foot imprisonment in the grip of the parish, has presented
as respectable an air. His forelock straggled as it willed.

Rosamund rose abruptly as soon as the terminating notes of the Mass had
been struck.

Dr. Shrapnel seemed to be concluding his devotions before he followed
her example.

“There, ma’am, you have a telegraphic system for the soul,” he said.
“It is harder work to travel from this place to this” (he pointed at
ear and breast) “than from here to yonder” (a similar indication
traversed the distance between earth and sun). “Man’s aim has hitherto
been to keep men from having a soul for _this_ world: he takes it for
something infernal. He?—I mean, they that hold power. They shudder to
think the conservatism of the earth will be shaken by a change; they
dread they won’t get men with souls to fetch and carry, dig, root,
mine, for them. Right!—what then? Digging and mining will be done; so
will harping and singing. But _then_ we have a natural optimacy! Then,
on the one hand, we whip the man-beast and the man-sloth; on the other,
we seize that old fatted iniquity—that tyrant! that tempter! that
legitimated swindler cursed of Christ! that palpable Satan whose name
is Capital! by the neck, and have him disgorging within three gasps of
his life. He is the villain! Let him live, for he too comes of blood
and bone. He shall not grind the faces of the poor and helpless—that’s
all.”

The comicality of her having such remarks addressed to her provoked a
smile on Rosamund’s lips.

“Don’t go at him like Samson blind,” said Mr. Lydiard; and Miss Denham,
who had returned, begged her guardian to entreat the guest to stay.

She said in an undertone, “I am very anxious you should see Captain
Beauchamp, madam.”

“I too; but he will write, and I really can wait no longer,” Rosamund
replied, in extreme apprehension lest a certain degree of pressure
should overbear her repugnance to the doctor’s dinner-table. Miss
Denham’s look was fixed on her; but, whatever it might mean, Rosamund’s
endurance was at an end. She was invited to dine; she refused. She was
exceedingly glad to find herself on the high-road again, with a
prospect of reaching Steynham that night; for it was important that she
should not have to confess a visit to Bevisham now when she had so
little of favourable to tell Mr. Everard Romfrey of his chosen nephew.
Whether she had acted quite wisely in not remaining to see Nevil, was
an agitating question that had to be silenced by an appeal to her
instincts of repulsion, and a further appeal for justification of them
to her imaginary sisterhood of gossips. How could she sit and eat, how
pass an evening in that house, in the society of that man? Her tuneful
chorus cried, “How indeed.” Besides, it would have offended Mr. Romfrey
to hear that she had done so. Still she could not refuse to remember
Miss Denham’s marked intimations of there being a reason for Nevil’s
friend to seize the chance of an immediate interview with him; and in
her distress at the thought, Rosamund reluctantly, but as if compelled
by necessity, ascribed the young lady’s conduct to a strong sense of
personal interests.

“Evidently _she_ has no desire he should run the risk of angering a
rich uncle.”

This shameful suspicion was unavoidable: there was no other opiate for
Rosamund’s blame of herself after letting her instincts gain the
ascendancy.

It will be found a common case, that when we have yielded to our
instincts, and then have to soothe conscience, we must slaughter
somebody, for a sacrificial offering to our sense of comfort.




CHAPTER XIII.
A SUPERFINE CONSCIENCE


However much Mr. Everard Romfrey may have laughed at Nevil Beauchamp
with his “banana-wreath,” he liked the fellow for having volunteered
for that African coast-service, and the news of his promotion by his
admiral to the post of commander through a death vacancy, had given him
an exalted satisfaction, for as he could always point to the cause of
failures, he strongly appreciated success. The circumstance had offered
an occasion for the new commander to hit him hard upon a matter of
fact. Beauchamp had sent word of his advance in rank, but requested his
uncle not to imagine him wearing an _additional epaulette;_ and he
corrected the infallible gentleman’s error (which had of course been
reported to him when he was dreaming of Renée, by Mrs. Culling)
concerning a lieutenant’s shoulder decorations, most gravely; informing
him of the anchor on the lieutenant’s _pair_ of epaulettes, and the
anchor and star on a commander’s, and the crown on a captain’s, with a
well-feigned solicitousness to save his uncle from blundering further.
This was done in the dry neat manner which Mr. Romfrey could feel to be
his own turned on him.

He began to conceive a vague respect for the fellow who had proved him
wrong upon a matter of fact. Beauchamp came from Africa rather worn by
the climate, and immediately obtained the command of the _Ariadne_
corvette, which had been some time in commission in the Mediterranean,
whither he departed, without visiting Steynham; allowing Rosamund to
think him tenacious of his wrath as well as of love. Mr. Romfrey
considered him to be insatiable for service. Beauchamp, during his
absence, had shown himself awake to the affairs of his country once
only, in an urgent supplication he had forwarded for all his uncle’s
influence to be used to get him appointed to the first vacancy in
Robert Hall’s naval brigade, then forming a part of our handful in
insurgent India. The fate of that chivalrous Englishman, that born
sailor-warrior, that truest of heroes, imperishable in the memory of
those who knew him, and in our annals, young though he was when death
took him, had wrung from Nevil Beauchamp such a letter of tears as to
make Mr. Romfrey believe the naval crown of glory his highest ambition.
Who on earth could have guessed him to be bothering his head about
politics all the while! Or was the whole stupid business a freak of the
moment?

It became necessary for Mr. Romfrey to contemplate his eccentric nephew
in the light of a mannikin once more. Consequently he called to mind,
and bade Rosamund Culling remember, that he had foreseen and had
predicted the mounting of Nevil Beauchamp on his political horse one
day or another; and perhaps the earlier the better. And a donkey could
have sworn that when he did mount he would come galloping in among the
Radical rough-riders. Letters were pouring upon Steynham from men and
women of Romfrey blood and relationship concerning the positive tone of
Radicalism in the commander’s address. Everard laughed at them. As a
practical man, his objection lay against the poor fool’s choice of the
peccant borough of Bevisham. Still, in view of the needfulness of his
learning wisdom, and rapidly, the disbursement of a lot of his money,
certain to be required by Bevisham’s electors, seemed to be the surest
method for quickening his wits. Thus would he be acting as his own
chirurgeon, gaily practising phlebotomy on his person to cure him of
his fever. Too much money was not the origin of the fever in Nevil’s
case, but he had too small a sense of the value of what he possessed,
and the diminishing stock would be likely to cry out shrilly.

To this effect, never complaining that Nevil Beauchamp had not come to
him to take counsel with him, the high-minded old gentleman talked. At
the same time, while indulging in so philosophical a picture of himself
as was presented by a Romfrey mildly accounting for events and
smoothing them under the infliction of an offence, he could not but
feel that Nevil had challenged him: such was the reading of it; and he
waited for some justifiable excitement to fetch him out of the
magnanimous mood, rather in the image of an angler, it must be owned.

“Nevil understands that I am not going to pay a farthing of his
expenses in Bevisham?” he said to Mrs. Culling.

She replied blandly and with innocence, “I have not seen him, sir.”

He nodded. At the next mention of Nevil between them, he asked, “Where
is it he’s lying perdu, ma’am?”

“I fancy in that town, in Bevisham.”

“At the Liberal, Radical, hotel?”

“I dare say; some place; I am not certain....”

“The rascal doctor’s house there? Shrapnel’s?”

“Really... I have not seen him.”

“Have you heard from him?”

“I have had a letter; a short one.”

“Where did he date his letter from?”

“From Bevisham.”

“From what house?”

Rosamund glanced about for a way of escaping the question. There was
none but the door. She replied, “From Dr. Shrapnel’s.”

“That’s the Anti-Game-Law agitator.”

“You do not imagine, sir, that Nevil subscribes to every thing the
horrid man agitates for?”

“You don’t like the man, ma’am?”

“I detest him.”

“Ha! So you have seen Shrapnel?”

“Only for a moment; a moment or two. I cannot endure him. I am sure I
have reason.”

Rosamund flushed exceedingly red. The visit to Dr. Shrapnel’s house was
her secret, and the worming of it out made her feel guilty, and that
feeling revived and heated her antipathy to the Radical doctor.

“What reason?” said Mr. Romfrey, freshening at her display of colour.

She would not expose Nevil to the accusation of childishness by
confessing her positive reason, so she answered, “The man is a kind of
man... I was not there long; I was glad to escape. He...” she
hesitated: for in truth it was difficult to shape the charge against
him, and the effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative,
now that he had been spoken of, as to the detested doctor, reduced her
to some confusion. She was also fatally anxious to be in the extreme
degree conscientious, and corrected and modified her remarks most
suspiciously.

“Did he insult you, ma’am?” Mr. Romfrey inquired.

She replied hastily, “Oh no. He may be a good man in his way. He is one
of those men who do not seem to think a woman may have opinions. He
does not scruple to outrage those we hold. I am afraid he is an
infidel. His ideas of family duties and ties, and his manner of
expressing himself, shocked me, that is all. He is absurd. I dare say
there is no harm in him, except for those who are so unfortunate as to
fall under his influence—and that, I feel sure, cannot be permanent. He
could not injure me personally. He could not offend me, I mean. Indeed,
I have nothing whatever to say against him, as far as I...”

“Did he fail to treat you as a lady, ma’am?”

Rosamund was getting frightened by the significant pertinacity of her
lord.

“I am sure, sir, he meant no harm.”

“Was the man uncivil to you, ma’am?” came the emphatic interrogation.

She asked herself, had Dr. Shrapnel been uncivil toward her? And so
conscientious was she, that she allowed the question to be debated in
her mind for half a minute, answering then, “No, not uncivil. I cannot
exactly explain.... He certainly did not intend to be uncivil. He is
only an unpolished, vexatious man; enormously tall.”

Mr. Romfrey ejaculated, “Ha! humph!”

His view of Dr. Shrapnel was taken from that instant. It was, that this
enormously big blustering agitator against the preservation of birds,
had behaved rudely toward the lady officially the chief of his
household, and might be considered in the light of an adversary one
would like to meet. The size of the man increased his aspect of
villany, which in return added largely to his giant size. Everard
Romfrey’s mental eye could perceive an attractiveness about the man
little short of magnetic; for he thought of him so much that he had to
think of what was due to his pacifical disposition (deeply believed in
by him) to spare himself the trouble of a visit to Bevisham.

The young gentleman whom he regarded as the Radical doctor’s dupe, fell
in for a share of his view of the doctor, and Mr. Romfrey became less
fitted to observe Nevil Beauchamp’s doings with the Olympian gravity he
had originally assumed.

The extreme delicacy of Rosamund’s conscience was fretted by a
remorseful doubt of her having conveyed a just impression of Dr.
Shrapnel, somewhat as though the fine sleek coat of it were brushed the
wrong way. Reflection warned her that her deliberative intensely
sincere pause before she responded to Mr. Romfrey’s last demand, might
have implied more than her words. She consoled herself with the thought
that it was the dainty susceptibility of her conscientiousness which
caused these noble qualms, and so deeply does a refined nature esteem
the gift, that her pride in it helped her to overlook her moral
perturbation. She was consoled, moreover, up to the verge of triumph in
her realization of the image of a rivalling and excelling power
presented by Mr. Romfrey, though it had frightened her at the time. Let
not Dr. Shrapnel come across him! She hoped he would not. Ultimately
she could say to herself, “Perhaps I need not have been so annoyed with
the horrid man.” It was on Nevil’s account. Shrapnel’s contempt of the
claims of Nevil’s family upon him was actually a piece of impudence,
impudently expressed, if she remembered correctly. And Shrapnel was a
black malignant, the foe of the nation’s Constitution, deserving of
punishment if ever man was; with his ridiculous metaphors, and talk of
organs and pianos, orchestras and despotisms, and flying to the sun!
How could Nevil listen to the creature! Shrapnel must be a shameless,
hypocrite to mask his wickedness from one so clear-sighted as Nevil,
and no doubt he indulged in his impudence out of wanton pleasure in it.
His business was to catch young gentlemen of family, and to turn them
against their families, plainly. That was thinking the best of him. No
doubt he had his objects to gain. “He might have been as impudent as he
liked to _me;_ I would have pardoned him!” Rosamund exclaimed.
Personally, you see, she was generous. On the whole, knowing Everard
Romfrey as she did, she wished that she had behaved, albeit perfectly
discreet in her behaviour, and conscientiously just, a shade or two
differently. But the evil was done.




CHAPTER XIV.
THE LEADING ARTICLE AND MR. TIMOTHY TURBOT


Nevil declined to come to Steynham, clearly owing to a dread of hearing
Dr. Shrapnel abused, as Rosamund judged by the warmth of his written
eulogies of the man, and an ensuing allusion to Game. He said that he
had not made up his mind as to the Game Laws. Rosamund mentioned the
fact to Mr. Romfrey. “So we may stick by our licences to shoot
to-morrow,” he rejoined. Of a letter that he also had received from
Nevil, he did not speak. She hinted at it, and he stared. He would have
deemed it as vain a subject to discourse of India, or Continental
affairs, at a period when his house was full for the opening day of
sport, and the expectation of keeping up his renown for great bags on
that day so entirely occupied his mind. Good shots were present who had
contributed to the fame of Steynham on other opening days. Birds were
plentiful and promised not to be too wild. He had the range of the
Steynham estate in his eye, dotted with covers; and after Steynham,
Holdesbury, which had never yielded him the same high celebrity, but
both lay mapped out for action under the profound calculations of the
strategist, ready to show the skill of the field tactician. He could
not attend to Nevil. Even the talk of the forthcoming Elections, hardly
to be avoided at his table, seemed a puerile distraction. Ware the foe
of his partridges and pheasants, be it man or vermin! The name of
Shrapnel was frequently on the tongue of Captain Baskelett. Rosamund
heard him, in her room, and his derisive shouts of laughter over it.
Cecil was a fine shot, quite as fond of the pastime as his uncle, and
always in favour with him while sport stalked the land. He was in
gallant spirits, and Rosamund, brooding over Nevil’s fortunes, and
sitting much alone, as she did when there were guests in the house,
gave way to her previous apprehensions. She touched on them to Mr.
Stukely Culbrett, her husband’s old friend, one of those happy men who
enjoy perceptions without opinions, and are not born to administer
comfort to other than themselves. As far as she could gather, he
fancied Nevil Beauchamp was in danger of something, but he delivered
his mind only upon circumstances and characters: Nevil risked his luck,
Cecil knew his game, Everard Romfrey was the staunchest of mankind:
Stukely had nothing further to say regarding the situation. She asked
him what he thought, and he smiled. Could a reasonable head venture to
think anything in particular? He repeated the amazed, “You don’t say
so” of Colonel Halkett, on hearing the name of the new Liberal
candidate for Bevisham at the dinner-table, together with some of
Cecil’s waggish embroidery upon the theme.

Rosamund exclaimed angrily, “Oh! if I had been there he would not have
dared.”

“Why not be there?” said Stukely. “You have had your choice for a
number of years.”

She shook her head, reddening.

But supposing that she had greater privileges than were hers now? The
idea flashed. A taint of personal pique, awakened by the fancied
necessity for putting her devotedness to Nevil to proof, asked her if
she would then be the official housekeeper to whom Captain Baskelett
bowed low with affected respect and impertinent affability, ironically
praising her abroad as a wonder among women, that could at one time
have played the deuce in the family, had she chosen to do so.

“Just as you like,” Mr. Culbrett remarked. It was his ironical habit of
mind to believe that the wishes of men and women—women as well as
men—were expressed by their utterances.

“But speak of Nevil to Colonel Halkett,” said Rosamund, earnestly
carrying on what was in her heart. “Persuade the colonel you do not
think Nevil foolish—not more than just a little impetuous. I want that
marriage to come off! Not on account of her wealth. She is to inherit a
Welsh mine from her uncle, you know, besides being an only child.
Recall what Nevil was during the war. Miss Halkett has not forgotten
it, I am sure, and a good word for him from a man of the world would, I
am certain, counteract Captain Baskelett’s—are they designs? At any
rate, you can if you like help Nevil with the colonel. I am convinced
they are doing him a mischief. Colonel Halkett has bought an estate—and
what a misfortune that is!—close to Bevisham. I fancy he is Toryish.
Will you not speak to him? At my request? I am so helpless I could cry.

“Fancy you have no handkerchief,” said Mr. Culbrett, “and give up
scheming, pray. One has only to begin to scheme, to shorten life to
half-a-dozen hops and jumps. I could say to the colonel, ‘Young
Beauchamp’s a political cub: he ought to have a motherly wife.’”

“Yes, yes, you are right; don’t speak to him at all,” said Rosamund,
feeling that there must be a conspiracy to rob her of her proud
independence, since not a soul could be won to spare her from taking
some energetic step, if she would be useful to him she loved.

Colonel Halkett was one of the guests at Steynham who knew and
respected her, and he paid her a visit and alluded to Nevil’s
candidature, apparently not thinking much the worse of him. “We can’t
allow him to succeed,” he said, and looked for a smiling approval of
such natural opposition, which Rosamund gave him readily after he had
expressed the hope that Nevil Beauchamp would take advantage of his
proximity to Mount Laurels during the contest to try the hospitality of
the house. “He won’t mind meeting his uncle?” The colonel’s eyes
twinkled. “My daughter has engaged Mr. Romfrey and Captain Baskelett to
come to us when they have shot Holdesbury.”

And Captain Baskelett! thought Rosamund; her jealousy whispering that
the mention of his name close upon Cecilia Halkett’s might have a
nuptial signification.

She was a witness from her window—a prisoner’s window, her eager heart
could have termed it—of a remarkable ostentation of cordiality between
the colonel and Cecil, in the presence of Mr. Romfrey. Was it his
humour to conspire to hand Miss Halkett to Cecil, and then to show
Nevil the prize he had forfeited by his folly? The three were on the
lawn a little before Colonel Halkett’s departure. The colonel’s arm was
linked with Cecil’s while they conversed. Presently the latter received
his afternoon’s letters, and a newspaper. He soon had the paper out at
a square stretch, and sprightly information for the other two was
visible in his crowing throat. Mr. Romfrey raised the gun from his
shoulder-pad, and grounded it. Colonel Halkett wished to peruse the
matter with his own eyes, but Cecil could not permit it; he must read
it aloud for them, and he suited his action to his sentences. Had
Rosamund been accustomed to leading articles which are the composition
of men of an imposing vocabulary, she would have recognized and as good
as read one in Cecil’s gestures as he tilted his lofty stature forward
and back, marking his commas and semicolons with flapping of his
elbows, and all but doubling his body at his periods. Mr. Romfrey had
enough of it half-way down the column; his head went sharply to left
and right. Cecil’s peculiar foppish slicing down of his hand pictured
him protesting that there was more and finer of the inimitable stuff to
follow. The end of the scene exhibited the paper on the turf, and
Colonel Halkett’s hand on Cecil’s shoulder, Mr. Romfrey nodding some
sort of acquiescence over the muzzle of his gun, whether reflective or
positive Rosamund could not decide. She sent out a footman for the
paper, and was presently communing with its eloquent large type, quite
unable to perceive where the comicality or the impropriety of it lay,
for it would have struck her that never were truer things of Nevil
Beauchamp better said in the tone befitting them. This perhaps was
because she never heard fervid praises of him, or of anybody, delivered
from the mouth, and it is not common to hear Englishmen phrasing great
eulogies of one another. Still, as a rule, they do not object to have
it performed in that region of our national eloquence, the Press, by an
Irishman or a Scotchman. And what could there be to warrant Captain
Baskelett’s malicious derision, and Mr. Romfrey’s nodding assent to it,
in an article where all was truth?

The truth was mounted on an unusually high wind. It was indeed a
leading article of a banner-like bravery, and the unrolling of it was
designed to stir emotions. Beauchamp was the theme. Nevil had it under
his eyes earlier than Cecil. The paper was brought into his room with
the beams of day, damp from the presses of the _Bevisham Gazette_,
exactly opposite to him in the White Hart Hotel, and a glance at the
paragraphs gave him a lively ardour to spring to his feet. What
writing! He was uplifted as “The heroical Commander Beauchamp, of the
Royal Navy,” and “Commander Beauchamp, R.N., a gentleman of the highest
connections”: he was “that illustrious Commander Beauchamp, of our
matchless, navy, who proved on every field of the last glorious war of
this country that the traditional valour of the noble and indomitable
blood transmitted to his veins had lost none of its edge and weight
since the battle-axes of the Lords de Romfrey, ever to the fore, clove
the skulls of our national enemy on the wide and fertile campaigns of
France.” This was pageantry.

There was more of it. Then the serious afflatus of the article
condescended, as it were, to blow a shrill and well-known whistle:—the
study of the science of navigation made by Commander Beauchamp, R.N.,
was cited for a jocose warranty of a seaman’s aptness to assist in
steering the Vessel of the State. After thus heeling over, to tip a
familiar wink to the multitude, the leader tone resumed its fit
deportment. Commander Beauchamp, in responding to the invitation of the
great and united Liberal party of the borough of Bevisham, obeyed the
inspirations of genius, the dictates of humanity, and what he rightly
considered the paramount duty, as it is the proudest ambition, of the
citizen of a free country.

But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon
catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy,
and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the
rhetorician’s emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for
flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than
ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public
opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan
as are the fife and bugle boys practising on their instruments round
melancholy outskirts of garrison towns with the regimental marching
full band under the presidency of its drum-major. No signature to the
article was needed for Bevisham to know who had returned to the town to
pen it. Those long-stretching sentences, comparable to the very ship
_Leviathan_, spanning two Atlantic billows, appertained to none but the
renowned Mr. Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law campaigns, Reform
agitations, and all manifestly popular movements requiring the
heaven-endowed man of speech, an interpreter of multitudes, and a
prompter. Like most men who have little to say, he was an orator in
print, but that was a poor medium for him—his body without his fire.
Mr. Timothy’s place was the platform. A wise discernment, or else a
lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from the soil of his native isle,
needing occupation), set him on that side in politics which happened to
be making an established current and strong headway. Oratory will not
work against the stream, or on languid tides. Driblets of movements
that allowed the world to doubt whether they were so much movements as
illusions of the optics, did not suit his genius. Thus he was a
Liberal, no Radical, fountain. Liberalism had the attraction for the
orator of being the active force in politics, between two passive
opposing bodies, the aspect of either of which it can assume for a
menace to the other, Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in the
eyes of the Tory. It can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem to
be amorous of the Future. It is actually the thing of the Present and
its urgencies, therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of
moderation, strong in their copiousness. Delicious and rapturous
effects are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal oration by a
chance infusion of the fierier spirit, a flavour of Radicalism. That is
the thing to set an audience bounding and quirking. Whereas if you
commence by tilling a Triton pitcher full of the neat liquor upon them,
you have to resort to the natural element for the orator’s art of
variation, you are diluted—and that’s bathos, to quote Mr. Timothy. It
was a fine piece of discernment in him. Let Liberalism be your feast,
Radicalism your spice. And now and then, off and on, for a change, for
diversion, for a new emotion, just for half an hour or so—now and then
the Sunday coat of Toryism will give you an air. You have only to
complain of the fit, to release your shoulders in a trice. Mr. Timothy
felt for his art as poets do for theirs, and considered what was best
adapted to speaking, purely to speaking. Upon no creature did he look
with such contempt as upon Dr. Shrapnel, whose loose disjunct audiences
he was conscious he could, giving the doctor any start he liked, whirl
away from him and have compact, enchained, at his first flourish; yea,
though they were composed of “the poor man,” with a stomach for the
political distillery fit to drain relishingly every private bogside or
mountain-side tap in old Ireland in its best days—the illicit, you
understand.

Further, to quote Mr. Timothy’s points of view, the Radical orator has
but two notes, and one is the drawling pathetic, and the other is the
ultra-furious; and the effect of the former we liken to the English
working man’s wife’s hob-set queasy brew of well-meant villany, that
she calls by the innocent name of tea; and the latter is to be blown,
asks to be blown, and never should be blown without at least seeming to
be blown, with an accompaniment of a house on fire. Sir, we must adapt
ourselves to our times. Perhaps a spark or two does lurk about our
house, but we have vigilant watchmen in plenty, and the house has been
pretty fairly insured. Shrieking in it is an annoyance to the inmates,
nonsensical; weeping is a sickly business. The times are against
Radicalism to the full as much as great oratory is opposed to extremes.
These drag the orator too near to the matter. So it is that one Radical
speech is amazingly like another—they all have the earth-spots. They
smell, too; they smell of brimstone. Soaring is impossible among that
faction; but this they can do, they can furnish the Tory his
opportunity to soar. When hear you a thrilling Tory speech that carries
the country with it, save when the incendiary Radical has shrieked? If
there was envy in the soul of Timothy, it was addressed to the fine
occasions offered to the Tory speaker for vindicating our ancient
principles and our sacred homes. He admired the tone to be assumed for
that purpose: it was a good note. Then could the Tory, delivering at
the right season the Shakesperian “_This England_...” and Byronic—“_The
inviolate Island_...” shake the frame, as though smiting it with the
tail of the gymnotus electricus. Ah, and then could he thump out his
Horace, the Tory’s mentor and his cordial, with other great ancient
comic and satiric poets, his old Port of the classical cellarage,
reflecting veneration upon him who did but name them to an audience of
good dispositions. The Tory possessed also an innate inimitably easy
style of humour, that had the long reach, the jolly lordly
indifference, the comfortable masterfulness, of the whip of a
four-in-hand driver, capable of flicking and stinging, and of being
ironically caressing. Timothy appreciated it, for he had winced under
it. No professor of Liberalism could venture on it, unless it were in
the remote district of a back parlour, in the society of a cherishing
friend or two, and with a slice of lemon requiring to be refloated in
the glass.

But gifts of this description were of a minor order. Liberalism gave
the heading cry, devoid of which parties are dogs without a scent,
orators mere pump-handles. The Tory’s cry was but a whistle to his
pack, the Radical howled to the moon like any chained hound. And no
wonder, for these parties had no established current, they were as
hard-bound waters; the Radical being dyked and dammed most soundly, the
Tory resembling a placid lake of the plains, fed by springs and no
confluents. For such good reasons, Mr. Timothy rejoiced in the happy
circumstances which had expelled him from the shores of his native isle
to find a refuge and a vocation in Manchester at a period when an
orator happened to be in request because dozens were wanted. That
centre of convulsions and source of streams possessed the statistical
orator, the reasoning orator, and the inspired; with others of quality;
and yet it had need of an ever-ready spontaneous imperturbable speaker,
whose bubbling generalizations and ability to beat the drum humorous
could swing halls of meeting from the grasp of an enemy, and then
ascend on incalescent adjectives to the popular idea of the sublime. He
was the artistic orator of Corn Law Repeal—the Manchester flood, before
which time Whigs were, since which they have walked like spectral
antediluvians, or floated as dead canine bodies that are sucked away on
the ebb of tides and flung back on the flow, ignorant whether they be
progressive or retrograde. Timothy Turbot assisted in that vast effort.
It should have elevated him beyond the editorship of a country
newspaper. Why it did not do so his antagonists pretended to know, and
his friends would smile to hear. The report was that he worshipped the
nymph Whisky.

Timothy’s article had plucked Beauchamp out of bed; Beauchamp’s card in
return did the same for him.

“Commander Beauchamp? I am heartily glad to make your acquaintance,
sir; I’ve been absent, at work, on the big business we have in common,
I rejoice to say, and am behind my fellow townsmen in this pleasure and
lucky I slept here in my room above, where I don’t often sleep, for the
row of the machinery—it’s like a steamer that won’t go, though it’s
always starting ye,” Mr. Timothy said in a single breath, upon entering
the back office of the _Gazette_, like unto those accomplished
violinists who can hold on the bow to finger an incredible number of
notes, and may be imaged as representing slow paternal Time, that rolls
his capering dot-headed generation of mortals over the wheel, hundreds
to the minute. “You’ll excuse my not shaving, sir, to come down to your
summons without an extra touch to the neck-band.”

Beauchamp beheld a middle-sized round man, with loose lips and pendant
indigo jowl, whose eyes twinkled watery, like pebbles under the
shore-wash, and whose neck-band needed an extra touch from fingers
other than his own.

“I am sorry to have disturbed you so early,” he replied.

“Not a bit, Commander Beauchamp, not a bit, sir. Early or late, and ay
ready—with the Napiers; I’ll wash, I’ll wash.”

“I came to speak to you of this article of yours on me. They tell me in
the office that you are the writer. Pray don’t ‘Commander’ me so
much.—It’s not customary, and I object to it.”

“Certainly, certainly,” Timothy acquiesced.

“And for the future, Mr. Turbot, please to be good enough not to allude
in print to any of my performances here and there. Your intentions are
complimentary, but it happens that I don’t like a public patting on the
back.”

“No, and that’s true,” said Timothy.

His appreciative and sympathetic agreement with these sharp strictures
on the article brought Beauchamp to a stop.

Timothy waited for him; then, smoothing his prickly cheek, remarked:
“If I’d guessed your errand, Commander Beauchamp, I’d have called in
the barber before I came down, just to make myself decent for a “first
introduction.”

Beauchamp was not insensible to the slyness of the poke at him. “You
see, I come to the borough unknown to it, and as quietly as possible,
and I want to be taken as a politician,” he continued, for the sake of
showing that he had sufficient to say to account for his hasty and
peremptory summons of the writer of that article to his presence. “It’s
excessively disagreeable to have one’s family lugged into notice in a
newspaper—especially if they are of different politics. _I_ feel it.”

“All would, sir,” said Timothy.

“Then why the deuce did you do it?”

Timothy drew a lading of air into his lungs. “Politics, Commander
Beauchamp, involves the doing of lots of disagreeable things to
ourselves and our relations; it’s positive. I’m a soldier of the Great
Campaign: and who knows it better than I, sir? It’s climbing the greasy
pole for the leg o’ mutton, that makes the mother’s heart ache for the
jacket and the nether garments she mended neatly, if she didn’t make
them. Mutton or no mutton, there’s grease for certain! Since it’s sure
we can’t be disconnected from the family, the trick is to turn the
misfortune to a profit; and allow me the observation, that an old
family, sir, and a high and titled family, is not to be despised for a
background of a portrait in naval uniform, with medal and clasps, and
some small smoke of powder clearing off over there:—that’s if we’re to
act sagaciously in introducing an unknown candidate to a borough that
has a sneaking liking for the kind of person, more honour to it. I’m a
political veteran, sir; I speak from experience. We must employ our
weapons, every one of them, and all off the grindstone.”

“Very well,” said Beauchamp. “Now understand; you are not in future to
employ the weapons, as you call them, that I have objected to.”

Timothy gaped slightly.

“Whatever you will, but no puffery,” Beauchamp added. “Can I by any
means arrest—purchase—is it possible, tell me, to lay an embargo—stop
to-day’s issue of the _Gazette?_”

“No more—than the bite of a mad dog,” Timothy replied, before he had
considered upon the monstrous nature of the proposal.

Beauchamp humphed, and tossed his head. The simile of the dog struck
him with intense effect.

“There’d be a second edition,” said Timothy, “and you might buy up
that. But there’ll be a third, and you may buy up that; but there’ll be
a fourth and a fifth, and so on ad infinitum, with the advertisement of
the sale of the foregoing creating a demand like a rageing thirst in a
shipwreck, in Bligh’s boat, in the tropics. I’m afraid, Com—Captain
Beauchamp, sir, there’s no stopping the Press while the people have an
appetite for it—and a Company’s at the back of it.”

“Pooh, don’t talk to me in that way; all I complain of is the figure
you have made of me,” said Beauchamp, fetching him smartly out of his
nonsense; “and all I ask of you is not to be at it again. Who would
suppose from reading an article like that, that I am a candidate with a
single political idea!”

“An article like that,” said Timothy, winking, and a little surer of
his man now that he suggested his possession of ideas, “an article like
that is the best cloak you can put on a candidate with too many of “em,
Captain Beauchamp. I’ll tell you, sir; I came, I heard of your
candidature, I had your sketch, the pattern of ye, before me, and I was
told that Dr. Shrapnel fathered you politically. There was my brief! I
had to persuade our constituents that you, Commander Beauchamp of the
Royal Navy, and the great family of the Earls of Romfrey, one of the
heroes of the war, and the recipient of a Royal Humane Society’s medal
for saving life in Bevisham waters, were something more than the
Radical doctor’s political son; and, sir, it was to this end, aim, and
object, that I wrote the article I am not ashamed to avow as mine, and
I do so, sir, because of the solitary merit it has of serving your
political interests as the liberal candidate for Bevisham by
counteracting the unpopularity of Dr. Shrapnel’s name, on the one part,
and of reviving the credit due to your valour and high bearing on the
field of battle in defence of your country, on the other, so that
Bevisham may apprehend, in spite of party distinctions, that it has the
option, and had better seize upon the honour, of making a M.P. of a
hero.”

Beauchamp interposed hastily: “Thank you, thank you for the best of
intentions. But let me tell you I am prepared to stand or fall with Dr.
Shrapnel, and be hanged to all that humbug.”

Timothy rubbed his hands with an abstracted air of washing. “Well,
commander, well, sir, they say a candidate’s to be humoured in his
infancy, for _he_ has to do all the humouring before he’s many weeks
old at it; only there’s the fact!—he soon finds out he has to pay for
his first fling, like the son of a family sowing his oats to reap his
Jews. Credit me, sir, I thought it prudent to counteract a bit of an
apothecary’s shop odour in the junior Liberal candidate’s address. I
found the town sniffing, they scented Shrapnel in the composition.”

“Every line of it was mine,” said Beauchamp.

“Of course it was, and the address was admirably worded, sir, I make
bold to say it to your face; but most indubitably it threatened
powerful drugs for weak stomachs, and it blew cold on votes, which are
sensitive plants like nothing else in botany.”

“If they are only to be got by abandoning principles, and by anything
but honesty in stating them, they may go,” said Beauchamp.

“I repeat, my dear sir, I repeat, the infant candidate delights in his
honesty, like the babe in its nakedness, the beautiful virgin in her
innocence. So he does; but he discovers it’s time for him to wear
clothes in a contested election. And what’s that but to preserve the
outlines pretty correctly, whilst he doesn’t shock and horrify the
optics? A dash of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin,
ye know. That’s the truth. You must appear to be one of them, for them
to choose you. After all, there’s no harm in a dyer’s hand; and, sir, a
candidate looking at his own, when he has won the Election...”

“Ah, well,” said Beauchamp, swinging on his heel, “and now I’ll take my
leave of you, and I apologize for bringing you down here so early.
Please attend to what I have said; it’s peremptory. You will give me
great pleasure by dining with me to-night, at the hotel opposite. Will
you? I don’t know what kind of wine I shall be able to offer you.
Perhaps you know the cellar, and may help me in that.”

Timothy grasped his hand, “With pleasure, Commander Beauchamp. They
have a bucellas over there that’s old, and a tolerable claret, and a
Port to be inquired for under the breath, in a mysteriously intimate
tone of voice, as one says, ‘I know of your treasure, and the corner
under ground where it lies.’ Avoid the champagne: ’tis the banqueting
wine. Ditto the sherry. One can drink them, one can drink them.”

“At a quarter to eight this evening, then,” said Nevil.

“I’ll be there at the stroke of the clock, sure as the date of a bill,”
said Timothy.

And it’s early to guess whether you’ll catch Bevisham or you won’t, he
reflected, as he gazed at the young gentleman crossing the road; but
female Bevisham’s with you, if that counts for much. Timothy confessed,
that without the employment of any weapon save arrogance and a look of
candour, the commander had gone some way toward catching the feminine
side of himself.




CHAPTER XV.
CECILIA HALKETT


Beauchamp walked down to the pier, where he took a boat for H.M.S.
_Isis_, to see Jack Wilmore, whom he had not met since his return from
his last cruise, and first he tried the efficacy of a dive in salt
water, as a specific for irritation. It gave the edge to a fine
appetite that he continued to satisfy while Wilmore talked of those
famous dogs to which the navy has ever been going.

“We want another panic, Beauchamp,” said Lieutenant Wilmore. “No one
knows better than you what a naval man has to complain of, so I hope
you’ll get your Election, if only that we may reckon on a good look-out
for the interests of the service. A regular Board with a permanent Lord
High Admiral, and a regular vote of money to keep it up to the mark.
Stick to that. Hardist has a vote in Bevisham. I think I can get one or
two more. Why aren’t you a Tory? No Whigs nor Liberals look after us
half so well as the Tories. It’s enough to break a man’s heart to see
the troops of dockyard workmen marching out as soon as ever a Liberal
Government marches in. Then it’s one of our infernal panics again, and
patch here, patch there; every inch of it make-believe! I’ll prove to
you from examples that the humbug of Government causes exactly the same
humbugging workmanship. It seems as if it were a game of ‘rascals all.’
Let them sink us! but, by heaven! one can’t help feeling for the
country. And I do say it’s the doing of those Liberals. Skilled
workmen, mind you, not to be netted again so easily. America reaps the
benefit of our folly .... That was a lucky run of yours up the Niger;
the admiral was friendly, but you deserved your luck. For God’s sake,
don’t forget the state of our service when you’re one of our cherubs up
aloft, Beauchamp. This I’ll say, I’ve never heard a man talk about it
as you used to in old midshipmite days, whole watches through—don’t you
remember? on the North American station, and in the Black Sea, and the
Mediterranean. And that girl at Malta! I wonder what has become of her?
What a beauty she was! I dare say she wasn’t so fine a girl as the
Armenian you unearthed on the Bosphorus, but she had something about
her a fellow can’t forget. That was a lovely creature coming down the
hills over Granada on her mule. Ay, we’ve seen handsome women, Nevil
Beauchamp. But you always were lucky, invariably, and I should bet on
you for the Election.”

“Canvass for me, Jack,” said Beauchamp, smiling at his friend’s
unconscious double-skeining of subjects. “If I turn out as good a
politician as you are a seaman, I shall do. Pounce on Hardist’s vote
without losing a day. I would go to him, but I’ve missed the Halketts
twice. They’re on the Otley river, at a place called Mount Laurels, and
I particularly want to see the colonel. Can you give me a boat there,
and come?”

“Certainly,” said Wilmore. “I’ve danced there with the lady, the
handsomest girl, English style, of her time. And come, come, our
English style’s the best. It wears best, it looks best. Foreign
women... they’re capital to flirt with. But a girl like Cecilia
Halkett—one can’t call her a girl, and it won’t do to say Goddess, and
queen and charmer are out of the question, though she’s both, and angel
into the bargain; but, by George! what a woman to call wife, you say;
and a man attached to a woman like that never can let himself look
small. No such luck for me; only I swear if I stood between a good and
a bad action, the thought of that girl would keep me straight, and I’ve
only danced with her once!”

Not long after sketching this rough presentation of the lady, with a
masculine hand, Wilmore was able to point to her in person on the deck
of her father’s yacht, the _Esperanza_, standing out of Otley river.
There was a gallant splendour in the vessel that threw a touch of glory
on its mistress in the minds of the two young naval officers, as they
pulled for her in the ship’s gig.

Wilmore sang out, “Give way, men!”

The sailors bent to their oars, and presently the schooner’s head was
put to the wind.

“She sees we’re giving chase,” Wilmore said. “She can’t be expecting
_me_, so it must be you. No, the colonel doesn’t race her. They’ve only
been back from Italy six months: I mean the schooner. I remember she
talked of you when I had her for a partner. Yes, now I mean Miss
Halkett. Blest if I think she talked of anything else. She sees us.
I’ll tell you what she likes: she likes yachting, she likes Italy, she
likes painting, likes things old English, awfully fond of heroes. I
told her a tale of one of our men saving life. ‘Oh!’ said she, ‘didn’t
your friend Nevil Beauchamp save a man from drowning, off the
guardship, in exactly the same place?’ And next day she sent me a
cheque for three pounds for the fellow. Steady, men! I keep her
letter.”

The boat went smoothly alongside the schooner. Miss Halkett had come to
the side. The oars swung fore and aft, and Beauchamp sprang on deck.

Wilmore had to decline Miss Halkett’s invitation to him as well as his
friend, and returned in his boat. He left the pair with a ruffling
breeze, and a sky all sail, prepared, it seemed to him, to enjoy the
most delicious you-and-I on salt water that a sailor could dream of;
and placidly envying, devoid of jealousy, there was just enough of
fancy quickened in Lieutenant Wilmore to give him pictures of them
without disturbance of his feelings—one of the conditions of the
singular visitation we call happiness, if he could have known it.

For a time his visionary eye followed them pretty correctly. So long
since they had parted last! such changes in the interval! and great
animation in Beauchamp’s gaze, and a blush on Miss Halkett’s cheeks.

She said once, “Captain Beauchamp.” He retorted with a solemn
formality. They smiled, and immediately took footing on their previous
intimacy.

“How good it was of you to come twice to Mount Laurels,” said she. “I
have not missed you to-day. No address was on your card. Where are you
staying in the neighbourhood? At Mr. Lespel’s?”

“I’m staying at a Bevisham hotel,” said Beauchamp.

“You have not been to Steynham yet? Papa comes home from Steynham
to-night.”

“Does he? Well, the _Ariadne_ is only just paid off, and I can’t well
go to Steynham yet. I—” Beauchamp was astonished at the hesitation he
found in himself to name it: “I have business in Bevisham.”

“Naval business?” she remarked.

“No,” said he.

The sensitive prescience we have of a critical distaste of our
proceedings is, the world is aware, keener than our intuition of
contrary opinions; and for the sake of preserving the sweet outward
forms of friendliness, Beauchamp was anxious not to speak of the
business in Bevisham just then, but she looked and he had hesitated, so
he said flatly, “I am one of the candidates for the borough.”

“Indeed!”

“And I want the colonel to give me his vote.”

The young lady breathed a melodious “Oh!” not condemnatory or
reproachful—a sound to fill a pause. But she was beginning to reflect.

“Italy and our English Channel are my two Poles,” she said. “I am
constantly swaying between them. I have told papa we will not lay up
the yacht while the weather holds fair. Except for the absence of deep
colour and bright colour, what can be more beautiful than these green
waves and that dark forest’s edge, and the garden of an island! The
yachting-water here is an unrivalled lake; and if I miss colour, which
I love, I remind myself that we have temperate air here, not a sun that
sends you under cover. We can have our fruits too, you see.” One of the
yachtsmen was handing her a basket of hot-house grapes, reclining
beside crisp home-made loaflets. “This is my luncheon. Will you share
it, Nevil?”

His Christian name was pleasant to hear from her lips. She held out a
bunch to him.

“Grapes take one back to the South,” said he. “How do you bear
compliments? You have been in Italy some years, and it must be the
South that has worked the miracle.”

“In my growth?” said Cecilia, smiling. “I have grown out of my
Circassian dress, Nevil.”

“You received it, then?”

“I wrote you a letter of thanks—and abuse, for your not coming to
Steynham. You may recognize these pearls.”

The pearls were round her right wrist. He looked at the blue veins.

“They’re not pearls of price,” he said.

“I do not wear them to fascinate the jewellers,” rejoined Miss Halkett.
“So you are a candidate at an Election. You still have a tinge of
Africa, do you know? But you have not abandoned the navy?”

“—Not altogether.”

“Oh! no, no: I hope not. I have heard of you,... but who has not? We
cannot spare officers like you. Papa was delighted to hear of your
promotion. Parliament!”

The exclamation was contemptuous.

“It’s the highest we can aim at,” Beauchamp observed meekly.

“I think I recollect you used to talk politics when you were a
midshipman,” she said. “You headed the aristocracy, did you not?”

“The aristocracy wants a head,” said Beauchamp.

“Parliament, in my opinion, is the best of occupations for idle men,”
said she.

“It shows that it is a little too full of them.”

“Surely the country can go on very well without so much speech-making?”

“It can go on very well for the rich.”

Miss Halkett tapped with her foot.

“I should expect a Radical to talk in that way, Nevil.”

“Take me for one.”

“I would not even imagine it.”

“Say Liberal, then.”

“Are you not”—her eyes opened on him largely, and narrowed from
surprise to reproach, and then to pain—are you not one of us? Have you
gone over to the enemy, Nevil?”

“I have taken my side, Cecilia; but we, on our side, don’t talk of an
enemy.”

“Most unfortunate! We are Tories, you know, Nevil. Papa is a thorough
Tory. He cannot vote for you. Indeed I have heard him say he is anxious
to defeat the plots of an old Republican in Bevisham—some doctor there;
and I believe he went to London to look out for a second Tory candidate
to oppose to the Liberals. Our present Member is quite safe, of course.
Nevil, this makes me unhappy. Do you not feel that it is playing
traitor to one’s class to join those men?”

Such was the Tory way of thinking, Nevil Beauchamp said: the Tories
upheld their Toryism in the place of patriotism.

“But do we not owe the grandeur of the country to the Tories?” she
said, with a lovely air of conviction. “Papa has told me how false the
Whigs played the Duke in the Peninsula: ruining his supplies, writing
him down, declaring, all the time he was fighting his first hard
battles, that his cause was hopeless—that resistance to Napoleon was
impossible. The Duke never, never had loyal support but from the Tory
Government. The Whigs, papa says, absolutely preached _submission_ to
Napoleon! The Whigs, I hear, were the Liberals of those days. The two
Pitts were Tories. The greatness of England has been built up by the
Tories. I do and will defend them: it is the fashion to decry them now.
They have the honour and safety of the country at heart. They do not
play disgracefully at reductions of taxes, as the Liberals do. They
have given us all our heroes. _Non fu mai gloria senza invidia_. They
have done service enough to despise the envious mob. They never
condescend to supplicate brute force for aid to crush their opponents.
You feel in all they do that the instincts of gentlemen are active.”

Beauchamp bowed.

“Do I speak too warmly?” she asked. “Papa and I have talked over it
often, and especially of late. You will find him your delighted host
and your inveterate opponent.”

“And you?”

“Just the same. You will have to pardon me; I am a terrible foe.”

“I declare to you, Cecilia, I would prefer having you against me to
having you indifferent.”

“I wish I had not to think it right that you should be beaten. And
now—can you throw off political Nevil, and be sailor Nevil? I
distinguish between my old friend, and my... our...”

“Dreadful antagonist?”

“Not so dreadful, except in the shock he gives us to find him in the
opposite ranks. I am grieved. But we will finish our sail in peace. I
detest controversy. I suppose, Nevil, you would have no such things as
yachts? they are the enjoyments of the rich!”

He reminded her that she wished to finish her sail in peace; and he had
to remind her of it more than once. Her scattered resources for
argumentation sprang up from various suggestions, such as the flight of
yachts, mention of the shooting season, sight of a royal palace; and
adopted a continually heightened satirical form, oddly intermixed with
an undisguised affectionate friendliness. Apparently she thought it
possible to worry him out of his adhesion to the wrong side in
politics. She certainly had no conception of the nature of his
political views, for one or two extreme propositions flung to him in
jest, he swallowed with every sign of a perfect facility, as if the
Radical had come to regard stupendous questions as morsels barely
sufficient for his daily sustenance. Cecilia reflected that he must be
playing, and as it was not a subject for play she tacitly reproved him
by letting him be the last to speak of it. He may not have been
susceptible to the delicate chastisement, probably was not, for when he
ceased it was to look on the beauty of her lowered eyelids, rather with
an idea that the weight of his argument lay on them. It breathed from
him; both in the department of logic and of feeling, in his plea for
the poor man and his exposition of the poor man’s rightful claims, he
evidently imagined that he had spoken overwhelmingly; and to undeceive
him in this respect, for his own good, Cecilia calmly awaited the
occasion when she might show the vanity of arguments in their effort to
overcome convictions. He stood up to take his leave of her, on their
return to the mouth of the Otley river, unexpectedly, so that the
occasion did not arrive; but on his mentioning an engagement he had to
give a dinner to a journalist and a tradesman of the town of Bevisham,
by way of excuse for not complying with her gentle entreaty that he
would go to Mount Laurels and wait to see the colonel that evening,
“Oh! then your choice must be made irrevocably, I am sure,” Miss
Halkett said, relying upon intonation and manner to convey a great deal
more, and not without a minor touch of resentment for his having
dragged her into the discussion of politics, which she considered as a
slime wherein men hustled and tussled, no doubt worthily enough, and as
became them; not however to impose the strife upon the elect ladies of
earth. What gentleman ever did talk to a young lady upon the dreary
topic seriously? Least of all should Nevil Beauchamp have done it. That
object of her high imagination belonged to the exquisite sphere of the
feminine vision of the pure poetic, and she was vexed by the discord he
threw between her long-cherished dream and her unanticipated
realization of him, if indeed it was he presenting himself to her in
his own character, and not trifling, or not passing through a phase of
young man’s madness.

Possibly he might be the victim of the latter and more pardonable
state, and so thinking she gave him her hand.

“Good-bye, Nevil. I may tell papa to expect you tomorrow?”

“Do, and tell him to prepare for a field-day.”

She smiled. “A sham fight that will not win you a vote! I hope you will
find your guests this evening agreeable companions.”

Beauchamp half-shrugged involuntarily. He obliterated the piece of
treason toward them by saying that he hoped so; as though the meeting
them, instead of slipping on to Mount Laurels with her, were an
enjoyable prospect.

He was dropped by the _Esperanza’s_ boat near Otley ferry, to walk
along the beach to Bevisham, and he kept eye on the elegant vessel as
she glided swan-like to her moorings off Mount Laurels park through
dusky merchant craft, colliers, and trawlers, loosely shaking her
towering snow-white sails, unchallenged in her scornful supremacy; an
image of a refinement of beauty, and of a beautiful servicelessness.

As the yacht, so the mistress: things of wealth, owing their graces to
wealth, devoting them to wealth—splendid achievements of art both! and
dedicated to the gratification of the superior senses.

Say that they were precious examples of an accomplished civilization;
and perhaps they did offer a visible ideal of grace for the rough world
to aim at. They might in the abstract address a bit of a monition to
the uncultivated, and encourage the soul to strive toward perfection,
in beauty: and there is no contesting the value of beauty when the soul
is taken into account. But were they not in too great a profusion in
proportion to their utility? That was the question for Nevil Beauchamp.
The democratic spirit inhabiting him, temporarily or permanently, asked
whether they were not increasing to numbers which were oppressive? And
further, whether it was good, for the country, the race, ay, the
species, that they should be so distinctly removed from the thousands
who fought the grand, and the grisly, old battle with nature for bread
of life. Those grimy sails of the colliers and fishing-smacks, set them
in a great sea, would have beauty for eyes and soul beyond that of
elegance and refinement. And do but look on them thoughtfully, the poor
are everlastingly, unrelievedly, in the abysses of the great sea....

One cannot pursue to conclusions a line of meditation that is
half-built on the sensations as well as on the mind. Did Beauchamp at
all desire to have those idly lovely adornments of riches, the Yacht
and the Lady, swept away? Oh, dear, no. He admired them, he was at home
with them. They were much to his taste. Standing on a point of the
beach for a last look at them before he set his face to the town, he
prolonged the look in a manner to indicate that the place where
business called him was not in comparison at all so pleasing: and just
as little enjoyable were his meditations opposed to predilections.
Beauty plucked the heart from his breast. But he had taken up arms; he
had drunk of the _questioning_ cup, that which denieth peace to us, and
which projects us upon the missionary search of the How, the Wherefore,
and the Why not, ever afterward. He questioned his justification, and
yours, for gratifying tastes in an ill-regulated world of wrong-doing,
suffering, sin, and bounties unrighteously dispensed—not sufficiently
dispersed. He said by-and-by to pleasure, battle to-day. From his point
of observation, and with the store of ideas and images his fiery yet
reflective youth had gathered, he presented himself as it were saddled
to that hard-riding force known as the logical impetus, which spying
its quarry over precipices, across oceans and deserts, and through
systems and webs, and into shops and cabinets of costliest china, will
come at it, will not be refused, let the distances and the breakages be
what they may. He went like the meteoric man with the mechanical legs
in the song, too quick for a cry of protestation, and reached results
amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his training, not less
rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is shot forth from the clash
of a syllogism.




CHAPTER XVI.
A PARTIAL DISPLAY OF BEAUCHAMP IN HIS COLOURS


Beauchamp presented himself at Mount Laurels next day, and formally
asked Colonel Halkett for his vote, in the presence of Cecilia.

She took it for a playful glance at his new profession of politician:
he spoke half-playfully. Was it possible to speak in earnest?

“I’m of the opposite party,” said the colonel; as conclusive a reply as
could be: but he at once fell upon the rotten navy of a Liberal
Government. How could a true sailor think of joining those Liberals!
The question referred to the country, not to a section of it, Beauchamp
protested with impending emphasis: Tories and Liberals were much the
same in regard to the care of the navy. “Nevil!” exclaimed Cecilia. He
cited beneficial Liberal bills recently passed, which she accepted for
a concession of the navy to the Tories, and she smiled. In spite of her
dislike of politics, she had only to listen a few minutes to be drawn
into the contest: and thus it is that one hot politician makes many
among women and men of a people that have the genius of strife, or else
in this case the young lady did unconsciously feel a deep interest in
refuting and overcoming Nevil Beauchamp. Colonel Halkett denied the
benefits of those bills. “Look,” said he, “at the scarecrow plight of
the army under a Liberal Government!” This laid him open to the charge
that he was for backing Administrations instead of principles.

“I do,” said the colonel. “I would rather have a good Administration
than all your talk of principles: one’s a fact, but principles?
principles?” He languished for a phrase to describe the hazy things. “I
have mine, and you have yours. It’s like a dispute between religions.
There’s no settling it except by main force. That’s what principles
lead you to.”

Principles may be hazy, but heavy artillery is disposable in defence of
them, and Beauchamp fired some reverberating guns for the eternal
against the transitory; with less of the gentlemanly fine taste, the
light and easy social semi-irony, than Cecilia liked and would have
expected from him. However, as to principles, no doubt Nevil was right,
and Cecilia drew her father to another position. “Are not we Tories to
have principles as well as the Liberals, Nevil?”

“They may have what they call principles,” he admitted, intent on
pursuing his advantage over the colonel, who said, to shorten the
controversy: “It’s a question of my vote, and my liking. I like a Tory
Government, and I don’t like the Liberals. I like gentlemen; I don’t
like a party that attacks everything, and beats up the mob for power,
and repays it with sops, and is dragging us down from all we were proud
of.”

“But the country is growing, the country wants expansion,” said
Beauchamp; “and if your gentlemen by birth are not up to the mark, you
must have leaders that are.”

“Leaders who cut down expenditure, to create a panic that doubles the
outlay! I know them.”

“A _panic_, Nevil.” Cecilia threw stress on the memorable word.

He would hear no reminder in it. The internal condition of the country
was now the point for seriously-minded Englishmen.

“My dear boy, what _have_ you seen of the country?” Colonel Halkett
inquired.

“Every time I have landed, colonel, I have gone to the mining and the
manufacturing districts, the centres of industry; wherever there was
dissatisfaction. I have attended meetings, to see and hear for myself.
I have read the papers....”

“The papers!”

“Well, they’re the mirror of the country.”

“Does one see everything in a mirror, Nevil?” said Cecilia: “even in
the smoothest?”

He retorted softly: “I should be glad to see what you see,” and felled
her with a blush.

For an example of the mirror offered by the Press, Colonel Halkett
touched on Mr. Timothy Turbot’s article in eulogy of the great
Commander Beauchamp. “Did you like it?” he asked. “Ah, but if you
meddle with politics, you must submit to be held up on the prongs of a
fork, my boy; soaped by your backers and shaved by the foe; and there’s
a figure for a gentleman! as your uncle Romfrey says.”

Cecilia did not join this discussion, though she had heard from her
father that something grotesque had been written of Nevil. Her
foolishness in blushing vexed body and mind. She was incensed by a
silly compliment that struck at her feminine nature when her intellect
stood in arms. Yet more hurt was she by the reflection that a too
lively sensibility might have conjured up the idea of the compliment.
And again, she wondered at herself for not resenting so rare a
presumption as it implied, and not disdaining so outworn a form of
flattery. She wondered at herself too for thinking of resentment and
disdain in relation to the familiar commonplaces of licenced
impertinence. Over all which hung a darkened image of her spirit of
independence, like a moon in eclipse.

Where lay _his_ weakness? Evidently in the belief that he had thought
profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was
discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes
and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient
knight of faery in a forest bewitched.

“Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,” she said, after
listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and
indifference to the union of classes.

“I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,” he turned to her.

“The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?”

“Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets.”

“It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have
only one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas,
can there be?”

“So you call me quack?”

“No, Nevil, no,” she breathed a rich contralto note of denial: “but if
the country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your
prescription...”

“There’s nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,” said Nevil, blinking
over it.

She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so
tedious that her father struck through it with the remark:

“Concerning that quack—that’s one in the background, though!”

“I know of none,” said Beauchamp, well-advised enough to forbear
mention of the name of Shrapnel.

Cecilia petitioned that her stumbling ignorance, which sought the road
of wisdom, might be heard out. She had a reserve entanglement for her
argumentative friend. “You were saying, Nevil, that you were for
principles rather than for individuals, and you instanced Mr. Cougham,
the senior Liberal candidate of Bevisham, as one whom you would prefer
to see in Parliament instead of Seymour Austin, though you confess to
Mr. Austin’s far superior merits as a politician and servant of his
country: but Mr. Cougham supports Liberalism while Mr. Austin is a
Tory. You are for the principle.”

“I am,” said he, bowing.

She asked: “Is not that equivalent to the doctrine of election by
Grace?”

Beauchamp interjected: “Grace! election?”

Cecilia was tender to his inability to follow her allusion.

“Thou art a Liberal—then rise to membership,” she said. “Accept my
creed, and thou art of the chosen. Yes, Nevil, you cannot escape from
it. Papa, he preaches Calvinism in politics.”

“We stick to men, and good men,” the colonel flourished. “Old English
for me!”

“You might as well say, old timber vessels, when Iron’s afloat,
colonel.”

“I suspect you have the worst of it there, papa,” said Cecilia, taken
by the unexpectedness and smartness of the comparison coming from wits
that she had been undervaluing.

“I shall not own I’m worsted until I surrender my vote,” the colonel
rejoined.

“I won’t despair of it,” said Beauchamp.

Colonel Halkett bade him come for it as often as he liked. You’ll be
beaten in Bevisham, I warn you. Tory reckonings are safest: it’s an
admitted fact: and _we know_ you can’t win. According to my judgement a
man owes a duty to his class.”

“A man owes a duty to his class as long as he sees his class doing its
duty to the country,” said Beauchamp; and he added, rather prettily in
contrast with the sententious commencement, Cecilia thought, that the
apathy of his class was proved when such as he deemed it an obligation
on them to come forward and do what little they could. The deduction of
the proof was not clearly consequent, but a meaning was expressed; and
in that form it brought him nearer to her abstract idea of Nevil
Beauchamp than when he raged and was precise.

After his departure she talked of him with her father, to be charitably
satirical over him, it seemed.

The critic in her ear had pounced on his repetition of certain words
that betrayed a dialectical stiffness and hinted a narrow vocabulary:
his use of emphasis, rather reminding her of his uncle Everard, was, in
a young man, a little distressing. “The _apathy_ of the country, papa;
the _apathy_ of the rich; a state of universal _apathy_. Will you
inform me, papa, what the Tories are _doing?_ Do we really give our
consciences to the keeping of the parsons once a week, and let them
_dogmatize_ for us to save us from exertion? We must attach ourselves
to _principles; nothing_ is _permanent_ but _principles_. Poor Nevil!
And still I am sure you have, as I have, the feeling that one must
respect him. I am quite convinced that he supposes he is doing his best
to serve his country by trying for Parliament, fancying himself a
Radical. I forgot to ask him whether he had visited his great-aunt,
Mrs. Beauchamp. They say the dear old lady has influence with him.”

“I don’t think he’s been anywhere,” Colonel Halkett half laughed at the
quaint fellow. “I wish the other great-nephew of hers were in England,
for us to run him against Nevil Beauchamp. He’s touring the world. I’m
told he’s orthodox, and a tough debater. We have to take what we can
get.”

“My best wishes for your success, and you and I will not talk of
politics any more, papa. I hope Nevil will come often, for his own
good; he will meet his own set of people here. And if he should
dogmatize so much as to rouse our apathy to denounce his principles, we
will remember that we are British, and can be sweet-blooded in
opposition. Perhaps he may change, even _tra le tre ore a le quattro:_
electioneering should be a lesson. From my recollection of Blackburn
Tuckham, he was a boisterous boy.”

“He writes uncommonly clever letters home to his aunt Beauchamp. She
has handed them to me to read,” said the colonel. “I do like to see
tolerably solid young fellows: they give one some hope of the stability
of the country.”

“They are not so interesting to study, and not half so amusing,” said
Cecilia.

Colonel Halkett muttered his objections to the sort of amusement
furnished by firebrands.

“Firebrand is too strong a word for poor Nevil,” she remonstrated.

In that estimate of the character of Nevil Beauchamp, Cecilia soon had
to confess that she had been deceived, though not by him.




CHAPTER XVII.
HIS FRIEND AND FOE


Looking from her window very early on a Sunday morning, Miss Halkett
saw Beauchamp strolling across the grass of the park. She dressed
hurriedly and went out to greet him, smiling and thanking him for his
friendliness in coming.

He said he was delighted, and appeared so, but dashed the sweetness.
“You know I can’t canvass on Sundays!”

“I suppose not,” she replied. “Have you walked up from Bevisham? You
must be tired.”

“Nothing tires me,” said he.

With that they stepped on together.

Mount Laurels, a fair broad house backed by a wood of beeches and firs,
lay open to view on the higher grassed knoll of a series of descending
turfy mounds dotted with gorseclumps, and faced South-westerly along
the run of the Otley river to the gleaming broad water and its opposite
border of forest, beyond which the downs of the island threw long
interlapping curves. Great ships passed on the line of the water to and
fro; and a little mist of masts of the fishing and coasting craft by
Otley village, near the river’s mouth, was like a web in air. Cecilia
led him to her dusky wood of firs, where she had raised a bower for a
place of poetical contemplation and reading when the clear lapping salt
river beneath her was at high tide. She could hail the _Esperanza_ from
that cover; she could step from her drawing-room window, over the
flower-beds, down the gravel walk to the hard, and be on board her
yacht within seven minutes, out on her salt-water lake within twenty,
closing her wings in a French harbour by nightfall of a summer’s day,
whenever she had the whim to fly abroad. Of these enviable privileges
she boasted with some happy pride.

“It’s the finest yachting-station in England,” said Beauchamp.

She expressed herself very glad that he should like it so much.
Unfortunately she added, “I hope you will find it pleasanter to be here
than canvassing.”

“I have no pleasure in canvassing,” said he. “I canvass poor men
accustomed to be paid for their votes, and who get nothing from me but
what the baron would call a parsonical exhortation. I’m in the thick of
the most spiritless crew in the kingdom. Our southern men will not
compare with the men of the north. But still, even among these fellows,
I see danger for the country if our commerce were to fail, if distress
came on them. There’s always danger in disunion. That’s what the rich
won’t see. They see simply nothing out of their own circle; and they
won’t take a thought of the overpowering contrast between their luxury
and the way of living, that’s half-starving, of the poor. They
understand it when fever comes up from back alleys and cottages, and
then they join their efforts to sweep the poor out of the district. The
poor are to get to their work anyhow, after a long morning’s walk over
the proscribed space; for we must have poor, you know. The wife of a
parson I canvassed yesterday, said to me, ‘Who is to work for us, if
you do away with the poor, Captain Beauchamp?’”

Cecilia quitted her bower and traversed the wood silently.

“So you would blow up my poor Mount Laurels for a peace-offering to the
lower classes?”

“I should hope to put it on a stronger foundation, Cecilia.”

“By means of some convulsion?”

“By forestalling one.”

“That must be one of the new ironclads,” observed Cecilia, gazing at
the black smoke-pennon of a tower that slipped along the water-line.
“Yes? You were saying? Put us on a stronger——?”

“It’s, I think, the _Hastings:_ she broke down the other day on her
trial trip,” said Beauchamp, watching the ship’s progress animatedly.
“Peppel commands her—a capital officer. I suppose we must have these
costly big floating barracks. I don’t like to hear of everything being
done for the defensive. The defensive is perilous policy in war. It’s
true, the English don’t wake up to their work under half a year. But,
no: defending and looking to defences is bad for the fighting power;
and there’s half a million gone on that ship. _Half a million!_ Do you
know how many poor taxpayers it takes to make up that sum, Cecilia?”

“A great many,” she slurred over them; “but we must have big ships, and
the best that are to be had.”

“Powerful fast rams, sea-worthy and fit for running over shallows,
carrying one big gun; swarms of harryers and worriers known to be kept
ready for immediate service; readiness for the offensive in case of
war—there’s the best defence against a declaration of war by a foreign
State.”

“I like to hear you, Nevil,” said Cecilia, beaming: “Papa thinks we
have a miserable army—in numbers. He says, the wealthier we become the
more difficult it is to recruit able-bodied men on the volunteering
system. Yet the wealthier we are the more an army is wanted, both to
defend our wealth and to preserve order. I fancy he half inclines to
compulsory enlistment. Do speak to him on that subject.”

Cecilia must have been innocent of a design to awaken the fire-flash in
Nevil’s eyes. She had no design, but hostility was latent, and hence
perhaps the offending phrase.

He nodded and spoke coolly. “An army _to preserve order?_ So, then, an
army to threaten civil war!”

“To crush revolutionists.”

“Agitators, you mean. My dear good old colonel—I have always loved
him—must not have more troops at his command.”

“Do you object to the drilling of the whole of the people?”

“Does not the colonel, Cecilia? I am sure he does in his heart, and,
for different reasons, I do. He won’t trust the working-classes, nor I
the middle.”

“Does Dr. Shrapnel hate the middle-class?”

“Dr. Shrapnel cannot hate. He and I are of opinion, that as the
middle-class are the party in power, they would not, if they knew the
use of arms, move an inch farther in Reform, for they would no longer
be in fear of the class below them.”

“But what horrible notions of your country have you, Nevil! It is
dreadful to hear. Oh! do let us avoid politics for ever. Fear!”

“All concessions to the people have been won from fear.”

“I have not heard so.”

“I will read it to you in the History of England.”

“You paint us in a condition of Revolution.”

“Happily it’s not a condition unnatural to us. The danger would be in
not letting it be progressive, and there’s a little danger too at times
in our slowness. We change our blood or we perish.”

“Dr. Shrapnel?”

“Yes, I _have_ heard Dr. Shrapnel say that. And, by-the-way,
Cecilia—will you? can you?—take me for the witness to his character. He
is the most guileless of men, and he’s the most unguarded. My good
Rosamund saw him. She is easily prejudiced when she is a trifle
jealous, and you may hear from her that he rambles, talks wildly. It
may seem so. I maintain there is wisdom in him when conventional minds
would think him at his wildest. Believe me, he is the humanest, the
best of men, tenderhearted as a child: the most benevolent,
simple-minded, admirable old man—the man I am proudest to think of as
an Englishman and a man living in my time, of all men existing. I can’t
overpraise him.”

“He has a bad reputation.”

“Only with the class that will not meet him and answer him.”

“Must we invite him to our houses?”

“It would be difficult to get him to come, if you did. I mean, meet him
in debate and answer his arguments. Try the question by brains.”

“Before mobs?”

“_Not_ before mobs. I punish you by answering you seriously.”

“I am sensible of the flattery.”

“Before mobs!” Nevil ejaculated. “It’s the Tories that mob together and
cry down every man who appears to them to threaten their privileges.
Can you guess what Dr. Shrapnel compares them to?”

“Indeed, Nevil, I have not an idea. I only wish your patriotism were
large enough to embrace them.”

“He compares them to geese claiming possession of the whole common, and
hissing at every foot of ground they have to yield. They’re always
having to retire and always hissing. ‘Retreat and menace,’ that’s the
motto for them.”

“Very well, Nevil, I am a goose upon a common.”

So saying, Cecilia swam forward like a swan on water to give the
morning kiss to her papa, by the open window of the breakfast-room.

Never did bird of Michaelmas fling off water from her feathers more
thoroughly than this fair young lady the false title she pretended to
assume.

“I hear you’re of the dinner party at Grancey Lespel’s on Wednesday,”
the colonel said to Beauchamp. “You’ll have to stand fire.”

“_They_ will, papa,” murmured Cecilia. “Will Mr. Austin be there?”

“I particularly wish to meet Mr. Austin,” said Beauchamp.

“Listen to him, if you do meet him,” she replied.

His look was rather grave.

“Lespel’s a Whig,” he said.

The colonel answered. “Lespel _was_ a Whig. Once a Tory always a
Tory,—but court the people and you’re on quicksands, and that’s where
the Whigs are. What he is now I don’t think he knows himself. You won’t
get a vote.”

Cecilia watched her friend Nevil recovering from his short fit of
gloom. He dismissed politics at breakfast and grew companionable, with
the charm of his earlier day. He was willing to accompany her to church
too.

“You will hear a long sermon,” she warned him.

“Forty minutes.” Colonel Halkett smothered a yawn that was both retro
and prospective.

“It has been fifty, papa.”

“It has been an hour, my dear.”

It was good discipline nevertheless, the colonel affirmed, and Cecilia
praised the Rev. Mr. Brisk of Urplesdon vicarage as one of our few
remaining Protestant clergymen.

“Then he ought to be supported,” said Beauchamp. “In the dissensions of
religious bodies it is wise to pat the weaker party on the back—I quote
Stukely Culbrett.”

“I’ve heard him,” sighed the colonel. “He calls the Protestant clergy
the social police of the English middle-class. Those are the things he
lets fly. I have heard that man say that the Church stands to show the
passion of the human race for the drama. He said it in my presence. And
there’s a man who calls himself a Tory!

“You have rather too much of that playing at grudges and dislikes at
Steynham, with squibs, nicknames, and jests at things that—well, that
our stability is bound up in. I hate squibs.”

“And I,” said Beauchamp. Some shadow of a frown crossed him; but
Stukely Culbrett’s humour seemed to be a refuge. “Protestant
_parson_—not clergy,” he corrected the colonel. “Can’t you hear Mr.
Culbrett, Cecilia? The Protestant parson is the policeman set to watch
over the respectability of the middle-class. He has sharp eyes for the
sins of the poor. As for the rich, they support his church; they listen
to his sermon—to set an example: _discipline_, colonel. You discipline
the tradesman, who’s afraid of losing your custom, and the labourer,
who might be deprived of his bread. But the people? It’s put down to
the wickedness of human nature that the parson has not got hold of the
people. The parsons have lost them by senseless Conservatism, because
they look to the Tories for the support of their Church, and let the
religion run down the gutters. And how many thousands have you at work
in the pulpit every Sunday? I’m told the Dissenting ministers have some
vitality.”

Colonel Halkett shrugged with disgust at the mention of Dissenters.

“And those thirty or forty thousand, colonel, call the men that do the
work they ought to be doing demagogues. The parsonry are a power
absolutely to be counted for waste, as to progress.”

Cecilia perceived that her father was beginning to be fretted.

She said, with a tact that effected its object: “I am one who hear Mr.
Culbrett without admiring his wit.”

“No, and I see no good in this kind of Steynham talk,” Colonel Halkett
said, rising. “We’re none of us perfect. Heaven save us from political
parsons!”

Beauchamp was heard to utter, “Humanity.”

The colonel left the room with Cecilia, muttering the Steynham tail to
that word: “tomtity,” for the solace of an aside repartee.

She was on her way to dress for church. He drew her into the library,
and there threw open a vast placard lying on the table. It was printed
in blue characters and red. “This is what I got by the post this
morning. I suppose Nevil knows about it. He wants tickling, but I don’t
like this kind of thing. It’s not fair war. It’s as bad as using
explosive bullets in my old game.”

“_Can_ he expect his adversaries to be tender with him?” Cecilia
simulated vehemence in an underbreath. She glanced down the page:

“FRENCH MARQUEES” caught her eye.

It was a page of verse. And, oh! could it have issued from a Tory
Committee?

“The Liberals are as bad, and worse,” her father said.

She became more and more distressed. “It seems so very mean, papa; so
base. Ungenerous is no word for it. And how vulgar! Now I remember,
Nevil said he wished to see Mr. Austin.”

“Seymour Austin would not sanction it.”

“No, but Nevil might hold him responsible for it.”

“I suspect Mr. Stukely Culbrett, whom he quotes, and that smoking-room
lot at Lespel’s. I distinctly discountenance it. So I shall tell them
on Wednesday night. Can you keep a secret?”

“And after all Nevil Beauchamp is very young, papa!—of course I can
keep a secret.”

The colonel exacted no word of honour, feeling quite sure of her.

He whispered the secret in six words, and her cheeks glowed vermilion.

“But they will meet on Wednesday after _this_,” she said, and her sight
went dancing down the column of verse, of which the following trotting
couplet is a specimen:—

“O did you ever, hot in love, a little British middy see,
Like Orpheus asking what the deuce to do without Eurydice?”

The middy is jilted by his FRENCH MARQUEES, whom he “did adore,” and in
his wrath he recommends himself to the wealthy widow Bevisham,
concerning whose choice of her suitors there is a doubt: but the middy
is encouraged to persevere:

“Up, up, my pretty middy; take a draught of foaming Sillery;
Go in and win the uriddy with your Radical artillery.”

And if Sillery will not do, he is advised, he being for superlatives,
to try the sparkling _Silliery_ of the Radical vintage, selected
grapes.

This was but impudent nonsense. But the reiterated apostrophe to “MY
FRENCH MARQUEES” was considered by Cecilia to be a brutal offence.

She was shocked that her party should have been guilty of it. Nevil
certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard
might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of
teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid
squib did appear to her a debasing weapon to use.

“I cannot congratulate you on your choice of a second candidate, papa,”
she said scornfully.

“I don’t much congratulate myself,” said the colonel.

“Here’s a letter from Mrs. Beauchamp informing me that her boy
Blackburn will be home in a month. There would have been plenty of time
for him. However, we must make up our minds to it. Those two’ll be
meeting on Wednesday, so keep your secret. It will be out tomorrow
week.”

“But Nevil will be accusing Mr. Austin.”

“Austin won’t be at Lespel’s. And he must bear it, for the sake of
peace.”

“Is Nevil ruined with his uncle, papa?”

“Not a bit, I should imagine. It’s Romfrey’s fun.”

“And this disgraceful squib is a part of the fun?”

“That I know nothing about, my dear. I’m sorry, but there’s pitch and
tar in politics as well as on shipboard.”

“I do not see that there should be,” said Cecilia resolutely.

“We can’t hope to have what should be.”

“Why not? I would have it: I would do my utmost to have it,” she flamed
out.

“Your _utmost?_” Her father was glancing at her foregone mimicry of
Beauchamp’s occasional strokes of emphasis. “Do your utmost to have
your bonnet on in time for us to walk to church. I can’t bear driving
there.”

Cecilia went to her room with the curious reflection, awakened by what
her father had chanced to suggest to her mind, that she likewise could
be fervid, positive, uncompromising—who knows? Radicalish, perhaps,
when she looked eye to eye on an evil. For a moment or so she espied
within herself a gulf of possibilities, wherein black night-birds,
known as queries, roused by shot of light, do flap their wings.—Her
utmost to have be what should be! And why not?

But the intemperate feeling subsided while she was doing duty before
her mirror, and the visionary gulf closed immediately.

She had merely been very angry on Nevil Beauchamp’s behalf, and had
dimly seen that a woman can feel insurgent, almost revolutionary, for a
personal cause, Tory though her instinct of safety and love of
smoothness make her.

No reflection upon this casual piece of self or sex revelation troubled
her head. She did, however, think of her position as the friend of
Nevil in utter antagonism to him. It beset her with contradictions that
blew rough on her cherished serenity; for she was of the order of
ladies who, by virtue of their pride and spirit, their port and their
beauty, decree unto themselves the rank of princesses among women,
before our world has tried their claim to it. She had lived hitherto in
upper air, high above the clouds of earth. Her ideal of a man was of
one similarly disengaged and lofty—loftier. Nevil, she could honestly
say, was not her ideal; he was only her old friend, and she was opposed
to him in his present adventure. The striking at him to cure him of his
mental errors and excesses was an obligation; she could descend upon
him calmly with the chastening rod, pointing to the better way; but the
shielding of him was a different thing; it dragged her down so low,
that in her condemnation of the Tory squib she found herself asking
herself whether haply Nevil had flung off the yoke of the French lady;
with the foolish excuse for the question, that if he had not, he must
be bitterly sensitive to the slightest public allusion to her. Had he?
And if not, how desperately faithful he was! or else how marvellously
seductive she!

Perhaps it was a lover’s despair that had precipitated him into the
mire of politics. She conceived the impression that it must be so, and
throughout the day she had an inexplicable unsweet pleasure in inciting
him to argumentation and combating him, though she was compelled to
admit that he had been colloquially charming antecedent to her naughty
provocation; and though she was indebted to him for his patient decorum
under the weary wave of the Reverend Mr. Brisk. Now what does it matter
what a woman thinks in politics? But he deemed it of great moment.
Politically, he deemed that women have souls, a certain fire of life
for exercise on earth. He appealed to reason in them; he would not hear
of convictions. He quoted the Bevisham doctor: “Convictions are
generally first impressions that are sealed with later prejudices,” and
insisted there was wisdom in it. Nothing tired him, as he had said, and
addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of hopeless effort
daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of judgement in
politics—_his_ notion of an error. The value he put upon speaking,
urging his views, was really fanatical. It appeared that he canvassed
the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing would
persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched Tory
like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the
reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.

Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the
sturdy beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without
shame that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal;
penetrating malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to
exhort bedraggled mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed
to rebuffs from impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied,
shouting speeches to roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of
the mob!...

Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind’s picture of him. But the
blinding curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could
not but be the desperation of a lover abandoned. She feared it was, she
feared it was not. Nevil Beauchamp’s foe persisted in fearing that it
was not; his friend feared that it was. Yet why? For if it was, then he
could not be quite in earnest, and might be cured. Nay, but earnestness
works out its own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be
preferable to think him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken.
Cecilia could not decide upon what she dared wish for his health’s
good. Friend and foe were not further separable within her bosom than
one tick from another of a clock; they changed places, and next his
friend was fearing what his foe had feared: they were inextricable.

Why had he not sprung up on a radiant aquiline ambition, whither one
might have followed him, with eyes and prayers for him, if it was not
possible to do so companionably? At present, in the shape of a
canvassing candidate, it was hardly honourable to let imagination dwell
on him, save compassionately.

When he rose to take his leave, Cecilia said, “_Must_ you go to
Itchincope on Wednesday, Nevil?”

Colonel Halkett added: “I don’t think I would go to Lespel’s if I were
you. I rather suspect Seymour Austin will be coming on Wednesday, and
that’ll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for
an evening.”

“I have particular reasons for going to Lespel’s; I hear he wavers
toward a Tory conspiracy of some sort,” said Beauchamp.

The colonel held his tongue.

The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven
o’clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass
of the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a
conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of
consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not
but approve.

Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young
fellow so misguided.

The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said
whimsically, “He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in
it!”

Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him
footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather
surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be
losing his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his
in Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking
as well as ever.

“He dresses just as he used to dress,” she observed.

The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see
neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness, like
the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil
Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a
cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the
thought, like something flashing black, crossed her—how attractive such
a style must be to a Frenchwoman!

“He may look a little worn,” she acquiesced.




CHAPTER XVIII.
CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING


Tories dread the restlessness of Radicals, and Radicals are in awe of
the organization of Tories. Beauchamp thought anxiously of the high
degree of confidence existing in the Tory camp, whose chief could
afford to keep aloof, while he slaved all day and half the night to
thump ideas into heads, like a cooper on a cask:—an impassioned cooper
on an empty cask! if such an image is presentable. Even so enviously
sometimes the writer and the barrister, men dependent on their active
wits, regard the man with a business fixed in an office managed by
clerks. That man seems by comparison celestially seated. But he has his
fits of trepidation; for new tastes prevail and new habits are formed,
and the structure of his business will not allow him to adapt himself
to them in a minute. The secure and comfortable have to pay in
occasional panics for the serenity they enjoy. Mr. Seymour Austin
candidly avowed to Colonel Halkett, on his arrival at Mount Laurels,
that he was advised to take up his quarters in the neighbourhood of
Bevisham by a recent report of his committee, describing the young
Radical’s canvass as redoubtable. Cougham he did not fear: he could
make a sort of calculation of the votes for the Liberal thumping on the
old drum of Reform; but the number for him who appealed to feelings and
quickened the romantic sentiments of the common people now huddled
within our electoral penfold, was not calculable. Tory and Radical have
an eye for one another, which overlooks the Liberal at all times except
when he is, as they imagine, playing the game of either of them.

“Now we shall see the passions worked,” Mr. Austin said, deploring the
extension of the franchise.

He asked whether Beauchamp spoke well.

Cecilia left it to her father to reply; but the colonel appealed to
her, saying, “Inclined to dragoon one, isn’t he?”

She did not think that. “He speaks... he speaks well in conversation. I
fancy he would be liked by the poor. I should doubt his being a good
public speaker. He certainly has command of his temper: that is one
thing. I cannot say whether it favours oratory. He is indefatigable.
One may be sure he will not faint by the way. He quite believes in
himself. But, Mr. Austin, do you really regard him as a serious rival?”

Mr. Austin could not tell. No one could tell the effect of an extended
franchise. The untried venture of it depressed him. “Men have come
suddenly on a borough before now and carried it,” he said.

“Not a borough like Bevisham?”

He shook his head. “A fluid borough, I’m afraid.”

Colonel Halkettt interposed: “But Ferbrass is quite sure of his
district.”

Cecilia wished to know who the man was, of the mediaevally sounding
name.

“Ferbrass is an old lawyer, my dear. He comes of five generations of
lawyers, and he’s as old in the county as Grancey Lespel. Hitherto he
has always been to be counted on for marching his district to the poll
like a regiment. That’s our strength—the professions, especially
lawyers.”

“Are not a great many lawyers Liberals, papa?”

“A great many _barristers_ are, my dear.”

Thereat the colonel and Mr. Austin smiled together.

It was a new idea to Cecilia that Nevil Beauchamp should be considered
by a man of the world anything but a well-meaning, moderately
ridiculous young candidate; and the fact that one so experienced as
Seymour Austin deemed him an adversary to be grappled with in earnest,
created a small revolution in her mind, entirely altering her view of
the probable pliability of his Radicalism under pressure of time and
circumstances. Many of his remarks, that she had previously half smiled
at, came across her memory hard as metal. She began to feel some terror
of him, and said, to reassure herself: “Captain Beauchamp is not likely
to be a champion with a very large following. He is too much of a
political mystic, I think.”

“Many young men are, before they have written out a fair copy of their
meaning,” said Mr. Austin.

Cecilia laughed to herself at the vision of the fiery Nevil engaged in
writing out a fair copy of his meaning. How many erasures! what
foot-notes!

The arrangement was for Cecilia to proceed to Itchincope alone for a
couple of days, and bring a party to Mount Laurels through Bevisham by
the yacht on Thursday, to meet Mr. Seymour Austin and Mr. Everard
Romfrey. An early day of the next week had been agreed on for the
unmasking of the second Tory candidate. She promised that in case Nevil
Beauchamp should have the hardihood to enter the enemy’s nest at
Itchincope on Wednesday, at the great dinner and ball there, she would
do her best to bring him back to Mount Laurels, that he might meet his
uncle Everard, who was expected there. At least he may consent to come
for an evening,” she said. “Nothing will take him from that canvassing.
It seems to me it must be not merely distasteful...?”

Mr. Austin replied: “It’s disagreeable, but it’s the practice. I would
gladly be bound by a common undertaking to abstain.”

“Captain Beauchamp argues that it would be all to your advantage. He
says that a personal visit is the only chance for an unknown candidate
to make the people acquainted with him.”

“It’s a very good opportunity for making him acquainted with _them;_
and I hope he may profit by it.”

“Ah! pah! ‘To beg the vote and wink the bribe,’” Colonel Halkett
subjoined abhorrently:

‘“It well becomes the Whiggish tribe
To beg the vote and wink the bribe.’

Canvassing means intimidation or corruption.”

“Or the mixture of the two, called cajolery,” said Mr. Austin; “and
that was the principal art of the Whigs.”

Thus did these gentlemen converse upon canvassing.

It is not possible to gather up in one volume of sound the rattle of
the knocks at Englishmen’s castle-gates during election days; so, with
the thunder of it unheard, the majesty of the act of canvassing can be
but barely appreciable, and he, therefore, who would celebrate it must
follow the candidate obsequiously from door to door, where, like a
cross between a postman delivering a bill and a beggar craving an alms,
patiently he attempts the extraction of the vote, as little boys pick
periwinkles with a pin.

“This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,” is pretty
nearly the form of the supplication.

How if, instead of the solicitation of the thousands by the unit, the
meritorious unit were besought by rushing thousands?—as a mound of the
plains that is circumvented by floods, and to which the waters cry, Be
thou our island. Let it be answered the questioner, with no
discourteous adjectives, Thou fool! To come to such heights of popular
discrimination and political ardour the people would have to be
vivified to a pitch little short of eruptive: it would be Boreas
blowing AEtna inside them; and we should have impulse at work in the
country, and immense importance attaching to a man’s whether he will or
he won’t—enough to womanize him. We should be all but having Parliament
for a sample of our choicest rather than our likest: and see you not a
peril in that?

Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable
flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as
would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too
much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once
and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed by
the head with a vengeance: all the rest of the country being base
members indeed; Spartans—helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would
wither to the root: fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it:
we could never laugh at our masters, or command them: and that good
old-fashioned shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops
progress, like a block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us
equal before the law, puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in
the one or the other, and renders a stout build the safest assurance
for coming through ultimately, would be transformed to a painful
orderliness, like a City procession under the conduct of the police,
and to classifications of things according to their public value:
decidedly no benefit to burly freedom. None, if there were no
shouldering and hustling, could tell whether actually the fittest
survived; as is now the case among survivors delighting in a
broad-chested fitness.

And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential
elect, seeing below them none to resemble them! Do you not hear in
imagination the land’s regrets for that amiable nobility whose
pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and
an air? Ah, that these unchallengeable new lords could be exchanged for
those old ones! These, with the traditions of how great people should
look in our country, these would pass among us like bergs of ice—a pure
Polar aristocracy, inflicting the woes of wintriness upon us. Keep them
from concentrating! At present I believe it to be their honest opinion,
their wise opinion, and the sole opinion common to a majority of them,
that it is more salutary, besides more diverting, to have the fools of
the kingdom represented than not. As professors of the sarcastic art
they can easily take the dignity out of the fools’ representative at
their pleasure, showing him at antics while he supposes he is
exhibiting an honourable and a decent series of movements. Generally,
too, their archery can check him when he is for any of his measures;
and if it does not check, there appears to be such a property in simple
sneering, that it consoles even when it fails to right the balance of
power. Sarcasm, we well know, confers a title of aristocracy
straightway and sharp on the sconce of the man who does but imagine
that he is using it. What, then, must be the elevation of these princes
of the intellect in their own minds! Hardly worth bartering for worldly
commanderships, it is evident.

Briefly, then, we have a system, not planned but grown, the outcome and
image of our genius, and all are dissatisfied with parts of it; but, as
each would preserve his own, the surest guarantee is obtained for the
integrity of the whole by a happy adjustment of the energies of
opposition, which—you have only to look to see—goes far beyond concord
in the promotion of harmony. This is our English system; like our
English pudding, a fortuitous concourse of all the sweets in the
grocer’s shop, but an excellent thing for all that, and let none
threaten it. Canvassing appears to be mixed up in the system; at least
I hope I have shown that it will not do to reverse the process, for
fear of changes leading to a sovereignty of the austere and
antipathetic Intellect in our England, that would be an inaccessible
tyranny of a very small minority, necessarily followed by tremendous
convulsions.




CHAPTER XIX.
LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS OF BEVISHAM


Meantime the candidates raised knockers, rang bells, bowed, expounded
their views, praised their virtues, begged for votes, and greatly and
strangely did the youngest of them enlarge his knowledge of his
countrymen. But he had an insatiable appetite, and except in relation
to Mr. Cougham, considerable tolerance. With Cougham, he was like a
young hound in the leash. They had to run as twins; but Beauchamp’s
conjunct would not run, he would walk. He imposed his experience on
Beauchamp, with an assumption that it must necessarily be taken for the
law of Beauchamp’s reason in electoral and in political affairs, and
this was hard on Beauchamp, who had faith in his reason. Beauchamp’s
early canvassing brought Cougham down to Bevisham earlier than usual in
the days when he and Seymour Austin divided the borough, and he
inclined to administer correction to the Radically-disposed youngster.
“Yes, I have gone all over that,” he said, in speech sometimes, in
manner perpetually, upon the intrusion of an idea by his junior.
Cougham also, Cougham had passed through his Radical phase, as one does
on the road to wisdom. So the frog telleth tadpoles: he too has
wriggled most preposterous of tails; and he has shoved a circular flat
head into corners unadapted to its shape; and that the undeveloped one
should dutifully listen to experience and accept guidance, is devoutly
to be hoped. Alas! Beauchamp would not be taught that though they were
yoked they stood at the opposite ends of the process of evolution.

The oddly coupled pair deplored, among their respective friends, the
disastrous Siamese twinship created by a haphazard improvident Liberal
camp. Look at us! they said:—Beauchamp is a young demagogue; Cougham is
chrysalis Tory. Such Liberals are the ruin of Liberalism; but of such
must it be composed when there is no new cry to loosen floods. It was
too late to think of an operation to divide them. They held the heart
of the cause between them, were bound fast together, and had to go on.
Beauchamp, with a furious tug of Radicalism, spoken or performed,
pulled Cougham on his beam-ends. Cougham, to right himself, defined his
Liberalism sharply from the politics of the pit, pointed to France and
her Revolutions, washed his hands of excesses, and entirely overset
Beauchamp. Seeing that he stood in the Liberal interest, the junior
could not abandon the Liberal flag; so he seized it and bore it ahead
of the time, there where Radicals trip their phantom dances like
shadows on a fog, and waved it as the very flag of our perfectible
race. So great was the impetus that Cougham had no choice but to step
out with him briskly—voluntarily as a man propelled by a hand on his
coat-collar. A word saved him: the word practical. “Are we practical?”
he inquired, and shivered Beauchamp’s galloping frame with a violent
application of the stop abrupt; for that question, “Are we practical?”
penetrates the bosom of an English audience, and will surely elicit a
response if not plaudits. Practical or not, the good people affectingly
wish to be thought practical. It has been asked by them.

If we’re not practical, what are we?—Beauchamp, talking to Cougham
apart, would argue that the daring and the far-sighted course was often
the most practical. Cougham extended a deprecating hand: “Yes, I have
gone over all that.” Occasionally he was maddening.

The melancholy position of the senior and junior Liberals was known
abroad and matter of derision.

It happened that the gay and good-humoured young Lord Palmet, heir to
the earldom of Elsea, walking up the High Street of Bevisham, met
Beauchamp on Tuesday morning as he sallied out of his hotel to canvass.
Lord Palmet was one of the numerous half-friends of Cecil Baskelett,
and it may be a revelation of his character to you, that he owned to
liking Beauchamp because of his having always been a favourite with the
women. He began chattering, with Beauchamp’s hand in his: “I’ve hit on
you, have I? My dear fellow, Miss Halkett was talking of you last
night. I slept at Mount Laurels; went on purpose to have a peep. I’m
bound for Itchincope. They’ve some grand procession in view there;
Lespel wrote for my team; I suspect he’s for starting some new October
races. He talks of half-a-dozen drags. He must have lots of women
there. I _say_, what a splendid creature Cissy Halkett has shot up! She
topped the season this year, and will next. You’re for the darkies,
Beauchamp. So am I, when I don’t see a blonde; just as a fellow admires
a girl when there’s no married woman or widow in sight. And, I say, it
can’t be true you’ve gone in for that crazy Radicalism? There’s nothing
to be gained by it, you know; the women hate it! A married blonde of
five-and-twenty’s the Venus of them all. Mind you, I don’t forget that
Mrs. Wardour-Devereux is a thorough-paced brunette; but, upon my
honour, I’d bet on Cissy Halkett at forty. ‘A dark eye in woman,’ if
you like, but blue and auburn drive it into a corner.”

Lord Palmet concluded by asking Beauchamp what he was doing and whither
going.

Beauchamp proposed to him maliciously, as one of our hereditary
legislators, to come and see something of canvassing. Lord Palmet had
no objection. “Capital opportunity for a review of their women,” he
remarked.

“I map the places for pretty women in England; some parts of Norfolk,
and a spot or two in Cumberland and Wales, and the island over there, I
know thoroughly. Those Jutes have turned out some splendid fair women.
Devonshire’s worth a tour. My man Davis is in charge of my team, and he
drives to Itchincope from Washwater station. I am independent; I’ll
have an hour with you. Do you think much of the women here?”

Beauchamp had not noticed them.

Palmet observed that he should not have noticed anything else.

“But you are qualifying for the _Upper_ House,” Beauchamp said in the
tone of an encomium.

Palmet accepted the statement. “Though I shall never care to figure
before peeresses,” he said. “I can’t tell you why. There’s a heavy
sprinkling of the old bird among them. It isn’t that. There’s too much
plumage; I think it must be that. A cloud of millinery shoots me off a
mile from a woman. In my opinion, witches are the only ones for wearing
jewels without chilling the feminine atmosphere about them. Fellows
think differently.” Lord Palmet waved a hand expressive of purely
amiable tolerance, for this question upon the most important topic of
human affairs was deep, and no judgement should be hasty in settling
it. “I’m peculiar,” he resumed. “A rose and a string of pearls: a woman
who goes beyond that’s in danger of petrifying herself and her fellow
man. Two women in Paris, last winter, set us on fire with pale thin
gold ornaments—neck, wrists, ears, ruche, skirts, all in a flutter, and
so were you. But you felt witchcraft. ‘The magical Orient,’ Vivian
Ducie called the blonde, and the dark beauty, ‘Young Endor.’”

“Her name?” said Beauchamp.

“A marquise; I forget her name. The other was Countess Rastaglione; you
must have heard of her; a towering witch, an empress, Helen of Troy;
though Ducie would have it the brunette was Queen of _Paris_. For
French taste, if you like.”

Countess Rastaglione was a lady enamelled on the scroll of Fame. “Did
you see them together?” said Beauchamp. “They weren’t together?”

Palmet looked at him and laughed. “You’re yourself again, are you? Go
to Paris in January, and cut out the Frenchmen.”

“Answer me, Palmet: they weren’t in couples?”

“I fancy not. It was luck to meet them, so they couldn’t have been.”

“Did you dance with either of them?”

Unable to state accurately that he had, Palmet cried, “Oh! for dancing,
the Frenchwoman beat the Italian.”

“Did you see her often—more than once?”

“My dear fellow, I went everywhere to see her: balls, theatres,
promenades, rides, churches.”

“And you say she dressed up to the Italian, to challenge her, rival
her?”

“Only one night; simple accident. Everybody noticed it, for they stood
for Night and Day,—both hung with gold; the brunette Etruscan, and the
blonde Asiatic; and every Frenchman present was epigramizing up and
down the rooms like mad.”

“Her husband’s Legitimist; he wouldn’t be at the Tuileries?” Beauchamp
spoke half to himself.

“What, then, what?” Palmet stared and chuckled. “Her husband must have
taken the Tuileries’ bait, if we mean the same woman. My dear old
Beauchamp, have I seen her, then? She’s a darling! The Rastaglione was
nothing to her. When you do light on a grand smoky pearl, the milky
ones may go and decorate plaster. That’s what I say of the loveliest
brunettes. It must be the same: there can’t be a couple of dark
beauties in Paris without a noise about them. Marquise—? I shall
recollect her name presently.”

“Here’s one of the houses I stop at,” said Beauchamp, “and drop that
subject.”

A scared servant-girl brought out her wizened mistress to confront the
candidate, and to this representative of the sex he addressed his arts
of persuasion, requesting her to repeat his words to her husband. The
contrast between Beauchamp palpably canvassing and the Beauchamp who
was the lover of the Marquise of the forgotten name, struck too
powerfully on Palmet for his gravity he retreated.

Beauchamp found him sauntering on the pavement, and would have
dismissed him but for an agreeable diversion that occurred at that
moment. A suavely smiling unctuous old gentleman advanced to them,
bowing, and presuming thus far, he said, under the supposition that he
was accosting the junior Liberal candidate for the borough. He
announced his name and his principles Tomlinson, progressive Liberal.

“A true distinction from some Liberals I know,” said Beauchamp.

Mr. Tomlinson hoped so. Never, he said, did he leave it to the man of
his choice at an election to knock at his door for the vote.

Beauchamp looked as if he had swallowed a cordial. Votes falling into
his lap are heavenly gifts to the candidate sick of the knocker and the
bell. Mr. Tomlinson eulogized the manly candour of the junior Liberal
candidate’s address, in which he professed to see ideas that
distinguished it from the address of the sound but otherwise
conventional Liberal, Mr. Cougham. He muttered of plumping for
Beauchamp. “Don’t plump,” Beauchamp said; and a candidate, if he would
be an honourable twin, must say it. Cougham had cautioned him against
the heresy of plumping.

They discoursed of the poor and their beverages, of pothouses, of the
anti-liquorites, and of the duties of parsons, and the value of a
robust and right-minded body of the poor to the country. Palmet found
himself following them into a tolerably spacious house that he took to
be the old gentleman’s until some of the apparatus of an Institute for
literary and scientific instruction revealed itself to him, and he
heard Mr. Tomlinson exalt the memory of one Wingham for the blessing
bequeathed by him to the town of Bevisham. “For,” said Mr. Tomlinson,
“it is open to both sexes, to all respectable classes, from ten in the
morning up to ten at night. Such a place affords us, I would venture to
say, the advantages without the seductions of a Club. I rank it next—at
a far remove, but next—the church.”

Lord Palmet brought his eyes down from the busts of certain worthies
ranged along the top of the book-shelves to the cushioned chairs, and
murmured, “Capital place for an appointment with a woman.”

Mr. Tomlinson gazed up at him mildly, with a fallen countenance. He
turned sadly agape in silence to the busts, the books, and the range of
scientific instruments, and directed a gaze under his eyebrows at
Beauchamp. “Does your friend canvass with you?” he inquired.

“I want him to taste it,” Beauchamp replied, and immediately introduced
the affable young lord—a proceeding marked by some of the dexterity he
had once been famous for, as was shown by a subsequent observation of
Mr. Tomlinson’s:

“Yes,” he said, on the question of classes, “yes, I fear we have
classes in this country whose habitual levity sharp experience will
have to correct. I very much fear it.”

“But if you have classes that are not to face realities classes that
look on them from the box-seats of a theatre,” said Beauchamp, “how can
you expect perfect seriousness, or any good service whatever?”

“Gently, sir, gently. No; we can, I feel confident, expand within the
limits of our most excellent and approved Constitution. I could wish
that socially... that is all.”

“Socially and politically mean one thing in the end,” said Beauchamp.
“If you have a nation politically corrupt, you won’t have a good state
of morals in it, and the laws that keep society together bear upon the
politics of a country.”

“True; yes,” Mr. Tomlinson hesitated assent. He dissociated Beauchamp
from Lord Palmet, but felt keenly that the latter’s presence desecrated
Wingham’s Institute, and he informed the candidate that he thought he
would no longer detain him from his labours.

“Just the sort of place wanted in every provincial town,” Palmet
remarked by way of a parting compliment.

Mr. Tomlinson bowed a civil acknowledgement of his having again spoken.

No further mention was made of the miraculous vote which had risen
responsive to the candidate’s address of its own inspired motion; so
Beauchamp said, “I beg you to bear in mind that I request you not to
plump.”

“You may be right, Captain Beauchamp. Good day, sir.”

Palmet strode after Beauchamp into the street.

“Why did you set me bowing to that old boy?” he asked.

“Why did you talk about women?” was the rejoinder.

“Oh, aha!” Palmet sang to himself. “You’re a Romfrey, Beauchamp. A blow
for a blow! But I only said what would strike every fellow first off.
It _is_ the place; the very place. Pastry-cooks’ shops won’t stand
comparison with it. Don’t tell me you’re the man not to see how much a
woman prefers to be under the wing of science and literature, in a
good-sized, well-warmed room, with a book, instead of making believe,
with a red face, over a tart.”

He received a smart lecture from Beauchamp, and began to think he had
enough of canvassing. But he was not suffered to escape. For his
instruction, for his positive and extreme good, Beauchamp determined
that the heir to an earldom should have a day’s lesson. We will hope
there was no intention to punish him for having frozen the genial
current of Mr. Tomlinson’s vote and interest; and it may be that he
clung to one who had, as he imagined, seen Renée. Accompanied by a Mr.
Oggler, a tradesman of the town, on the Liberal committee, dressed in a
pea-jacket and proudly nautical, they applied for the vote, and found
it oftener than beauty. Palmet contrasted his repeated disappointments
with the scoring of two, three, four and more in the candidate’s list,
and informed him that he would certainly get the Election. “I think
you’re sure of it,” he said. “There’s not a pretty woman to be seen;
not one.”

One came up to them, the sight of whom counselled Lord Palmet to
reconsider his verdict. She was addressed by Beauchamp as Miss Denham,
and soon passed on.

Palmet was guilty of staring at her, and of lingering behind the others
for a last look at her.

They were on the steps of a voter’s house, calmly enduring a rebuff
from him in person, when Palmet returned to them, exclaiming
effusively, “What luck you have, Beauchamp!” He stopped till the
applicants descended the steps, with the voice of the voter ringing
contempt as well as refusal in their ears; then continued: “You
introduced me neck and heels to that undertakerly old Tomlinson, of
Wingham’s Institute; you might have given me a chance with that
Miss—Miss Denham, was it? She has a bit of a style!”

“She has a head,” said Beauchamp.

“A girl like that may have what she likes. I don’t care what she
has—there’s woman in her. You might take her for a younger sister of
Mrs. Wardour-Devereux. Who’s the uncle she speaks of? She ought not to
be allowed to walk out by herself.”

“She can take care of herself,” said Beauchamp.

Palmet denied it. “No woman can. Upon my honour, it’s a shame that she
should be out alone. What are her people? I’ll run—from you, you
know—and see her safe home. There’s such an infernal lot of fellows
about; and a girl simply bewitching and unprotected! I ought to be
after her.”

Beauchamp held him firmly to the task of canvassing.

“Then will you tell me where she lives?” Palmet stipulated. He
reproached Beauchamp for a notorious Grand Turk exclusiveness and
greediness in regard to women, as well as a disposition to run hard
races for them out of a spirit of pure rivalry.

“It’s no use contradicting, it’s universally known of you,” reiterated
Palmet. “I could name a dozen women, and dozens of fellows you
deliberately set yourself to cut out, for the honour of it. What’s that
story they tell of you in one of the American cities or
watering-places, North or South? You would dance at a ball a dozen
times with a girl engaged to a man—who drenched you with a tumbler at
the hotel bar, and off you all marched to the sands and exchanged shots
from revolvers; and both of you, they say, saw the body of a drowned
sailor in the water, in the moonlight, heaving nearer and nearer, and
you stretched your man just as the body was flung up by a wave between
you. Picturesque, if you like!”

“Dramatic, certainly. And I ran away with the bride next morning?”

“No!” roared Palmet; “you didn’t. There’s the cruelty of the whole
affair.”

Beauchamp laughed. “An old messmate of mine, Lieutenant Jack Wilmore,
can give you a different version of the story. I never have fought a
duel, and never will. Here we are at the shop of a tough voter, Mr.
Oggler. So it says in my note-book. Shall we put Lord Palmet to speak
to him first?”

“If his lordship will put his heart into what he says,” Mr. Oggler
bowed. “Are you for giving the people recreation on a Sunday, my lord?”

“Trap-bat and ball, cricket, dancing, military bands, puppet-shows,
theatres, merry-go-rounds, bosky dells—anything to make them happy,”
said Palmet.

“Oh, dear! then I’m afraid we cannot ask you to speak to this Mr.
Carpendike.” Oggler shook his head.

“Does the fellow want the people to be miserable?”

“I’m afraid, my lord, he would rather see them miserable.”

They introduced themselves to Mr. Carpendike in his shop. He was a
flat-chested, sallow young shoemaker, with a shelving forehead, who
seeing three gentlemen enter to him recognized at once with a practised
resignation that they had not come to order shoe-leather, though he
would fain have shod them, being needy; but it was not the design of
Providence that they should so come as he in his blindness would have
had them. Admitting this he wished for nothing.

The battle with Carpendike lasted three-quarters of an hour, during
which he was chiefly and most effectively silent. Carpendike would not
vote for a man that proposed to open museums on the Sabbath day. The
striking simile of the thin end of the wedge was recurred to by him for
a damning illustration. Captain Beauchamp might be honest in putting
his mind on most questions in his address, when there was no demand
upon him to do it; but honesty was no antidote to impiety. Thus
Carpendike.

As to Sunday museuming being an antidote to the pothouse—no. For the
people knew the frequenting of the pothouse to be a vice; it was a
temptation of Satan that often in overcoming them was the cause of
their flying back to grace: whereas museums and picture galleries were
insidious attractions cloaked by the name of virtue, whereby they were
allured to abandon worship.

Beauchamp flew at this young monster of unreason: “But the people are
_not_ worshipping; they are idling and sotting, and if you carry your
despotism farther still, and shut them out of every shop on Sundays, do
you suppose you promote the spirit of worship? If you don’t revolt them
you unman them, and I warn you we can’t afford to destroy what manhood
remains to us in England. Look at the facts.”

He flung the facts at Carpendike with the natural exaggeration of them
which eloquence produces, rather, as a rule, to assure itself in
passing of the overwhelming justice of the cause it pleads than to
deceive the adversary. Brewers’ beer and publicans’ beer,
wife-beatings, the homes and the blood of the people, were matters
reviewed to the confusion of Sabbatarians.

Carpendike listened with a bent head, upraised eyes, and brows
wrinkling far on to his poll: a picture of a mind entrenched beyond the
potentialities of mortal assault. He signified that he had spoken.
Indeed Beauchamp’s reply was vain to one whose argument was that he
considered the people nearer to holiness in the indulging of an evil
propensity than in satisfying a harmless curiosity and getting a
recreation. The Sabbath claimed them; if they were disobedient, Sin
ultimately might scourge them back to the fold, but never if they were
permitted to regard themselves as innocent in their backsliding and
rebelliousness.

Such language was quite new to Beauchamp. The parsons he had spoken to
were of one voice in objecting to the pothouse. He appealed to
Carpendike’s humanity. Carpendike smote him with a text from Scripture.

“Devilish cold in this shop,” muttered Palmet.

Two not flourishing little children of the emaciated Puritan burst into
the shop, followed by their mother, carrying a child in her arms. She
had a sad look, upon traces of a past fairness, vaguely like a snow
landscape in the thaw. Palmet stooped to toss shillings with her young
ones, that he might avoid the woman’s face. It cramped his heart.

“Don’t you see, Mr. Carpendike,” said fat Mr. Oggler, “it’s the
happiness of the people we want; that’s what Captain Beauchamp works
for—their happiness; that’s the aim of life for all of us. Look at me!
I’m as happy as the day. I pray every night, and I go to church every
Sunday, and I never know what it is to be unhappy. The Lord has blessed
me with a good digestion, healthy pious children, and a prosperous shop
that’s a competency—a modest one, but I make it satisfy me, because I
know it’s the Lord’s gift. Well, now, and I hate Sabbath-breakers; I
would punish them; and I’m against the public-houses on a Sunday; but
aboard my little yacht, say on a Sunday morning in the Channel, I don’t
forget I owe it to the Lord that he has been good enough to put me in
the way of keeping a yacht; no; I read prayers to my crew, and a
chapter in the Bible—Genesis, Deuteronomy, Kings, Acts, Paul, just as
it comes. All’s good that’s there. Then we’re free for the day! man,
boy, and me; we cook our victuals, and we _must_ look to the yacht, do
you see. But we’ve made our peace with the Almighty. We know that. He
don’t mind the working of the vessel so long as we’ve remembered him.
He put us in that situation, exactly there, latitude and longitude, do
you see, and work the vessel we must. And a glass of grog and a pipe
after dinner, can’t be any offence. And I tell you, honestly and
sincerely, I’m sure my conscience is good, and I really and truly don’t
know what it is _not_ to know happiness.”

“Then you don’t know God,” said Carpendike, like a voice from a cave.

“Or nature: or the state of the world,” said Beauchamp, singularly
impressed to find himself between two men, of whom—each perforce of his
tenuity and the evident leaning of his appetites—one was for the barren
black view of existence, the other for the fantastically bright. As to
the men personally, he chose Carpendike, for all his obstinacy and
sourness. Oggler’s genial piety made him shrink with nausea.

But Lord Palmet paid Mr. Oggler a memorable compliment, by assuring him
that he was altogether of his way of thinking about happiness.

The frank young nobleman did not withhold a reference to the two or
three things essential to his happiness; otherwise Mr. Oggler might
have been pleased and flattered.

Before quitting the shop, Beauchamp warned Carpendike that he should
come again. “Vote or no vote, you’re worth the trial. Texts as many as
you like. I’ll make your faith active, if it’s alive at all. You speak
of the Lord loving his own; you make out the Lord to be _your_ own, and
use your religion like a drug. So it appears to me. That Sunday tyranny
of yours has to be defended.

Remember that; for I for one shall combat it and expose it. Good day.”

Beauchamp continued, in the street: “Tyrannies like this fellow’s have
made the English the dullest and wretchedest people in Europe.”

Palmet animadverted on Carpendike: “The dog looks like a deadly fungus
that has poisoned the woman.”

“I’d trust him with a post of danger, though,” said Beauchamp.

Before the candidate had opened his mouth to the next elector he was
beamed on. M’Gilliper, baker, a floured brick face, leaned on folded
arms across his counter and said, in Scotch: “My vote? and he that asks
me for my vote is the man who, when he was midshipman, saved the life
of a relation of mine from death by drowning! my wife’s first cousin,
Johnny Brownson—and held him up four to five minutes in the water, and
never left him till he was out of danger! There’s my hand on it, I
will, and a score of householders in Bevisham the same.” He dictated
precious names and addresses to Beauchamp, and was curtly thanked for
his pains.

Such treatment of a favourable voter seemed odd to Palmet.

“Oh, a vote given for reasons of sentiment!” Beauchamp interjected.

Palmet reflected and said: “Well, perhaps that’s how it is women don’t
care uncommonly for the men who love them, though they like precious
well to be loved. Opposition does it.”

“You have discovered my likeness to women,” said Beauchamp, eyeing him
critically, and then thinking, with a sudden warmth, that he had seen
Renée: “Look here, Palmet, you’re too late for Itchincope, to-day; come
and eat fish and meat with me at my hotel, and come to a meeting after
it. You can run by rail to Itchincope to breakfast in the morning, and
I may come with you. You’ll hear one or two men speak well to-night.”

“I suppose I shall have to be at this business myself some day,” sighed
Palmet. “Any women on the platform? Oh, but political women! And the
Tories get the pick of the women. No, I don’t think I’ll stay. Yes, I
will; I’ll go through with it. I like to be learning something. You
wouldn’t think it of me, Beauchamp, but I envy fellows at work.”

“You might make a speech for me, Palmet.”

“No man better, my dear fellow, if it were proposing a toast to the
poor devils and asking them to drink it. But a dry speech, like leading
them over the desert without a well to cheer them—no oasis, as we used
to call a five-pound note and a holiday—I haven’t the heart for that.
Is your Miss Denham a Radical?”

Beauchamp asserted that he had not yet met a woman at all inclining in
the direction of Radicalism. “I don’t call furies Radicals. There may
be women who think as well as feel; I don’t know them.”

“Lots of them, Beauchamp. Take my word for it. I do know women. They
haven’t a shift, nor a trick, I don’t know. They’re as clear to me as
glass. I’ll wager your Miss Denham goes to the meetings. Now, doesn’t
she? Of course she does. And there couldn’t be a gallanter way of
spending an evening, so I’ll try it. Nothing to repent of next morning!
That’s to be said for politics, Beauchamp, and I confess I’m rather
jealous of you. A thoroughly good-looking girl who takes to a fellow
for what he’s doing in the world, must have ideas of him precious
different from the adoration of six feet three and a fine seat in the
saddle. I see that. There’s Baskelett in the Blues; and if I were he I
should detest my cuirass and helmet, for if he’s half as successful as
he boasts—it’s the uniform.”

Two notorious Radicals, Peter Molyneux and Samuel Killick, were called
on. The first saw Beauchamp and refused him; the second declined to see
him. He was amazed and staggered, but said little.

Among the remainder of the electors of Bevisham, roused that day to a
sense of their independence by the summons of the candidates, only one
man made himself conspicuous, by premising that he had two important
questions to ask, and he trusted Commander Beauchamp to answer them
unreservedly. They were: first, What is a FRENCH MARQUEES? and second:
Who was EURYDICEY?

Beauchamp referred him to the Tory camp, whence the placard alluding to
those ladies had issued.

“Both of them’s ladies! I guessed it,” said the elector.

“Did you guess that one of them is a mythological lady?”

“I’m not far wrong in guessing t’other’s not much better, I reckon.
Now, sir, may I ask you, is there any tale concerning your morals?”

“No: you may not ask; you take a liberty.”

“Then I’ll take the liberty to postpone talking about my vote. Look
here, Mr. Commander; if the upper classes want anything of me and come
to me for it, I’ll know what sort of an example they’re setting; now
that’s me.”

“You pay attention to a stupid Tory squib?”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire, sir.”

Beauchamp glanced at his note-book for the name of this man, who was a
ragman and dustman.

“My private character has nothing whatever to do with my politics,” he
said, and had barely said it when he remembered having spoken somewhat
differently, upon the abstract consideration of the case, to Mr.
Tomlinson.

“You’re quite welcome to examine my character for yourself, only I
don’t consent to be catechized. Understand that.”

“You quite understand that, Mr. Tripehallow,” said Oggler, bolder in
taking up the strange name than Beauchamp had been.

“I understand that. But you understand, there’s never been a word
against the morals of Mr. Cougham. Here’s the point: Do we mean to be a
moral country? Very well, then so let our representatives be, I say.
And if I hear nothing against your morals, Mr. Commander, I don’t say
you shan’t have my vote. I mean to deliberate. You young nobs capering
over our heads—I nail you down to morals. Politics secondary. Adew, as
the dying spirit remarked to weeping friends.”

“Au revoir—would have been kinder,” said Palmet.

Mr. Tripehallow smiled roguishly, to betoken comprehension.

Beauchamp asked Mr. Oggler whether that fellow was to be taken for a
humourist or a five-pound-note man.

“It may be both, sir. I know he’s called Morality Joseph.”

An all but acknowledged five-pound-note man was the last they visited.
He cut short the preliminaries of the interview by saying that he was a
four-o’clock man; i.e. the man who waited for the final bids to him
upon the closing hour of the election day.

“Not one farthing!” said Beauchamp, having been warned beforehand of
the signification of the phrase by his canvassing lieutenant.

“Then you’re nowhere,” the honest fellow replied in the mystic tongue
of prophecy.

Palmet and Beauchamp went to their fish and meat; smoked a cigarette or
two afterward, conjured away the smell of tobacco from their persons as
well as they could, and betook themselves to the assembly-room of the
Liberal party, where the young lord had an opportunity of beholding Mr.
Cougham, and of listening to him for an hour and forty minutes. He
heard Mr. Timothy Turbot likewise. And Miss Denham was present. Lord
Palmet applauded when she smiled. When she looked attentive he was
deeply studious. Her expression of fatigue under the sonorous ring of
statistics poured out from Cougham was translated by Palmet into yawns
and sighs of a profoundly fraternal sympathy. Her face quickened on the
rising of Beauchamp to speak. She kept eye on him all the while, as
Palmet, with the skill of an adept in disguising his petty larceny of
the optics, did on her. Twice or thrice she looked pained: Beauchamp
was hesitating for the word. Once she looked startled and shut her
eyes: a hiss had sounded; Beauchamp sprang on it as if enlivened by
hostility, and dominated the factious note. Thereat she turned to a
gentleman sitting beside her; apparently they agreed that some incident
had occurred characteristic of Nevil Beauchamp; for whom, however, it
was not a brilliant evening. He was very well able to account for it,
and did so, after he had walked a few steps with Miss Denham on her
homeward way.

“You heard Cougham, Palmet! He’s my senior, and I’m obliged to come
second to him, and how am I to have a chance when he has drenched the
audience for close upon a couple of hours!”

Palmet mimicked the manner of Cougham.

“They cry for Turbot naturally; they want a relief,” Beauchamp groaned.

Palmet gave an imitation of Timothy Turbot.

He was an admirable mimic, perfectly spontaneous, without stressing any
points, and Beauchamp was provoked to laugh his discontentment with the
evening out of recollection.

But a grave matter troubled Palmet’s head.

“Who was that fellow who walked off with Miss Denham?”

“A married man,” said Beauchamp: “badly married; more’s the pity; he
has a wife in the madhouse. His name is Lydiard.”

“Not her brother! Where’s her uncle?”

“She won’t let him come to these meetings. It’s her idea;
well-intended, but wrong, I think. She’s afraid that Dr. Shrapnel will
alarm the moderate Liberals and damage Radical me.”

Palmet muttered between his teeth, “What queer things they let their
women do!” He felt compelled to say, “Odd for her to be walking home at
night with a fellow like that.”

It chimed too consonantly with a feeling of Beauchamp’s, to repress
which he replied: “Your ideas about women are simply barbarous, Palmet.
Why shouldn’t she? Her uncle places his confidence in the man, and in
her. Isn’t that better—ten times more likely to call out the sense of
honour and loyalty, than the distrust and the scandal going on in your
class?”

“Please to say yours too.”

“I’ve no class. I say that the education for women is to teach them to
rely on themselves.”

“Ah! well, I don’t object, if I’m the man.”

“Because you and your set are absolutely uncivilized in your views of
women.”

“Common sense, Beauchamp!”

“Prey. You eye them as prey. And it comes of an idle aristocracy. You
have no faith in them, and they repay you for your suspicion.”

“All the same, Beauchamp, she ought not to be allowed to go about at
night with that fellow. ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore’: but
that was in Erin’s isle, and if we knew the whole history, she’d better
have stopped at home. She’s marvellously pretty, to my mind. She looks
a high-bred wench. Odd it is, Beauchamp, to see a lady’s-maid now and
then catch the style of my lady. No, by Jove! I’ve known one or two—you
couldn’t tell the difference! Not till you were intimate. I know one
would walk a minuet with a duchess. Of course—all the worse for her. If
you see that uncle of Miss Denham’s—upon my honour, I should advise
him: I mean, counsel him not to trust her with any fellow but you.”

Beauchamp asked Lord Palmet how old he was.

Palmet gave his age; correcting the figures from six-and-twenty to one
year more. “And never did a stroke of work in my life,” he said,
speaking genially out of an acute guess at the sentiments of the man he
walked with.

It seemed a farcical state of things.

There was a kind of contrition in Palmet’s voice, and to put him at his
ease, as well as to stamp something in his own mind, Beauchamp said:
“It’s common enough.”




CHAPTER XX.
A DAY AT ITCHINCOPE


An election in Bevisham was always an exciting period at Itchincope,
the large and influential old estate of the Lespels, which at one time,
with but a ceremonious drive through the town, sent you two good Whig
men to Parliament to sit at Reform banquets; two unswerving party men,
blest subscribers to the right Review, and personally proud of its
trenchancy. Mr. Grancey Lespel was the survivor of them, and well could
he remember the happier day of his grandfather, his father, and his own
hot youth. He could be carried so far by affectionate regrets as to
think of the Tories of that day benignly:—when his champion Review of
the orange and blue livery waved a wondrous sharp knife, and stuck and
bled them, proving to his party, by trenchancy alone, that the Whig was
the cause of Providence. Then politics presented you a table whereat
two parties feasted, with no fear of the intrusion of a third, and your
backs were turned on the noisy lower world, your ears were deaf to it.

Apply we now the knocker to the door of venerable Quotation, and call
the aged creature forth, that he, half choked by his eheu—!

“A sound between a sigh and bray,”

may pronounce the familiar but respectable words, the burial-service of
a time so happy!

Mr. Grancey Lespel would still have been sitting for Bevisham (or
politely at this elective moment bowing to resume the seat) had not
those Manchester jugglers caught up his cry, appropriated his colours,
displaced and impersonated him, acting beneficent Whig on a scale
approaching treason to the Constitution; leaning on the people in
earnest, instead of taking the popular shoulder for a temporary lift,
all in high party policy, for the clever manœuvre, to oust the Tory and
sway the realm. See the consequences. For power, for no other
consideration, those manufacturing rascals have raised Radicalism from
its primaeval mire—from its petty backslum bookseller’s shop and
public-house back-parlour effluvia of oratory—to issue dictates in
England, and we, England, formerly the oak, are topsy-turvy, like
onions, our heels in the air!

The language of party is eloquent, and famous for being grand at
illustration; but it is equally well known that much of it gives us
humble ideas of the speaker, probably because of the naughty temper
party is prone to; which, while endowing it with vehemence, lessens the
stout circumferential view that should be taken, at least historically.
Indeed, though we admit party to be the soundest method for conducting
us, party talk soon expends its attractiveness, as would a summer’s
afternoon given up to the contemplation of an encounter of rams’ heads.
Let us be quit of Mr. Grancey Lespel’s lamentations. The Whig gentleman
had some reason to complain. He had been trained to expect no other
attack than that of his hereditary adversary-ram in front, and a sham
ram—no honest animal, but a ramming engine rather—had attacked him in
the rear. Like Mr. Everard Romfrey and other Whigs, he was profoundly
chagrined by popular ingratitude: “not the same man,” his wife said of
him. It nipped him early. He took to proverbs; sure sign of the sere
leaf in a man’s mind.

His wife reproached the people for their behaviour to him bitterly. The
lady regarded politics as a business that helped hunting-men a stage
above sportsmen, for numbers of the politicians she was acquainted with
were hunting-men, yet something more by virtue of the variety they
could introduce into a conversation ordinarily treating of sport and
the qualities of wines. Her husband seemed to have lost in that
Parliamentary seat the talisman which gave him notions distinguishing
him from country squires; he had sunk, and he no longer cared for the
months in London, nor for the speeches she read to him to re-awaken his
mind and make him look out of himself, as he had done when he was a
younger man and not a suspended Whig. Her own favourite reading was of
love-adventures written in the French tongue. She had once been in
love, and could be so sympathetic with that passion as to avow to
Cecilia Halkett a tenderness for Nevil Beauchamp, on account of his
relations with the Marquise de Rouaillout, and notwithstanding the
demoniacal flame-halo of the Radical encircling him.

The allusion to Beauchamp occurred a few hours after Cecilia’s arrival
at Itchincope.

Cecilia begged for the French lady’s name to be repeated; she had not
heard it before, and she tasted the strange bitter relish of
realization when it struck her ear to confirm a story that she believed
indeed, but had not quite sensibly felt.

“And it is not over yet, they say,” Mrs. Grancey Lespel added, while
softly flipping some spots of the colour proper to radicals in morals
on the fame of the French lady. She possessed fully the grave judicial
spirit of her countrywomen, and could sit in judgement on the
personages of tales which had entranced her, to condemn the heroines:
it was impolitic in her sex to pity females. As for the men—poor weak
things! As for Nevil Beauchamp, in particular, his case, this
penetrating lady said, was clear: he ought to be married. “Could _you_
make a sacrifice?” she asked Cecilia playfully.

“Nevil Beauchamp and I are old friends, but we have agreed that we are
deadly political enemies,” Miss Halkett replied.

“It is not so bad for a beginning,” said Mrs. Lespel.

“If one were disposed to martyrdom.”

The older woman nodded. “Without that.”

“My dear Mrs. Lespel, wait till you have heard him. He is at war with
everything we venerate and build on. The wife you would give him should
be a creature rooted in nothing—in sea-water. Simply two or three
conversations with him have made me uncomfortable ever since; I can see
nothing durable; I dream of surprises, outbreaks, dreadful events. At
least it is perfectly true that I do not look with the same eyes on my
country. He seems to delight in destroying one’s peaceful contemplation
of life. The truth is that he blows a perpetual gale, and is all
agitation,” Cecilia concluded, affecting with a smile a slight shiver.

“Yes, one tires of that,” said Mrs. Lespel. “I was determined I would
have him here if we could get him to come. Grancey objected. We shall
have to manage Captain Beauchamp and the rest as well. He is sure to
come late to-morrow, and will leave early on Thursday morning for his
canvass; our driving into Bevisham is for Friday or Saturday. I do not
see that he need have any suspicions. Those verses you are so angry
about cannot be traced to Itchincope. My dear, they are a childish
trifle. When my husband stood first for Bevisham, the whole of his
University life appeared in print. What we have to do is to forewarn
the gentlemen to be guarded, and especially in what they say to my
nephew Lord Palmet, for that boy cannot keep a secret; he is as open as
a plate.”

“The smoking-room at night?” Cecilia suggested, remembering her
father’s words about Itchincope’s tobacco-hall.

“They have Captain Beauchamp’s address hung up there, I have heard,”
said Mrs. Lespel. “There may be other things—another address, though it
is not yet, placarded. Come with me. For fifteen years I have never
once put my head into that room, and now I’ve a superstitious fear
about it.”

Mrs. Lespel led the way to the deserted smoking-room, where the stale
reek of tobacco assailed the ladies, as does that dire place of Customs
the stranger visiting savage (or too natural) potentates.

In silence they tore down from the wall Beauchamp’s electoral
Address—flanked all its length with satirical pen and pencil comments
and sketches; and they consigned to flames the vast sheet of animated
verses relating to the FRENCH MARQUEES. A quarter-size chalk-drawing of
a slippered pantaloon having a duck on his shoulder, labelled to say
“Quack-quack,” and offering our nauseated Dame Britannia (or else it
was the widow Bevisham) a globe of a pill to swallow, crossed with the
consolatory and reassuring name of _Shrapnel_, they disposed of
likewise. And then they fled, chased forth either by the brilliancy of
the politically allusive epigrams profusely inscribed around them on
the walls, or by the atmosphere. Mrs. Lespel gave her orders for the
walls to be scraped, and said to Cecilia: “A strange air to breathe,
was it not? The less men and women know of one another, the happier for
them. I knew my superstition was correct as a guide to me. I do so much
wish to respect men, and all my experience tells me the Turks know best
how to preserve it for us. Two men in this house would give their wives
for pipes, if it came to the choice. We might all go for a cellar of
old wine. After forty, men have married their habits, and wives are
only an item in the list, and not the most important.”

With the assistance of Mr. Stukely Culbrett, Mrs. Lespel prepared the
house and those of the company who were in the secret of affairs for
the arrival of Beauchamp. The ladies were curious to see him. The
gentlemen, not anticipating extreme amusement, were calm: for it is an
axiom in the world of buckskins and billiard-cues, that one man is very
like another; and so true is it with them, that they can in time teach
it to the fair sex. Friends of Cecil Baskelett predominated, and the
absence of so sprightly a fellow was regretted seriously; but he was
shooting with his uncle at Holdesbury, and they did not expect him
before Thursday.

On Wednesday morning Lord Palmet presented himself at a remarkably
well-attended breakfast-table at Itchincope. He passed from Mrs. Lespel
to Mrs. Wardour-Devsreux and Miss Halkett, bowed to other ladies, shook
hands with two or three men, and nodded over the heads of half-a-dozen,
accounting rather mysteriously for his delay in coming, it was thought,
until he sat down before a plate of Yorkshire pie, and said:

“The fact is I’ve been canvassing hard. With Beauchamp!”

Astonishment and laughter surrounded him, and Palmet looked from face
to face, equally astonished, and desirous to laugh too.

“Ernest! how could you do that?” said Mrs. Lespel; and her husband
cried in stupefaction, “With Beauchamp?”

“Oh! it’s because of the Radicalism,” Palmet murmured to himself. “I
didn’t mind that.”

“What sort of a day did you have?” Mr. Culbrett asked him; and several
gentlemen fell upon him for an account of the day.

Palmet grimaced over a mouthful of his pie.

“Bad!” quoth Mr. Lespel; “I knew it. I know Bevisham. The only chance
there is for five thousand pounds in a sack with a hole in it.”

“Bad for Beauchamp? Dear me, no”; Palmet corrected the error. “He is
carrying all before him. And he tells them,” Palmet mimicked Beauchamp,
“they shall not have one penny: not a farthing. I gave a couple of
young ones a shilling apiece, and he rowed me for bribery; somehow I
did wrong.”

Lord Palmet described the various unearthly characters he had inspected
in their dens: Carpendike, Tripehallow, and the radicals Peter Molyneux
and Samuel Killick, and the ex-member for the borough, Cougham, posing
to suit sign-boards of Liberal inns, with a hand thrust in his
waistcoat, and his head well up, the eyes running over the under-lids,
after the traditional style of our aristocracy; but perhaps more
closely resembling an urchin on tiptoe peering above park-palings.
Cougham’s remark to Beauchamp, heard and repeated by Palmet with the
object of giving an example of the senior Liberal’s phraseology: “I was
necessitated to vacate my town mansion, to my material discomfort and
that of my wife, whose equipage I have been compelled to take, by your
premature canvass of the borough, Captain Beauchamp: and now, I hear,
on undeniable authority, that no second opponent to us will be
forthcoming”—this produced the greatest effect on the company.

“But do you tell me,” said Mr. Lespel, when the shouts of the gentlemen
were subsiding, “do you tell me that young Beauchamp is going ahead?”

“That he is. They flock to him in the street.”

“He stands there, then, and jingles a money-bag.”

Palmet resumed his mimicry of Beauchamp: “Not a stiver; purity of
election is the first condition of instruction to the people!
Principles! Then they’ve got a capital orator: Turbot, an Irishman. I
went to a meeting last night, and heard him; never heard anything finer
in my life. You may laugh he whipped me off my legs; fellow spun me
like a top; and while he was orationing, a donkey calls, ‘Turbot! ain’t
you a flat fish?’ and he swings round, ‘Not for a fool’s hook!’ and out
they hustled the villain for a Tory. I never saw anything like it.”

“That repartee wouldn’t have done with a Dutchman or a Torbay trawler,”
said Stukely Culbrett. “But let us hear more.”

“Is it fair?” Miss Halkett murmured anxiously to Mrs. Lespel, who
returned a flitting shrug.

“Charming women follow Beauchamp, you know,” Palmet proceeded, as he
conceived, to confirm and heighten the tale of success. “There’s a Miss
Denham, niece of a doctor, a Dr.... Shot—Shrapnel! a wonderfully
good-looking, clever-looking girl, comes across him in half-a-dozen
streets to ask how he’s getting on, and goes every night to his
meetings, with a man who’s a writer and has a mad wife; a man named
Lydia—no, that’s a woman—Lydiard. It’s rather a jumble; but you should
see her when Beauchamp’s on his legs and speaking.”

“Mr. Lydiard is in Bevisham?” Mrs. Wardour-Devereux remarked.

“I know the girl,” growled Mr. Lespel. “She comes with that rascally
doctor and a bobtail of tea-drinking men and women and their brats to
Northeden Heath—my ground. There they stand and sing.”

“Hymns?” inquired Mr. Culbrett.

“I don’t know what they sing. And when it rains they take the liberty
to step over my bank into my plantation. Some day I shall have them
stepping into my house.”

“Yes, it’s Mr. Lydiard; I’m sure of the man’s name,” Palmet replied to
Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

“We met him in Spain the year before last,” she observed to Cecilia.

The “we” reminded Palmet that her husband was present.

“Ah, Devereux, I didn’t see you,” he nodded obliquely down the table.
“By the way, what’s the grand procession? I hear my man Davis has come
all right, and I caught sight of the top of your coach-box in the
stableyard as I came in. What are we up to?”

“Baskelett writes, it’s to be for to-morrow morning at ten—the start.”
Mr. Wardour-Devereux addressed the table generally. He was a fair,
huge, bush-bearded man, with a voice of unvarying bass: a squire in his
county, and energetic in his pursuit of the pleasures of hunting,
driving, travelling, and tobacco.

“Old Bask’s the captain of us? Very well, but where do we drive the
teams? How many are we? What’s in hand?”

Cecilia threw a hurried glance at her hostess.

Luckily some witling said, “Fours-in-hand!” and so dryly that it passed
for humour, and gave Mrs. Lespel time to interpose. “You are not to
know till to-morrow, Ernest.”

Palmet had traced the authorship of the sally to Mr. Algy Borolick, and
crowned him with praise for it. He asked, “Why not know till
to-morrow?” A word in a murmur from Mr. Culbrett, “Don’t frighten the
women,” satisfied him, though why it should he could not have imagined.

Mrs. Lespel quitted the breakfast-table before the setting in of the
dangerous five minutes of conversation over its ruins, and spoke to her
husband, who contested the necessity for secresy, but yielded to her
judgement when it was backed by Stukely Culbrett. Soon after Lord
Palmet found himself encountered by evasions and witticisms, in spite
of the absence of the ladies, upon every attempt he made to get some
light regarding the destination of the four-in-hands next day.

“What are you going to do?” he said to Mr. Devereux, thinking him the
likeliest one to grow confidential in private.

“Smoke,” resounded from the depths of that gentleman.

Palmet recollected the ground of division between the beautiful
brunette and her lord—his addiction to the pipe in perpetuity, and
deemed it sweeter to be with the lady.

She and Miss Halkett were walking in the garden.

Miss Halkett said to him: “How wrong of you to betray the secrets of
your friend! Is he really making way?”

“Beauchamp will head the poll to a certainty,” Palmet replied.

“Still,” said Miss Halkett, “you should not forget that you are not in
the house of a Liberal. Did you canvass in the town or the suburbs?”

“Everywhere. I assure you, Miss Halkett, there’s a feeling for
Beauchamp—they’re in love with him!”

“He promises them everything, I suppose?”

“Not he. And the odd thing is, it isn’t the Radicals he catches. He
won’t go against the game laws for them, and he won’t cut down army and
navy. So the Radicals yell at him. One confessed he had sold his vote
for five pounds last election: ‘you shall have it for the same,’ says
he, ‘for you’re all humbugs.’ Beauchamp took him by the throat and
shook him—metaphorically, you know. But as for the tradesmen, he’s
their hero; bakers especially.”

“Mr. Austin may be right, then!” Cecilia reflected aloud.

She went to Mrs. Lespel to repeat what she had extracted from Palmet,
after warning the latter not, in common loyalty, to converse about his
canvass with Beauchamp.

“Did you speak of Mr. Lydiard as Captain Beauchamp’s friend?” Mrs.
Devereux inquired of him.

“Lydiard? why, he was the man who made off with that pretty Miss
Denham,” said Palmet. “I have the greatest trouble to remember them
all; but it was not a day wasted. Now I know politics. Shall we ride or
walk? You will let me have the happiness? I’m so unlucky; I rarely meet
you!”

“You will bring Captain Beauchamp to me the moment he comes?”

“I’ll bring him. Bring him? Nevil Beauchamp won’t want bringing.”

Mrs. Devereux smiled with some pleasure.

Grancey Lespel, followed at some distance by Mr. Ferbrass, the Tory
lawyer, stepped quickly up to Palmet, and asked whether Beauchamp had
seen Dollikins, the brewer.

Palmet could recollect the name of one Tomlinson, and also the calling
at a brewery. Moreover, Beauchamp had uttered contempt of the brewer’s
business, and of the social rule to accept rich brewers for gentlemen.
The man’s name might be Dollikins and not Tomlinson, and if so, it was
Dollikins who would not see Beauchamp. To preserve his political
importance, Palmet said, “Dollikins! to be sure, that was the man.”

“Treats him as he does you,” Mr. Lespel turned to Ferbrass. “I’ve sent
to Dollikins to come to me this morning, if he’s not driving into the
town. I’ll have him before Beauchamp sees him. I’ve asked half-a-dozen
of these country gentlemen-tradesmen to lunch at my table to-day.”

“Then, sir,” observed Ferbrass, “if they are men to be persuaded, they
had better not see me.”

“True; they’re my old supporters, and mightn’t like your Tory face,”
Mr. Lespel assented.

Mr. Ferbrass congratulated him on the heartiness of his espousal of the
Tory cause.

Mr. Lespel winced a little, and told him not to put his trust in that.

“Turned Tory?” said Palmet.

Mr. Lespel declined to answer.

Palmet said to Mrs. Devereux, “He thinks I’m not worth speaking to upon
politics. Now I’ll give him some Beauchamp; I learned lots yesterday.”

“Then let it be in Captain Beauchamp’s manner,” said she softly.

Palmet obeyed her commands with the liveliest exhibition of his
peculiar faculty: Cecilia, rejoining them, seemed to hear Nevil himself
in his emphatic political mood. “Because the Whigs are defunct! They
had no root in the people! Whig is the name of a tribe that was! You
have Tory, Liberal, and Radical. There is no place for Whig. He is
played out.”

“Who has been putting that nonsense into your head?” Mr. Lespel
retorted. “Go shooting, go shooting!”

Shots were heard in the woods. Palmet pricked up his ears; but he was
taken out riding to act cavalier to Mrs. Devereux and Miss Halkett.

Cecilia corrected his enthusiasm with the situation. “No flatteries
to-day. There are hours when women feel their insignificance and
helplessness. I begin to fear for Mr. Austin; and I find I can do
nothing to aid him. My hands are tied. And yet I know I could win
voters if only it were permissible for me to go and speak to them.”

“Win them!” cried Palmet, imagining the alacrity of men’s votes to be
won by her. He recommended a gallop for the chasing away of melancholy,
and as they were on the Bevisham high road, which was bordered by
strips of turf and heath, a few good stretches brought them on the
fir-heights, commanding views of the town and broad water.

“No, I cannot enjoy it,” Cecilia said to Mrs. Devereux; “I don’t mind
the grey light; cloud and water, and halftones of colour, are homely
English and pleasant, and that opal where the sun should be has a
suggestiveness richer than sunlight. I’m quite northern enough to
understand it; but with me it must be either peace or strife, and that
Election down there destroys my chance of peace. I never could mix
reverie with excitement; the battle must be over first, and the dead
buried. Can you?”

Mrs. Devereux answered: “Excitement? I am not sure that I know what it
is. An Election does not excite me.”

“There’s Nevil Beauchamp himself!” Palmet sang out, and the ladies
discerned Beauchamp under a fir-tree, down by the road, not alone. A
man, increasing in length like a telescope gradually reaching its end
for observation, and coming to the height of a landmark, as if raised
by ropes, was rising from the ground beside him. “Shall we trot on,
Miss Halkett?”

Cecilia said, “No.”

“Now I see a third fellow,” said Palmet. “It’s the other fellow, the
Denham-Shrapnel-Radical meeting... Lydiard’s his name: writes books!”

“We may as well ride on,” Mrs. Devereux remarked, and her horse fretted
singularly.

Beauchamp perceived them, and lifted his hat. Palmet made
demonstrations for the ladies. Still neither party moved nearer.

After some waiting, Cecilia proposed to turn back.

Mrs. Devereux looked into her eyes. “I’ll take the lead,” she said, and
started forward, pursued by Palmet. Cecilia followed at a sullen
canter.

Before they came up to Beauchamp, the long-shanked man had stalked away
townward. Lydiard held Beauchamp by the hand. Some last words, after
the manner of instructions, passed between them, and then Lydiard also
turned away.

“I say, Beauchamp, Mrs. Devereux wants to hear who that man is,” Palmet
said, drawing up.

“That man is Dr. Shrapnel,” said Beauchamp, convinced that Cecilia had
checked her horse at the sight of the doctor.

“Dr. Shrapnel,” Palmet informed Mrs. Devereux.

She looked at him to seek his wits, and returning Beauchamp’s admiring
salutation with a little bow and smile, said, “I fancied it was a
gentleman we met in Spain.”

“He writes books,” observed Palmet, to jog a slow intelligence.

“Pamphlets, you mean.”

“I think he is not a pamphleteer”, Mrs. Devereux said.

“Mr. Lydiard, then, of course; how silly I am! How can you pardon me!”
Beauchamp was contrite; he could not explain that a long guess he had
made at Miss Halkett’s reluctance to come up to him when Dr. Shrapnel
was with him had preoccupied his mind. He sent off Palmet the bearer of
a pretext for bringing Lydiard back, and then said to Cecilia, “You
recognized Dr. Shrapnel?”

“I thought it might be Dr. Shrapnel”, she was candid enough to reply.
“I could not well recognize him, not knowing him.”

“Here comes Mr. Lydiard; and let me assure you, if I may take the
liberty of introducing him, he is no true Radical. He is a
philosopher—one of the flirts, the butterflies of politics, as Dr.
Shrapnel calls them.”

Beauchamp hummed over some improvized trifles to Lydiard, then
introduced him cursorily, and all walked in the direction of
Itchincope. It was really the Mr. Lydiard Mrs. Devereux had met in
Spain, so they were left in the rear to discuss their travels. Much
conversation did not go on in front. Cecilia was very reserved.
By-and-by she said, “I am glad you have come into the country early
to-day.”

He spoke rapturously of the fresh air, and not too mildly of his
pleasure in meeting her. Quite off her guard, she began to hope he was
getting to be one of them again, until she heard him tell Lord Palmet
that he had come early out of Bevisham for the walk with Dr. Shrapnel,
and to call on certain rich tradesmen living near Itchincope. He
mentioned the name of Dollikins.

“Dollikins?” Palmet consulted a perturbed recollection. Among the
entangled list of new names he had gathered recently from the study of
politics, Dollikins rang in his head. He shouted, “Yes, Dollikins! to
be sure. Lespel has him to lunch to-day;—calls him a
gentleman-tradesman; odd fish! and told a fellow called—where is it
now?—a name like brass or copper... Copperstone? Brasspot?... told him
he’d do well to keep his Tory cheek out of sight. It’s the names of
those fellows bother one so! All the rest’s easy.”

“You are evidently in a state of confusion, Lord Palmet,” said Cecilia.

The tone of rebuke and admonishment was unperceived. “Not about the
facts,” he rejoined. “I’m for fair play all round; no trickery. I tell
Beauchamp all I know, just as I told you this morning, Miss Halkett.
What I don’t like is Lespel turning Tory.”

Cecilia put a stop to his indiscretions by halting for Mrs. Devereux,
and saying to Beauchamp, “If your friend would return to Bevisham by
rail, this is the nearest point to the station.”

Palmet, best-natured of men, though generally prompted by some of his
peculiar motives, dismounted from his horse, leaving him to Beauchamp,
that he might conduct Mr. Lydiard to the station, and perhaps hear a
word of Miss Denham: at any rate be able to form a guess as to the
secret of that art of his, which had in the space of an hour restored a
happy and luminous vivacity to the languid Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.




CHAPTER XXI.
THE QUESTION AS TO THE EXAMINATION OF THE WHIGS, AND THE FINE BLOW
STRUCK BY MR. EVERARD ROMFREY


Itchincope was famous for its hospitality. Yet Beauchamp, when in the
presence of his hostess, could see that he was both unexpected and
unwelcome. Mrs. Lespel was unable to conceal it; she looked meaningly
at Cecilia, talked of the house being very full, and her husband
engaged till late in the afternoon. And Captain Baskelett had arrived
on a sudden, she said. And the luncheon-table in the dining-room could
not possibly hold more.

“We three will sit in the library, anywhere,” said Cecilia.

So they sat and lunched in the library, where Mrs. Devereux served
unconsciously for an excellent ally to Cecilia in chatting to
Beauchamp, principally of the writings of Mr. Lydiard.

Had the blinds of the windows been drawn down and candles lighted,
Beauchamp would have been well contented to remain with these two
ladies, and forget the outer world; sweeter society could not have been
offered him: but glancing carelessly on to the lawn, he exclaimed in
some wonderment that the man he particularly wished to see was there.
“It must be Dollikins, the brewer. I’ve had him pointed out to me in
Bevisham, and I never can light on him at his brewery.”

No excuse for detaining the impetuous candidate struck Cecilia. She
betook herself to Mrs. Lespel, to give and receive counsel in the
emergency, while Beauchamp struck across the lawn to Mr. Dollikins, who
had the squire of Itchincope on the other side of him.

Late in the afternoon a report reached the ladies of a furious contest
going on over Dollikins. Mr. Algy Borolick was the first to give them
intelligence of it, and he declared that Beauchamp had wrested
Dollikins from Grancey Lespel. This was contradicted subsequently by
Mr. Stukely Culbrett. “But there’s heavy pulling between them,” he
said.

“It will do all the good in the world to Grancey,” said Mrs. Lespel.

She sat in her little blue-room, with gentlemen congregating at the
open window.

Presently Grancey Lespel rounded a projection of the house where the
drawing-room stood out: “The maddest folly ever talked!” he delivered
himself in wrath. “The Whigs dead? You may as well say I’m dead.”

It was Beauchamp answering: “Politically, you’re dead, if you call
yourself a Whig. You couldn’t be a live one, for the party’s in pieces,
blown to the winds. The country was once a chess-board for Whig and
Tory: but that game’s at an end. There’s no doubt on earth that the
Whigs are dead.”

“But if there’s no doubt about it, how is it I have a doubt about it?”

“You know you’re a Tory. You tried to get that man Dollikins from me in
the Tory interest.”

“I mean to keep him out of Radical clutches. Now that’s the truth.”

They came up to the group by the open window, still conversing hotly,
indifferent to listeners.

“You won’t keep him from me; I have him,” said Beauchamp.

“You delude yourself; I have his promise, his pledged word,” said
Grancey Lespel.

“The man himself told you his opinion of renegade Whigs.”

“Renegade!”

“Renegade Whig is an actionable phrase,” Mr. Culbrett observed.

He was unnoticed.

“If you don’t like ‘renegade,’ take ‘dead,’” said Beauchamp. “Dead Whig
resurgent in the Tory. You are dead.”

“It’s the stupid conceit of your party thinks that.”

“_Dead_, my dear Mr. Lespel. I’ll say for the Whigs, they would not be
seen touting for Tories if they were not ghosts of Whigs. You are dead.
There is no doubt of it.”

“But,” Grancey Lespel repeated, “if there’s no doubt about it, how is
it I have a doubt about it?”

“The Whigs preached finality in Reform. It was their own funeral
sermon.”

“Nonsensical talk!”

“I don’t dispute your liberty of action to go over to the Tories, but
you have no right to attempt to take an honest Liberal with you. And
that I’ve stopped.”

“Aha! Beauchamp; the man’s mine. Come, you’ll own he swore he wouldn’t
vote for a Shrapnelite.”

“Don’t you remember?—that’s how the Tories used to fight _you;_ they
stuck an epithet to you, and hooted to set the mob an example; you hit
them off to the life,” said Beauchamp, brightening with the fine ire of
strife, and affecting a sadder indignation. “You traded on the
ignorance of a man prejudiced by lying reports of one of the noblest of
human creatures.”

“Shrapnel? There! I’ve had enough.” Grancey Lespel bounced away with
both hands outspread on the level of his ears.

“Dead!” Beauchamp sent the ghastly accusation after him.

Grancey faced round and said, “Bo!” which was applauded for a smart
retort. And let none of us be so exalted above the wit of daily life as
to sneer at it. Mrs. Lespel remarked to Mr. Culbrett, “Do you not see
how much he is refreshed by the interest he takes in this election? He
is ten years younger.”

Beauchamp bent to her, saying mock-dolefully, “I’m sorry to tell you
that if ever he was a sincere Whig, he has years of remorse before
him.”

“Promise me, Captain Beauchamp,” she answered, “promise you will give
us no more politics to-day.”

“If none provoke me.”

“None shall.”

“And as to Bevisham,” said Mr. Culbrett, “it’s the identical borough
for a Radical candidate, for every voter there demands a division of
his property, and he should be the last to complain of an adoption of
his principles.”

“Clever,” rejoined Beauchamp; “but I am under government”; and he swept
a bow to Mrs. Lespel.

As they were breaking up the group, Captain Baskelett appeared.

“Ah! Nevil,” said he, passed him, saluted Miss Halkett through the
window, then cordially squeezed his cousin’s hand. “Having a holiday
out of Bevisham? The baron expects to meet you at Mount Laurels
to-morrow. He particularly wishes me to ask you whether you think all
is fair in war.”

“I don’t,” said Nevil.

“Not? The canvass goes on swimmingly?”

“Ask Palmet.”

“Palmet gives you two-thirds of the borough. The poor old Tory tortoise
is nowhere. They’ve been writing about you, Nevil.”

“They have. And if there’s a man of honour in the party I shall hold
him responsible for it.”

“I allude to an article in the Bevisham Liberal paper; a magnificent
eulogy, upon my honour. I give you my word, I have rarely read an
article so eloquent. And what is the Conservative misdemeanour which
the man of honour in the party is to pay for?”

“I’ll talk to you about it by-and-by,” said Nevil.

He seemed to Cecilia too trusting, too simple, considering his cousin’s
undisguised tone of banter. Yet she could not put him on his guard. She
would have had Mr. Culbrett do so. She walked on the terrace with him
near upon sunset, and said, “The position Captain Beauchamp is in here
is most unfair to him.”

“There’s nothing unfair in the lion’s den,” said Stukely Culbrett;
adding, “Now, observe, Miss Halkett; he talks for effect. He discovers
that Lespel is a Torified Whig; but that does not make him a bit more
alert. It’s to say smart things. He speaks, but won’t act, as if he
were among enemies. He’s getting too fond of his bow-wow. Here he is,
and he knows the den, and he chooses to act the innocent. You see how
ridiculous? That trick of the ingenu, or peculiarly heavenly messenger,
who pretends that he ought never to have any harm done to him, though
he carries the lighted match, is the way of young Radicals. Otherwise
Beauchamp would be a dear boy. We shall see how he takes his
thrashing.”

“You feel sure he will be beaten?”

“He has too strong a dose of fool’s honesty to succeed—stands for the
game laws with Radicals, for example. He’s loaded with scruples and
crotchets, and thinks more of them than of his winds and his tides. No
public man is to be made out of that. His idea of the Whigs being dead
shows a head that can’t read the country. He means himself for mankind,
and is preparing to be the benefactor of a country parish.”

“But as a naval officer?”

“Excellent.”

Cecilia was convinced that Mr. Culbrett underestimated Beauchamp.
Nevertheless the confidence expressed in Beauchamp’s defeat reassured
and pleased her. At midnight she was dancing with him in the midst of
great matronly country vessels that raised a wind when they launched on
the waltz, and exacted an anxious pilotage on the part of gentlemen
careful of their partners; and why I cannot say, but contrasts produce
quaint ideas in excited spirits, and a dancing politician appeared to
her so absurd that at one moment she had to bite her lips not to laugh.
It will hardly be credited that the waltz with Nevil was delightful to
Cecilia all the while, and dancing with others a penance. He danced
with none other. He led her to a three o’clock morning supper: one of
those triumphant subversions of the laws and customs of earth which
have the charm of a form of present deification for all young people;
and she, while noting how the poor man’s advocate dealt with costly
pasties and sparkling wines, was overjoyed at his hearty comrade’s
manner with the gentlemen, and a leadership in fun that he seemed to
have established. Cecil Baskelett acknowledged it, and complimented him
on it. “I give you my word, Nevil, I never heard you in finer trim.
Here’s to our drive into Bevisham to-morrow! Do you drink it? I beg; I
entreat.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Nevil.

“Will you take a whip down there?”

“If you’re all insured.”

“On my honour, old Nevil, driving a four-in-hand is easier than
governing the country.”

“I’ll accept your authority for what you know best,” said Nevil.

The toast of the Drive into Bevisham was drunk.

Cecilia left the supper-table, mortified, and feeling disgraced by her
participation in a secret that was being wantonly abused to humiliate
Nevil, as she was made to think by her sensitiveness. All the gentlemen
were against him, excepting perhaps that chattering pie Lord Palmet,
who did him more mischief than his enemies. She could not sleep. She
walked out on the terrace with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, in a dream,
hearing that lady breathe remarks hardly less than sentimental, and an
unwearied succession of shouts from the smoking-room.

“They are not going to bed to-night,” said Mrs. Devereux.

“They are mystifying Captain Beauchamp,” said Cecilia.

“My husband tells me they are going to drive him into the town
to-morrow.”

Cecilia flushed: she could scarcely get her breath.

“Is that their plot?” she murmured.

Sleep was rejected by her, bed itself. The drive into Bevisham had been
fixed for nine A.M. She wrote two lines on note-paper in her room: but
found them overfervid and mysterious. Besides, how were they to be
conveyed to Nevil’s chamber.

She walked in the passage for half an hour, thinking it possible she
might meet him; not the most lady-like of proceedings, but her head was
bewildered. An arm-chair in her room invited her to rest and think—the
mask of a natural desire for sleep. At eight in the morning she was
awakened by her maid, and at a touch exclaimed, “Have they gone?” and
her heart still throbbed after hearing that most of the gentlemen were
in and about the stables. Cecilia was down-stairs at a quarter to nine.
The breakfast-room was empty of all but Lord Palmet and Mr.
Wardour-Devereux; one selecting a cigar to light out of doors, the
other debating between two pipes. She beckoned to Palmet, and
commissioned him to inform Beauchamp that she wished him to drive her
down to Bevisham in her pony-carriage. Palmet brought back word from
Beauchamp that he had an appointment at ten o’clock in the town. “I
want to see him,” she said; so Palmet ran out with the order. Cecilia
met Beauchamp in the entrance-hall.

“You must not go,” she said bluntly.

“I can’t break an appointment,” said he—“for the sake of my own
pleasure,” was implied.

“Will you not listen to me, Nevil, when I say you cannot go?”

A coachman’s trumpet blew.

“I shall be late. That’s Colonel Millington’s team. He starts first,
then Wardour-Devereux, then Cecil, and I mount beside him; Palmet’s at
our heels.”

“But can’t you even imagine a purpose for their driving into Bevisham
so pompously?”

“Well, men with drags haven’t commonly much purpose,” he said.

“But on this occasion! At an Election time! Surely, Nevil, you can
guess at a reason.”

A second trumpet blew very martially. Footmen came in search of Captain
Beauchamp. The alternative of breaking her pledged word to her father,
or of letting Nevil be burlesqued in the sight of the town, could no
longer be dallied with.

Cecilia said, “Well, Nevil, then you shall hear it.”

Hereupon Captain Baskelett’s groom informed Captain Beauchamp that he
was off.

“Yes,” Nevil said to Cecilia, “tell me on board the yacht.”

“Nevil, you will be driving into the town with the second Tory
candidate of the borough.”

“Which? who?” Nevil asked.

“Your cousin Cecil.”

“Tell Captain Baskelett that I don’t drive down till an hour later,”
Nevil said to the groom. “Cecilia, you’re my friend; I wish you were
more. I wish we didn’t differ. I shall hope to change you—make you come
half-way out of that citadel of yours. This is my uncle Everard! I
might have made sure there’d be a blow from him! And Cecil! of all men
for a politician! Cecilia, think of it! Cecil Baskelett! I beg Seymour
Austin’s pardon for having suspected him...”

Now sounded Captain Baskelett’s trumpet.

Angry though he was, Beauchamp laughed. “Isn’t it exactly like the
baron to spring a mine of this kind?”

There was decidedly humour in the plot, and it was a lusty quarterstaff
blow into the bargain. Beauchamp’s head rang with it. He could not
conceal the stunning effect it had on him. Gratitude and tenderness
toward Cecilia for saving him, at the cost of a partial breach of faith
that he quite understood, from the scandal of the public entry into
Bevisham on the Tory coach-box, alternated with his interjections
regarding his uncle Everard.

At eleven, Cecilia sat in her pony-carriage giving final directions to
Mrs. Devereux where to look out for the _Esperanza_ and the schooner’s
boat. “Then I drive down alone,” Mrs. Devereux said.

The gentlemen were all off, and every available maid with them on the
coach-boxes, a brilliant sight that had been missed by Nevil and
Cecilia.

“Why, here’s Lydiard!” said Nevil, supposing that Lydiard must be
approaching him with tidings of the second Tory candidate. But Lydiard
knew nothing of it. He was the bearer of a letter on foreign
paper—marked urgent, in Rosamund’s hand—and similarly worded in the
well-known hand which had inscribed the original address of the letter
to Steynham.

Beauchamp opened it and read:

Château Tourdestelle
“(Eure).

“Come. I give you three days—no more.

“RENÉE.”

The brevity was horrible. Did it spring from childish imperiousness or
tragic peril?

Beauchamp could imagine it to be this or that. In moments of excited
speculation we do not dwell on the possibility that there may be a
mixture of motives.

“I fear I must cross over to France this evening,” he said to Cecilia.

She replied, “It is likely to be stormy to-night. The steamboat may not
run.”

“If there’s a doubt of it, I shall find a French lugger. You are tired,
from not sleeping last night.”

“No,” she answered, and nodded to Mrs. Devereux, beside whom Mr.
Lydiard stood: “You will not drive down alone, you see.”

For a young lady threatened with a tempest in her heart, as disturbing
to her as the one gathering in the West for ships at sea, Miss Halkett
bore herself well.




CHAPTER XXII.
THE DRIVE INTO BEVISHAM


Beauchamp was requested by Cecilia to hold the reins. His fair
companion in the pony-carriage preferred to lean back musing, and he
had leisure to think over the blow dealt him by his uncle Everard with
so sure an aim so ringingly on the head. And in the first place he made
no attempt to disdain it because it was nothing but artful and
heavy-handed, after the mediaeval pattern. Of old he himself had
delighted in artfulness as well as boldness and the unmistakeable hit.
Highly to prize generalship was in his blood, though latterly the very
forces propelling him to his political warfare had forbidden the use of
it to him. He saw the patient veteran laying his gun for a long shot—to
give as good as he had received; and in realizing Everard Romfrey’s
perfectly placid bearing under provocation, such as he certainly would
have maintained while preparing his reply to it, the raw fighting
humour of the plot touched the sense of justice in Beauchamp enough to
make him own that he had been the first to offend.

He could reflect also on the likelihood that other offended men of his
uncle’s age and position would have sulked or stormed, threatening the
Parthian shot of the vindictive testator. If there was godlessness in
turning to politics for a weapon to strike a domestic blow, manfulness
in some degree signalized it. Beauchamp could fancy his uncle crying
out, Who set the example? and he was not at that instant inclined to
dwell on the occult virtues of the example he had set. To be honest,
this elevation of a political puppet like Cecil Baskelett, and the
starting him, out of the same family which Turbot, the journalist, had
magnified, into Bevisham with such pomp and flourish in opposition to
the serious young champion of popular rights and the Puritan style, was
ludicrously effective. Conscienceless of course. But that was the way
of the Old School.

Beauchamp broke the silence by thanking Cecilia once more for saving
him from the absurd exhibition of the Radical candidate on the Tory
coach-box, and laughing at the grimmish slyness of his uncle Everard’s
conspiracy a something in it that was half-smile half-sneer; not
exactly malignant, and by no means innocent; something made up of the
simplicity of a lighted match, and its proximity to powder, yet neither
deadly, in spite of a wicked twinkle, nor at all pretending to be
harmless: in short, a specimen of old English practical humour.

He laboured to express these or corresponding views of it, with
tolerably natural laughter, and Cecilia rallied her spirits at his
pleasant manner of taking his blow.

“I shall compliment the baron when I meet him tonight,” he said. “What
can we compare him to?”

She suggested the Commander of the Faithful, the Lord Haroun, who
likewise had a turn for buffooneries to serve a purpose, and could
direct them loftily and sovereignty.

“No: Everard Romfrey’s a Northerner from the feet up,” said Beauchamp.

Cecilia compliantly offered him a sketch of the Scandinavian Troll:
much nearer the mark, he thought, and exclaimed: “Baron Troll! I’m
afraid, Cecilia, you have robbed him of the best part of his fun. And
you will owe it entirely to him if you should be represented in
Parliament by my cousin Baskelett.”

“Promise me, Nevil, that you will, when you meet Captain Baskelett, not
forget I did you some service, and that I wish, I shall be so glad if
you do not resent certain things.... Very objectionable, we all think.”

He released her from the embarrassing petition: “Oh! now I know my man,
you may be sure I won’t waste a word on him. The fact is, he would not
understand a word, and would require more—and that I don’t do. When I
fancied Mr. Austin was the responsible person, I meant to speak to
him.”

Cecilia smiled gratefully.

The sweetness of a love-speech would not have been sweeter to her than
this proof of civilized chivalry in Nevil.

They came to the fir-heights overlooking Bevisham. Here the breezy
beginning of a South-western autumnal gale tossed the ponies’ manes and
made threads of Cecilia’s shorter locks of beautiful auburn by the
temples and the neck, blustering the curls that streamed in a thick
involution from the silken band gathering them off her uncovered
clear-swept ears.

Beauchamp took an impression of her side face. It seemed to offer him
everything the world could offer of cultivated purity, intelligent
beauty and attractiveness; and “Wilt thou?” said the winged minute.
Peace, a good repute in the mouths of men, home, and a trustworthy
woman for mate, an ideal English lady, the rarest growth of our
country, and friends and fair esteem, were offered. Last night he had
waltzed with her, and the manner of this tall graceful girl in
submitting to the union of the measure and reserving her individual
distinction, had exquisitely flattered his taste, giving him an
auspicious image of her in partnership, through the uses of life.

He looked ahead at the low dead-blue cloud swinging from across
channel. What could be the riddle of Renée’s letter! It chained him
completely.

“At all events, I shall not be away longer than three days,” he said;
paused, eyed Cecilia’s profile, and added, “Do we differ so much?”

“It may not be so much as we think,” said she.

“But if we do!”

“Then, Nevil, there is a difference between us.”

“But if we keep our lips closed?”

“We should have to shut our eyes as well!”

A lovely melting image of her stole over him; all the warmer for her
unwittingness in producing it: and it awakened a tenderness toward the
simple speaker.

Cecilia’s delicate breeding saved her from running on figuratively. She
continued: “Intellectual differences do not cause wounds, except when
very unintellectual sentiments are behind them:—my conceit, or your
impatience, Nevil? ‘_Noi veggiam come quei, che ha mala luce._’... I
can confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so?”

Her musical voice in Italian charmed his hearing.

“What poet was that you quoted?”

“The wisest: Dante.”

“Dr. Shrapnel’s favourite! I must try to read him.”

“He reads Dante?” Cecilia threw a stress on the august name; and it was
manifest that she cared not for the answer.

Contemptuous exclusiveness could not go farther.

“He is a man of cultivation,” Beauchamp said cursorily, trying to avoid
dissension, but in vain. “I wish I were half as well instructed, and
the world half as charitable as he!—You ask me if I shall admit my
sight to be imperfect. Yes; when you prove to me that priests and
landlords are willing to do their duty by the people in preference to
their churches and their property: but will you ever shake off
prejudice?”

Here was opposition sounding again. Cecilia mentally reproached Dr.
Shrapnel for it.

“Indeed, Nevil, really, must not—may I not ask you this?—must not every
one feel the evil spell of some associations? And Dante and Dr.
Shrapnel!”

“You don’t know him, Cecilia.”

“I saw him yesterday.”

“You thought him too tall?”

“I thought of his character.”

“How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!”

“I am immensely indebted to my unconscious advocate.”

“You are clad in steel; you flash back; you won’t answer me out of the
heart. I’m convinced it is pure wilfulness that makes you oppose me.”

“I fancy you must be convinced because you cannot imagine women to have
any share of public spirit, Nevil.”

A grain of truth in that remark set Nevil reflecting.

“I want them to have it,” he remarked, and glanced at a Tory placard,
probably the puppet’s fresh-printed address to the electors, on one of
the wayside fir-trees. “Bevisham looks well from here. We might make a
North-western Venice of it, if we liked.”

“Papa told you it would be money sunk in mud.”

“Did I mention it to him?—Thoroughly Conservative!—So he would leave
the mud as it is. They insist on our not venturing anything—those
Tories! exactly as though we had gained the best of human conditions,
instead of counting crops of rogues, malefactors, egoists, noxious and
lumbersome creatures that deaden the country. Your town down there is
one of the ugliest and dirtiest in the kingdom: it might be the
fairest.”

“I have often thought that of Bevisham, Nevil.”

He drew a visionary sketch of quays, embankments, bridged islands,
public buildings, magical emanations of patriotic architecture, with a
practical air, an absence of that enthusiasm which struck her with
suspicion when it was not applied to landscape or the Arts; and she
accepted it, and warmed, and even allowed herself to appear hesitating
when he returned to the similarity of the state of mud-begirt Bevisham
and our great sluggish England.

Was he not perhaps to be pitied in his bondage to the Frenchwoman, who
could have no ideas in common with him?

The rare circumstance that she and Nevil Beauchamp had found a subject
of agreement, partially overcame the sentiment Cecilia entertained for
the foreign lady; and having now one idea in common with him, she
conceived the possibility that there might be more. There must be many,
for he loved England, and she no less. She clung, however, to the topic
of Bevisham, preferring to dream of the many more, rather than run
risks. Undoubtedly the town was of an ignoble aspect; and it was
declining in prosperity; and it was consequently over-populated. And
undoubtedly (so she was induced to coincide for the moment) a
Government, acting to any extent like a supervising head, should aid
and direct the energies of towns and ports and trades, and not leave
everything everywhere to chance: schools for the people, public
morality, should be the charge of Government. Cecilia had surrendered
the lead to him, and was forced to subscribe to an equivalent of
“undoubtedly” the Tories just as little as the Liberals had done these
good offices. Party against party, neither of them had a forethoughtful
head for the land at large. They waited for the Press to spur a great
imperial country to be but defensively armed, and they accepted the
so-called volunteers, with a nominal one-month’s drill per annum, as a
guarantee of defence!

Beauchamp startled her, actually kindled her mind to an activity of
wonder and regret, with the statement of how much Government, acting
with some degree of farsightedness, _might_ have won to pay the public
debt and remit taxation, by originally retaining the lines of railway,
and fastening on the valuable land adjoining stations. Hundreds of
millions of pounds!

She dropped a sigh at the prodigious amount, but inquired, “Who has
calculated it?”

For though perfectly aware that this kind of conversation was a special
compliment paid to her by her friend Nevil, and dimly perceiving that
it implied something beyond a compliment—in fact, that it was his
manner of probing her for sympathy, as other men would have conducted
the process preliminary to deadly flattery or to wooing, her wits
fenced her heart about; the exercise of shrewdness was an instinct of
self-preservation. She had nothing but her poor wits, daily growing
fainter, to resist him with. And he seemed to know it, and therefore
assailed them, never trying at the heart.

That vast army of figures might be but a phantom army conjured out of
the Radical mists, might it not? she hinted. And besides, we cannot
surely require a Government to speculate in the future, can we?

Possibly not, as Governments go, Beauchamp said.

But what think you of a Government of landowners decreeing the
enclosure of millions of acres of common land amongst themselves;
taking the property of the people to add to their own! Say, is not that
plunder? Public property, observe; decreed to them by their own
law-making, under the pretence that it was being reclaimed for
cultivation, when in reality it has been but an addition to their
pleasure-grounds: a flat robbery of pasture from the poor man’s cow and
goose, and his right of cutting furze for firing. Consider that!
Beauchamp’s eyes flashed democratic in reciting this injury to the
objects of his warm solicitude—the man, the cow, and the goose. But so
must he have looked when fronting England’s enemies, and his aspect of
fervour subdued Cecilia. She confessed her inability to form an
estimate of such conduct.

“Are they doing it still?” she asked.

“We owe it to Dr. Shrapnel foremost that there is now a watch over them
to stop them. But for him, Grancey Lespel would have enclosed half of
Northeden Heath. As it is, he has filched bits here and there, and he
will have to put back his palings.”

However, now let Cecilia understand that we English, calling ourselves
free, are under morally lawless rule. _Government_ is what we require,
and our means of getting it must be through universal suffrage. At
present we have no Government; only shifting Party Ministries, which
are the tools of divers interests, wealthy factions, to the sacrifice
of the Commonwealth.

She listened, like Rosamund Culling overborne by Dr. Shrapnel, inwardly
praying that she might discover a man to reply to him.

“A Despotism, Nevil?”

He hoped not, declined the despot, was English enough to stand against
the best of men in that character; but he cast it on Tory, Whig, and
Liberal, otherwise the Constitutionalists, if we were to come upon the
despot.

“They see we are close on universal suffrage; they’ve been bidding each
in turn for ‘the people,’ and that has brought them to it, and now
they’re alarmed, and accuse one another of treason to the Constitution,
and they don’t accept the situation: and there’s a fear, that to carry
on their present system, they will be thwarting the people or
corrupting them: and in that case we shall have our despot in some
shape or other, and we shall suffer.”

“Nevil,” said Cecilia, “I am out of my depth.”

“I’ll support you; I can swim for two,” said he.

“You are very self-confident, but I find I am not fit for battle; at
least not in the front ranks.”

“Nerve me, then: will you? Try to comprehend once for all what the
battle is.”

“I am afraid I am too indifferent; I am too luxurious. That reminds me:
you want to meet your uncle Everard and if you will sleep at Mount
Laurels to-night, the _Esperanza_ shall take you to France to-morrow
morning, and can wait to bring you back.”

As she spoke she perceived a flush mounting over Nevil’s face. Soon it
was communicated to hers.

The strange secret of the blood electrified them both, and revealed the
burning undercurrent running between them from the hearts of each. The
light that showed how near they were to one another was kindled at the
barrier dividing them. It remained as good as a secret, unchallenged
until they had separated, and after midnight Cecilia looked through her
chamber windows at the driving moon of a hurricane scud, and read
clearly his honourable reluctance to be wafted over to his French love
by her assistance; and Beauchamp on board the tossing steamboat
perceived in her sympathetic reddening that she had divined him.

This auroral light eclipsed the other events of the day. He drove into
a town royally decorated, and still humming with the ravishment of the
Tory entrance. He sailed in the schooner to Mount Laurels, in the
society of Captain Baskelett and his friends, who, finding him tamer
than they expected, bantered him in the cheerfullest fashion. He waited
for his uncle Everard several hours at Mount Laurels, perused the
junior Tory’s address to the Electors, throughout which there was not
an idea—safest of addresses to canvass upon! perused likewise, at
Captain Baskelett’s request, a broad sheet of an article introducing
the new candidate to Bevisham with the battle-axe Romfreys to back him,
in high burlesque of Timothy Turbot upon Beauchamp: and Cecil hoped his
cousin would not object to his borrowing a Romfrey or two for so
pressing an occasion. All very funny, and no doubt the presence of Mr.
Everard Romfrey would have heightened the fun from the fountain-head;
but he happened to be delayed, and Beauchamp had to leave directions
behind him in the town, besides the discussion of a whole plan of
conduct with Dr. Shrapnel, so he was under the necessity of departing
without seeing his uncle, really to his regret. He left word to that
effect.

Taking leave of Cecilia, he talked of his return “home” within three or
four days as a certainty.

She said: “Canvassing should not be neglected now.”

Her hostility was confused by what she had done to save him from
annoyance, while his behaviour to his cousin Cecil increased her
respect for him. She detected a pathetic meaning in his mention of the
word home; she mused on his having called her beautiful: whither was
she hurrying? Forgetful of her horror of his revolutionary ideas,
forgetful of the elevation of her own, she thrilled secretly on hearing
it stated by the jubilant young Tories at Mount Laurels, as a
characteristic of Beauchamp, that he was clever in parrying political
thrusts, and slipping from the theme; he who with her gave out
unguardedly the thoughts deepest in him. And the thoughts!—were they
not of generous origin? Where so true a helpmate for him as the one to
whom his mind appealed? It could not be so with the Frenchwoman.
Cecilia divined a generous nature by generosity, and set herself to
believe that in honour he had not yet dared to speak to her from the
heart, not being at heart quite free. She was at the same time in her
remains of pride cool enough to examine and rebuke the weakness she
succumbed to in now clinging to him by that which yesterday she hardly
less than loathed, still deeply disliked.




CHAPTER XXIII.
TOURDESTELLE


On the part of Beauchamp, his conversation with Cecilia during the
drive into Bevisham opened out for the first time in his life a
prospect of home; he had felt the word in speaking it, and it signified
an end to the distractions produced by the sex, allegiance to one
beloved respected woman, and also a basis of operations against the
world. For she was evidently conquerable, and once matched with him
would be the very woman to nerve and sustain him. Did she not listen to
him? He liked her resistance. That element of the barbarous which went
largely to form his emotional nature was overjoyed in wresting such a
woman from the enemy, and subduing her personally. She was a prize. She
was a splendid prize, cut out from under the guns of the fort. He
rendered all that was due to his eminently good cause for its part in
so signal a success, but individual satisfaction is not diminished by
the thought that the individual’s discernment selected the cause thus
beneficent to him.

Beauchamp’s meditations were diverted by the sight of the coast of
France dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea. The “three days”
granted him by Renée were over, and it scarcely troubled him that he
should be behind the time; he detested mystery, holding it to be a sign
of pretentious feebleness, often of imposture, it might be frivolity.
Punctilious obedience to the mysterious brevity of the summons, and not
to chafe at it, appeared to him as much as could be expected of a
struggling man. This was the state of the case with him, until he stood
on French earth, breathed French air, and chanced to hear the tongue of
France twittered by a lady on the quay. The charm was instantaneous. He
reminded himself that Renée, unlike her countrywomen, had no gift for
writing letters. They had never corresponded since the hour of her
marriage. They had met in Sicily, at Syracuse, in the presence of her
father and her husband, and so inanimate was she that the meeting
seemed like the conclusion of their history. Her brother Roland sent
tidings of her by fits, and sometimes a conventional message from
Tourdestelle. Latterly her husband’s name had been cited as among the
wildfires of Parisian quays, in journals more or less devoted to those
unreclaimed spaces of the city. Well, if she was unhappy, was it not
the fulfilment of his prophecy in Venice?

Renée’s brevity became luminous. She needed him urgently, and knowing
him faithful to the death, she, because she knew him, dispatched purely
the words which said she needed him. Why, those brief words were the
poetry of noble confidence! But what could her distress be? The lover
was able to read that, “Come; I give you three days,” addressed to him,
was not language of a woman free of her yoke.

Excited to guess and guess, Beauchamp swept on to speculations of a
madness that seized him bodily at last. Were you loved, Cecilia? He
thought little of politics in relation to Renée; or of home, or of
honour in the world’s eye, or of labouring to pay the fee for his share
of life. This at least was one of the forms of love which precipitate
men: the sole thought in him was to be with her. She was Renée, the
girl of whom he had prophetically said that she must come to regrets
and tears. His vision of her was not at Tourdestelle, though he assumed
her to be there awaiting him: she was under the sea-shadowing Alps,
looking up to the red and gold-rosed heights of a realm of morning that
was hers inviolably, and under which Renée was eternally his.

The interval between then and now was but the space of an unquiet sea
traversed in the night, sad in the passage of it, but featureless—and
it had proved him right! It was to Nevil Beauchamp as if the spirit of
his old passion woke up again to glorious hopeful morning when he stood
in Renée’s France.

Tourdestelle enjoyed the aristocratic privilege of being twelve miles
from the nearest railway station. Alighting here on an evening of clear
sky, Beauchamp found an English groom ready to dismount for him and
bring on his portmanteau. The man said that his mistress had been twice
to the station, and was now at the neighbouring Château Dianet. Thither
Beauchamp betook himself on horseback. He was informed at the gates
that Madame la Marquise had left for Tourdestelle in the saddle only
ten minutes previously. The lodge-keeper had been instructed to invite
him to stay at Château Dianet in the event of his arriving late, but it
would be possible to overtake madame by a cut across the heights at a
turn of the valley. Beauchamp pushed along the valley for this visible
projection; a towering mass of woodland, in the midst of which a narrow
roadway, worn like the track of a torrent with heavy rain, wound
upward. On his descent to the farther side, he was to spy directly
below in the flat for Tourdestelle. He crossed the wooded neck above
the valley, and began descending, peering into gulfs of the twilight
dusk. Some paces down he was aided by a brilliant half-moon that
divided the whole underlying country into sharp outlines of dark and
fair, and while endeavouring to distinguish the château of Tourdestelle
his eyes were attracted to an angle of the downward zigzag, where a
pair of horses emerged into broad light swiftly; apparently the riders
were disputing, or one had overtaken the other in pursuit. Riding-habit
and plumed hat signalized the sex of one. Beauchamp sung out a
gondolier’s cry. He fancied it was answered.

He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still
uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no
uncertainty.

Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long
unseen. It was Renée whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years
on her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing
her, he could not see.

Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice. “You
have come. That storm! You are safe!”

So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him. “I lost no time. But
you?”

“I am well.”

“Nothing hangs over you?”

“Nothing.”

“Why give me just three days?”

“Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?”

Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.

“You knew it was I?” said he.

“Who else could it be? I heard Venice,” she replied.

Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it
appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side
bank. He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked,
as he drew up beside Renée: “What one picks from the earth one may
wear, I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property.”

Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the
breast buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some
drooping exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.

Renée pronounced his name: “M. le Comte Henri d’Henriel.”

He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.

“Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God,
beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the
storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won.”

“You wear your trophy,” said Renée, and her horse reared and darted
ahead.

The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot. Beauchamp glanced
at M. d’Henriel’s breast-decoration. Renée pressed the pace, and
threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley,
where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now
in shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a
line of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale
and shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.

The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face,
marvelling at her voice—that was like and unlike the Renée of old, full
of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer—made the ride
magical to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a
perceptible ghost.

Renée slackened speed, saying: “Tourdestelle spans a branch of our
little river. This is our gate. Had it been daylight I would have taken
you by another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in
the Revolution; an imposing monument, I am assured. However, you will
think it pretty beside the stream. Do you come with us, M. le Comte?”

His answer was inaudible to Beauchamp; he did not quit them.

The lamp at the lodge-gates presented the young man’s face in full
view, and Beauchamp thought him supremely handsome. He perceived it to
be a lady’s glove that M. d’Henriel wore at his breast.

Renée walked her horse up the park-drive, alongside the bright running
water. It seemed that she was aware of the method of provoking or
reproving M. d’Henriel. He endured some minutes of total speechlessness
at this pace, and abruptly said adieu and turned back.

Renée bounded like a vessel free of her load. “But why should we
hurry?” said she, and checked her course to the walk again. “I hope you
like our Normandy, and my valley. You used to love France, Nevil; and
Normandy, they tell me, is cousin to the opposite coast of England, in
climate, soil, people, it may be in manners too. A Beauchamp never can
feel that he is a foreigner in Normandy. We claim you half French. You
have grander parks, they say. We can give you sunlight.”

“And it was really only the wish to see me?” said Beauchamp.

“Only, and really. One does not live for ever—on earth; and it becomes
a question whether friends should be shadows to one another before
death. I wrote to you because I wished to see you: I was impatient
because I am Renée.”

“You relieve me!”

“Evidently you have forgotten my character, Nevil.”

“Not a feature of it.”

“Ah!” she breathed involuntarily.

“Would you have me forget it?”

“When I think by myself, quite alone, yes, I would. Otherwise how can
one hope that one’s friend is friendship, supposing him to read us as
we are—minutely, accurately? And it is in absence that we desire our
friends to be friendship itself. And... and I am utterly astray! I have
not dealt in this language since I last thought of writing a diary, and
stared at the first line. If I mistake not, you are fond of the
picturesque. If moonlight and water will satisfy you, look yonder.”

The moon launched her fairy silver fleets on a double sweep of the
little river round an island of reeds and two tall poplars.

“I have wondered whether I should ever see you looking at that scene,”
said Renée.

He looked from it to her, and asked if Roland was well, and her father;
then alluded to her husband; but the unlettering elusive moon, bright
only in the extension of her beams, would not tell him what story this
face, once heaven to him, wore imprinted on it. Her smile upon a parted
mouth struck him as two-edged in replying: “I have good news to give
you of them all: Roland is in garrison at Rouen, and will come when I
telegraph. My father is in Touraine, and greets you affectionately; he
hopes to come. They are both perfectly happy. My husband is
travelling.”

Beauchamp was conscious of some bitter taste; unaware of what it was,
though it led him to say, undesigningly: “How very handsome that M.
d’Henriel is!—if I have his name correctly.”

Renée answered: “He has the misfortune to be considered the handsomest
young man in France.”

“He has an Italian look.”

“His mother was Provençale.”

She put her horse in motion, saying: “I agree with you that handsome
men are rarities. And, by the way, they do not set _our_ world on fire
quite as much as beautiful women do yours, my friend. Acknowledge so
much in our favour.”

He assented indefinitely. He could have wished himself away canvassing
in Bevisham. He had only to imagine himself away from her, to feel the
flood of joy in being with her.

“Your husband is travelling?”

“It is his pleasure.”

Could she have intended to say that this was good news to give of him
as well as of the happiness of her father and brother?

“Now look on Tourdestelle,” said Renée. “You will avow that for an
active man to be condemned to seek repose in so dull a place, after the
fatigues of the season in Paris, it is considerably worse than for
women, so I am here to dispense the hospitalities. The right wing of
the château, on your left, is new. The side abutting the river is
inhabited by Dame Philiberte, whom her husband imprisoned for
attempting to take her pleasure in travel. I hear upon authority that
she dresses in white, and wears a black crucifix. She is many centuries
old, and still she lives to remind people that she married a
Rouaillout. Do you not think she should have come to me to welcome me?
She never has; and possibly of ladies who are disembodied we may say
that they know best. For me, I desire the interview—and I am a coward:
I need not state it.” She ceased; presently continuing: “The other
inhabitants are my sister, Agnès d’Auffray, wife of a general officer
serving in Afric—my sister by marriage, and my friend; the baronne
d’Orbec, a relation by marriage; M. d’Orbec, her son, a guest, and a
sportsman; M. Livret, an erudite. No young ladies: I can bear much, but
not their presence; girls are odious to me. I knew one in Venice.”

They came within the rays of the lamp hanging above the unpretending
entrance to the château. Renée’s broad grey Longueville hat curved low
with its black plume on the side farthest from him. He was favoured by
the gallant lift of the brim on the near side, but she had overshadowed
her eyes.

“He wears a glove at his breast,” said Beauchamp.

“You speak of M. d’Henriel. He wears a glove at his breast; yes, it is
mine,” said Renée.

She slipped from her horse and stood against his shoulder, as if
waiting to be questioned before she rang the bell of the château.

Beauchamp alighted, burning with his unutterable questions concerning
that glove.

“Lift your hat, let me beg you; let me see you,” he said.

This was not what she had expected. With one heave of her bosom, and
murmuring: “I made a vow I would obey you absolutely if you came,” she
raised the hat above her brows, and lightning would not have surprised
him more; for there had not been a single vibration of her voice to
tell him of tears running: nay, the absence of the usual French
formalities in her manner of addressing him, had seemed to him to
indicate her intention to put him at once on an easy friendly footing,
such as would be natural to her, and not painful to him. Now she said:

“You perceive, monsieur, that I have my sentimental fits like others;
but in truth I am not insensible to the picturesque or to gratitude,
and I thank you sincerely for coming, considering that I wrote like a
Sphinx—to evade writing _comme une folle!_”

She swept to the bell.

Standing in the arch of the entrance, she stretched her whip out to a
black mass of prostrate timber, saying:

“It fell in the storm at two o’clock after midnight, and you on the
sea!”




CHAPTER XXIV.
HIS HOLIDAY


A single day was to be the term of his holiday at Tourdestelle; but it
stood forth as one of those perfect days which are rounded by an
evening before and a morning after, giving him two nights under the
same roof with Renée, something of a resemblance to three days of her;
anticipation and wonder filling the first, she the next, the adieu the
last: every hour filled. And the first day was not over yet. He forced
himself to calmness, that he might not fritter it, and walked up and
down the room he was dressing in, examining its foreign decorations,
and peering through the window, to quiet his nerves. He was in her own
France with her! The country borrowed hues from Renée, and lent some.
This chivalrous France framed and interlaced her image, aided in
idealizing her, and was in turn transfigured. Not half so well would
his native land have pleaded for the forgiveness of a British damsel
who had wrecked a young man’s immoderate first love. That glorified
self-love requires the touch upon imagination of strangeness and an
unaccustomed grace, to subdue it and make it pardon an outrage to its
temples and altars, and its happy reading of the heavens, the earth
too: earth foremost, we ought perhaps to say. It is an exacting
heathen, best understood by a glance at what will appease it:
beautiful, however, as everybody has proved; and shall it be decried in
a world where beauty is not overcommon, though it would slaughter us
for its angry satisfaction, yet can be soothed by a tone of colour, as
it were by a novel inscription on a sweetmeat?

The peculiarity of Beauchamp was that he knew the slenderness of the
thread which was leading him, and foresaw it twisting to a coil unless
he should hold firm. His work in life was much above the love of a
woman in his estimation, so he was not deluded by passion when he
entered the château; it is doubtful whether he would not hesitatingly
have sacrificed one of the precious votes in Bevisham for the pleasure
of kissing her hand when they were on the steps. She was his first love
and only love, married, and long ago forgiven:—married; that is to say,
she especially among women was interdicted to him by the lingering
shadow of the reverential love gone by; and if the anguish of the
lover’s worse than death survived in a shudder of memory at the thought
of her not solely lost to him but possessed by another, it did but
quicken a hunger that was three parts curiosity to see how she who had
suffered this bore the change; how like or unlike she might be to the
extinct Renée; what traces she kept of the face he had known. Her tears
were startling, but tears tell of a mood, they do not tell the story of
the years; and it was that story he had such eagerness to read in one
brief revelation: an eagerness born only of the last few hours, and
broken by fears of a tarnished aspect; these again being partly hopes
of a coming disillusion that would restore him his independence and ask
him only for pity. The slavery of the love of a woman chained like
Renée was the most revolting of prospects to a man who cherished his
freedom that he might work to the end of his time. Moreover, it swung a
thunder-cloud across his holiday. He recurred to the idea of the
holiday repeatedly, and the more he did so the thinner it waned. He was
exhausting the very air and spirit of it with a mind that ran
incessantly forward and back; and when he and the lady of so much
speculation were again together, an incapacity of observation seemed to
have come over him. In reality it was the inability to reflect on his
observations. Her presence resembled those dark sunsets throwing the
spell of colour across the world; when there is no question with us of
morning or of night, but of that sole splendour only.

Owing to their arrival late at the château, covers were laid for them
in the boudoir of Madame la Marquise, where he had his hostess to
himself, and certainly the opportunity of studying her. An English Navy
List, solitary on a shelf, and laid within it an extract of a paper
announcing the return of the _Ariadne_ to port, explained the mystery
of her knowing that he was in England, as well as the correctness of
the superscription of her letter to him. “You see, I follow you,” she
said.

Beauchamp asked if she read English now.

“A little; but the paper was dispatched to me by M. Vivian Ducie, of
your embassy in Paris. He is in the valley.”

The name of Ducie recalled Lord Palmet’s description of the dark beauty
of the fluttering pale gold ornaments. She was now dressed without one
decoration of gold or jewel, with scarcely a wave in the silk, a
modesty of style eloquent of the pride of her form.

Could those eyes fronting him under the lamp have recently shed tears?
They were the living eyes of a brilliant unembarrassed lady; shields
flinging light rather than well-depths inviting it.

Beauchamp tried to compare her with the Renée of Venice, and found
himself thinking of the glove she had surrendered to the handsomest
young man in France. The effort to recover the younger face gave him a
dead creature, with the eyelashes of Renée, the cast of her mouth and
throat, misty as a shape in a dream.

He could compare her with Cecilia, who never would have risked a glove,
never have betrayed a tear, and was the statelier lady, not without
language: but how much less vivid in feature and the gift of speech!
Renée’s gift of speech counted unnumbered strings which she played on
with a grace that clothed the skill, and was her natural endowment—an
art perfected by the education of the world. Who cannot talk!—but who
can? Discover the writers in a day when all are writing! It is as rare
an art as poetry, and in the mouths of women as enrapturing, richer
than their voices in music.

This was the fascination Beauchamp felt weaving round him. Would you,
that are separable from boys and mobs, and the object malignly called
the Briton, prefer the celestial singing of a woman to her excellently
talking? But not if it were given you to run in unison with her genius
of the tongue, following her verbal ingenuities and feminine
silk-flashes of meaning; not if she led you to match her fine quick
perceptions with more or less of the discreet concordance of the
violoncello accompanying the viol. It is not high flying, which usually
ends in heavy falling. You quit the level of earth no more than two
birds that chase from bush to bush to bill in air, for mutual delight
to make the concert heavenly. Language flowed from Renée in affinity
with the pleasure-giving laws that make the curves we recognize as
beauty in sublimer arts. Accept companionship for the dearest of the
good things we pray to have, and what equalled her! Who could be her
rival!

Her girl’s crown of irradiated Alps began to tremble over her dimly, as
from moment to moment their intimacy warmed, and Beauchamp saw the
young face vanishing out of this flower of womanhood. He did not see it
appearing or present, but vanishing like the faint ray in the rosier.
Nay, the blot of her faithlessness underwent a transformation: it
affected him somewhat as the patch cunningly laid on near a liquid
dimple in fair cheeks at once allures and evades a susceptible
attention.

Unused in his French of late, he stumbled at times, and she supplied
the needed phrase, taking no note of a blunder. Now men of sweet blood
cannot be secretly accusing or criticizing a gracious lady. Domestic
men are charged with thinking instantly of dark death when an ordinary
illness befalls them; and it may be so or not: but it is positive that
the gallant man of the world, if he is in the sensitive condition, and
not yet established as the lord of her, feels paralyzed in his
masculine sense of leadership the moment his lady assumes the
initiative and directs him: he gives up at once; and thus have many
nimble-witted dames from one clear start retained their advantage.

Concerning that glove: well! the handsomest young man in France wore
the glove of the loveliest woman. The loveliest? The very loveliest in
the purity of her French style—the woman to challenge England for a
type of beauty to eclipse her. It was possible to conceive her country
wagering her against all women.

If Renée had faults, Beauchamp thought of her as at sea breasting
tempests, while Cecilia was a vessel lying safe in harbour, untried,
however promising: and if Cecilia raised a steady light for him, it was
over the shores he had left behind, while Renée had really nothing to
do with warning or rescuing, or with imperilling; she welcomed him
simply to a holiday in her society. He associated Cecilia strangely
with the political labours she would have had him relinquish; and Renée
with a pleasant state of indolence, that her lightest smile disturbed.
Shun comparisons.

It is the tricksy heart which sets up that balance, to jump into it on
one side or the other. Comparisons come of a secret leaning that is
sure to play rogue under its mien of honest dealer: so Beauchamp
suffered himself to be unjust to graver England, and lost the strength
she would have given him to resist a bewitchment. The case with him
was, that his apprenticeship was new; he had been trotting in harness
as a veritable cab-horse of politics—he by blood a racer; and his
nature craved for diversions, against his will, against his moral sense
and born tenacity of spirit.

Not a word further of the glove. But at night, in his bed, the glove
was a principal actor in events of extraordinary magnitude and
inconsequence.

He was out in the grounds with the early morning light. Coffee and
sweet French bread were brought out to him, and he was informed of the
hours of reunion at the château, whose mistress continued invisible.
She might be sleeping. He strolled about, within view of the windows,
wondering at her subservience to sleep. Tourdestelle lay in one of
those Norman valleys where the river is the mother of rich pasture, and
runs hidden between double ranks of sallows, aspens and poplars, that
mark its winding line in the arms of trenched meadows. The high land on
either side is an unwatered flat up to the horizon, little varied by
dusty apple-trees planted in the stubble here and there, and brown mud
walls of hamlets; a church-top, a copse, an avenue of dwarf limes
leading to the three-parts farm, quarter residence of an enriched
peasant striking new roots, or decayed proprietor pinching not to be
severed from ancient. Descending on the deep green valley in Summer is
like a change of climes. The château stood square at a branch of the
river, tossing three light bridges of pretty woodwork to park and
garden. Great bouquets of swelling blue and pink hydrangia nestled at
his feet on shaven grass. An open window showed a cloth of colour, as
in a reminiscence of Italy.

Beauchamp heard himself addressed:—“You are looking for my
sister-in-law, M. Beauchamp?”

The speaker was Madame d’Auffray, to whom he had been introduced
overnight—a lady of the aquiline French outline, not ungentle.

Renée had spoken affectionately of her, he remembered. There was
nothing to make him be on his guard, and he stated that he was looking
for Madame de Rouaillout, and did not conceal surprise at the
information that she was out on horseback.

“She is a tireless person,” Madame d’Auffray remarked. “You will not
miss her long. We all meet at twelve, as you know.”

“I grudge an hour, for I go to-morrow,” said Beauchamp.

The notification of so early a departure, or else his bluntness,
astonished her. She fell to praising Renée’s goodness. He kept her to
it with lively interrogations, in the manner of a guileless boy urging
for eulogies of his dear absent friend. Was it duplicity in him or
artlessness?

“Has she, do you think, increased in beauty?” Madame d’Auffray
inquired: an insidious question, to which he replied:

“Once I thought it would be impossible.”

Not so bad an answer for an Englishman, in a country where speaking is
fencing; the race being little famous for dialectical alertness: but
was it artful or simple?

They skirted the château, and Beauchamp had the history of Dame
Philiberte recounted to him, with a mixture of Gallic irony, innuendo,
openness, touchingness, ridicule, and charity novel to his ears. Madame
d’Auffray struck the note of intimacy earlier than is habitual. She
sounded him in this way once or twice, carelessly perusing him, and
waiting for the interesting edition of the Book of Man to summarize its
character by showing its pages or remaining shut. It was done
delicately, like the tap of a finger-nail on a vase. He rang clear; he
had nothing to conceal; and where he was reserved, that is, in speaking
of the developed beauty and grace of Renée, he was transparent. She
read the sort of man he was; she could also hazard a guess as to the
man’s present state. She ventured to think him comparatively
harmless—for the hour: for she was not the woman to be hoodwinked by
man’s dark nature because she inclined to think well of a particular
man; nor was she one to trust to any man subject to temptation. The
wisdom of the Frenchwoman’s fortieth year forbade it. A land where the
war between the sexes is honestly acknowledged, and is full of
instruction, abounds in precepts; but it ill becomes the veteran to
practise rigorously what she would prescribe to young women. She may
discriminate; as thus:—Trust no man. Still, this man may be better than
that man; and it is bad policy to distrust a reasonably guileless
member of the preying sex entirely, and so to lose his good services.
Hawks have their uses in destroying vermin; and though we cannot rely
upon the taming of hawks, one tied by the leg in a garden preserves the
fruit.

“There is a necessity for your leaving us to-morrow; M. Beauchamp?”

“I regret to say, it is imperative, madame.”

“My husband will congratulate me on the pleasure I have, and have long
desired, of making your acquaintance, and he will grieve that he has
not been so fortunate; he is on service in Africa. My brother, I need
not say, will deplore the mischance which has prevented him from
welcoming you. I have telegraphed to him; he is at one of the Baths in
Germany, and will come assuredly, if there is a prospect of finding you
here. None? Supposing my telegram not to fall short of him, I may count
on his being here within four days.”

Beauchamp begged her to convey the proper expressions of his regret to
M. le Marquis.

“And M. de Croisnel? And Roland, your old comrade and brother-in-arms?
What will be their disappointment!” she said.

“I intend to stop for an hour at Rouen on my way back,” said Beauchamp.

She asked if her belle-soeur was aware of the short limitation of his
visit.

He had not mentioned it to Madame la Marquise.

“Perhaps you may be moved by the grief of a friend: Renée may persuade
you to stay.”

“I came imagining I could be of some use to Madame la Marquise. She
writes as if she were telegraphing.”

“Perfectly true of her! For that matter, I saw the letter. Your looks
betray a very natural jealousy; but seeing it or not it would have been
the same: she and I have no secrets. She was, I may tell you, strictly
unable to write more words in the letter. Which brings me to inquire
what impression M. d’Henriel made on you yesterday evening.”

“He is particularly handsome.”

“We women think so. Did you take him to be... eccentric?”

Beauchamp gave a French jerk of the shoulders.

It confessed the incident of the glove to one who knew it as well as
he: but it masked the weight he was beginning to attach to that
incident, and Madame d’Auffray was misled. Truly, the Englishman may be
just such an ex-lover, uninflammable by virtue of his blood’s native
coldness; endued with the frozen vanity called pride, which does not
seek to be revenged. Under wary espionage, he might be a young woman’s
friend, though male friend of a half-abandoned wife should write
himself down morally saint, mentally sage, medically incurable, if he
would win our confidence.

This lady of sharp intelligence was the guardian of Renée during the
foolish husband’s flights about Paris and over Europe, and, for a proof
of her consummate astuteness, Renée had no secrets and had absolute
liberty. And hitherto no man could build a boast on her reputation. The
liberty she would have had at any cost, as Madame d’Auffray knew; and
an attempt to restrict it would have created secrets.

Near upon the breakfast-hour Renée was perceived by them going toward
the château at a walking pace. They crossed one of the garden bridges
to intercept her. She started out of some deep meditation, and raised
her whip hand to Beauchamp’s greeting. “I had forgotten to tell you,
monsieur, that I should be out for some hours in the morning.”

“Are you aware,” said Madame d’Auffray, “that M. Beauchamp leaves us
to-morrow?”

“So soon?” It was uttered hardly with a tone of disappointment.

The marquise alighted, crying hold, to the stables, caressed her horse,
and sent him off with a smack on the smoking flanks to meet the groom.

“To-morrow? That is very soon; but M. Beauchamp is engaged in an
Election, and what have we to induce him to stay?”

“Would it not be better to tell M. Beauchamp why he was invited to
come?” rejoined Madame d’Auffray.

The sombre light in Renée’s eyes quickened through shadowy spheres of
surprise and pain to resolution. She cried, “You have my full consent,”
and left them.

Madame d’Auffray smiled at Beauchamp, to excuse the childishness of the
little story she was about to relate; she gave it in the essence,
without a commencement or an ending. She had in fact but two or three
hurried minutes before the breakfast-bell would ring; and the fan she
opened and shut, and at times shaded her head with, was nearly as
explicit as her tongue.

He understood that Renée had staked her glove on his coming within a
certain number of hours to the briefest wording of invitation possible.
Owing to his detention by the storm, M. d’Henriel had won the bet, and
now insisted on wearing the glove. “He is the privileged young madman
our women make of a handsome youth,” said Madame d’Auffray.

Where am I? thought Beauchamp—in what land, he would have phrased it,
of whirlwinds catching the wits, and whipping the passions? Calmer than
they, but unable to command them, and guessing that Renée’s errand of
the morning, by which he had lost hours of her, pertained to the glove,
he said quiveringly, “Madame la Marquise objects?”

“We,” replied Madame d’Auffray, “contend that the glove was not loyally
won. The wager was upon your coming to the invitation, not upon your
conquering the elements. As to his flaunting the glove for a favour, I
would ask you, whom does he advertize by that? Gloves do not wear
white; which fact compromises none but the wearer. He picked it up from
the ground, and does not restore it; that is all. You see a boy who
catches at anything to placard himself. There is a compatriot of yours,
a M. Ducie, who assured us you must be with an uncle in your county of
Sussex. Of course we ran the risk of the letter missing you, but the
chance was worth a glove. Can you believe it, M. Beauchamp? it was I,
old woman as I am, I who provoked the silly wager. I have long desired
to meet you; and we have little society here, we are desperate with
loneliness, half mad with our whims. I said, that if you were what I
had heard of you, you would come to us at a word. They dared Madame la
Marquise to say the same. I wished to see the friend of Frenchmen, as
M. Roland calls you; not merely to see him—to know him, whether he is
this perfect friend whose absolute devotion has impressed my dear
sister Renée’s mind. She respects you: that is a sentiment scarcely
complimentary to the ideas of young men. She places you above human
creatures: possibly you may not dislike to be worshipped. It is not to
be rejected when one’s influence is powerful for good. But you leave us
to-morrow!”

“I might stay...” Beauchamp hesitated to name the number of hours. He
stood divided between a sense of the bubbling shallowness of the life
about him, and a thought, grave as an eye dwelling on blood, of
sinister things below it.

“I may stay another day or two,” he said, “if I can be of any earthly
service.”

Madame d’Auffray bowed as to a friendly decision on his part, saying,
“It would be a thousand pities to disappoint M. Roland; and it will be
offering my brother an amicable chance. I will send him word that you
await him; at least, that you defer your departure as long as possible.
Ah! now you perceive, M. Beauchamp, now you have become aware of our
purely infantile plan to bring you over to us, how very ostensible a
punishment it would be were you to remain so short a period.”

Having no designs, he was neither dupe nor sceptic; but he felt oddly
entangled, and the dream of his holiday had fled like morning’s beams,
as a self-deception will at a very gentle shaking.




CHAPTER XXV.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOAT


Madame d’Auffray passed Renée, whispering on her way to take her seat
at the breakfast-table.

Renée did not condescend to whisper. “Roland will be glad,” she said
aloud.

Her low eyelids challenged Beauchamp for a look of indifference. There
was more for her to unbosom than Madame d’Auffray had revealed, but the
comparative innocence of her position in this new light prompted her to
meet him defiantly, if he chose to feel injured. He was attracted by a
happy contrast of colour between her dress and complexion, together
with a cavalierly charm in the sullen brows she lifted; and seeing the
reverse of a look of indifference on his face, after what he had heard
of her frivolousness, she had a fear that it existed.

“Are we not to have M. d’Henriel to-day? he amuses me,” the baronne
d’Orbec remarked.

“If he would learn that he was fashioned for that purpose!” exclaimed
little M. Livret.

“Do not ask young men for too much head, my friend; he would cease to
be amusing.”

“D’Henriel should have been up in the fields at ten this morning,” said
M. d’Orbec. “As to his head, I back him for a clever shot.”

“Or a duelling-sword,” said Renée. “It is a quality, count it for what
we will. Your favourite, Madame la Baronne, is interdicted from
presenting himself here so long as he persists in offending me.”

She was requested to explain, and, with the fair ingenuousness which
outshines innocence, she touched on the story of the glove.

Ah! what a delicate, what an exciting, how subtle a question!

Had M. d’Henriel the right to possess it? and, having that, had he the
right to wear it at his breast?

Beauchamp was dragged into the discussion of the case.

Renée waited curiously for his judgement.

Pleading an apology for the stormy weather, which had detained him, and
for his ignorance that so precious an article was at stake, he held,
that by the terms of the wager, the glove was lost; the claim to wear
it was a matter of taste.

“Matters of taste, monsieur, are not, I think, decided by weapons in
your country?” said M. d’Orbec.

“We have no duelling,” said Beauchamp.

The Frenchman imagined the confession to be somewhat humbling, and
generously added, “But you have your volunteers—a magnificent spectacle
of patriotism and national readiness for defence!”

A shrewd pang traversed Beauchamp’s heart, as he looked back on his
country from the outside and the inside, thinking what amount of
patriotic readiness the character of the volunteering signified, in the
face of all that England has to maintain. Like a politic islander, he
allowed the patriotic spectacle to be imagined; reflecting that it did
a sort of service abroad, and had only to be unmasked at home.

“But you surrendered the glove, marquise!” The baronne d’Orbec spoke
judicially.

“I flung it to the ground: that made it neutral,” said Renée.

“Hum. He wears it with the dust on it, certainly.”

“And for how long a time,” M. Livret wished to know, “does this amusing
young man proclaim his intention of wearing the glove?”

“Until he can see with us that his Order of Merit is utter kid,” said
Madame d’Auffray; and as she had spoken more or less neatly,
satisfaction was left residing in the ear of the assembly, and the
glove was permitted to be swept away on a fresh tide of dialogue.

The admirable candour of Renée in publicly alluding to M. d’Henriel’s
foolishness restored a peep of his holiday to Beauchamp. Madame
d’Auffray took note of the effect it produced, and quite excused her
sister-in-law for intending to produce it; but that speaking out the
half-truth that we may put on the mask of the whole, is no new trick;
and believing as she did that Renée was in danger with the handsome
Count Henri, the practice of such a kind of honesty on her part
appeared alarming.

Still it is imprudent to press for confidences when our friend’s heart
is manifestly trifling with sincerity. Who knows but that some foregone
reckless act or word may have superinduced the healthy shame which
cannot speak, which must disguise itself, and is honesty in that form,
but roughly troubled would resolve to rank dishonesty? So thought the
patient lady, wiser in that than in her perceptions.

Renée made a boast of not persuading her guest to stay, avowing that
she would not willingly have him go. Praising him equably, she listened
to praise of him with animation. She was dumb and statue-like when
Count Henri’s name was mentioned. Did not this betray liking for one,
subjection to the other? Indeed, there was an Asiatic splendour of
animal beauty about M. d’Henriel that would be serpent with most women,
Madame d’Auffray conceived; why not with the deserted Renée, who adored
beauty of shape and colour, and was compassionate toward a rashness of
character that her own unnatural solitariness and quick spirit made her
emulous of?

Meanwhile Beauchamp’s day of adieu succeeded that of his holiday, and
no adieu was uttered. The hours at Tourdestelle had a singular turn for
slipping. Interlinked and all as one they swam by, brought evening,
brought morning, never varied. They might have varied with such a
division as when flame lights up the night or a tempest shades the day,
had Renée chosen; she had that power over him. She had no wish to use
it; perhaps she apprehended what it would cause her to forfeit. She
wished him to respect her; felt that she was under the shadow of the
glove, slight though it was while it was nothing but a tale of a lady
and a glove; and her desire, like his, was that they should meet daily
and dream on, without a variation. He noticed how seldom she led him
beyond the grounds of the château. They were to make excursions when
her brother came, she said. Roland de Croisnel’s colonel, Coïn de
Grandchamp, happened to be engaged in a duel, which great business
detained Roland. It supplied Beauchamp with an excuse for staying, that
he was angry with himself for being pleased to have; so he attacked the
practice of duelling, and next the shrug, wherewith M. Livret and M.
d’Orbec sought at first to defend the foul custom, or apologize for it,
or plead for it philosophically, or altogether cast it off their
shoulders; for the literal interpretation of the shrug in argument is
beyond human capacity; it is the point of speech beyond our treasury of
language. He attacked the shrug, as he thought, very temperately; but
in controlling his native vehemence he grew, perforce of repression,
and of incompetency to deliver himself copiously in French, sarcastic.
In fine, his contrast of the pretence of their noble country to head
civilization, and its encouragement of a custom so barbarous, offended
M. d’Orbec and irritated M. Livret.

The latter delivered a brief essay on Gallic blood; the former
maintained that Frenchmen were the best judges of their own ways and
deeds. Politeness reigned, but politeness is compelled to throw off
cloak and jacket when it steps into the arena to meet the encounter of
a bull. Beauchamp drew on their word “solidaire” to assist him in
declaring that no civilized nation could be thus independent. Imagining
himself in the France of brave ideas, he contrived to strike out sparks
of Legitimist ire around him, and found himself breathing the
atmosphere of the most primitive nursery of Toryism. Again he
encountered the shrug, and he would have it a verbal matter. M. d’Orbec
gravely recited the programme of the country party in France. M. Livret
carried the war across Channel. You English have retired from active
life, like the exhausted author, to turn critic—the critic that sneers:
unless we copy you abjectly we are execrable. And what is that sneer?
Materially it is an acrid saliva, withering where it drops; in the way
of fellowship it is a corpse-emanation. As to wit, the sneer is the
cloak of clumsiness; it is the Pharisee’s incense, the hypocrite’s
pity, the post of exaltation of the fat citizen, etc.; but, said M.
Livret, the people using it should have a care that they keep powerful:
they make no friends. He terminated with this warning to a nation not
devoid of superior merit. M. d’Orbec said less, and was less consoled
by his outburst.

In the opinion of Mr. Vivian Ducie, present at the discussion,
Beauchamp provoked the lash; for, in the first place, a beautiful
woman’s apparent favourite should be particularly discreet in all that
he says: and next, he should have known that the Gallic shrug over
matters political is volcanic—it is the heaving of the mountain, and,
like the proverbial Russ, leaps up Tartarly at a scratch. Our
newspapers also had been flea-biting M. Livret and his countrymen of
late; and, to conclude, over in old England you may fly out against
what you will, and there is little beyond a motherly smile, a nurse’s
rebuke, or a fool’s rudeness to answer you. In quick-blooded France you
have whip for whip, sneer, sarcasm, claw, fang, tussle, in a trice; and
if you choose to comport yourself according to your insular notion of
freedom, you are bound to march out to the measured ground at an
invitation. To begin by saying that your principles are opposed to it,
naturally excites a malicious propensity to try your temper.

A further cause, unknown to Mr. Ducie, of M. Livret’s irritation was,
that Beauchamp had vexed him on a subject peculiarly dear to him. The
celebrated Château Dianet was about to be visited by the guests at
Tourdestelle. In common with some French philosophers and English
matrons, he cherished a sentimental sad enthusiasm for royal
concubines; and when dilating upon one among them, the ruins of whose
family’s castle stood in the neighbourhood-Agrees, who was really a
kindly soul, though not virtuous—M. Livret had been traversed by
Beauchamp with questions as to the condition of the people, the
peasantry, that were sweated in taxes to support these lovely
frailties. They came oddly from a man in the fire of youth, and a
little old gentleman somewhat seduced by the melting image of his theme
might well blink at him to ask, of what flesh are you, then? His
historic harem was insulted. Personally too, the fair creature
picturesquely soiled, intrepid in her amorousness, and ultimately
absolved by repentance (a shuddering narrative of her sins under
showers of salt drops), cried to him to champion her. Excited by the
supposed cold critical mind in Beauchamp, M. Livret painted and painted
this lady, tricked her in casuistical niceties, scenes of pomp and
boudoir pathos, with many shifting sidelights and a risky word or two,
until Renée cried out, “Spare us the esprit Gaulois, M. Livret!” There
was much to make him angry with this Englishman.

“The esprit Gaulois is the sparkle of crystal common sense, madame, and
may we never abandon it for a Puritanism that hides its face to conceal
its filthiness, like a stagnant pond,” replied M. Livret, flashing.

“It seems, then, that there are two ways of being objectionable,” said
Renée.

“Ah! Madame la Marquise, your wit is French,” he breathed low; “keep
your heart so!”

Both M. Livret and M. d’Orbec had forgotten that when Count Henri
d’Henriel was received at Tourdestelle, the arrival of the Englishman
was pleasantly anticipated by them as an eclipse of the handsome boy;
but a foreign interloper is quickly dispossessed of all means of
pleasing save that one of taking his departure; and they now talked of
Count Henri’s disgrace and banishment in a very warm spirit of
sympathy, not at all seeing why it should be made to depend upon the
movements of this M. Beauchamp, as it appeared to be. Madame d’Auffray
heard some of their dialogue, and hurried with a mouth full of comedy
to Renée, who did not reproach them for silly beings, as would be done
elsewhere. On the contrary, she appreciated a scene of such absolute
comedy, recognizing it instantly as a situation plucked out of human
nature. She compared them to republicans that regretted the sovereign
they had deposed for a pretender to start up and govern them.

“Who hurries them round to the legitimate king again!” said Madame
d’Auffray.

Renée cast her chin up. “How, my dear?”

“Your husband.”

“What of him?”

“He is returning.”

“What brings him?”

“You should ask who, my Renée! I was sure he would not hear of M.
Beauchamp’s being here, without an effort to return and do the honours
of the château.”

Renée looked hard at her, saying, “How thoughtful of you! You must have
made use of the telegraph wires to inform him that M. Beauchamp was
with us.”

“More; I made use of them to inform him that M. Beauchamp was
expected.”

“And that was enough to bring him! He pays M. Beauchamp a wonderful
compliment.”

“Such as he would pay to no other man, my Renée. Virtually it is the
highest of compliments to you. I say that to M. Beauchamp’s credit; for
Raoul has met him, and, whatever his personal feeling may be, must know
your friend is a man of honour.”

“My friend is... yes, I have no reason to think otherwise,” Renée
replied. Her husband’s persistent and exclusive jealousy of Beauchamp
was the singular point in the character of one who appeared to have no
sentiment of the kind as regarded men that were much less than men of
honour. “So, then, my sister Agnès,” she said, “you suggested the
invitation of M. Beauchamp for the purpose of spurring my husband to
return! Apparently he and I are surrounded by plotters.”

“Am I so very guilty?” said Madame d’Auffray.

“If that mad boy, half idiot, half panther, were by chance to insult M.
Beauchamp, you would feel so.”

“You have taken precautions to prevent their meeting; and besides, M.
Beauchamp does not fight.”

Renée flushed crimson.

Madame d’Auffray added, “I do not say that he is other than a perfectly
brave and chivalrous gentleman.”

“Oh!” cried Renée, “do not say it, if ever you should imagine it. Bid
Roland speak of him. He is changed, oppressed: I did him a terrible
wrong ....” She checked herself. “But the chief thing to do is to keep
M. d’Henriel away from him. I suspect M. d’Orbec of a design to make
them clash: and you, my dear, will explain why, to flatter me. Believe
me, I thirst for flattery; I have had none since M. Beauchamp came: and
you, so acute, must have seen the want of it in my face. But you, so
skilful, Agnès, will manage these men. Do you know, Agnès, that the
pride of a woman so incredibly clever as you have shown me you are
should resent their intrigues and overthrow them. As for me, I thought
I could command M. d’Henriel, and I find he has neither reason in him
nor obedience. Singular to say, I knew him just as well a week back as
I do now, and then I liked him for his qualities—or the absence of any.
But how shall we avoid him on the road to Dianet? He is aware that we
are going.”

“Take M. Beauchamp by boat,” said Madame d’Auffray.

“The river winds to within a five minutes’ walk of Dianet; we could go
by boat,” Renée said musingly. “I thought of the boat. But does it not
give the man a triumph that we should seem to try to elude him? What
matter! Still, I do not like him to be the falcon, and Nevil Beauchamp
the... little bird. So it is, because we began badly, Agnès!”

“Was it my fault?”

“Mine. Tell me: the legitimate king returns when?”

“In two days or three.”

“And his rebel subjects are to address him—how?”

Madame d’Auffray smote the point of a finger softly on her cheek.

“Will they be pardoned?” said Renée.

“It is for _him_ to kneel, my dearest.”

“Legitimacy kneeling for forgiveness is a painful picture, Agnès.
Legitimacy jealous of a foreigner is an odd one. However, we are women,
born to our lot. If we could rise en masse!—but we cannot. Embrace me.”

Madame d’Auffray embraced her, without an idea that she assisted in
performing the farewell of their confidential intimacy.

When Renée trifled with Count Henri, it was playing with fire, and she
knew it; and once or twice she bemoaned to Agnès d’Auffray her
abandoned state, which condemned her, for the sake of the sensation of
living, to have recourse to perilous pastimes; but she was revolted, as
at a piece of treachery, that Agnès should have suggested the
invitation of Nevil Beauchamp with the secret design of winning home
her husband to protect her. This, for one reason, was because Beauchamp
gave her no notion of danger; none, therefore, of requiring protection;
and the presence of her husband could not but be hateful to him, an
undeserved infliction. To her it was intolerable that they should be
brought into contact. It seemed almost as hard that she should have to
dismiss Beauchamp to preclude their meeting. She remembered,
nevertheless, a certain desperation of mind, scarce imaginable in the
retrospect, by which, trembling, fever-smitten, scorning herself, she
had been reduced to hope for Nevil Beauchamp’s coming as for a rescue.
The night of the storm had roused her heart. Since then his perfect
friendliness had lulled, his air of thoughtfulness had interested it;
and the fancy that he, who neither reproached nor sentimentalized, was
to be infinitely compassionated, stirred up remorse. She could not tell
her friend Agnès of these feelings while her feelings were angered
against her friend. So she talked lightly of “the legitimate king,” and
they embraced: a situation of comedy quite as true as that presented by
the humble admirers of the brilliant chatelaine.

Beauchamp had the pleasure of rowing Madame la Marquise to the short
shaded walk separating the river from Château Dianet, whither M.
d’Orbec went on horseback, and Madame d’Auffray and M. Livret were
driven. The portrait of Diane of Dianet was praised for the beauty of
the dame, a soft-fleshed acutely featured person, a
fresh-of-the-toilette face, of the configuration of head of the cat,
relieved by a delicately aquiline nose; and it could only be the cat of
fairy metamorphosis which should stand for that illustration: brows and
chin made an acceptable triangle, and eyes and mouth could be what she
pleased for mice or monarchs. M. Livret did not gainsay the impeachment
of her by a great French historian, tender to women, to frailties in
particular—yes, she was cold, perhaps grasping: but dwell upon her in
her character of woman; conceive her existing, to estimate the charm of
her graciousness. Name the two countries which alone have produced THE
WOMAN, the ideal woman, the woman of art, whose beauty, grace, and wit
offer her to our contemplation in an atmosphere above the ordinary
conditions of the world: these two countries are France and Greece!
None other give you the perfect woman, the woman who conquers time, as
she conquers men, by virtue of the divinity in her blood; and she, as
little as illustrious heroes, is to be judged by the laws and standards
of lesser creatures. In fashioning her, nature and art have worked
together: in her, poetry walks the earth. The question of good or bad
is entirely to be put aside: it is a rustic’s impertinence—a bourgeois’
vulgarity. She is preeminent, voilà tout. Has she grace and beauty?
Then you are answered: such possessions are an assurance that her
influence in the aggregate must be for good. Thunder, destructive to
insects, refreshes earth: so she. So sang the rhapsodist. Possibly a
scholarly little French gentleman, going down the grey slopes of sixty
to second childishness, recovers a second juvenility in these
enthusiasms; though what it is that inspires our matrons to take up
with them is unimaginable. M. Livret’s ardour was a contrast to the
young Englishman’s vacant gaze at Diane, and the symbols of her
goddesship running along the walls, the bed, the cabinets, everywhere
that the chaste device could find frontage and a corner.

M. d’Orbec remained outside the château inspecting the fish-ponds. When
they rejoined him he complimented Beauchamp semi-ironically on his
choice of the river’s quiet charms in preference to the dusty roads.
Madame de Rouaillout said, “Come, M. d’Orbec; what if you surrender
your horse to M. Beauchamp, and row me back?” He changed colour,
hesitated, and declined he had an engagement to call on M. d’Henriel.

“When did you see him?” said she.

He was confused. “It is not long since, madame.”

“On the road?”

“Coming along the road.”

“And our glove?”

“Madame la Marquise, if I may trust my memory, M. d’Henriel was not in
official costume.”

Renée allowed herself to be reassured.

A ceremonious visit that M. Livret insisted on was paid to the chapel
of Diane, where she had worshipped and laid her widowed ashes, which,
said M. Livret, the fiends of the Revolution would not let rest.

He raised his voice to denounce them.

It was Roland de Croisnel that answered: “The Revolution was our
grandmother, monsieur, and I cannot hear her abused.”

Renée caught her brother by the hand. He stepped out of the chapel with
Beauchamp to embrace him; then kissed Renée, and, remarking that she
was pale, fetched flooding colour to her cheeks. He was hearty air to
them after the sentimentalism they had been hearing. Beauchamp and he
walked like loving comrades at school, questioning, answering,
chattering, laughing,—a beautiful sight to Renée, and she looked at
Agnès d’Auffray to ask her whether “this Englishman” was not one of
them in his frankness and freshness.

Roland stopped to turn to Renée. “I met d’Henriel on my ride here,” he
said with a sharp inquisitive expression of eye that passed
immediately.

“You rode here from Tourdestelle, then,” said Renée.

“Has he been one of the company, marquise?”

“Did he ride by you without speaking, Roland?”

“Thus.” Roland described a Spanish caballero’s formallest salutation,
saying to Beauchamp, “Not the best sample of our young
Frenchman;—woman-spoiled! Not that the better kind of article need be
spoiled by them—heaven forbid that! Friend Nevil,” he spoke lower, “do
you know, you have something of the prophet in you? I remember: much
has come true. An old spoiler of women is worse than one spoiled by
them! Ah, well: and Madame Culling? and your seven-feet high uncle? And
have you a fleet to satisfy Nevil Beauchamp yet? You shall see a trial
of our new field-guns at Rouen.”

They were separated with difficulty.

Renée wished her brother to come in the boat; and he would have done
so, but for his objection to have his Arab bestridden by a man unknown
to him.

“My love is a four-foot, and here’s my love,” Roland said, going
outside the gilt gate-rails to the graceful little beast, that
acknowledged his ownership with an arch and swing of the neck round to
him.

He mounted and called, “Au revoir, M. le Capitaine.”

“Au revoir, M. le Commandant,” cried Beauchamp.

“Admiral and marshal, each of us in good season,” said Roland. “Thanks
to your promotion, I had a letter from my sister. Advance a grade, and
I may get another.”

Beauchamp thought of the strange gulf now between him and the time when
he pined to be a commodore, and an admiral. The gulf was bridged as he
looked at Renée petting Roland’s horse.

“Is there in the world so lovely a creature?” she said, and appealed
fondlingly to the beauty that brings out beauty, and, bidding it
disdain rivalry, rivalled it insomuch that in a moment of trance
Beauchamp with his bodily vision beheld her, not there, but on the Lido
of Venice, shining out of the years gone.

Old love reviving may be love of a phantom after all. We can, if it
must revive, keep it to the limits of a ghostly love. The ship in the
Arabian tale coming within the zone of the magnetic mountain, flies all
its bolts and bars, and becomes sheer timbers, but that is the
carelessness of the ship’s captain; and hitherto Beauchamp could
applaud himself for steering with prudence, while Renée’s attractions
warned more than they beckoned. She was magnetic to him as no other
woman was. Then whither his course but homeward?

After they had taken leave of their host and hostess of Château Dianet,
walking across a meadow to a line of charmilles that led to the
river-side, he said, “Now I have seen Roland I shall have to decide
upon going.”

“Wantonly won is deservedly lost,” said Renée. “But do not disappoint
my Roland much because of his foolish sister. Is he not looking
handsome? And he is young to be a commandant, for we have no interest
at this Court. They kept him out of the last war! My father expects to
find you at Tourdestelle, and how account to him for your hurried
flight? save with the story of that which brought you to us!”

“The glove? I shall beg for the fellow to it before I depart,
marquise.”

“You perceived my disposition to light-headedness, monsieur, when I was
a girl.”

“I said that I—But the past is dust. Shall I ever see you in England?”

“That country seems to frown on me. But if I do not go there, nor you
come here, except to imperious mysterious invitations, which will not
be repeated, the future is dust as well as the past: for me, at least.
Dust here, dust there!—if one could be like a silk-worm, and live lying
on the leaf one feeds on, it would be a sort of answer to the
riddle—living out of the dust, and in the present. I find none in my
religion. No doubt, Madame de Brézé did: why did you call Diane so to
M. Livret?”

She looked at him smiling as they came out of the shadow of the clipped
trees. He was glancing about for the boat.

“The boat is across the river,” Renée said, in a voice that made him
seek her eyes for an explanation of the dead sound. She was very pale.
“You have perfect command of yourself? For my sake!” she said.

He looked round.

Standing up in the boat, against the opposite bank, and leaning with
crossed legs on one of the sculls planted in the gravel of the river,
Count Henri d’Henriel’s handsome figure presented itself to Beauchamp’s
gaze.

With a dryness that smacked of his uncle Everard Romfrey, Beauchamp
said of the fantastical posture of the young man, “One can do that on
fresh water.”

Renée did not comprehend the sailor-sarcasm of the remark; but she also
commented on the statuesque appearance of Count Henri: “Is the pose for
photography or for sculpture?”

Neither of them showed a sign of surprise or of impatience.

M. d’Henriel could not maintain the attitude. He uncrossed his legs
deliberately, drooped hat in hand, and came paddling over; apologized
indolently, and said, “I am not, I believe, trespassing on the grounds
of Tourdestelle, Madame la Marquise!”

“You happen to be in my boat, M. le Comte,” said Renée.

“Permit me, madame.” He had set one foot on shore, with his back to
Beauchamp, and reached a hand to assist her step into the boat.

Beauchamp caught fast hold of the bows while Renée laid a finger on
Count Henri’s shoulder to steady herself.

The instant she had taken her seat, Count Henri dashed the scull’s
blade at the bank to push off with her, but the boat was fast. His
manœuvre had been foreseen. Beauchamp swung on board like the last
seaman of a launch, and crouched as the boat rocked away to the stream;
and still Count Henri leaned on the scull, not in a chosen attitude,
but for positive support. He had thrown his force into the blow, to
push off triumphantly, and leave his rival standing. It occurred that
the boat’s brief resistance and rocking away agitated his artificial
equipoise, and, by the operation of inexorable laws, the longer he
leaned across an extending surface the more was he dependent; so that
when the measure of the water exceeded the length of his failing
support on land, there was no help for it: he pitched in. His grimace
of chagrin at the sight of Beauchamp securely established, had scarcely
yielded to the grimness of feature of the man who feels he must go, as
he took the plunge; and these two emotions combined to make an
extraordinary countenance.

He went like a gallant gentleman; he threw up his heels to clear the
boat, dropping into about four feet of water, and his first remark on
rising was, “I trust, madame, I have not had the misfortune to splash
you.”

Then he waded to the bank, scrambled to his feet, and drew out his
moustachios to their curving ends. Renée nodded sharply to Beauchamp to
bid him row. He, with less of wisdom, having seized the floating scull
abandoned by Count Henri, and got it ready for the stroke, said a word
of condolence to the dripping man.

Count Henri’s shoulders and neck expressed a kind of negative that,
like a wet dog’s shake of the head, ended in an involuntary whole
length shudder, dog-like and deplorable to behold. He must have been
conscious of this miserable exhibition of himself; he turned to
Beauchamp: “You are, I am informed, a sailor, monsieur. I compliment
you on your naval tactics: our next meeting will be on land. Au revoir,
monsieur. Madame la Marquise, I have the honour to salute you.”

With these words he retreated.

“Row quickly, I beg of you,” Renée said to Beauchamp. Her desire was to
see Roland, and open her heart to her brother; for now it had to be
opened. Not a minute must be lost to prevent further mischief. And who
was guilty? she. Her heart clamoured of her guilt to waken a cry of
innocence. A disdainful pity for the superb young savage just made
ludicrous, relieved him of blame, implacable though he was. He was
nothing; an accident—a fool. But he might become a terrible instrument
of punishment. The thought of that possibility gave it an aspect of
retribution, under which her cry of innocence was insufferable in its
feebleness. It would have been different with her if Beauchamp had
taken advantage of her fever of anxiety, suddenly appeased by the sight
of him on the evening of his arrival at Tourdestelle after the storm,
to attempt a renewal of their old broken love-bonds. Then she would
have seen only a conflict between two men, neither of whom could claim
a more secret right than the other to be called her lover, and of whom
both were on a common footing, and partly despicable. But Nevil
Beauchamp had behaved as her perfect true friend, in the character she
had hoped for when she summoned him. The sense of her guilt lay in the
recognition that he had saved her. From what? From the consequences of
delirium rather than from love—surely delirium, founded on delusion;
love had not existed. She had said to Count Henri, “You speak to me of
love. I was beloved when I was a girl, before my marriage, and for
years I have not seen or corresponded with the man who loved me, and I
have only to lift my finger now and he will come to me, and not once
will he speak to me of love.” Those were the words originating the
wager of the glove. But what of her, if Nevil Beauchamp had not come?

Her heart jumped, and she blushed ungovernably in his face,—as if he
were seeing her withdraw her foot from the rock’s edge, and had that
instant rescued her. But how came it she had been so helpless? She
could ask; she could not answer.

Thinking, talking to her heart, was useless. The deceiver simply
feigned utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable. She
burned to do some act of extreme self-abasement that should bring an
unwonted degree of wrath on her externally, and so re-entitle her to
consideration in her own eyes. She burned to be interrogated, to have
to weep, to be scorned, abused, and forgiven, that she might say she
did not deserve pardon. Beauchamp was too English, evidently too blind,
for the description of judge-accuser she required; one who would worry
her without mercy, until—disgraced by the excess of torture
inflicted—he should reinstate her by as much as he had overcharged his
accusation, and a little more. Reasonably enough, instinctively in
fact, she shunned the hollow of an English ear. A surprise was in
reserve for her.

Beauchamp gave up rowing. As he rested on the sculls, his head was bent
and turned toward the bank. Renée perceived an over-swollen monster
gourd that had strayed from a garden adjoining the river, and hung
sliding heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in
prolonged contemplation of its image in the mirror below. Apparently
this obese Narcissus enchained his attention.

She tapped her foot. “Are you tired of rowing, monsieur?”

“It was exactly here,” said he, “that you told me you expected your
husband’s return.”

She glanced at the gourd, bit her lip, and, colouring, said, “At what
point of the river did I request you to congratulate me on it?”

She would not have said that, if she had known the thoughts at work
within him.

He set the boat swaying from side to side, and at once the hugeous
reflection of that conceivably self-enamoured bulk quavered and
distended, and was shattered in a thousand dancing fragments, to
re-unite and recompose its maudlin air of imaged satisfaction.

She began to have a vague idea that he was indulging grotesque fancies.

Very strangely, the ridiculous thing, in the shape of an over-stretched
likeness, that she never would have seen had he indicated it directly,
became transfused from his mind to hers by his abstract, half-amused
observation of the great dancing gourd—that capering antiquity,
lumbering volatility, wandering, self-adored, gross bald Cupid, elatest
of nondescripts! Her senses imagined the impressions agitating
Beauchamp’s, and exaggerated them beyond limit; and when he amazed her
with a straight look into her eyes, and the words, “Better let it be a
youth—and live, than fall back to that!” she understood him
immediately; and, together with her old fear of his impetuosity and
downrightness, came the vivid recollection, like a bright finger
pointing upon darkness, of what foul destiny, magnified by her present
abhorrence of it, he would have saved her from in the days of Venice
and Touraine, and unto what loathly example of the hideous grotesque
she, in spite of her lover’s foresight on her behalf, had become
allied.

Face to face as they sat, she had no defence for her scarlet cheeks;
her eyes wavered.

“We will land here; the cottagers shall row the boat up,” she said.

“Somewhere—anywhere,” said Beauchamp. “But I must speak. I will tell
you now. I do not think you to blame—barely; not in my sight; though no
man living would have suffered as I should. Probably some days more and
you would have been lost. You looked for me! Trust your instinct now
I’m with you as well as when I’m absent. Have you courage? that’s the
question. You have years to live. Can you live them in this place—with
honour? and alive really?”

Renée’s eyes grew wide; she tried to frown, and her brows merely
twitched; to speak, and she was inarticulate. His madness, miraculous
penetration, and the super-masculine charity in him, unknown to the
world of young men in their treatment of women, excited, awed, and
melted her. He had seen the whole truth of her relations with M.
d’Henriel!—the wickedness of them in one light, the innocence in
another; and without prompting a confession he forgave her. Could she
believe it? This was love, and manly love.

She yearned to be on her feet, to feel the possibility of an escape
from him.

She pointed to a landing. He sprang to the bank. “It could end in
nothing else,” he said, “unless you beat cold to me. And now I have
your hand, Renée! It’s the hand of a living woman, you have no need to
tell me that; but faithful to her comrade! I can swear it for
her—faithful to a _true_ alliance! You are not married, you are simply
chained: and you are terrorized. What a perversion of you it is! It
wrecks you. But with me? Am I not your lover? You and I are one life.
What have we suffered for but to find this out and act on it? Do I not
know that a woman lives, and is not the rooted piece of vegetation
hypocrites and tyrants expect her to be? Act on it, I say; own me,
break the chains, come to me; say, Nevil Beauchamp or death! And death
for you? But you are poisoned and thwart-eddying, as you live now:
worse, shaming the Renée I knew. Ah—Venice! But now we are both of us
wiser and stronger: we have gone through fire. Who foretold it? This
day, and this misery and perversion that we can turn to joy, if we
will—if you will! No heart to dare is no heart to love!—answer that!
Shall I see you cower away from me again? Not this time!”

He swept on in a flood, uttered mad things, foolish things, and things
of an insight electrifying to her. Through the cottager’s garden,
across a field, and within the park gates of Tourdestelle it continued
unceasingly; and deeply was she won by the rebellious note in all that
he said, deeply too by his disregard of the vulgar arts of wooers: she
detected none. He did not speak so much to win as to help her to see
with her own orbs. Nor was it roughly or chidingly, though it was
absolutely, that he stripped her of the veil a wavering woman will keep
to herself from her heart’s lord if she can.

They arrived long after the boat at Tourdestelle, and Beauchamp might
believe he had prevailed with her, but for her forlorn repetition of
the question he had put to her idly and as a new idea, instead of
significantly, with a recollection and a doubt “Have I courage, Nevil?”

The grain of common sense in cowardice caused her to repeat it when her
reason was bedimmed, and passion assumed the right to show the way of
right and wrong.




CHAPTER XXVI.
MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM


Some time after Beauchamp had been seen renewing his canvass in
Bevisham a report reached Mount Laurels that he was lame of a leg. The
wits of the opposite camp revived the FRENCH MARQUEES, but it was
generally acknowledged that he had come back without the lady: she was
invisible. Cecilia Halkett rode home with her father on a dusky Autumn
evening, and found the card of Commander Beauchamp awaiting her. He
might have stayed to see her, she thought. Ladies are not customarily
so very late in returning from a ride on chill evenings of Autumn. Only
a quarter of an hour was between his visit and her return. The
shortness of the interval made it appear the deeper gulf. She noticed
that her father particularly inquired of the man-servant whether
Captain Beauchamp limped. It seemed a piece of kindly anxiety on his
part. The captain was mounted, the man said. Cecilia was conscious of
rumours being abroad relating to Nevil’s expedition to France; but he
had enemies, and was at war with them, and she held herself indifferent
to tattle. This card bearing his name, recently in his hand, was much
more insidious and precise. She took it to her room to look at it.
Nothing but his name and naval title was inscribed; no pencilled line;
she had not expected to discover one. The simple card was her dark
light, as a handkerchief, a flower, a knot of riband, has been for men
luridly illuminated by such small sparks to fling their beams on
shadows and read the monstrous things for truths. Her purer virgin
blood was not inflamed. She read the signification of the card sadly as
she did clearly. What she could not so distinctly imagine was, how he
could reconcile the devotion to his country, which he had taught her to
put her faith in, with his unhappy subjection to Madame de Rouaillout.
How could the nobler sentiment exist side by side with one that was
lawless? Or was the wildness characteristic of his political views
proof of a nature inclining to disown moral ties? She feared so; he did
not speak of the clergy respectfully. Reading in the dark, she was
forced to rely on her social instincts, and she distrusted her personal
feelings as much as she could, for she wished to know the truth of him;
anything, pain and heartrending, rather than the shutting of the eyes
in an unworthy abandonment to mere emotion and fascination. Cecilia’s
love could not be otherwise given to a man, however near she might be
drawn to love—though she should suffer the pangs of love cruelly.

She placed his card in her writing-desk; she had his likeness there.
Commander Beauchamp encouraged the art of photography, as those that
make long voyages do, in reciprocating what they petition their friends
for. Mrs. Rosamund Culling had a whole collection of photographs of
him, equal to a visual history of his growth in chapters, from boyhood
to midshipmanship and to manhood. The specimen possessed by Cecilia was
one of a couple that Beauchamp had forwarded to Mrs. Grancey Lespel on
the day of his departure for France, and was a present from that lady,
purchased, like so many presents, at a cost Cecilia would have paid
heavily in gold to have been spared, namely, a public blush. She was
allowed to make her choice, and she chose the profile, repeating a
remark of Mrs. Culling’s, that it suggested an arrow-head in the
upflight; whereupon Mr. Stukely Culbrett had said, “Then there is the
man, for he is undoubtedly a projectile”; nor were politically-hostile
punsters on an arrow-head inactive. But Cecilia was thinking of the
side-face she (less intently than Beauchamp at hers) had glanced at
during the drive into Bevisham. At that moment, she fancied Madame de
Rouaillout might be doing likewise; and oh that she had the portrait of
the French lady as well!

Next day her father tossed her a photograph of another gentleman,
coming out of a letter he had received from old Mrs. Beauchamp. He
asked her opinion of it. She said, “I think he would have suited
Bevisham better than Captain Baskelett.” Of the original, who presented
himself at Mount Laurels in the course of the week, she had nothing to
say, except that he was very like the photograph, very unlike Nevil
Beauchamp. “Yes, there I’m of your opinion,” her father observed. The
gentleman was Mr. Blackburn Tuckham, and it was amusing to find an
exuberant Tory in one who was the reverse of the cavalier type. Nevil
and he seemed to have been sorted to the wrong sides. Mr. Tuckham had a
round head, square flat forehead, and ruddy face; he stood as if his
feet claimed the earth under them for his own, with a certain shortness
of leg that detracted from the majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth
Harry, but increased his air of solidity; and he was authoritative in
speaking. “Let me set you right, sir,” he said sometimes to Colonel
Halkett, and that was his modesty. “You are altogether wrong,” Miss
Halkett heard herself informed, which was his courtesy. He examined
some of her water-colour drawings before sitting down to dinner,
approved of them, but thought it necessary to lay a broad finger on
them to show their defects. On the question of politics, “I venture to
state,” he remarked, in anything but the tone of a venture, “that no
educated man of ordinary sense who has visited our colonies will come
back a Liberal.” As for a man of sense and education being a Radical,
he scouted the notion with a pooh sufficient to awaken a vessel in the
doldrums. He said carelessly of Commander Beauchamp, that he might
think himself one. Either the Radical candidate for Bevisham stood
self-deceived, or—the other supposition. Mr. Tuckham would venture to
state that no English gentleman, exempt from an examination by order of
the Commissioners of Lunacy, could be sincerely a Radical. “Not a bit
of it; nonsense,” he replied to Miss Halkett’s hint at the existence of
Radical views; “that is, those views are out of politics; they are
matters for the police. Dutch dykes are built to shut away the sea from
cultivated land, and of course it’s a part of the business of the Dutch
Government to keep up the dykes,—and of ours to guard against the mob;
but that is only a political consideration after the mob has been
allowed to undermine our defences.”

“They speak,” said Miss Halkett, “of educating the people to fit them—”

“They speak of commanding the winds and tides,” he cut her short, with
no clear analogy; “wait till we have a storm. It’s a delusion amounting
to dementedness to suppose, that with the people inside our defences,
we can be taming them and tricking them. As for sending them to school
after giving them power, it’s like asking a wild beast to sit down to
dinner with us—he wants the whole table and us too. The best education
for the people is government. They’re beginning to see that in
Lancashire at last. I ran down to Lancashire for a couple of days on my
landing, and I’m thankful to say Lancashire is preparing to take a step
back. Lancashire leads the country. Lancashire men see what this
Liberalism has done for the Labour-market.”

“Captain Beauchamp considers that the political change coming over the
minds of the manufacturers is due to the large fortunes they have
made,” said Miss Halkett, maliciously associating a Radical prophet
with him.

He was unaffected by it, and continued: “Property is ballast as well as
treasure. I call property funded good sense. I would give it every
privilege. If we are to speak of patriotism, I say the possession of
property guarantees it. I maintain that the lead of men of property is
in most cases sure to be the safe one.”

“_I_ think so,” Colonel Halkett interposed, and he spoke as a man of
property.

Mr. Tuckham grew fervent in his allusions to our wealth and our
commerce. Having won the race and gained the prize, shall we let it
slip out of our grasp? Upon this topic his voice descended to tones of
priestlike awe: for are we not the envy of the world? Our wealth is
countless, fabulous. It may well inspire veneration. And we have won it
with our hands, thanks (he implied it so) to our religion. We are rich
in money and industry, in those two things only, and the corruption of
an energetic industry is constantly threatened by the profusion of
wealth giving it employment. This being the case, either your Radicals
do not know the first conditions of human nature, or they do; and if
they do they are traitors, and the Liberals opening the gates to them
are fools: and some are knaves. We perish as a Great Power if we cease
to look sharp ahead, hold firm together, and make the utmost of what we
possess. The word for the performance of those duties is Toryism: a
word with an older flavour than Conservatism, and Mr. Tuckham preferred
it. By all means let workmen be free men but a man must earn his
freedom daily, or he will become a slave in some form or another: and
the way to earn it is by work and obedience to right direction. In a
country like ours, open on all sides to the competition of intelligence
and strength, with a Press that is the voice of all parties and of
every interest; in a country offering to your investments three and a
half and more per cent., secure as the firmament!

He perceived an amazed expression on Miss Halkett’s countenance; and
“Ay,” said he, “that means the certainty of food to millions of mouths,
and comforts, if not luxuries, to half the population. A safe
percentage on savings is the basis of civilization.”

But he had bruised his eloquence, for though you may start a sermon
from stones to hit the stars, he must be a practised orator who shall
descend out of the abstract to take up a heavy lump of the concrete
without unseating himself, and he stammered and came to a flat ending:
“In such a country—well, I venture to say, we have a right to condemn
in advance disturbers of the peace, and they must show very good cause
indeed for not being summarily held—to account for their conduct.”

The allocution was not delivered in the presence of an audience other
than sympathetic, and Miss Halkett rightly guessed that it was intended
to strike Captain Beauchamp by ricochet. He puffed at the mention of
Beauchamp’s name. He had read a reported speech or two of Beauchamp’s,
and shook his head over a quotation of the stuff, as though he would
have sprung at him like a lion, but for his enrolment as a constable.

Not a whit the less did Mr. Tuckham drink his claret relishingly, and
he told stories incidental to his travels now and then, commended the
fishing here, the shooting there, and in some few places the cookery,
with much bright emphasis when it could be praised; it appeared to be
an endearing recollection to him. Still, as a man of progress, he
declared his belief that we English would ultimately turn out the best
cooks, having indubitably the best material. “Our incomprehensible
political pusillanimity” was the one sad point about us: we had been
driven from surrender to surrender.

“Like geese upon a common, I have heard it said,” Miss Halkett assisted
him to Dr. Shrapnel’s comparison.

Mr. Tuckham laughed, and half yawned and sighed, “Dear me!”

His laughter was catching, and somehow more persuasive of the soundness
of the man’s heart and head than his remarks.

She would have been astonished to know that a gentleman so uncourtly,
if not uncouth—judged by the standard of the circle she moved in—and so
unskilled in pleasing the sight and hearing of ladies as to treat them
like junior comrades, had raised the vow within himself on seeing her:
You, or no woman!

The colonel delighted in him, both as a strong and able young fellow,
and a refreshingly aggressive recruit of his party, who was for
onslaught, and invoked common sense, instead of waving the flag of
sentiment in retreat; a very horse-artillery man of Tories. Regretting
immensely that Mr. Tuckham had not reached England earlier, that he
might have occupied the seat for Bevisham, about to be given to Captain
Baskelett, Colonel Halkett set up a contrast of Blackburn Tuckham and
Nevil Beauchamp; a singular instance of unfairness, his daughter
thought, considering that the distinct contrast presented by the
circumstances was that of Mr. Tuckham and Captain Baskelett.

“It seems to me, papa,—that you are contrasting the idealist and the
realist,” she said.

“Ah, well, we don’t want the idealist in politics,” muttered the
colonel.

Latterly he also had taken to shaking his head over Nevil: Cecilia
dared not ask him why.

Mr. Tuckham arrived at Mount Laurels on the eve of the Nomination day
in Bevisham. An article in the Bevisham Gazette calling upon all true
Liberals to demonstrate their unanimity by a multitudinous show of
hands, he ascribed to the writing of a child of Erin; and he was highly
diverted by the Liberal’s hiring of Paddy to “pen and spout” for him.
“A Scotchman manages, and Paddy does the sermon for _all_ their
journals,” he said off-hand; adding: “And the English are the
compositors, I suppose.” You may take that for an instance of the
national spirit of Liberal newspapers!

“Ah!” sighed the colonel, as at a case clearly demonstrated against
them.

A drive down to Bevisham to witness the ceremony of the nomination in
the town-hall sobered Mr. Tuckham’s disposition to generalize.
Beauchamp had the show of hands, and to say with Captain Baskelett,
that they were a dirty majority, was beneath Mr. Tuckham’s verbal
antagonism. He fell into a studious reserve, noting everything,
listening to everybody, greatly to Colonel Halkett’s admiration of one
by nature a talker and a thunderer.

The show of hands Mr. Seymour Austin declared to be the most delusive
of electoral auspices; and it proved so. A little later than four
o’clock in the afternoon of the election-day, Cecilia received a
message from her father telling her that both of the Liberals were
headed; “Beauchamp nowhere.”

Mrs. Grancey Lespel was the next herald of Beauchamp’s defeat. She
merely stated the fact that she had met the colonel and Mr. Blackburn
Tuckham driving on the outskirts of the town, and had promised to bring
Cecilia the final numbers of the poll. Without naming them, she
unrolled the greater business in her mind.

“A man who in the middle of an Election goes over to France to fight a
duel, can hardly expect to win; he has all the morality of an English
borough opposed to him,” she said; and seeing the young lady stiffen:
“Oh! the duel is positive,” she dropped her voice. “With the husband.
Who else could it be? And returns invalided. That is evidence. My
nephew Palmet has it from Vivian Ducie, and he is acquainted with her
tolerably intimately, and the story is, she was overtaken in her flight
in the night, and the duel followed at eight o’clock in the morning;
but her brother insisted on fighting for Captain Beauchamp, and I
cannot tell you how—but _his_ place in it I can’t explain—there was a
beau jeune homme, and it’s quite possible that _he_ should have been
the person to stand up against the marquis. At any rate, he insulted
Captain Beauchamp, or thought your hero had insulted him, and the duel
was with one or the other. It matters exceedingly little with whom, if
a duel was fought, and you see we have quite established that.”

“I hope it is not true,” said Cecilia.

“My dear, that is the Christian thing to do,” said Mrs. Lespel.
“Duelling is horrible: though those Romfreys!—and the Beauchamps were
just as bad, or nearly. Colonel Richard fought for a friend’s wife or
sister. But in these days duelling is incredible. It was an inhuman
practice always, and it is now worse—it is a breach of manners. I would
hope it is not true; and you may mean that I have it from Lord Palmet.
But I know Vivian Ducie as well as I know my nephew, and if he
distinctly mentions an occurrence, we may too surely rely on the truth
of it; he is not a man to spread mischief. Are you unaware that he met
Captain Beauchamp at the château of the marquise? The whole story was
acted under his eyes. He had only to take up his pen. Generally he
favours me with his French gossip. I suppose there were circumstances
in this affair more suitable to Palmet than to me. He wrote a
description of Madame de Rouaillout that set Palmet strutting about for
an hour. I have no doubt she must be a very beautiful woman, for a
Frenchwoman: not regular features; expressive, capricious. Vivian Ducie
lays great stress on her eyes and eyebrows, and, I think, her hair.
With a Frenchwoman’s figure, that is enough to make men crazy. He says
her husband deserves—but what will not young men write? It is deeply to
be regretted that Englishmen abroad—women the same, I fear—get the
Continental tone in morals. But how Captain Beauchamp could expect to
carry on an Election and an intrigue together, only a head like his can
tell us. Grancey is in high indignation with him. It does not concern
the Election, you can imagine. Something that man Dr. Shrapnel has
done, which he says Captain Beauchamp could have prevented. Quarrels of
men! I have instructed Palmet to write to Vivian Ducie for a photograph
of Madame de Rouaillout. Do you know, one has a curiosity to see the
face of the woman for whom a man ruins himself. But I say again, he
ought to be married.”

“That there may be two victims?” Cecilia said it smiling.

She was young in suffering, and thought, as the unseasoned and
inexperienced do, that a mask is a concealment.

“Married—settled; to have him bound in honour,” said Mrs. Lespel. “I
had a conversation with him when he was at Itchincope; and his look,
and what I know of his father, that gallant and handsome Colonel
Richard Beauchamp, would give one a kind of confidence in him;
supposing always that he is not struck with one of those deadly
passions that are like snakes, like magic. I positively believe in
them. I have seen them. And if they end, they end as if the man were
burnt out, and was ashes inside; as you see Mr. Stukely Culbrett, all
cynicism. You would not now suspect him of a passion! It is true. Oh, I
know it! That is what the men go to. The women die. Vera Winter died at
twenty-three. Caroline Ormond was hardly older. You know her story;
everybody knows it. The most singular and convincing case was that of
Lord Alfred Burnley and Lady Susan Gardiner, wife of the general; and
there was an instance of two similarly afflicted—a very rare case, most
rare: they never could meet to part! It was almost ludicrous. It is now
quite certain that they did not conspire to meet. At last the absolute
fatality became so well understood by the persons immediately
interested—You laugh?”

“Do I laugh?” said Cecilia.

“We should all know the world, my dear, and you are a strong head. The
knowledge is only dangerous for fools. And if romance is occasionally
ridiculous, as I own it can be, humdrum, I protest, is everlastingly
so. By-the-by, I should have told you that Captain Beauchamp was one
hundred and ninety below Captain Baskelett when the state of the poll
was handed to me. The gentleman driving with your father compared the
Liberals to a parachute cut away from the balloon. Is he army or navy?”

“He is a barrister, and some cousin of Captain Beauchamp.”

“I should not have taken him for a Beauchamp,” said Mrs. Lespel; and,
resuming her worldly sagacity, “I should not like to be in opposition
to that young man.”

She seemed to have a fancy unexpressed regarding Mr. Tuckham. Reminding
herself that she might be behind time at Itchincope, where the guests
would be numerous that evening, and the song of triumph loud, with
Captain Baskelett to lead it, she kissed the young lady she had
unintentionally been torturing so long, and drove away.

Cecilia hoped it was not true. Her heart sank heavily under the belief
that it was. She imagined the world abusing Nevil and casting him out,
as those electors of Bevisham had just done, and impulsively she
pleaded for him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her
to defend herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful
story, though she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by
a singular inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it
was her heart that condemned him. She dwelt fondly on an image of the
“gallant and handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,” conjured up in her
mind from the fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking of Nevil’s father,
whose chivalry threw a light on the son’s, and whose errors, condoned
by time, and with a certain brilliancy playing above them, interceded
strangely on behalf of Nevil.




CHAPTER XXVII.
A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION


The brisk Election-day, unlike that wearisome but instructive canvass
of the Englishman in his castle vicatim, teaches little; and its
humours are those of a badly managed Christmas pantomime without a
columbine—old tricks, no graces. Nevertheless, things hang together so
that it cannot be passed over with a bare statement of the fact of the
Liberal-Radical defeat in Bevisham: the day was not without fruit in
time to come for him whom his commiserating admirers of the non-voting
sex all round the borough called the poor dear commander. Beauchamp’s
holiday out of England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive
restriction put upon him by Jenny Denham, and actively pursue the
canvass and the harangue in person; by which conduct, as Jenny had
foreseen, many temperate electors were alienated from Commander
Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals were made compact: for they may
be the skirmishing faction—poor scattered fragments, none of them
sufficiently downright for the other; each outstripping each;
rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets, inspired physicians,
nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will; and still here and
there a man shall arise to march them in close columns, if they can but
trust him; in perfect subordination, a model even for Tories while they
keep shoulder to shoulder. And to behold such a disciplined body is
intoxicating to the eye of a leader accustomed to count ahead upon
vapourish abstractions, and therefore predisposed to add a couple of
noughts to every tangible figure in his grasp. Thus will a realized
fifty become five hundred or five thousand to him: the very sense of
number is instinct with multiplication in his mind; and those years far
on in advance, which he has been looking to with some fatigue to the
optics, will suddenly and rollickingly roll up to him at the shutting
of his eyes in a temporary fit of gratification. So, by looking and by
not looking, he achieves his phantom victory—embraces his cloud.

Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and
he, a citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit
of them indeed as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow
that struck him, was, it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down
when he saw Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled
to a man. Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they
might; they dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you
will find descriptions of it in the poet’s Inferno. They are for
lifting our clay soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great
mathematicians. They have perchance a foot of our earth, and
perpetually do they seem to be producing an effect, perpetually does
the whole land roll back on them. You have not surely to be reminded
that it hurts them; the weight is immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however,
speedily looked out again on his vast horizon, though prostrate. He
regained his height of stature with no man’s help. Success was but
postponed for a generation or two. Is it so very distant? Gaze on it
with the eye of our parent orb! “I shall not see it here; you may,” he
said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his outlook by saying to Mr.
Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or rather stuck, in the
track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note, then, that Radicals,
always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and for Tories it is
Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals, those
temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in
the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which
they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for they have no
vital principle.

Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work of
the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady
swing, from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock,
which is the clock’s life, remember that. The Liberals are the
professors of the practicable in politics.

“A suitable image for time-servers!” Dr. Shrapnel exclaimed, intolerant
of any mention of the Liberals as a party, especially in the hour of
Radical discomfiture, when the fact that compromisers should exist
exasperates men of a principle. “Your Liberals are the band of Pyrrhus,
an army of bastards, mercenaries professing the practicable for pay.
They know us the motive force, the Tories the resisting power, and they
feign to aid us in battering our enemy, that they may stop the shock.
We fight, they profit. What are they? Stranded Whigs, crotchetty
manufacturers; dissentient religionists; the half-minded, the
hare-hearted; the I would and I would-not—shifty creatures, with
youth’s enthusiasm decaying in them, and a purse beginning to jingle;
fearing lest we do too much for safety, our enemy not enough for
safety. They a party? Let them take action and see! _We_ stand a
thousand defeats; they not one! Compromise begat them. Once let them
leave sucking the teats of compromise, yea, once put on the air of men
who fight and die for a cause, they fly to pieces. And whither the
fragments? Chiefly, my friend, into the _Tory_ ranks. Seriously so I
say. You between future and past are for the present—but with the
hunted look behind of all godless livers in the present. You Liberals
are Tories with foresight, Radicals without faith. You start, in fear
of Toryism, on an errand of Radicalism, and in fear of Radicalism to
Toryism you draw back. There is your pendulum-swing!”

Lectures to this effect were delivered by Dr. Shrapnel throughout the
day, for his private spiritual solace it may be supposed, unto Lydiard,
Turbot, Beauchamp, or whomsoever the man chancing to be near him, and
never did Sir Oracle wear so extraordinary a garb. The favourite
missiles of the day were flour-bags. Dr. Shrapnel’s uncommon height,
and his outrageous long brown coat, would have been sufficient to
attract them, without the reputation he had for desiring to subvert
everything old English. The first discharges gave him the appearance of
a thawing snowman. Drenchings of water turned the flour to ribs of
paste, and in colour at least he looked legitimately the cook’s own
spitted hare, escaped from her basting ladle, elongated on two legs. It
ensued that whenever he was caught sight of, as he walked unconcernedly
about, the young street-professors of the decorative arts were seized
with a frenzy to add their share to the whitening of him, until he
might have been taken for a miller that had gone bodily through his
meal. The popular cry proclaimed him a ghost, and he walked like one,
impassive, blanched, and silent amid the uproar of mobs of jolly
ruffians, for each of whom it was a point of honour to have a shy at
old Shrapnel.

Clad in this preparation of pie-crust, he called from time to time at
Beauchamp’s hotel, and renewed his monologue upon that Radical empire
in the future which was for ever in the future for the pioneers of men,
yet not the less their empire. “Do we live in our bodies?” quoth he,
replying to his fiery interrogation: “Ay, the Tories! the Liberals!”

_They_ lived in their bodies. Not one syllable of personal consolation
did he vouchsafe to Beauchamp. He did not imagine it could be required
by a man who had bathed in the pure springs of Radicalism; and it
should be remarked that Beauchamp deceived him by imitating his air of
happy abstraction, or subordination of the faculties to a distant view,
comparable to a ship’s crew in difficulties receiving the report of the
man at the masthead. Beauchamp deceived Miss Denham too, and himself,
by saying, as if he cherished the philosophy of defeat, besides the
resolution to fight on:

“It’s only a skirmish lost, and that counts for nothing in a battle
without end: it must be incessant.”

“But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?” was her
memorable answer.

He glanced at Lydiard, to indicate that it came of that gentleman’s
influence upon her mind. It was impossible for him to think that women
thought. The idea of a pretty woman exercising her mind independently,
and moreover moving him to examine his own, made him smile. Could a
sweet-faced girl, the nearest to Renée in grace of manner and in
feature of all women known to him, originate a sentence that would set
him reflecting? He was unable to forget it, though he allowed her no
credit for it.

On the other hand, his admiration of her devotedness to Dr. Shrapnel
was unbounded. There shone a strictly feminine quality! according to
the romantic visions of the sex entertained by Commander Beauchamp, and
by others who would be the objects of it. But not alone the passive
virtues were exhibited by Jenny Denham: she proved that she had high
courage. No remonstrance could restrain Dr. Shrapnel from going out to
watch the struggle, and she went with him as a matter of course on each
occasion. Her dress bore witness to her running the gauntlet beside
him.

“It was not thrown at me purposely,” she said, to quiet Beauchamp’s
wrath. She saved the doctor from being rough mobbed. Once when they
were surrounded she fastened his arm under hers, and by simply moving
on with an unswerving air of serenity obtained a passage for him. So
much did she make herself respected, that the gallant rascals became
emulous in dexterity to avoid powdering her, by loudly execrating any
but dead shots at the detested one, and certain boys were maltreated
for an ardour involving clumsiness. A young genius of this horde
conceiving, in the spirit of the inventors of our improved modern
ordnance, that it was vain to cast missiles which left a thing
standing, hurled a stone wrapped in paper. It missed its mark. Jenny
said nothing about it. The day closed with a comfortable fight or two
in by-quarters of the town, probably to prove that an undaunted English
spirit, spite of fickle Fortune, survived in our muscles.




CHAPTER XXVIII.
TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY’S HEART AND HER INTELLECT


Mr. Tuckham found his way to Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage to see his kinsman
on the day after the election. There was a dinner in honour of the
Members for Bevisham at Mount Laurels in the evening, and he was five
minutes behind military time when he entered the restive drawing-room
and stood before the colonel. No sooner had he stated that he had been
under the roof of Dr. Shrapnel, than his unpunctuality was immediately
overlooked in the burst of impatience evoked by the name.

“That pestilent fellow!” Colonel Halkett ejaculated. “I understand he
has had the impudence to serve a notice on Grancey Lespel about
encroachments on common land.”

Some one described Dr. Shrapnel’s appearance under the flour storm.

“He deserves anything,” said the colonel, consulting his mantelpiece
clock.

Captain Baskelett observed: “I shall have my account to settle with Dr.
Shrapnel.” He spoke like a man having a right to be indignant, but
excepting that the doctor had bestowed nicknames upon him in a speech
at a meeting, no one could discover the grounds for it. He nodded
briefly. A Radical apple had struck him on the left cheekbone as he
performed his triumphal drive through the town, and a slight
disfigurement remained, to which his hand was applied sympathetically
at intervals, for the cheek-bone was prominent in his countenance, and
did not well bear enlargement. And when a fortunate gentleman, desiring
to be still more fortunate, would display the winning amiability of his
character, distension of one cheek gives him an afflictingly false look
of sweetness.

The bent of his mind, nevertheless, was to please Miss Halkett. He
would be smiling, and intimately smiling. Aware that she had a kind of
pitiful sentiment for Nevil, he smiled over Nevil—poor Nevil! “I give
you my word, Miss Halkett, old Nevil was off his head yesterday. I
daresay he meant to be civil. I met him; I called out to him, ‘Good
day, cousin, I’m afraid you’re beaten’ and says he, ‘I fancy you’ve
gained it, _uncle_.’ He didn’t know where he was; all abroad, poor boy.
Uncle!—to me!”

Miss Halkett would have accepted the instance for a proof of Nevil’s
distraction, had not Mr. Seymour Austin, who sat beside her, laughed
and said to her: “I suppose ‘uncle’ was a chance shot, but it’s equal
to a poetic epithet in the light it casts on the story.” Then it seemed
to her that Nevil had been keenly quick, and Captain Baskelett’s
impenetrability was a sign of his density. Her mood was to think Nevil
Beauchamp only too quick, too adventurous and restless: one that
wrecked brilliant gifts in a too general warfare; a lover of hazards, a
hater of laws. Her eyes flew over Captain Baskelett as she imagined
Nevil addressing him as uncle, and, to put aside a spirit of mockery
rising within her, she hinted a wish to hear Seymour Austin’s opinion
of Mr. Tuckham. He condensed it in an interrogative tone: “The _other_
extreme?” The Tory extreme of Radical Nevil Beauchamp. She assented.
Mr. Tuckham was at that moment prophesying the Torification of mankind;
not as the trembling venturesome idea which we cast on doubtful winds,
but as a ship is launched to ride the waters, with huzzas for a thing
accomplished. Mr. Austin raised his shoulders imperceptibly, saying to
Miss Halkett: “The turn will come to us as to others—and go. Nothing
earthly can escape _that_ revolution. We have to meet it with a policy,
and let it pass with measures carried and our hands washed of some of
our party sins. I am, I hope, true to my party, but the enthusiasm of
party I do not share. He is right, however, when he accuses the nation
of cowardice for the last ten years. One third of the Liberals have
been with us at heart, and dared not speak, and we dared not say what
we wished. We accepted a compact that satisfied us both—satisfied _us_
better than when we were opposed by Whigs—that is, the Liberal reigned,
and we governed: and I should add, a very clever juggler was our common
chief. Now we have the consequences of hollow peacemaking, in a
suffrage that bids fair to extend to the wearing of hats and boots for
a qualification. The moral of it seems to be that cowardice is even
worse for nations than for individual men, though the consequences come
on us more slowly.”

“You spoke of party sins,” Miss Halkett said incredulously.

“I shall think we are the redoubtable party when we admit the charge.”

“Are you alluding to the landowners?”

“Like the land itself, they have rich veins in heavy matter. For
instance, the increasing wealth of the country is largely recruiting
our ranks; and we shall be tempted to mistake numbers for strength, and
perhaps again be reading Conservatism for a special thing of our own—a
fortification. That would be a party sin. Conservatism is a principle
of government; the best because the safest for an old country; and the
guarantee that we do not lose the wisdom of past experience in our
struggle with what is doubtful. Liberalism stakes too much on the
chance of gain. It is uncomfortably seated on half-a-dozen horses; and
it has to feed them too, and on varieties of corn.”

“Yes,” Miss Halkett said, pausing, “and I know you would not talk down
to me, but the use of imagery makes me feel that I am addressed as a
primitive intelligence.”

“That’s the fault of my trying at condensation, as the hieroglyphists
put an animal for a paragraph. I am incorrigible, you see; but the
lecture in prose must be for by-and-by, if you care to have it.”

“If you care to read it to me. Did a single hieroglyphic figure stand
for so much?”

“I have never deciphered one.”

“You have been speaking to me too long in earnest, Mr. Austin!”

“I accept the admonition, though it is wider than the truth. Have you
ever consented to listen to politics before?”

Cecilia reddened faintly, thinking of him who had taught her to listen,
and of her previous contempt of the subject.

A political exposition devoid of imagery was given to her next day on
the sunny South-western terrace of Mount Laurels, when it was only by
mentally translating it into imagery that she could advance a step
beside her intellectual guide; and she was ashamed of the volatility of
her ideas. She was constantly comparing Mr. Austin and Nevil Beauchamp,
seeing that the senior and the junior both talked to her with the
familiar recognition of her understanding which was a compliment
without the gross corporeal phrase. But now she made another discovery,
that should have been infinitely more of a compliment, and it was
bewildering, if not repulsive to her:—could it be credited? Mr. Austin
was a firm believer in new and higher destinies for women. He went
farther than she could concede the right of human speculation to go; he
was, in fact, as Radical there as Nevil Beauchamp politically; and
would not the latter innovator stare, perchance frown conservatively,
at a prospect of woman taking counsel, _in council_, with men upon
public affairs, like the women in the Germania! Mr. Austin, if this
time he talked in earnest, deemed that Englishwomen were on the road to
win such a promotion, and would win it ultimately. He said soberly that
he saw more certain indications of the reality of progress among women
than any at present shown by men. And he was professedly temperate. He
was but for opening avenues to the means of livelihood for them, and
leaving it to their strength to conquer the position they might wish to
win. His belief that they would do so was the revolutionary sign.

“Are there points of likeness between Radicals and Tories?” she
inquired.

“I suspect a cousinship in extremes,” he answered.

“If one might be present at an argument,” said she.

“We have only to meet to fly apart as wide as the Poles,” Mr. Austin
rejoined.

But she had not spoken of a particular person to meet him; and how,
then, had she betrayed herself? She fancied he looked unwontedly arch
as he resumed:

“The end of the argument would see us each entrenched in his party.
Suppose me to be telling your Radical friend such truisms as that we
English have not grown in a day, and were not originally made free and
equal by decree; that we have grown, and must continue to grow, by the
aid and the development of our strength; that ours is a fairly legible
history, and a fair example of the good and the bad in human growth;
that his landowner and his peasant have no clear case of right and
wrong to divide them, one being the descendant of strong men, the other
of weak ones; and that the former may sink, the latter may rise—there
is no artificial obstruction; and if it is difficult to rise, it is
easy to sink. Your Radical friend, who would bring them to a level by
proclamation, could not adopt a surer method for destroying the manhood
of a people: he is for doctoring wooden men, and I for not letting our
stout English be cut down short as Laplanders; he would have them in a
forcing house, and I in open air, as hitherto. Do you perceive a
discussion? and you apprehend the nature of it. We have nerves. That is
why it is better for men of extremely opposite opinions not to meet. I
dare say Radicalism has a function, and so long as it respects the laws
I am ready to encounter it where it cannot be avoided. Pardon my
prosing.”

“Recommend me some hard books to study through the Winter,” said
Cecilia, refreshed by a discourse that touched no emotions, as by a
febrifuge. Could Nevil reply to it? She fancied him replying, with that
wild head of his—wildest of natures. She fancied also that her wish was
like Mr. Austin’s not to meet him. She was enjoying a little rest.

It was not quite generous in Mr. Austin to assume that “her Radical
friend” had been prompting her. However, she thanked him in her heart
for the calm he had given her. To be able to imagine Nevil Beauchamp
intellectually erratic was a tonic satisfaction to the proud young
lady, ashamed of a bondage that the bracing and pointing of her
critical powers helped her to forget. She had always preferred the
society of men of Mr. Austin’s age. How old was he? Her father would
know. And why was he unmarried? A light frost had settled on the hair
about his temples; his forehead was lightly wrinkled; but his mouth and
smile, and his eyes, were lively as a young man’s, with more in them.
His age must be something less than fifty. O for peace! she sighed.
When he stepped into his carriage, and stood up in it to wave adieu to
her, she thought his face and figure a perfect example of an English
gentleman in his prime.

Captain Baskelett requested the favour of five minutes of conversation
with Miss Halkett before he followed Mr. Austin, on his way to
Steynham.

She returned from that colloquy to her father and Mr. Tuckham. The
colonel looked straight in her face, with an elevation of the brows. To
these points of interrogation she answered with a placid fall of her
eyelids. He sounded a note of approbation in his throat.

All the company having departed, Mr. Tuckham for the first time spoke
of his interview with his kinsman Beauchamp. Yesterday evening he had
slurred it, as if he had nothing to relate, except the finding of an
old schoolfellow at Dr. Shrapnel’s named Lydiard, a man of ability fool
enough to have turned author on no income. But that which had appeared
to Miss Halkett a want of observancy, became attributable to depth of
character on its being clear that he had waited for the departure of
the transient guests of the house, to pour forth his impressions
without holding up his kinsman to public scorn. He considered Shrapnel
mad and Beauchamp mad. No such grotesque old monster as Dr. Shrapnel
had he seen in the course of his travels. He had never listened to a
madman running loose who was at all up to Beauchamp. At a loss for
words to paint him, he said: “Beauchamp seems to have a head like a
firework manufactory, he’s perfectly pyrocephalic.” For an example of
Dr. Shrapnel’s talk: “I happened,” said Mr. Tuckham, “casually, meaning
no harm, and not supposing I was throwing a lighted match on powder, to
mention the word Providence. I found myself immediately confronted by
Shrapnel—overtopped, I should say. He is a lank giant of about seven
feet in height; the kind of show man that used to go about in caravans
over the country; and he began rocking over me like a poplar in a gale,
and cries out: ‘Stay there! away with that! Providence? Can you set a
thought on Providence, not seeking to propitiate it? And have you not
there the damning proof that you are at the foot of an Idol?’—The old
idea about a special Providence, I suppose. These fellows have nothing
new but their trimmings. And he went on with: ‘Ay, invisible,’ and his
arm chopping, ‘but an Idol! an Idol!’—I was to think of ‘nought but
Laws.’ He admitted there might be one above the Laws. ‘To realize him
is to fry the brains in their pan,’ says he, and struck his forehead—a
slap: and off he walked down the garden, with his hands at his
coat-tails. I venture to say it may be taken for a proof of incipient
insanity to care to hear such a fellow twice. And Beauchamp holds him
up for a sage and a prophet!”

“He is a very dangerous dog,” said Colonel Halkett.

“The best of it is—and I take this for the strongest possible proof
that Beauchamp is mad—Shrapnel stands for an _advocate of morality_
against him. I’ll speak of it....”

Mr. Tuckham nodded to the colonel, who said: “Speak out. My daughter
has been educated for a woman of the world.”

“Well, sir, it’s nothing to offend a young lady’s ears. Beauchamp is
for socially enfranchising the sex—that is all. Quite enough. Not a
whit politically. Love is to be the test: and if a lady ceases to love
her husband... if she sets her fancy elsewhere, she’s bound to leave
him. The laws are tyrannical, our objections are cowardly. Well, this
Dr. Shrapnel harangued about society; and men as well as women are to
sacrifice their passions _on that altar_. If he could burlesque himself
it would be in coming out as a cleric—the old Pagan!”

“Did he convince Captain Beauchamp?” the colonel asked, manifestly for
his daughter to hear the reply; which was: “Oh dear, no!”

“Were you able to gather from Captain Beauchamp’s remarks whether he is
much disappointed by the result of the election?” said Cecilia.

Mr. Tuckham could tell her only that Captain Beauchamp was incensed
against an elector named Tomlinson for withdrawing a promised vote on
account of lying rumours, and elated by the conquest of a Mr.
Carpendike, who was reckoned a tough one to drag by the neck. “The only
sane people in the house are a Miss Denham and the cook: I lunched
there,” Mr. Tuckham nodded approvingly. “Lydiard must be mad. What he’s
wasting his time there for I can’t guess. He says he’s engaged there in
writing a prefatory essay to a new publication of Harry Denham’s
poems—whoever that may be. And why wasting it there? I don’t like it.
He ought to be earning his bread. He’ll be sure to be borrowing money
by-and-by. We’ve got ten thousand too many fellows writing already, and
they’ve seen a few inches of the world, on the Continent! He can write.
But it’s all unproductive—dead weight on the country, these fellows
with their writings! He says Beauchamp’s praise of Miss Denham is quite
deserved. He tells me, that at great peril to herself—and she nearly
had her arm broken by a stone he saved Shrapnel from rough usage on the
election-day.”

“Hum!” Colonel Halkett grunted significantly.

“So I thought,” Mr. Tuckham responded. “One doesn’t want the man to be
hurt, but he ought to be put down in some way. My belief is he’s a
Fire-worshipper. I warrant I would extinguish him if he came before me.
He’s an incendiary, at any rate.”

“Do you think,” said Cecilia, “that Captain Beauchamp is now satisfied
with his experience of politics?”

“Dear me, no,” said Mr. Tuckham. “It’s the opening of a campaign. He’s
off to the North, after he has been to Sussex and Bucks. He’s to be at
it all his life. One thing he shows common sense in. If I heard him
once I heard him say half-a-dozen times, that he must have money:—‘_I
must have money!_’ And so he must if he’s to head the Radicals. He
wants to start a newspaper! Is he likely to get money from his uncle
Romfrey?”

“Not for his present plan of campaign.” Colonel Halkett enunciated the
military word sarcastically. “Let’s hope he won’t get money.”

“He says he must have it.”

“Who is to stand and deliver, then?”

“I don’t know; I only repeat what he says: unless he has an eye on my
Aunt Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for
political campaigning.”

“Money!” Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

That word too was in the heart of the heiress.

Nevil must have money! Could he have said it? Ordinary men might say or
think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance: but not Nevil
Beauchamp.

Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father
for his comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on
these occasions, had proposed to her unavailingly. Italian and English
gentlemen were in the list of her rejected suitors: and hitherto she
had seen them come and go, one might say, from a watchtower in the
skies. None of them was the ideal she waited for: what their feelings
were, their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on. They dotted
the landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their
fashion, somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields
were to the giant’s daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia. But
Nevil Beauchamp had compelled her to quit her lofty station, pulled her
low as the littlest of women that throb and flush at one man’s
footstep: and being well able to read the nature and aspirations of
Captain Baskelett, it was with the knowledge of her having been
proposed to as heiress of a great fortune that she chanced to hear of
Nevil’s resolve to have money. If he did say it! And was anything
likelier? was anything unlikelier? His foreign love denied to him, why,
now he devoted himself to money: money—the last consideration of a man
so single-mindedly generous as he! But he must have money to pursue his
contest! But would he forfeit the truth in him for money for any
purpose?

The debate on this question grew as incessant as the thought of him.
Was it not to be supposed that the madness of the pursuit of his
political chimaera might change his character?

She hoped he would not come to Mount Laurels, thinking she should
esteem him less if he did; knowing that her defence of him, on her own
behalf, against herself, depended now on an esteem lodged perhaps in
her wilfulness. Yet if he did not come, what an Arctic world!

He came on a November afternoon when the woods glowed, and no sun. The
day was narrowed in mist from earth to heaven: a moveless and
possessing mist. It left space overhead for one wreath of high cloud
mixed with touches of washed red upon moist blue, still as the mist,
insensibly passing into it. Wet webs crossed the grass, chill in the
feeble light. The last flowers of the garden bowed to decay. Dead
leaves, red and brown and spotted yellow, fell straight around the
stems of trees, lying thick. The glow was universal, and the chill.

Cecilia sat sketching the scene at a window of her study, on the level
of the drawing-room, and he stood by outside till she saw him. He
greeted her through the glass, then went round to the hall door, giving
her time to recover, if only her heart had been less shaken.

Their meeting was like the features of the day she set her brush to
picture: characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone,
though it breathed little cheer. Is there not a pleasure in
contemplating that which is characteristic? Her unfinished sketch
recalled him after he had gone: he lived in it, to startle her again,
and bid her heart gallop and her cheeks burn. The question occurred to
her: May not one love, not craving to be beloved? Such a love does not
sap our pride, but supports it; increases rather than diminishes our
noble self-esteem. To attain such a love the martyrs writhed up to the
crown of saints. For a while Cecilia revelled in the thought that she
could love in this most saint-like manner. How they fled, the sordid
ideas of him which accused him of the world’s one passion, and were
transferred to her own bosom in reproach that she should have imagined
them existing in his! He talked simply and sweetly of his defeat, of
time wasted away from the canvass, of loss of money: and he had little
to spare, he said. The water-colour drawing interested him. He said he
envied her that power of isolation, and the eye for beauty in every
season. She opened a portfolio of Mr. Tuckham’s water-colour drawings
in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and he was to
be excused for not caring to look through them. His remark, that they
seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust, she thought, smiling to
think of the critic criticized. His wonderment that a young man like
his Lancastrian cousin should be “an unmitigated Tory” was perhaps
natural.

Cecilia said, “Yet I cannot discern in him a veneration for
aristocracy.” “That’s not wanted for modern Toryism,” said Nevil. “One
may venerate old families when they show the blood of the founder, and
are not dead wood. I do. And I believe the blood of the founder, though
the man may have been a savage and a robber, had in his day finer
elements in it than were common. But let me say at a meeting that I
respect true aristocracy, I hear a growl and a hiss beginning: why?
Don’t judge them hastily: because the people have seen the aristocracy
opposed to the cause that was weak, and only submitting to it when it
commanded them to resist at their peril; clinging to traditions, and
not anywhere standing for humanity: much more a herd than the people
themselves. Ah! well, we won’t talk of it now. I say that is no
aristocracy, if it does not head the people in virtue—military,
political, national: I mean the qualities required by the times for
leadership. I won’t bother you with my ideas now. I love to see you
paint-brush in hand.”

Her brush trembled on the illumination of a scarlet maple. “In this
country we were not originally made free and equal by decree, Nevil.”

“No,” said he, “and I cast no blame on our farthest ancestors.”

It struck her that this might be an outline of a reply to Mr. Austin.

“So you have been thinking over it?” he asked.

“Not to conclusions,” she said, trying to retain in her mind the
evanescent suggestiveness of his previous remark, and vexed to find
herself upon nothing but a devious phosphorescent trail there.

Her forehead betrayed the unwonted mental action. He cried out for
pardon. “What right have I to bother you? I see it annoys you. The
truth is, I came for peace. I think of you when they talk of English
homes.”

She felt then that he was comparing her home with another, a foreign
home. After he had gone she felt that there had been a comparison of
two persons. She remembered one of his observations: “Few women seem to
have courage”; when his look at her was for an instant one of scrutiny
or calculation. Under a look like that we perceive that we are being
weighed. She had no clue to tell her what it signified.

Glorious and solely glorious love, that has risen above emotion, quite
independent of craving! That is to be the bird of upper air, poised on
his wings. It is a home in the sky. Cecilia took possession of it
systematically, not questioning whether it would last; like one who is
too enamoured of the habitation to object to be a tenant-at-will. If it
was cold, it was in recompense immeasurably lofty, a star-girdled
place; and dwelling in it she could avow to herself the secret which
was now working self-deception, and still preserve her pride unwounded.
Her womanly pride, she would have said in vindication of it: but
Cecilia Halkett’s pride went far beyond the merely womanly.

Thus she was assisted to endure a journey down to Wales, where Nevil
would surely not be. She passed a Winter without seeing him. She
returned to Mount Laurels from London at Easter, and went on a visit to
Steynham, and back to London, having sight of him nowhere, still firm
in the thought that she loved ethereally, to bless, forgive, direct,
encourage, pray for him, impersonally. She read certain speeches
delivered by Nevil at assemblies of Liberals or Radicals, which were
reported in papers in the easy irony of the style of here and there a
sentence, here and there a summary: salient quotations interspersed
with running abstracts: a style terrible to friends of the speaker so
reported, overwhelming if they differ in opinion: yet her charity was a
match for it. She was obliged to have recourse to charity, it should be
observed. Her father drew her attention to the spectacle of R. C. S.
Nevil Beauchamp, Commander R.N., fighting those reporters with letters
in the newspapers, and the dry editorial comment flanked by three stars
on the left. He was shocked to see a gentleman writing such letters to
the papers. “But one thing hangs on another,” said he.

“But you seem angry with Nevil, papa,” said she.

“I do hate a turbulent, restless fellow, my dear,” the colonel burst
out.

“Papa, he has really been unfairly reported.”

Cecilia laid three privately-printed full reports of Commander
Beauchamp’s speeches (very carefully corrected by him) before her
father.

He suffered his eye to run down a page. “Is it possible you read
this?—this trash!—dangerous folly, I call it.”

Cecilia’s reply, “In the interests of justice, I do,” was meant to
express her pure impartiality. By a toleration of what is detested we
expose ourselves to the keenness of an adverse mind.

“Does he write to you, too?” said the colonel.

She answered: “Oh, no; I am not a politician.”

“He seems to have expected you to read those tracts of his, though.”

“Yes, I think he would convert me if he could,” said Cecilia.

“Though you’re not a politician.”

“He relies on the views he delivers in public, rather than on writing
to persuade; that was my meaning, papa.”

“Very well,” said the colonel, not caring to show his anxiety.

Mr. Tuckham dined with them frequently in London. This gentleman
betrayed his accomplishments one by one. He sketched, and was no
artist; he planted, and was no gardener; he touched the piano neatly,
and was no musician; he sang, and he had no voice. Apparently he tried
his hand at anything, for the privilege of speaking decisively upon all
things. He accompanied the colonel and his daughter on a day’s
expedition to Mrs. Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames, and they agreed that
he shone to great advantage in her society. Mrs. Beauchamp said she had
seen her great-nephew Nevil, but without a comment on his conduct or
his person; grave silence. Reflecting on it, Cecilia grew indignant at
the thought that Mr. Tuckham might have been acting a sinister part.
Mrs. Beauchamp alluded to a newspaper article of her favourite
great-nephew Blackburn, written, Cecilia knew through her father, to
controvert some tremendous proposition of Nevil’s. _That_ was writing,
Mrs. Beauchamp said. “I am not in the habit of fearing a conflict, so
long as we have stout defenders. I rather like it,” she said.

The colonel entertained Mrs. Beauchamp, while Mr. Tuckham led Miss
Halkett over the garden. Cecilia considered that his remarks upon Nevil
were insolent.

“Seriously, Miss Halkett, to take him at his best, he is a very good
fellow, I don’t doubt; I am told so; and a capital fellow among men, a
good friend and not a bad boon-fellow, and for that matter, the
smoking-room is a better test than the drawing-room; all he wants is
emphatically school—school—school. I have recommended the simple
iteration of that one word in answer to him at his meetings, and the
printing of it as a foot-note to his letters.”

Cecilia’s combative spirit precipitated her to say, “I hear the mob in
it shouting Captain Beauchamp down.”

“Ay,” said Mr. Tuckham, “it would be setting the mob to shout wisely at
last.”

“The mob is a wild beast.”

“Then we should hear wisdom coming out of the mouth of the wild beast.”

“Men have the phrase, ‘fair play.’”

“Fair play, I say, is not applicable to a man who deliberately goes
about to stir the wild beast. He is laughed at, plucked, hustled, and
robbed, by those who deafen him with their ‘plaudits’—their roars. Did
you see his advertisement of a great-coat, lost at some rapscallion
gathering down in the North, near my part of the country? A great-coat
and a packet of letters. He offers a reward of L10. But that’s honest
robbery compared with the bleeding he’ll get.”

“Do you know Mr. Seymour Austin?” Miss Halkett asked him.

“I met him once at your father’s table. Why?”

“I think you would like to listen to him.”

“Yes, my fault is not listening enough,” said Mr. Tuckham.

He was capable of receiving correction.

Her father told her he was indebted to Mr. Tuckham past payment in
coin, for services rendered by him on a trying occasion among the
miners in Wales during the first spring month. “I dare say he can speak
effectively to miners,” Cecilia said, outvying the contemptuous young
man in superciliousness, but with effort and not with satisfaction.

She left London in July, two days before her father could be induced to
return to Mount Laurels. Feverish, and strangely subject to caprices
now, she chose the longer way round by Sussex, and alighted at the
station near Steynham to call on Mrs. Culling, whom she knew to be at
the Hall, preparing it for Mr. Romfrey’s occupation. In imitation of
her father she was Rosamund’s fast friend, though she had never quite
realized her position, and did not thoroughly understand her. Would it
not please her father to hear that she had chosen the tedious route for
the purpose of visiting this lady, whose champion he was?

So she went to Steynham, and for hours she heard talk of no one, of
nothing, but her friend Nevil. Cecilia was on her guard against
Rosamund’s defence of his conduct in France. The declaration that there
had been no misbehaviour at all could not be accepted; but the news of
Mr. Romfrey’s having installed Nevil in Holdesbury to manage that
property, and of his having mooted to her father the question of an
alliance between her and Nevil, was wonderful. Rosamund could not say
what answer her father had made: hardly favourable, Cecilia supposed,
since he had not spoken of the circumstance to her. But Mr. Romfrey’s
influence with him would certainly be powerful.

It was to be assumed, also, that Nevil had been consulted by his uncle.
Rosamund said full-heartedly that this alliance had for years been her
life’s desire, and then she let the matter pass, nor did she once loop
at Cecilia searchingly, or seem to wish to probe her. Cecilia disagreed
with Rosamund on an insignificant point in relation to something Mr.
Romfrey and Captain Baskelett had done, and, as far as she could
recollect subsequently, there was a packet of letters, or a pocket-book
containing letters of Nevil’s which he had lost, and which had been
forwarded to Mr. Romfrey; for the pocket-book was originally his, and
his address was printed inside. But among these letters was one from
Dr. Shrapnel to Nevil: a letter so horrible that Rosamund frowned at
the reminiscence of it, holding it to be too horrible for the quotation
of a sentence. She owned she had forgotten any three consecutive words.
Her known dislike of Captain Baskelett, however, was insufficient to
make her see that it was unjustifiable in him to run about London
reading it, with comments of the cruellest. Rosamund’s greater
detestation of Dr. Shrapnel blinded her to the offence committed by the
man she would otherwise have been very ready to scorn. So small did the
circumstance appear to Cecilia, notwithstanding her gentle opposition
at the time she listened to it, that she never thought of mentioning it
to her father, and only remembered it when Captain Baskelett, with Lord
Palmet in his company, presented himself at Mount Laurels, and proposed
to the colonel to read to him “a letter from that scoundrelly old
Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp, upon women, wives, thrones, republics,
British loyalty, et cætera,”—an et cætera that rolled a series of
tremendous reverberations down the list of all things held precious by
freeborn Englishmen.

She would have prevented the reading. But the colonel would have it.

“Read on,” said he. “Mr. Romfrey saw no harm.”

Captain Baskelett held up Dr. Shrapnel’s letter to Commander Beauchamp,
at about half a yard’s distance on the level of his chin, as a
big-chested singer in a concert-room holds his music-scroll.




CHAPTER XXIX.
THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP


Before we give ear to the recital of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter to his pupil
in politics by the mouth of Captain Baskelett, it is necessary to
defend this gentleman, as he would handsomely have defended himself,
from the charge that he entertained ultimate designs in regard to the
really abominable scrawl, which was like a child’s drawing of ocean
with here and there a sail capsized, and excited his disgust almost as
much as did the contents his great indignation. He was prepared to read
it, and stood blown out for the task, but it was temporarily too much
for him. “My dear Colonel, look at it, I entreat you,” he said, handing
the letter for exhibition, after fixing his eye-glass, and dropping it
in repulsion. The common sentiment of mankind is offended by heterodoxy
in mean attire; for there we see the self-convicted villain—the
criminal caught in the act; we try it and convict it by instinct
without the ceremony of a jury; and so thoroughly aware of our
promptitude in this respect has our arch-enemy become since his
mediaeval disgraces that his particular advice to his followers is now
to scrupulously copy the world in externals; never to appear poorly
clothed, nor to impart deceptive communications in bad handwriting. We
can tell black from white, and our sagacity has taught him a lesson.

Colonel Halkett glanced at the detestable penmanship. Lord Palmet did
the same, and cried, “Why, it’s worse than mine!”

Cecilia had protested against the reading of the letter, and she
declined to look at the writing. She was entreated, adjured to look, in
Captain Baskelett’s peculiarly pursuing fashion; a “nay, but you
shall,” that she had been subjected to previously, and would have
consented to run like a schoolgirl to escape from.

To resume the defence of him: he was a man incapable of forming plots,
because his head would not hold them. He was an impulsive man, who
could impale a character of either sex by narrating fables touching
persons of whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid
of malice, unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so
aggrieved that his original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new
circumstances and be the parent of a line of successive impulses, in
the main resembling an extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed
back with fondness, all the while protesting sincerely his perfect
innocence of anything of the kind. Circumstances will often interwind
with the moods of simply irritated men. In the present instance he
could just perceive what might immediately come of his reading out of
this atrocious epistle wherein Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the
dangling puppet of a mountebank wire-pulley, infidel, agitator,
leveller, and scoundrel. Cognizant of Mr. Romfrey’s overtures to
Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming woman in the house at
Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a friendly and good thing
to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett know Mr. Nevil through a
bit of his correspondence. This, then, was a matter of business and
duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of his, way to call at
Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not to alarm the
heiress.

A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the
shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an
heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament
and the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride,
all the habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by
that stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her
father with the mere lowering of her eyelids. Conceive the highest
bidder at an auction hearing the article announce that it will not have
_him!_ Captain Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:—the
girl could not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he
requested the world to partake of his astonishment. Chronicles of the
season in London informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom
the gates were shut. She could hardly be thinking of Nevil? However,
let the epistle be read. “Now for the Shrapnel shot,” he nodded finally
to Colonel Halkett, expanded his bosom, or natural cuirass, as
before-mentioned, and was vocable above the common pitch:—

“‘MY BRAVE BEAUCHAMP,—On with your mission, and never a summing of
results in hand, nor thirst for _prospects_, nor counting upon
harvests; for seed sown in faith day by day is the nightly harvest of
the soul, and with the soul we work. With the soul we see.’”

Captain Baskelett intervened: “Ahem! I beg to observe that this
delectable rubbish is underlined by old Nevil’s pencil.” He promised to
do a little roaring whenever it occurred, and continued with ghastly
false accentuation, an intermittent sprightliness and depression of
tone in the wrong places.

“‘The soul,’ et cætera. Here we are! ‘Desires to realize our gains are
akin to the passion of usury; these are tricks of the usurer to grasp
his gold in act and imagination. Have none of them. Work at the
people!’ —_At_ them, remark!—‘Moveless do they seem to you? Why, so is
the earth to the sowing husbandman, and though we cannot forecast a
reaping season, we have in history durable testification that our
seasons come in the souls of men, yea, as a planet that we have set in
motion, and faster and faster are we spinning it, and firmer and firmer
shall we set it to regularity of revolution. _That means
life!_’—Shrapnel roars: you will have Nevil in a minute.—‘Recognize
that now we have bare life; at best for the bulk of men the Saurian
lizard’s broad back soaking and roasting in primeval slime; or say, in
the so-called teachers of men, as much of life as pricks the frog in
March to stir and yawn, and up on a flaccid leap that rolls him over
some three inches nearer to the ditchwater besought by his instinct.’

“I ask you, did you ever hear? The flaccid frog! But on we go.”

“‘Professors, prophets, masters, each hitherto has had his creed and
system to offer, good mayhap for the term; and each has put it forth
for the truth everlasting, to drive the dagger to the heart of time,
and put the axe to human growth!—that one circle of wisdom issuing of
the experience and needs of their day, should act the despot over all
other circles for ever!—so where at first light shone to light the
yawning frog to his wet ditch, there, with the necessitated revolution
of men’s minds in the course of ages, _darkness radiates_.’

“That’s old Nevil. Upon my honour, I haven’t a notion of what it all
means, and I don’t believe the old rascal Shrapnel has himself. And
pray be patient, my dear colonel. You will find him practical
presently. I’ll skip, if you tell me to. Darkness radiates, does it!

“‘The creed that rose in heaven sets below; and where we had an angel
we have claw-feet and fangs. Ask how that is! The creed is much what it
was when the followers diverged it from the Founder. But humanity is
not _where_ it was when that creed was food and guidance. Creeds will
not die not fighting. We cannot root them up out of us without blood.’

“He threatens blood!—‘Ours, my Beauchamp, is the belief that humanity
advances beyond the limits of creeds, is to be tied to none. We
reverence the Master in his teachings; we behold the limits of him in
his creed— and that is not his work. We truly are his disciples, who
see how far it was in him to do service; not they that made of his
creed a strait-jacket for humanity. So, in our prayers we dedicate the
world to God, not calling him great for a title, no—showing him we know
him great in a limitless world, lord of a truth we tend to, have not
grasped. I say Prayer is good. I counsel it to you again and again: in
joy, in sickness of heart. The infidel will not pray; the creed-slave
prays to the image in his box.’”

“I’ve had enough!” Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

“‘We,’” Captain Baskelett put out his hand for silence with an
ineffable look of entreaty, for here was Shrapnel’s hypocrisy in full
bloom: “‘We make prayer a part of us, praying for no gifts, no
interventions; through the faith in prayer opening the soul to the
undiscerned. And take this, my Beauchamp, for the good in prayer, that
it makes us repose on the unknown with confidence, makes us flexible to
change, makes us ready for revolution—for life, then! He who has the
fountain of prayer in him will not complain of hazards. Prayer is the
recognition of laws; the soul’s exercise and source of strength; its
thread of conjunction with them. Prayer for an object is the cajolery
of an idol; the resource of superstition. There you misread it,
Beauchamp. We that fight the living world must have the universal for
succour of the truth in it. Cast forth the soul in prayer, you meet the
effluence of the outer truth, you join with the creative elements
giving breath to you; and that crust of habit which is the soul’s tomb;
and custom, the soul’s tyrant; and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks
us in a crater; and fear, which plucks the feathers from the wings of
the soul and sits it naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing
of a common hodman’s foot above sounds like the king of terrors
coming,—you are free of them, you live in the day and for the future,
by this exercise and discipline of the soul’s faith. Me it keeps young
everlastingly, like the fountain of...’”

“I say I cannot sit and hear any more of it!” exclaimed the colonel,
chafing out of patience.

Lord Palmet said to Miss Halkett: “Isn’t it like what we used to
remember of a sermon?”

Cecilia waited for her father to break away, but Captain Baskelett had
undertaken to skip, and was murmuring in sing-song some of the phrases
that warned him off:

“‘History—Bible of Humanity;... Permanency—enthusiast’s dream—despot’s
aim—clutch of dead men’s fingers in live flesh... Man animal; man
angel; man rooted; man winged’:... Really, all this is too bad. Ah!
here we are: ‘At them with outspeaking, Beauchamp!’ Here we are,
colonel, and you will tell me whether you think it treasonable or not.
‘At them,’ et cætera: ‘We have signed no convention to respect
their’—he speaks of Englishmen, Colonel Halkett—‘their passive
idolatries; a people with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship,
but a word of dissent holds you up to execration; and only for the
freedom won in foregone days their hate would be active. _As we have
them in their present stage_,’—old Nevil’s mark—‘We are not parties to
the tacit agreement to fill our mouths and shut our eyes. We speak
because it is better they be roused to lapidate us than soused in their
sty, with none to let them hear they live like swine, craving only not
to be disturbed at the trough. The religion of this vast English
middle-class ruling the land is Comfort. It is their central thought;
their idea of necessity; their sole aim. Whatsoever ministers to
Comfort, seems to belong to it, pretends to support it, they yield
their passive worship to. Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush.
There you get at their point of unity. They will pay for the security
of Comfort, calling it national worship, or national defence, if too
much money is not subtracted from the means of individual comfort: if
too much foresight is not demanded for the comfort of their brains.
Have at them there. Speak. Moveless as you find them, they are not yet
all gross clay, and I say again, the true word spoken has its chance of
somewhere alighting and striking root. Look not to that. Seeds perish
in nature; good men fail. Look to the truth in you, and deliver it,
with no afterthought of hope, for hope is dogged by dread; we give our
courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope. Meditate on that
transaction. Hope is for boys and girls, to whom nature is kind. For
men to hope is to tremble. Let prayer—the soul’s overflow, the heart’s
resignation—supplant it...’

“Pardon, colonel; I forgot to roar, but old Nevil marks all down that
page for encomium,” said Captain Baskelett. “Oh! here we are. English
loyalty is the subject. Now, pray attend to this, colonel. Shrapnel
communicates to Beauchamp that if ten Beauchamps were spouting over the
country without intermission he might condescend to hope. So on—to
British loyalty. We are, so long as our sovereigns are well-conducted
persons, and we cannot unseat them—observe; he is eminently explicit,
the old traitor!—we are to submit to the outward forms of respect, but
we are frankly to say we are Republicans; he has the impudence to swear
that England is a Republican country, and calls our thoroughgoing
loyalty—yours and mine, colonel—disloyalty. Hark: ‘Where kings lead, it
is to be supposed they are wanted. Service is the noble office on
earth, and where kings do service let them take the first honours of
the State: but’—hark at this—‘the English middle-class, which has
absorbed the upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the
lower, will have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you
see on a confectioner’s twelfth-cake.’”

“The man deserves hanging!” said Colonel Halkett.

“Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout:
‘This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy. Pass the lords and squires;
they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or
new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river
rises, or a man speaks;—that comes of age or aping age: their hearts
are in their holdings! For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is
the shopkeeper’s loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual
sum of his net profits. It is now at high tide. It will last with the
prosperity of our commerce.’—The insolent old vagabond!—‘Let commercial
disasters come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds
of thousands, and howling down questioners! In a day of bankruptcies,
how much would you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering under
deprivation of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared? Ay, my
Beauchamp,’—the most offensive thing to me is that ‘my Beauchamp,’ but
old Nevil has evidently given himself up hand and foot to this
ruffian—‘ay, when you reflect that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e.
the people, the unmoneyed class, which knows not Comfort, tastes not of
luxuries, is the main component of their noisy frigid loyalty, and that
the people are not with them but against, and yet that the people might
be won by visible forthright kingly service to a loyalty outdoing
theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that the people verily thirst to love
and reverence; and _that their love is the only love worth having_,
because it is disinterested love, and endures, and takes heat in
adversity,—reflect on it and wonder at the inversion of things! So with
a Church. It lives if it is at home with the poor. In the arms of
enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in vestments—vestments!
flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their
political truncheons—to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not
much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They
call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy and Cunning go to
form a word. _Deadmanship_, I call it.’—To quote my uncle the baron,
this is lunatic dribble!—‘Parsons and princes are happy with the homage
of this huge passive fleshpot class. It is enough for them. Why not?
The taxes are paid and the tithes. Whilst commercial prosperity
lasts!’”

Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.

“‘Meanwhile, note this: the people are the Power to come. Oppressed,
unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the tides of the
market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve, committed to the
shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of Capital—the whited name
for old accursed Mammon: and of all the ranked and black-uniformed host
no pastor to come out of the association of shepherds, and proclaim
before heaven and man the primary claim of their cause; they are, I
say, the power, worth the seduction of by another Power not mighty in
England now: and likely in time to set up yet another Power not
existing in England now. What if a passive comfortable clergy hand them
over to men on the models of Irish pastors, who will succour, console,
enfold, champion them? what if, when they have learnt to use their
majority, sick of deceptions and the endless pulling of interests, they
raise ONE representative to force the current of action with an
authority as little fictitious as their preponderance of numbers? The
despot and the priest! There I see _our_ danger, Beauchamp. You and I
and some dozen labour to tie and knot them to manliness. We are few;
they are many and weak. Rome offers them real comfort in return for
their mites in coin, and—poor souls! mites in conscience, many of them.
A Tyrant offers them to be directly their friend. Ask, Beauchamp, why
they should not have comfort for pay as well as the big round—’”
Captain Baskelett stopped and laid the letter out for Colonel Halkett
to read an unmentionable word, shamelessly marked by Nevil’s
pencil:—‘_belly-class!_’ Ask, too, whether the comfort they wish for is
not approaching divine compared with the stagnant fleshliness of that
fat shopkeeper’s Comfort.

“‘Warn the people of this. Ay, warn the clergy. It is not only the poor
that are caught by ranters. Endeavour to make those accommodating
shepherds understand that they stand a chance of losing rich as well as
poor! It should awaken them. The helpless poor and the uneasy rich are
alike open to the seductions of Romish priests and intoxicated ranters.
I say so it will be if that band of forty thousand go on slumbering and
nodding. They walk in a dream. The flesh is a dream. The soul only is
life.’

“Now for you, colonel.

“‘No extension of the army—no! A thousand times no. Let India go, then!
Good for India that we hold India? Ay, good: but not at such a cost as
an extra tax, or compulsory service of our working man. If India is to
be held for the good of India, throw open India to the civilized
nations, that they help us in a task that overstrains us. At present
India means utter perversion of the policy of England. Adrift India!
rather than England red-coated. We dissent, Beauchamp! For by-and-by.’

“That is,” Captain Baskelett explained, “by-and-by Shrapnel will have
old Nevil fast enough.”

“Is there more of it?” said Colonel Halkett, flapping his forehead for
coolness.

“The impudence of this dog in presuming to talk about India!—eh,
colonel? Only a paragraph or two more: I skip a lot.... Ah! here we
are.” Captain Baskelett read to himself and laughed in derision: “He
calls our Constitution a compact unsigned by the larger number involved
in it. What’s this? ‘A band of dealers in _fleshpottery_.’ Do you
detect a gleam of sense? He underscores it. Then he comes to this”:
Captain Baskelett requested Colonel Halkett to read for himself: “The
stench of the trail of Ego in our History.”

The colonel perused it with an unsavoury expression of his features,
and jumped up.

“Oddly, Mr. Romfrey thought this rather clever,” said Captain
Baskelett, and read rapidly: “‘Trace the course of Ego for them: first
the king who conquers and can govern. In his egoism he dubs him holy;
his family is of a selected blood; he makes the crown hereditary—Ego.
Son by son the shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary
Crown, no hereditary qualities. The Barons rise. They in turn hold
sway, and for their order—Ego. The traders overturn them: each class
rides the classes under it while it can. It is ego—ego, the fountain
cry, origin, sole source of war! Then death to ego, I say! If those
traders had ruled for other than ego, power might have rested with them
on broad basis enough to carry us forward for centuries. The workmen
have ever been too anxious _to be ruled_. Now comes on the workman’s
era. Numbers win in the end: proof of small wisdom in the world.
Anyhow, with numbers there is rough nature’s wisdom and justice. With
numbers ego is inter-dependent and dispersed; it is universalized. Yet
these may require correctives. If so, they will have it in a series of
despots and revolutions that toss, mix, and bind the classes together:
despots, revolutions; _panting alternations of the quickened heart of
humanity:_’ marked by our friend Nevil in notes of admiration.”

“Mad as the writer,” groaned Colonel Halkett. “Never in my life have I
heard such stuff.”

“Stay, colonel; here’s Shrapnel defending Morality and Society,” said
Captain Baskelett.

Colonel Halkett vowed he was under no penal law to listen, and would
not; but Captain Baskelett persuaded him: “Yes, here it is: I give you
my word. Apparently old Nevil has been standing up for every man’s
right to run away with... Yes, really! I give you my word; and here we
have Shrapnel insisting on respect for the marriage laws. Do hear this;
here it is in black and white:—‘Society is our one tangible gain, our
one roofing and flooring in a world of most uncertain structures built
on morasses. Toward the laws that support it men hopeful of progress
give their adhesion. If it is martyrdom, what then? Let the martyrdom
be. Contumacy is animalism. And attend to me,’ says Shrapnel, ‘the
truer the love the readier for sacrifice! A thousand times yes.
Rebellion against Society, and advocacy of Humanity, run counter. Tell
me Society is the whited sepulchre, that it is blotched, hideous,
hollow: and I say, add not another disfigurement to it; add to the
purification of it. And you, if you answer, what can only one? I say
that is the animal’s answer, and applies also to politics, where the
question, _what can one?_ put in the relapsing tone, shows the country
decaying in the individual. Society is the protection of the weaker,
therefore a shield of women, who are our temple of civilization, to be
kept sacred; and he that loves a woman will assuredly esteem and pity
her sex, and not drag her down for another example of their frailty.
Fight this out within you—!’

But you are right, colonel; we have had sufficient. I shall be getting
a democratic orator’s twang, or a crazy parson’s, if I go on much
further. He covers thirty-two pages of letter-paper. The conclusion
is:—‘Jenny sends you her compliments, respects, and best wishes, and
hopes she may see you before she goes to her friend Clara Sherwin and
the General.’”

“Sherwin? Why, General Sherwin’s a perfect gentleman,” Colonel Halkett
interjected; and Lord Palmet caught the other name: “Jenny? That’s Miss
Denham, Jenny Denham; an amazingly pretty girl: beautiful thick brown
hair, real hazel eyes, and walks like a yacht before the wind.”

“Perhaps, colonel, _Jenny_ accounts for the defence of society,” said
Captain Baskelett. “I have no doubt Shrapnel has a scheme for Jenny.
The old communist and socialist!” He folded up the letter: “A curious
composition, is it not, Miss Halkett?”

Cecilia was thinking that he tempted her to be the apologist of even
such a letter.

“One likes to know the worst, and what’s possible,” said the colonel.

After Captain Baskelett had gone, Colonel Halkett persisted in talking
of the letter, and would have impressed on his daughter that the person
to whom the letter was addressed must be partly responsible for the
contents of it. Cecilia put on the argumentative air of a Court of
Equity to discuss the point with him.

“Then you defend that letter?” he cried.

Oh, no: she did not defend the letter; she thought it wicked and
senseless. “But,” said she, “the superior strength of men to women
seems to me to come from their examining all subjects, shrinking from
none. At least, I should not condemn Nevil on account of his
correspondence.”

“We shall see,” said her father, sighing rather heavily. “I must have a
talk with Mr. Romfrey about that letter.”




CHAPTER XXX.
THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL


Captain Baskelett went down from Mount Laurels to Bevisham to arrange
for the giving of a dinner to certain of his chief supporters in the
borough, that they might know he was not obliged literally to sit in
Parliament in order to pay a close attention to their affairs. He had
not distinguished himself by a speech during the session, but he had
stored a political precept or two in his memory, and, as he told Lord
Palmet, he thought a dinner was due to his villains. “The way to manage
your Englishman, Palmet, is to dine him.” As the dinner would decidedly
be dull, he insisted on having Lord Palmet’s company.

They crossed over to the yachting island, where portions of the letter
of Commander Beauchamp’s correspondent were read at the Club, under the
verandah, and the question put, whether a man who held those opinions
had a right to wear his uniform.

The letter was transmitted to Steynham in time to be consigned to the
pocket-book before Beauchamp arrived there on one of his rare visits.
Mr. Romfrey handed him the pocketbook with the frank declaration that
he had read Shrapnel’s letter. “All is fair in war, Sir!” Beauchamp
quoted him ambiguously.

The thieves had amused Mr. Romfrey by their scrupulous honesty in
returning what was useless to them, while reserving the coat: but
subsequently seeing the advertized reward, they had written to claim
it; and, according to Rosamund Culling, he had been so tickled that he
had deigned to reply to them, very briefly, but very comically.

Speaking of the matter with her, Beauchamp said (so greatly was he
infatuated with the dangerous man) that the reading of a letter of Dr.
Shrapnel’s could do nothing but good to any reflecting human creature:
he admitted that as the lost pocket-book was addressed to Mr. Romfrey,
it might have been by mistake that he had opened it, and read the
topmost letter lying open. But he pressed Rosamund to say whether that
one only had been read.

“Only Dr. Shrapnel’s letter,” Rosamund affirmed. “The letter from
Normandy was untouched by him.”

“Untouched by anybody?”

“Unopened, Nevil. You look incredulous.”

“Not if I have your word, ma’am.”

He glanced somewhat contemptuously at his uncle Everard’s anachronistic
notions of what was fair in war.

To prove to him Mr. Romfrey’s affectionate interest in his fortunes,
Rosamund mentioned the overtures which had been made to Colonel Halkett
for a nuptial alliance between the two houses; and she said: “Your
uncle Everard was completely won by your manly way of taking his
opposition to you in Bevisham. He pays for Captain Baskelett, but you
and your fortunes are nearest his heart, Nevil.”

Beauchamp hung silent. His first remark was, “Yes, I want money. I must
have money.” By degrees he seemed to warm to some sense of gratitude.
“It was kind of the baron,” he said.

“He has a great affection for you, Nevil, though you know he spares no
one who chooses to be antagonistic. All that is over. But do you not
second him, Nevil? You admire her? You are not adverse?”

Beauchamp signified the horrid intermixture of yes and no, frowned in
pain of mind, and Walked up and down. “There’s no living woman I admire
so much.”

“She has refused the highest matches.”

“I hold her in every way incomparable.”

“She tries to understand your political ideas, if she cannot quite
sympathize with them, Nevil. And consider how hard it is for a young
English lady, bred in refinement, to understand such things.”

“Yes,” Beauchamp nodded; yes. Well, more’s the pity for me!”

“Ah! Nevil, that fatal Renée!”

“Ma’am, I acquit you of any suspicion of your having read her letter in
this pocket-book. She wishes me to marry. You would have seen it
written here. She wishes it.”

“Fly, clipped wing!” murmured Rosamund, and purposely sent a buzz into
her ears to shut out his extravagant talk of Renée’s friendly wishes.

“How is it you women will not believe in the sincerity of a woman!” he
exclaimed.

“Nevil, I am not alluding to the damage done to your election.”

“To my candidature, ma’am. You mean those rumours, those lies of the
enemy. Tell me how I could suppose you were alluding to them. You bring
them forward now to justify your charge of ‘fatal’ against her. She has
one fault; she wants courage; she has none other, not one that is not
excuseable. We won’t speak of France. What did her father say?”

“Colonel Halkett? I do not know. He and his daughter come here next
week, and the colonel will expect to meet you here. That does not look
like so positive an objection to you?”

“To me personally, no,” said Beauchamp. “But Mr. Romfrey has not told
me that I am to meet them.”

“Perhaps he has not thought it worth while. It is not his way. He has
asked you to come. You and Miss Halkett will be left to yourselves. Her
father assured Mr. Romfrey that he should not go beyond advising her.
His advice might not be exactly favourable to you at present, but if
you sued and she accepted—and she would, I am convinced she would; she
was here with me, talking of you a whole afternoon, and I have
eyes—then he would not oppose the match, and then I should see you
settled, the husband of the handsomest wife and richest heiress in
England.”

A vision of Cecilia swam before him, gracious in stateliness.

Two weeks back Renée’s expression of a wish that he would marry had
seemed to him an idle sentence in a letter breathing of her own
intolerable situation. The marquis had been struck down by illness.
What if she were to be soon suddenly free? But Renée could not be
looking to freedom, otherwise she never would have written the wish for
him to marry. She wrote perhaps hearing temptation whisper; perhaps
wishing to save herself and him by the aid of a tie that would bring
his honour into play and fix his loyalty. He remembered Dr. Shrapnel’s
written words: “_Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run
counter._” They had a stronger effect on him than when he was ignorant
of his uncle Everard’s plan to match him with Cecilia. He took refuge
from them in the image of that beautiful desolate Renée, born to be
beloved, now wasted, worse than trodden under foot—perverted; a life
that looked to him for direction and resuscitation. She was as good as
dead in her marriage. It was impossible for him ever to think of Renée
without the surprising thrill of his enchantment with her, and tender
pity that drew her closer to him by darkening her brightness.

Still a man may love his wife. A wife like Cecilia was not to be
imagined coldly. Let the knot once be tied, it would not be regretted,
could not be; hers was a character, and hers a smile, firmly assuring
him of that.

He told Mr. Romfrey that he should be glad to meet Colonel Halkett and
Cecilia. Business called him to Holdesbury. Thence he betook himself to
Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage to say farewell to Jenny Denham previous to her
departure for Switzerland with her friend Clara Sherwin. She had never
seen a snow-mountain, and it was pleasant to him to observe in her
eyes, which he had known weighing and balancing intellectual questions
more than he quite liked, a childlike effort to conjure in imagination
the glories of the Alps. She appeared very happy, only a little anxious
about leaving Dr. Shrapnel with no one to take care of him for a whole
month. Beauchamp promised he would run over to him from Holdesbury,
only an hour by rail, as often as he could. He envied her the sight of
the Alps, he said, and tried to give her an idea of them, from which he
broke off to boast of a famous little Jersey bull that he had won from
a rival, an American, deeply in love with the bull; cutting him out by
telegraph by just five minutes. The latter had examined the bull in the
island and had passed on to Paris, not suspecting there would be haste
to sell him. Beauchamp, seeing the bull advertized, took him on trust,
galloped to the nearest telegraph station forthwith, and so obtained
possession of him; and the bull was now shipped on the voyage. But for
this precious bull, however, and other business, he would have been
able to spend almost the entire month with Dr. Shrapnel, he said
regretfully. Miss Denham on the contrary did not regret his active
occupation. The story of his rush from the breakfast-table to the
stables, and gallop away to the station, while the American Quaker
gentleman soberly paced down a street in Paris on the same errand, in
invisible rivalry, touched her risible fancy. She was especially
pleased to think of him living in harmony with his uncle—that strange,
lofty, powerful man, who by plot or by violence punished opposition to
his will, but who must be kind at heart, as well as forethoughtful of
his nephew’s good; the assurance of it being, that when the conflict
was at an end he had immediately installed him as manager of one of his
estates, to give his energy play and make him practically useful.

The day before she left home was passed by the three in botanizing,
some miles distant from Bevisham, over sand country, marsh and meadow;
Dr. Shrapnel, deep in the science, on one side of her, and Beauchamp,
requiring instruction in the names and properties of every plant and
simple, on the other. It was a day of summer sweetness, gentle
laughter, conversation, and the happiest homeliness. The politicians
uttered barely a syllable of politics. The dinner basket was emptied
heartily to make way for herb and flower, and at night the expedition
homeward was crowned with stars along a road refreshed by mid-day
thunder-showers and smelling of the rain in the dust, past meadows
keenly scenting, gardens giving out their innermost balm and odour.
Late at night they drank tea in Jenny’s own garden. They separated a
little after two in the morning, when the faded Western light still lay
warm on a bow of sky, and on the level of the East it quickened. Jenny
felt sure she should long for that yesterday when she was among foreign
scenes, even among high Alps—those mysterious eminences which seemed in
her imagination to know of heaven and have the dawn of a new life for
her beyond their peaks.

Her last words when stepping into the railway carriage were to
Beauchamp: “_Will_ you take care of him?” She flung her arms round Dr.
Shrapnel’s neck, and gazed at him under troubled eyelids which seemed
to be passing in review every vision of possible harm that might come
to him during her absence; and so she continued gazing, and at no one
but Dr. Shrapnel until the bend of the line cut him from her sight.
Beauchamp was a very secondary person on that occasion, and he was
unused to being so in the society of women—unused to find himself
entirely eclipsed by their interest in another. He speculated on it,
wondering at her concentrated fervency; for he had not supposed her to
possess much warmth.

After she was fairly off on her journey, Dr. Shrapnel mentioned to
Beauchamp a case of a Steynham poacher, whom he had thought it his duty
to supply with means of defence. It was a common poaching case.

Beauchamp was not surprised that Mr. Romfrey and Dr. Shrapnel should
come to a collision; the marvel was that it had never occurred before,
and Beauchamp said at once: “Oh, my uncle Mr. Romfrey would rather see
them stand their ground than not.” He was disposed to think well of his
uncle. The Jersey bull called him away to Holdesbury.

Captain Baskelett heard of this poaching case at Steynham, where he had
to appear in person when he was in want of cheques, and the Bevisham
dinner furnished an excuse for demanding one. He would have preferred a
positive sum annually. Mr. Romfrey, however, though he wrote his
cheques out like the lord he was by nature, exacted the request for
them; a system that kept the gallant gentleman on his good behaviour,
probably at a lower cost than the regular stipend. In handing the
cheque to Cecil Baskelett, Mr. Romfrey spoke of a poacher, of an old
poaching family called the Dicketts, who wanted punishment and was to
have it, but Mr. Romfrey’s local lawyer had informed him that the man
Shrapnel was, as usual, supplying the means of defence. For his own
part, Mr. Romfrey said, he had no objection to one rascal’s backing
another, and Shrapnel might hit his hardest, only perhaps Nevil might
somehow get mixed up in it, and Nevil was going on quietly now—he had
in fact just done capitally in lassoing with a shot of the telegraph a
splendid little Jersey bull that a Yankee was after: and on the whole
it was best to try to keep him quiet, for he was mad about that man
Shrapnel; Shrapnel was his joss: and if legal knocks came of this
business Nevil might be thinking of interfering: “Or he and I may be
getting to exchange a lot of shindy letters,” Mr. Romfrey said. “Tell
him I take Shrapnel just like any other man, and don’t want to hear
apologies, and I don’t mix him up in it. Tell him if he likes to have
an explanation from me, I’ll give it him when he comes here. You can
run over to Holdesbury the morning after your dinner.”

Captain Baskelett said he would go. He was pleased with his cheque at
the time, but hearing subsequently that Nevil was coming to Steynham to
meet Colonel Halkett and his daughter, he became displeased,
considering it a very silly commission. The more he thought of it the
more ridiculous and unworthy it appeared. He asked himself and Lord
Palmet also why he should have to go to Nevil at Holdesbury to tell him
of circumstances that he would hear of two or three days later at
Steynham. There was no sense in it. The only conclusion for him was
that the scheming woman Culling had determined to bring down every man
concerned in the Bevisham election, and particularly Mr. Romfrey, on
his knees before Nevil. Holdesbury had been placed at his disposal, and
the use of the house in London, which latter would have been extremely
serviceable to Cecil as a place of dinners to the Parliament of Great
Britain in lieu of the speech-making generally expected of Members, and
not so effectively performed. One would think the baron had grown
afraid of old Nevil! He had spoken as if he were.

Cecil railed unreservedly to Lord Palmet against that woman “Mistress
Culling,” as it pleased him to term her, and who could be offended by
his calling her so? His fine wit revelled in bestowing titles that were
at once batteries directed upon persons he hated, and entrenchments for
himself.

At four o’clock on a sultry afternoon he sat at table with his Bevisham
supporters, and pledged them correspondingly in English hotel
champagne, sherry and claret. At seven he was rid of them, but parched
and heated, as he deserved to be, he owned, for drinking the poison. It
would be a good subject for Parliament if he could get it up, he
reflected.

“And now,” said he to Palmet, “we might be crossing over to the Club if
I hadn’t to go about that stupid business to Holdesbury to-morrow
morning. We shall miss the race, or, at least, the start.”

The idea struck him: “Ten to one old Nevil’s with Shrapnel,” and no
idea could be more natural.

“We’ll call on Shrapnel,” said Palmet. “We shall see Jenny Denham. He
gives her out as his niece. Whatever she is she’s a brimming little
beauty. I assure you, Bask, you seldom see so pretty a girl.”

Wine, which has directed men’s footsteps upon more marvellous
adventures, took them to a chemist’s shop for a cooling effervescent
draught, and thence through the town to the address, furnished to them
by the chemist, of Dr. Shrapnel on the common.

Bad wine, which is responsible for the fate of half the dismal bodies
hanging from trees, weltering by rocks, grovelling and bleaching round
the bedabbled mouth of the poet’s Cave of Despair, had rendered Captain
Baskelett’s temper extremely irascible; so when he caught sight of Dr.
Shrapnel walling in his garden, and perceived him of a giant’s height,
his eyes fastened on the writer of the abominable letter with an
exultation peculiar to men having a devil inside them that kicks to be
out. The sun was low, blazing among the thicker branches of the pollard
forest trees, and through sprays of hawthorn. Dr. Shrapnel stopped,
facing the visible master of men, at the end of his walk before he
turned his back to continue the exercise and some discourse he was
holding aloud either to the heavens or bands of invisible men.

“Ahem, Dr. Shrapnel!” He was accosted twice, the second time
imperiously.

He saw two gentlemen outside the garden-hedge.

“I spoke, sir,” said Captain Baskelett.

“I hear you now, sir,” said the doctor, walking in a parallel line with
them.

“I desired to know, sir, if you are Dr. Shrapnel?”

“I am.”

They arrived at the garden-gate.

“You have a charming garden, Dr. Shrapnel,” said Lord Palmet, very
affably and loudly, with a steady observation of the cottage windows.

Dr. Shrapnel flung the gate open.

Lord Palmet raised his hat and entered, crying loudly, “A very charming
garden, upon my word!”

Captain Baskelett followed him, bowing stiffly.

“I am,” he said, “Captain Beauchamp’s cousin. I am Captain Baskelett,
one of the Members for the borough.”

The doctor said, “Ah.”

“I wish to see Captain Beauchamp, sir. He is absent?”

“I shall have him here shortly, sir.”

“Oh, you will have him!” Cecil paused.

“Admirable roses!” exclaimed Lord Palmet.

“You _have_ him, I think,” said Cecil, “if what we hear is correct. I
wish to know, sir, whether the case you are conducting against his
uncle is one you have communicated to Captain Beauchamp. I repeat, I am
here to inquire if he is privy to it. You may hold family ties in
contempt—Now, sir! I request you abstain from provocations with me.”

Dr. Shrapnel had raised his head, with something of the rush of a
rocket, from the stooping posture to listen, and his frown of
non-intelligence might be interpreted as the coming on of the fury
Radicals are prone to, by a gentleman who believed in their constant
disposition to explode.

Cecil made play with a pacifying hand. “We shall arrive at no
understanding unless you are good enough to be perfectly calm. I
repeat, my cousin Captain Beauchamp is more or less at variance with
his family, owing to these doctrines of yours, and your extraordinary
Michael-Scott-the-wizard kind of spell you seem to have cast upon his
common sense as a man of the world. _You have him_, as you say. I do
not dispute it. I have no doubt you have him fast. But here is a case
demanding a certain respect for decency. Pray, if I may ask you, be
still, be quiet, and hear me out if you can. I am accustomed to explain
myself to the comprehension of most men who are at large, and I tell
you candidly I am not to be deceived or diverted from my path by a show
of ignorance.”

“What is your immediate object, sir?” said Dr. Shrapnel, chagrined by
the mystification within him, and a fear that his patience was going.

“Exactly,” Cecil nodded. He was acute enough to see that he had
established the happy commencement of fretfulness in the victim, which
is equivalent to a hook well struck in the mouth of your fish, and with
an angler’s joy he prepared to play his man. “Exactly. I have stated
it. And you ask me. But I really must decline to run over the whole
ground again for you. I am here to fulfil a duty to my family; a highly
disagreeable one to me. I may fail, like the lady who came here
previous to the Election, for the result of which I am assured I ought
to thank your eminently disinterested services. I do. You recollect a
lady calling on you?”

Dr. Shrapnel consulted his memory. “I think I have a recollection of
some lady calling.”

“Oh! you think you have a recollection of some lady calling.”

“Do you mean a lady connected with Captain Beauchamp?”

“A lady connected with Captain Beauchamp. You are not aware of the
situation of the lady?”

“If I remember, she was a kind of confidential housekeeper, some one
said, to Captain Beauchamp’s uncle.”

“A kind of confidential housekeeper! She is recognized in our family as
a lady, sir. I can hardly expect better treatment at your hands than
she met with, but I do positively request you to keep your temper
whilst I am explaining my business to you. Now, sir! what now?”

A trifling breeze will set the tall tree bending, and Dr. Shrapnel did
indeed appear to display the agitation of a full-driving storm when he
was but harassed and vexed.

“Will you mention your business concisely, if you Please?” he said.

“Precisely; it is my endeavour. I supposed I had done so. To be frank,
I would advise you to summon a member of your household, wife,
daughter, housekeeper, any one you like, to whom you may appeal, and I
too, whenever your recollections are at fault.”

“I am competent,” said the doctor.

“But in justice to you,” urged Cecil considerately.

Dr. Shrapnel smoothed his chin hastily. “Have you done?”

“Believe me, the instant I have an answer to my question, I have done.”

“Name your question.”

“Very well, sir. Now mark, I will be plain with you. There is no escape
for you from this. You destroy my cousin’s professional prospects—I
request you to listen—you blast his career in the navy; it was
considered promising. He was a gallant officer and a smart seaman. Very
well. You set him up as a politician, to be knocked down, to a dead
certainty. You set him against his class; you embroil him with his
family ...”

“On all those points,” interposed Dr. Shrapnel, after dashing a hand to
straighten his forelock; but Cecil vehemently entreated him to control
his temper.

“I say you embroil him with his family, you cause him to be in
everlasting altercation with his uncle Mr. Romfrey, materially to his
personal detriment; and the question of his family is one that every
man of sense would apprehend on the spot; for we, you should know,
have, sir, an opinion of Captain Beauchamp’s talents and abilities
forbidding us to think he could possibly be the total simpleton you
make him appear, unless to the seductions of your political
instructions, other seductions were added.... You apprehend me, I am
sure.”

“I don’t,” cried the doctor, descending from his height and swinging
about forlornly.

“Oh! yes, you do; you do indeed, you cannot avoid it; you quite
apprehend me; it is admitted that you take my meaning: I insist on
that. I have nothing to say but what is complimentary of the young
lady, whoever she may turn out to be; bewitching, no doubt; and to
speak frankly, Dr. Shrapnel, I, and I am pretty certain every honest
man would think with me, I take it to be ten times more creditable to
my cousin Captain Beauchamp that he should be under a lady’s influence
than under yours. Come, sir! I ask you. You must confess that a gallant
officer and great admirer of the sex does not look such a donkey if he
is led in silken strings by a beautiful creature. And mark—stop! mark
this, Dr. Shrapnel: I say, to the lady we can all excuse a good deal,
and at the same time you are to be congratulated on first-rate
diplomacy in employing so charming an agent. I wish, I really wish you
did it generally, I assure you: only, mark this—I do beg you to contain
yourself for a minute, if possible—I say, my cousin Captain Beauchamp
is fair game to hunt, and there is no law to prevent the chase, only
you must not expect us to be quiet spectators of your sport; and we
have, I say, undoubtedly a right to lay the case before the lady, and
induce her to be a peace-agent in the family if we can. Very well.”

“This garden is redolent of a lady’s hand,” sighed Palmet, poetical in
his dejection.

“Have you taken too much wine, gentlemen?” said Dr. Shrapnel.

Cecil put this impertinence aside with a graceful sweep of his fingers.
“You attempt to elude me, sir.”

“Not I! You mention some lady.”

“Exactly. A young lady.”

“What is the name of the lady?”

“Oh! You ask the name of the lady. And I too. What is it? I have heard
two or three names.”

“Then you have heard villanies.”

“Denham, Jenny Denham, Miss Jenny Denham,” said Palmet, rejoiced at the
opportunity of trumpeting her name so that she should not fail to hear
it.

“I stake my reputation I have heard her called Shrapnel—Miss Shrapnel,”
said Cecil.

The doctor glanced hastily from one to the other of his visitors. “The
young lady is my ward; I am her guardian,” he said.

Cecil pursed his mouth. “I have heard her called your niece.”

“Niece—ward; she is a lady by birth and education, in manners,
accomplishments, and character; and she is under my protection,” cried
Dr. Shrapnel.

Cecil bowed. “So you are for gentle birth? I forgot you are for
morality too, and for praying; exactly; I recollect. But now let me
tell you, entirely with the object of conciliation, my particular
desire is to see the young lady, in your presence of course, and
endeavour to persuade her, as I have very little doubt I shall do,
assuming that you give me fair play, to exercise her influence, on this
occasion contrary to yours, and save my cousin Captain Beauchamp from a
fresh misunderstanding with his uncle Mr. Romfrey. Now, sir; now,
there!”

“You will not see Miss Denham with my sanction ever,” said Dr.
Shrapnel.

“Oh! Then I perceive your policy. Mark, sir, my assumption was that the
young lady would, on hearing my representations, exert herself to heal
the breach between Captain Beauchamp and his family. You stand in the
way. You treat me as you treated the lady who came here formerly to
wrest your dupe from your clutches. If I mistake not, she saw the young
lady you acknowledge to be your ward.”

Dr. Shrapnel flashed back: “I acknowledge? Mercy and justice! is there
no peace with the man? You walk here to me, I can’t yet guess why, from
a town where I have enemies, and every scandal flies touching me and
mine; and you—” He stopped short to master his anger. He subdued it so
far as to cloak it in an attempt to speak reasoningly, as angry men
sometimes deceive themselves in doing, despite the good maxim for the
wrathful—speak not at all. “See,” said he, “I was never married. My
dear friend dies, and leaves me his child to protect and rear; and
though she bears her father’s name, she is most wrongly and foully made
to share the blows levelled at her guardian. Ay, have at me, all of
you, as much as you will! Hold off from her. Were it true, the
cowardice would be not a whit the smaller. Why, casting a stone like
that, were it the size of a pebble and the weight of a glance, is to
toss the whole cowardly world on an innocent young girl. And why
suspect evil? You talk of that lady who paid me a visit here once, and
whom I treated becomingly, I swear. I never do otherwise. She was a
handsome woman; and what was she? The housekeeper of Captain
Beauchamp’s uncle. Hear me, if you please! To go with the world, I have
as good a right to suppose the worst of an attractive lady in that
situation as you regarding my ward: better warrant for scandalizing, I
think; to go with the world. But now—”

Cecil checked him, ejaculating, “Thank you, Dr. Shrapnel; I thank you
most cordially,” with a shining smile. “Stay, sir! no more. I take my
leave of you. Not another word. No ‘buts’! I recognize that
conciliation is out of the question: you are the natural protector of
poachers, and you will not grant me an interview with the young lady
you call your ward, that I may represent to her, as a person we presume
to have a chance of moving you, how easily—I am determined you shall
hear me, Dr. Shrapnel!—how easily the position of Captain Beauchamp may
become precarious with his uncle Mr. Romfrey. And let me add—‘but’ and
‘but’ me till Doomsday, sir!—if you were—I _do_ hear you, sir, and you
shall hear me—if you were a younger man, I say, I would hold you
answerable to me for your scandalous and disgraceful insinuations.”

Dr. Shrapnel was adroitly fenced and over-shouted. He shrugged,
stuttered, swayed, wagged a bulrush-head, flapped his elbows, puffed
like a swimmer in the breakers, tried many times to expostulate, and
finding the effort useless, for his adversary was copious and
commanding, relapsed, eyeing him as an object far removed.

Cecil rounded one of his perplexingly empty sentences and turned on his
heel.

“War, then!” he said.

“As you like,” retorted the doctor.

“Oh! Very good. Good evening.” Cecil slightly lifted his hat, with the
short projection of the head of the stately peacock in its walk, and
passed out of the garden. Lord Palmet, deeply disappointed and
mystified, went after him, leaving Dr. Shrapnel to shorten his garden
walk with enormous long strides.

“I’m afraid you didn’t manage the old boy,” Palmet complained. “They’re
people who have tea in their gardens; we might have sat down with them
and talked, the best friends in the world, and come again to-morrow
might have called her Jenny in a week. She didn’t show her pretty nose
at any of the windows.”

His companion pooh-poohed and said: “Foh! I’m afraid I permitted myself
to lose my self-command for a moment.”

Palmet sang out an amorous couplet to console himself. Captain
Baskelett respected the poetic art for its magical power over woman’s
virtue, but he disliked hearing verses, and they were ill-suited to
Palmet. He abused his friend roundly, telling him it was contemptible
to be quoting verses. He was irritable still.

He declared himself nevertheless much refreshed by his visit to Dr.
Shrapnel. “We shall have to sleep tonight in this unhallowed town, but
I needn’t be off to Holdesbury in the morning; I’ve done my business. I
shall write to the baron to-night, and we can cross the water to-morrow
in time for operations.”

The letter to Mr. Romfrey was composed before midnight. It was a long
one, and when he had finished it, Cecil remembered that the act of
composition had been assisted by a cigar in his mouth, and Mr. Romfrey
detested the smell of tobacco. There was nothing to be done but to
write the letter over again, somewhat more briefly: it ran thus:

“Thinking to kill two birds at a blow, I went yesterday with Palmet
after the dinner at this place to Shrapnel’s house, where, as I heard,
I stood a chance of catching friend Nevil. The young person living
under the man’s protection was absent, and so was the ‘poor dear
commander,’ perhaps attending on his bull. Shrapnel said he was
expecting him. I write to you to confess I thought myself a cleverer
fellow than I am. I talked to Shrapnel and tried hard to reason with
him. I hope I can keep my temper under ordinary circumstances. You will
understand that it required remarkable restraint when I make you
acquainted with the fact that a lady’s name was introduced, which, as
your representative in relation to her, I was bound to defend from a
gratuitous and scoundrelly aspersion. Shrapnel’s epistle to ‘brave
Beauchamp’ is Church hymnification in comparison with his conversation.
He is indubitably one of the greatest ruffians of his time.

“I took the step with the best of intentions, and all I can plead is
that I am not a diplomatist of sixty. His last word was that he is for
war with us. As far as we men are concerned it is of small importance.
I should think that the sort of society he would scandalize a lady in
is not much to be feared. I have given him his warning. He tops me by
about a head, and loses his temper every two minutes. I could have
drawn him out deliciously if he had not rather disturbed mine. By this
time my equanimity is restored. The only thing I apprehend is your
displeasure with me for having gone to the man. I have done no good,
and it prevents me from running over to Holdesbury to see Nevil, for if
‘shindy letters,’ as you call them, are bad, shindy meetings are worse.
I should be telling him my opinion of Shrapnel, he would be firing out,
I should retort, he would yell, I should snap my fingers, and he would
go into convulsions. I am convinced that a cattle-breeder ought to keep
himself particularly calm. So unless I have further orders from you I
refrain from going.

“The dinner was enthusiastic. I sat three hours among my Commons, they
on me for that length of time—fatiguing, but a duty.”

Cecil subscribed his name with the warmest affection toward his uncle.

The brevity of the second letter had not brought him nearer to the
truth in rescinding the picturesque accessories of his altercation with
Dr. Shrapnel, but it veraciously expressed the sentiments he felt, and
that was the palpable truth for him.

He posted the letter next morning.




CHAPTER XXXI.
SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION


About noon the day following, on board the steam-yacht of the Countess
of Menai, Cecil was very much astonished to see Mr. Romfrey descending
into a boat hard by, from Grancey Lespel’s hired cutter. Steam was up,
and the countess was off for a cruise in the Channel, as it was not a
race-day, but seeing Mr. Romfrey’s hand raised, she spoke to Cecil, and
immediately gave orders to wait for the boat. This lady was a fervent
admirer of the knightly gentleman, and had reason to like him, for he
had once been her champion. Mr. Romfrey mounted the steps, received her
greeting, and beckoned to Cecil. He carried a gold-headed horsewhip
under his arm. Lady Menai would gladly have persuaded him to be one of
her company for the day’s voyage, but he said he had business in
Bevisham, and moving aside with Cecil, put the question to him
abruptly: “What were the words used by Shrapnel?”

“The identical words?” Captain Baskelett asked. He could have tripped
out the words with the fluency of ancient historians relating what
great kings, ambassadors, or Generals may well have uttered on State
occasions, but if you want the identical words, who is to remember them
the day after they have been delivered? He said:

“Well, as for the identical words, I really, and I was tolerably
excited, sir, and upon my honour, the identical words are rather
difficult to....” He glanced at the horsewhip, and pricked by the sight
of it to proceed, thought it good to soften the matter if possible. “I
don’t quite recollect... I wrote off to you rather hastily. I think he
said—but Palmet was there.”

“Shrapnel spoke the words before Lord Palmet?” said Mr. Romfrey
austerely.

Captain Baskelett summoned Palmet to come near, and inquired of him
what he had heard Shrapnel say, suggesting: “He spoke of a handsome
woman for a housekeeper, and all the world knew her character?”

Mr. Romfrey cleared his throat.

“Or knew she had _no_ character,” Cecil pursued in a fit of gratified
spleen, in scorn of the woman. “Don’t you recollect his accent in
pronouncing _housekeeper?_”

The menacing thunder sounded from Mr. Romfrey. He was patient in
appearance, and waited for Cecil’s witness to corroborate the evidence.

It happened (and here we are in one of the circles of small things
producing great consequences, which have inspired diminutive
philosophers with ironical visions of history and the littleness of
man), it happened that Lord Palmet, the humanest of young aristocrats,
well-disposed toward the entire world, especially to women, also to men
in any way related to pretty women, had just lit a cigar, and it was a
cigar that he had been recommended to try the flavour of; and though
he, having his wits about him, was fully aware that shipboard is no
good place for a trial of the delicacy of tobacco in the leaf, he had
begun puffing and sniffing in a critical spirit, and scarcely knew for
the moment what to decide as to this particular cigar. He remembered,
however, Mr. Romfrey’s objection to tobacco. Imagining that he saw the
expression of a profound distaste in that gentleman’s more than usually
serious face, he hesitated between casting the cigar into the water and
retaining it. He decided upon the latter course, and held the cigar
behind his back, bowing to Mr. Romfrey at about a couple of yards
distance, and saying to Cecil, “Housekeeper; yes, I remember hearing
housekeeper. I think so. Housekeeper? yes, oh yes.”

“And handsome housekeepers were doubtful characters,” Captain Baskelett
prompted him.

Palmet laughed out a single “Ha!” that seemed to excuse him for
lounging away to the forepart of the vessel, where he tugged at his
fine specimen of a cigar to rekindle it, and discharged it with a wry
grimace, so delicate is the flavour of that weed, and so adversely ever
is it affected by a breeze and a moist atmosphere. He could then return
undivided in his mind to Mr. Romfrey and Cecil, but the subject was not
resumed in his presence.

The Countess of Menai steamed into Bevisham to land Mr. Romfrey there.
“I can be out in the Channel any day; it is not every day that I see
you,” she said, in support of her proposal to take him over.

They sat together conversing, apart from the rest of the company, until
they sighted Bevisham, when Mr. Romfrey stood up, and a little crowd of
men came round him to enjoy his famous racy talk. Captain Baskelett
offered to land with him. He declined companionship. Dropping her hand
in his, the countess asked him what he had to do in that town, and he
replied, “I have to demand an apology.”

Answering the direct look of his eyes, she said, “Oh, I shall not speak
of it.”

In his younger days, if the rumour was correct, he had done the same on
her account.

He stepped into the boat, and presently they saw him mount the
pier-steps, with the riding-whip under his arm, his head more than
commonly bent, a noticeable point in a man of his tall erect figure.
The ladies and some of the gentlemen thought he was looking
particularly grave, even sorrowful.

Lady Menai inquired of Captain Baskelett whether he knew the nature of
his uncle’s business in Bevisham, the town he despised.

What could Cecil say but no? His uncle had not imparted it to him.

She was flattered in being the sole confidante, and said no more.

The sprightly ingenuity of Captain Baskelett’s mind would have informed
him of the nature of his uncle’s expedition, we may be sure, had he put
it to the trial; for Mr. Romfrey was as plain to read as a rudimentary
sum in arithmetic, and like the tracings of a pedigree-map his
preliminary steps to deeds were seen pointing on their issue in lines
of straight descent. But Cecil could protest that he was not bound to
know, and considering that he was neither bound to know nor to
speculate, he determined to stand on his right. So effectually did he
accomplish the task, that he was frequently surprised during the
evening and the night by the effervescence of a secret exultation
rising imp-like within him, that was, he assured himself, perfectly
unaccountable.




CHAPTER XXXII.
AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP’S FASHION


The day after Mr. Romfrey’s landing in Bevisham a full South-wester
stretched the canvas of yachts of all classes, schooner, cutter and
yawl, on the lively green water between the island and the forest
shore. Cecilia’s noble schooner was sure to be out in such a ringing
breeze, for the pride of it as well as the pleasure. She landed her
father at the Club steps, and then bore away Eastward to sight a cutter
race, the breeze beginning to stiffen. Looking back against sun and
wind, she saw herself pursued by a saucy little 15-ton craft that had
been in her track since she left the Otley river before noon, dipping
and straining, with every inch of sail set; as mad a stern chase as
ever was witnessed: and who could the man at the tiller, clad cap-A-pie
in tarpaulin, be? She led him dancing away, to prove his resoluteness
and laugh at him. She had the powerful wings, and a glory in them
coming of this pursuit: her triumph was delicious, until the occasional
sparkle of the tarpaulin was lost, the small boat appeared a motionless
object far behind, and all ahead of her exceedingly dull, though the
race hung there and the crowd of sail.

Cecilia’s transient flutter of coquettry created by the animating air
and her queenly flight was over. She fled splendidly and she came back
graciously. But he refused her open hand, as it were. He made as if to
stand across her tack, and, reconsidering it, evidently scorned his
advantage and challenged the stately vessel for a beat up against the
wind. It was as pretty as a Court minuet. But presently Cecilia stood
too far on one tack, and returning to the centre of the channel, found
herself headed by seamanship. He waved an ironical salute with his
sou’wester. Her retort consisted in bringing her vessel to the wind,
and sending a boat for him.

She did it on the impulse; had she consulted her wishes she would
rather have seen him at his post, where he seemed in his element,
facing the spray and cunningly calculating to get wind and tide in his
favour. Partly with regret she saw him, stripped of his tarpaulin, jump
into her boat, as though she had once more to say farewell to sailor
Nevil Beauchamp; farewell the bright youth, the hero, the true servant
of his country!

That feeling of hers changed when he was on board. The stirring cordial
day had put new breath in him.

“Should not the flag be dipped?” he said, looking up at the peak, where
the white flag streamed.

“Can you really mistake compassion for defeat?” said she, with a smile.

“Oh! before the wind of course I hadn’t a chance.”

“How could you be so presumptuous as to give chase? And who has lent
you that little cutter?”

Beauchamp had hired her for a month, and he praised her sailing, and
pretended to say that the race was not always to the strong in a stiff
breeze.

“But in point” of fact I was bent on trying how my boat swims, and had
no idea of overhauling you. To-day our salt-water lake is as fine as
the Mediterranean.”

“Omitting the islands and the Mediterranean colour, it is. I have often
told you how I love it. I have landed papa at the Club. Are you aware
that we meet you at Steynham the day after to-morrow?”

“Well, we can ride on the downs. The downs between three and four of a
summer’s morning are as lovely as anything in the world. They have the
softest outlines imaginable... and remind me of a friend’s upper lip
when she deigns to smile.”

“Is one to rise at that hour to behold the effect? And let me remind
you further, Nevil, that the comparison of nature’s minor work beside
her mighty is an error, if you will be poetical.”

She cited a well-known instance of degradation in verse.

But a young man who happens to be intimately acquainted with a certain
“dark eye in woman” will not so lightly be brought to consider that the
comparison of tempestuous night to the flashing of those eyes of hers
topples the scene headlong from grandeur. And if Beauchamp remembered
rightly, the scene was the Alps at night.

He was prepared to contest Cecilia’s judgement. At that moment the
breeze freshened and the canvas lifted: from due South the yacht swung
her sails to drive toward the West, and Cecilia’s face and hair came
out golden in the sunlight. Speech was difficult, admiration natural,
so he sat beside her, admiring in silence.

She said a good word for the smartness of his little yacht.

“This is my first trial of her,” said Beauchamp. “I hired her chiefly
to give Dr. Shrapnel a taste of salt air. I’ve no real right to be
idling about. His ward Miss Denham is travelling in Switzerland; the
dear old man is alone, and not quite so well as I should wish. Change
of scene will do him good. I shall land him on the French coast for a
couple of days, or take him down Channel.”

Cecilia gazed abstractedly at a passing schooner.

“He works too hard,” said Beauchamp.

“Who does?”

“Dr. Shrapnel.”

Some one else whom we have heard of works too hard, and it would be
happy for mankind if he did not.

Cecilia named the schooner; an American that had beaten our crack
yachts. Beauchamp sprang up to spy at the American.

“That’s the _Corinne_, is she!”

Yankee craftiness on salt water always excited his respectful attention
as a spectator.

“And what is the name of your boat, Nevil?”

“The fool of an owner calls her the _Petrel_. It’s not that I’m
superstitious, but to give a boat a name of bad augury to sailors
appears to me... however, I’ve argued it with him and I will have her
called the _Curlew_. Carrying Dr. Shrapnel and me, _Petrel_ would be
thought the proper title for her—isn’t that your idea?”

He laughed and she smiled, and then he became overcast with his
political face, and said, “I hope—I believe—you will alter your opinion
of him. Can it be an opinion when it’s founded on nothing? You know
really nothing of him. I have in my pocket what I believe would alter
your mind about him entirely. I do think so; and I think so because I
feel you would appreciate his deep sincerity and real nobleness.”

“Is it a talisman that you have, Nevil?”

“No, it’s a letter.”

Cecilia’s cheeks took fire.

“I should so much like to read it to you,” said he.

“Do not, please,” she replied with a dash of supplication in her voice.

“Not the whole of it—an extract here and there? I want you so much to
understand him.”

“I am sure I should not.”

“Let me try you!”

“Pray do not.”

“Merely to show you...”

“But, Nevil, I do not wish to understand him.”

“But you have only to listen for a few minutes, and I want you to know
what good reason I have to reverence him as a teacher and a friend.”

Cecilia looked at Beauchamp with wonder. A confused recollection of the
contents of the letter declaimed at Mount Laurels in Captain
Baskelett’s absurd sing-song, surged up in her mind revoltingly. She
signified a decided negative. Something of a shudder accompanied the
expression of it.

But he as little as any member of the Romfrey blood was framed to let
the word no stand quietly opposed to him. And the no that a woman
utters! It calls for wholesome tyranny. Those old, those hoar-old
duellists, Yes and No, have rarely been better matched than in
Beauchamp and Cecilia. For if he was obstinate in attack she had great
resisting power. Twice to listen to that letter was beyond her
endurance. Indeed it cast a shadow on him and disfigured him; and when,
affecting to plead, he said: “You must listen to it to please me, for
my sake, Cecilia,” she answered: “It is for your sake, Nevil, I decline
to.”

“Why, what do you know of it?” he exclaimed.

“I know the kind of writing it would be.”

“How do you know it?”

“I have heard of some of Dr. Shrapnel’s opinions.”

“You imagine him to be subversive, intolerant, immoral, and the rest!
all that comes under your word revolutionary.”

“Possibly; but I must defend myself from hearing what I know will be
certain to annoy me.”

“But he is the reverse of immoral: and I intend to read you parts of
the letter to prove to you that he is not the man you would blame, but
I, and that if ever I am worthier... worthier of you, as I hope to
become, it will be owing to this admirable and good old man.”

Cecilia trembled: she was touched to the quick. Yet it was not pleasant
to her to be wooed obliquely, through Dr. Shrapnel.

She recognized the very letter, crowned with many stamps, thick with
many pages, in Beauchamp’s hands.

“When you are at Steynham you will probably hear my uncle Everard’s
version of this letter,” he said. “The baron chooses to think
everything fair in war, and the letter came accidentally into his hands
with the seal broken; well, he read it. And, Cecilia, you can fancy the
sort of stuff he would make of it. Apart from that, I want you
particularly to know how much I am indebted to Dr. Shrapnel. Won’t you
learn to like him a little? Won’t you tolerate him?—I could almost say,
for my sake! He and I are at variance on certain points, but taking him
altogether, I am under deeper obligations to him than to any man on
earth. He has found where I bend and waver.”

“I recognize your chivalry, Nevil.”

“He has done his best to train me to be of some service. Where’s the
chivalry in owning a debt? He is one of our true warriors; fearless and
blameless. I have had my heroes before. You know how I loved Robert
Hall: his death is a gap in my life. He is a light for fighting
Englishmen—who fight with the sword. But the scale of the war, the
cause, and the end in view, raise Dr. Shrapnel above the bravest I have
ever had the luck to meet. Soldiers and sailors have their excitement
to keep them up to the mark; praise and rewards. He is in his
eight-and-sixtieth year, and he has never received anything but obloquy
for his pains. Half of the small fortune he has goes in charities and
subscriptions. Will that touch you? But I think little of that, and so
does he. Charity is a common duty. The dedication of a man’s life and
whole mind to a cause, there’s heroism. I wish I were eloquent; I wish
I could move you.”

Cecilia turned her face to him. “I listen to you with pleasure, Nevil;
but please do not read the letter.”

“Yes; a paragraph or two I must read.”

She rose.

He was promptly by her side. “If I say I ask you for one sign that you
care for me in some degree?”

“I have not for a moment ceased to be your friend, Nevil, since I was a
child.”

“But if you allow yourself to be so prejudiced against my best friend
that you will not hear a word of his writing, are you friendly?”

“Feminine, and obstinate,” said Cecilia.

“Give me your eyes an instant. I know you think me reckless and
lawless: now is not that true? You doubt whether, if a lady gave me her
hand I should hold to it in perfect faith. Or, perhaps not that: but
you do suspect I should be capable of every sophism under the sun to
persuade a woman to break her faith, if it suited me: supposing some
passion to be at work. Men who are open to passion have to be taught
reflection before they distinguish between the woman they should sue
for love because she would be their best mate, and the woman who has
thrown a spell on them. Now, what I beg you to let me read you in this
letter is a truth nobly stated that has gone into my blood, and changed
me. It cannot fail, too, in changeing your opinion of Dr. Shrapnel. It
makes me wretched that you should be divided from me in your ideas of
him. I, you see—and I confess I think it my chief title to
honour—reverence him.”

“I regret that I am unable to utter the words of Ruth,” said Cecilia,
in a low voice. She felt rather tremulously; opposed only to the letter
and the writer of it, not at all to Beauchamp, except on account of his
idolatry of the wicked revolutionist. Far from having a sense of
opposition to Beauchamp; she pitied him for his infatuation, and in her
lofty mental serenity she warmed to him for the seeming boyishness of
his constant and extravagant worship of the man, though such an
enthusiasm cast shadows on his intellect.

He was reading a sentence of the letter.

“I hear nothing but the breeze, Nevil,” she said.

The breeze fluttered the letter-sheets: they threatened to fly. Cecilia
stepped two paces away.

“Hark; there is a military band playing on the pier,” said she. “I am
so fond of hearing music a little off shore.”

Beauchamp consigned the letter to his pocket.

“You are not offended, Nevil?”

“Dear me, no. You haven’t a mind for tonics, that’s all.”

“Healthy persons rarely have,” she remarked, and asked him, smiling
softly, whether he had a mind for music.

His insensibility to music was curious, considering how impressionable
he was to verse, and to songs of birds. He listened with an oppressed
look, as to something the particular secret of which had to be reached
by a determined effort of sympathy for those whom it affected. He liked
it if she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he liked it,
clearly trying hard to comprehend it, as unmoved by the swell and sigh
of the resonant brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit
thrilled to it, and was bountiful in glowing visions and in tenderness.

There hung her hand. She would not have refused to yield it. The hero
of her childhood, the friend of her womanhood, and her hero still,
might have taken her with half a word.

Beauchamp was thinking: She can listen to that brass band, and she
shuts her ears to this letter!

The reading of it would have been a prelude to the opening of his heart
to her, at the same time that it vindicated his dear and honoured
master, as he called Dr. Shrapnel. To speak, without the explanation of
his previous reticence which this letter would afford, seemed useless:
even the desire to speak was absent, passion being absent.

“I see papa; he is getting into a boat with some one,” said Cecilia,
and gave orders for the yacht to stand in toward the Club steps. “Do
you know, Nevil, the Italian common people are not so subject to the
charm of music as other races? They have more of the gift, and I think
less of the feeling. You do not hear much music in Italy. I remember in
the year of Revolution there was danger of a rising in some Austrian
city, and a colonel of a regiment commanded his band to play. The mob
was put in good humour immediately.”

“It’s a soporific,” said Beauchamp.

“You would not rather have had them rise to be slaughtered?”

“Would you have them waltzed into perpetual servility?”

Cecilia hummed, and suggested: “If one can have them happy in any way?”

“Then the day of destruction may almost be dated.”

“Nevil, your terrible view of life must be false.”

“I make it out worse to you than to any one else, because I want our
minds to be united.”

“Give me a respite now and then.”

“With all my heart. And forgive me for beating my drum. I see what
others don’t see, or else I feel it more; I don’t know; but it appears
to me our country needs rousing if it’s to live. There’s a division
between poor and rich that you have no conception of, and it can’t
safely be left unnoticed. I’ve done.”

He looked at her and saw tears on her under-lids.

“My dearest Cecilia!”

“Music makes me childish,” said she.

Her father was approaching in the boat. Beside him sat the Earl of
Lockrace, latterly classed among the suitors of the lady of Mount
Laurels.

A few minutes remained to Beauchamp of his lost opportunity. Instead of
seizing them with his usual promptitude, he let them slip, painfully
mindful of his treatment of her last year after the drive into
Bevisham, when she was England, and Renée holiday France.

This feeling he fervently translated into the reflection that the bride
who would bring him beauty and wealth, and her especial gift of tender
womanliness, was not yet so thoroughly mastered as to grant her husband
his just prevalence with her, or even indeed his complete independence
of action, without which life itself was not desireable.

Colonel Halkett stared at Beauchamp as if he had risen from the deep.

“Have you been in that town this morning?” was one of his first
questions to him when he stood on board.

“I came through it,” said Beauchamp, and pointed to his little cutter
labouring in the distance. “She’s mine for a month; I came from
Holdesbury to try her; and then he stated how he had danced attendance
on the schooner for a couple of hours before any notice was taken of
him, and Cecilia with her graceful humour held up his presumption to
scorn.

Her father was eyeing Beauchamp narrowly, and appeared troubled.

“Did you see Mr. Romfrey yesterday, or this morning?” the colonel asked
him, mentioning that Mr. Romfrey had been somewhere about the island
yesterday, at which Beauchamp expressed astonishment, for his uncle
Everard seldom visited a yachting station.

Colonel Halkett exchanged looks with Cecilia. Hers were inquiring, and
he confirmed her side-glance at Beauchamp. She raised her brows; he
nodded, to signify that there was gravity in the case. Here the
signalling stopped short; she had to carry on a conversation with Lord
Lockrace, one of those men who betray the latent despot in an
exhibition of discontentment unless they have all a lady’s hundred eyes
attentive to their discourse.

At last Beauchamp quitted the vessel.

When he was out of hearing, Colonel Halkett said to Cecilia: “Grancey
Lespel tells me that Mr. Romfrey called on the man Shrapnel yesterday
evening at six o’clock.”

“Yes, Papa?”

“Now come and see the fittings below,” the colonel addressed Lord
Lockrace, and murmured to his daughter:

“And soundly horsewhipped him!”

Cecilia turned on the instant to gaze after Nevil Beauchamp. She could
have wept for pity. Her father’s emphasis on “soundly” declared an
approval of the deed, and she was chilled by a sickening abhorrence and
dread of the cruel brute in men, such as, awakened by she knew not
what, had haunted her for a year of her girlhood.

“And he deserved it!” the colonel pursued, on emerging from the cabin
at Lord Lockrace’s heels. “I’ve no doubt he richly deserved it. The
writer of that letter we heard Captain Baskelett read the other day
deserves the very worst he gets.”

“Baskelett bored the Club the other night with a letter of a Radical
fellow,” said Lord Lockrace. “Men who write that stuff should be strung
up and whipped by the common hangman.”

“It was a private letter,” said Cecilia.

“Public or private, Miss Halkett.”

Her mind flew back to Seymour Austin for the sense of stedfastness when
she heard such language as this, which, taken in conjunction with Dr.
Shrapnel’s, seemed to uncloak our Constitutional realm and show it
boiling up with the frightful elements of primitive societies.

“I suppose we are but half civilized,” she said.

“If that,” said the earl.

Colonel Halkett protested that he never could quite make out what
Radicals were driving at.

“The rents,” Lord Lockrace observed in the conclusive tone of brevity.
He did not stay very long.

The schooner was boarded subsequently by another nobleman, an Admiral
of the Fleet and ex-minister of the Whig Government, Lord Croyston, who
was a friend of Mr. Romfrey’s, and thought well of Nevil Beauchamp as a
seaman and naval officer, but shook an old head over him as a
politician. He came to beg a passage across the water to his marine
Lodge, an accident having happened early in the morning to his yacht,
the _Lady Violet_. He was able to communicate the latest version of the
horsewhipping of Dr. Shrapnel, from which it appeared that after Mr.
Romfrey had handsomely flogged the man he flung his card on the
prostrate body, to let men know who was responsible for the act. He
expected that Mr. Romfrey would be subjected to legal proceedings. “But
if there’s a pleasure worth paying for it’s the trouncing of a
villain,” said he; and he had been informed that Dr. Shrapnel was a big
one. Lord Croyston’s favourite country residence was in the
neighbourhood of old Mrs. Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames. Speaking of
Nevil Beauchamp a second time, he alluded to his relations with his
great-aunt, said his prospects were bad, that she had interdicted her
house to him, and was devoted to her other great-nephew.

“And so she should be,” said Colonel Halkett. “That’s a young man who’s
an Englishman without French gunpowder notions in his head. He works
for us down at the mine in Wales a good part of the year, and has tided
us over a threatening strike there: gratuitously: I can’t get him to
accept anything. I can’t think why he does it.”

“He’ll have plenty,” said Lord Croyston, levelling his telescope to
sight the racing cutters.

Cecilia fancied she descried Nevil’s _Petrel_, dubbed _Curlew_, to
Eastward, and had a faint gladness in the thought that his knowledge of
his uncle Everard’s deed of violence would be deferred for another two
or three hours.

She tried to persuade her father to wait for Nevil, and invite him to
dine at Mount Laurels, and break the news to him gently. Colonel
Halkett argued that in speaking of the affair he should certainly not
commiserate the man who had got his deserts, and saying this he burst
into a petty fury against the epistle of Dr. Shrapnel, which appeared
to be growing more monstrous in proportion to his forgetfulness of the
details, as mountains gather vastness to the eye at a certain remove.
Though he could not guess the reason for Mr. Romfrey’s visit to
Bevisham, he was, he said, quite prepared to maintain that Mr. Romfrey
had a perfect justification for his conduct.

Cecilia hinted at barbarism. The colonel hinted at high police duties
that gentlemen were sometimes called on to perform for the protection
of society. “In defiance of its laws?” she asked; and he answered:
“Women must not be judging things out of their sphere,” with the
familiar accent on “women” which proves their inferiority. He was
rarely guilty of it toward his daughter. Evidently he had resolved to
back Mr. Romfrey blindly. That epistle of Dr. Shrapnel’s merited
condign punishment and had met with it, he seemed to rejoice in saying:
and this was his abstract of the same: “An old charlatan who tells his
dupe to pray every night of his life for the beheading of kings and
princes, and scattering of the clergy, and disbanding the army, that he
and his rabble may fall upon the wealthy, and show us numbers win; and
he’ll undertake to make them moral!”

“I wish we were not going to Steynham,” said Cecilia.

“So do I. Well, no, I don’t,” the colonel corrected himself, “no; it’s
an engagement. I gave my consent so far. We shall see whether Nevil
Beauchamp’s a man of any sense.”

Her heart sank. This was as much as to let her know that if Nevil broke
with his uncle, the treaty of union between the two families, which her
father submitted to entertain out of consideration for Mr. Romfrey,
would be at an end.

The wind had fallen. Entering her river, Cecilia gazed back at the
smooth broad water, and the band of golden beams flung across it from
the evening sun over the forest. No little cutter was visible. She
could not write to Nevil to bid him come and concert with her in what
spirit to encounter his uncle Everard at Steynham. And guests would be
at Mount Laurels next day; Lord Lockrace, Lord Croyston, and the
Lespels; she could not drive down to Bevisham on the chance of seeing
him. Nor was it to be acknowledged even to herself that she so greatly
desired to see him and advise him. Why not? Because she was one of the
artificial creatures called women (with the accent) who dare not be
spontaneous, and cannot act independently if they would continue to be
admirable in the world’s eye, and who for that object must remain fixed
on shelves, like other marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid
shattering or tarnishing. This is their fate, only in degree less
inhuman than that of Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the
Gods, or pretty slaves to the dealers. Their artificiality is at once
their bane and their source of superior pride.

Seymour Austin might have reason for seeking to emancipate them, she
thought, and blushed in thought that she could never be learning
anything but from her own immediate sensations.

Of course it was in her power to write to Beauchamp, just as it had
been in his to speak to her, but the fire was wanting in her blood and
absent from his mood, so they were kept apart.

Her father knew as little as she what was the positive cause of Mr.
Romfrey’s chastisement of Dr. Shrapnel. “Cause enough, I don’t doubt,”
he said, and cited the mephitic letter.

Cecilia was not given to suspicions, or she would have had them kindled
by a certain wilfulness in his incessant reference to the letter, and
exoneration, if not approval, of Mr. Romfrey’s conduct.

How did that chivalrous gentleman justify himself for condescending to
such an extreme as the use of personal violence? Was there a
possibility of his justifying it to Nevil? She was most wretched in her
reiteration of these inquiries, for, with a heart subdued, she had
still a mind whose habit of independent judgement was not to be
constrained, and while she felt that it was only by siding with Nevil
submissively and blindly in this lamentable case that she could hope
for happiness, she foresaw the likelihood of her not being able to do
so as much as he would desire and demand. This she took for the protest
of her pure reason. In reality, grieved though she was on account of
that Dr. Shrapnel, her captive heart resented the anticipated challenge
to her to espouse his cause or languish.




CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM


The judge pronouncing sentence of condemnation on the criminal is
proverbially a sorrowfully-minded man; and still more would he be so
had he to undertake the part of executioner as well. This is equivalent
to saying that the simple pleasures are no longer with us; it must be a
personal enemy now to give us any satisfaction in chastising and
slaying. Perhaps by-and-by that will be savourless: we degenerate.
There is, nevertheless, ever (and let nature be praised for it) a
strong sustainment in the dutiful exertion of our physical energies,
and Mr. Everard Romfrey experienced it after he had fulfilled his
double office on the person of Dr. Shrapnel by carrying out his own
decree. His conscience approved him cheerlessly, as it is the habit of
that secret monitor to do when we have no particular advantage coming
of the act we have performed; but the righteous labour of his arm gave
him high breathing and an appetite.

He foresaw that he and Nevil would soon be having a wrestle over the
matter, hand and thigh; but a gentleman in the right engaged with a
fellow in the wrong has nothing to apprehend; is, in fact, in the
position of a game-preserver with a poacher. The nearest approach to
gratification in that day’s work which Mr. Romfrey knew was offered by
the picture of Nevil’s lamentable attitude above his dirty idol. He
conceived it in the mock-mediaeval style of our caricaturists:—Shrapnel
stretched at his length, half a league, in slashed yellows and blacks,
with his bauble beside him, and prodigious pointed toes; Nevil in
parti-coloured tights, on one leg, raising his fists in imprecation to
a nose in the firmament.

Gentlemen of an unpractised imaginative capacity cannot vision for
themselves exactly what they would, being unable to exercise authority
over the proportions and the hues of the objects they conceive, which
are very much at the mercy of their sportive caprices; and the state of
mind of Mr. Romfrey is not to be judged by his ridiculous view of the
pair. In the abstract he could be sorry for Shrapnel. As he knew
himself magnanimous, he promised himself to be forbearing with Nevil.

Moreover, the month of September was drawing nigh; he had plenty to
think of. The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy
the situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling the
same thought in connection with September. Our England holds possession
of a considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps the world in awe
to see her bestowing so considerable a portion of her intelligence upon
her recreations. To prosecute them with her whole heart is an ingenious
exhibition of her power. Mr. Romfrey was of those who said to his
countrymen, “Go yachting; go cricketing; go boat-racing; go shooting;
go horseracing, nine months of the year, while the other Europeans go
marching and drilling.” Those occupations he considered good for us;
and our much talking, writing, and thinking about them characteristic,
and therefore good. And he was not one of those who do penance for that
sweating indolence in the fits of desperate panic. Beauchamp’s argument
that the rich idler begets the idling vagabond, the rich wagerer the
brutal swindler, the general thirst for a mad round of recreation a
generally-increasing disposition to avoid serious work, and the
unbraced moral tone of the country an indifference to national
responsibility (an argument doubtless extracted from Shrapnel, talk
tall as the very demagogue when he stood upright), Mr. Romfrey laughed
at scornfully, affirming that our manufactures could take care of
themselves. As for invasion, we are circled by the sea. Providence has
done that for us, and may be relied on to do more in an emergency.—The
children of wealth and the children of the sun alike believe that
Providence is for them, and it would seem that the former can do
without it less than the latter, though the former are less inclined to
give it personification.

This year, however, the array of armaments on the Continent made Mr.
Romfrey anxious about our navy. Almost his first topic in welcoming
Colonel Halkett and Cecilia to Steynham was the rottenness of navy
administration; for if Providence is to do anything for us it must have
a sea-worthy fleet for the operation. How loudly would his contemptuous
laughter have repudiated the charge that he trusted to supernatural
agency for assistance in case of need! But so it was: and he owned to
believing in English luck. Partly of course he meant that steady fire
of combat which his countrymen have got heated to of old till fortune
blessed them.

“Nevil is not here?” the colonel asked.

“No, I suspect he’s gruelling and plastering a doctor of his
acquaintance,” Mr. Romfrey said, with his nasal laugh composed of scorn
and resignation.

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard,” said Colonel Halkett hastily.

He would have liked to be informed of Dr. Shrapnel’s particular
offence: he mentioned the execrable letter.

Mr. Romfrey complacently interjected: “Drug-vomit!” and after an
interval: “Gallows!”

“That man has done Nevil Beauchamp a world of mischief, Romfrey.”

“We’ll hope for a cure, colonel.”

“Did the man come across you?”

“He did.”

Mr. Romfrey was mute on the subject. Colonel Halkett abstained from
pushing his inquiries.

Cecilia could only tell her father when they were alone in the
drawing-room a few minutes before dinner that Mrs. Culling was entirely
ignorant of any cause to which Nevil’s absence might be attributed.

“Mr. Romfrey had good cause,” the colonel said, emphatically.

He repeated it next day, without being a bit wiser of the cause.

Cecilia’s happiness or hope was too sensitive to allow of a beloved
father’s deceiving her in his opposition to it.

She saw clearly now that he had fastened on this miserable incident,
expecting an imbroglio that would divide Nevil and his uncle, and be an
excuse for dividing her and Nevil. O for the passionate will to make
head against what appeared as a fate in this matter! She had it not.

Mr. and Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, Sir John and Lady Baskelett, and the
Countess of Welshpool, another sister of Mr. Romfrey’s, arrived at
Steynham for a day and a night. Lady Baskelett and Lady Welshpool came
to see their brother, not to countenance his household; and Mr.
Wardour-Devereux could not stay longer than a certain number of hours
under a roof where tobacco was in evil odour. From her friend Louise,
his wife, Cecilia learnt that Mr. Lydiard had been summoned to Dr.
Shrapnel’s bedside, as Mrs. Devereux knew by a letter she had received
from Mr. Lydiard, who was no political devotee of that man, she assured
Cecilia, but had an extraordinary admiration for the Miss Denham living
with him. This was kindly intended to imply that Beauchamp was released
from his attendance on Dr. Shrapnel, and also that it was not he whom
the Miss Denham attracted.

“She is in Switzerland,” said Cecilia.

“She is better there,” said Mrs. Devereux.

Mr. Stukely Culbrett succeeded to these visitors. He heard of the case
of Dr. Shrapnel from Colonel Halkett, and of Beauchamp’s missing of his
chance with the heiress from Mr. Romfrey.

Rosamund Culling was in great perplexity about Beauchamp’s prolonged
absence; for he had engaged to come, he had written to her to say he
would be sure to come; and she feared he was ill. She would have
persuaded Mr. Culbrett to go down to Bevisham to see him: she declared
that she could even persuade herself to call on Dr. Shrapnel a second
time, in spite of her horror of the man. Her anger at the thought of
his keeping Nevil away from good fortune and happiness caused her to
speak in resentment and loathing of the man.

“He behaved badly when you saw him, did he?” said Stukely.

“Badly, is no word. He is detestable,” Rosamund replied.

“You think he ought to be whipped?”

She feigned an extremity of vindictiveness, and twisted her brows in
comic apology for the unfeminine sentiment, as she said: “I really do.”

The feminine gentleness of her character was known to Stukely, so she
could afford to exaggerate the expression of her anger, and she did not
modify it, forgetful that a woman is the representative of the sex with
cynical men, and escapes from contempt at the cost of her sisterhood.

Looking out of an upper window in the afternoon she beheld Nevil
Beauchamp in a group with his uncle Everard, the colonel and Cecilia,
and Mr. Culbrett. Nevil was on his feet; the others were seated under
the great tulip-tree on the lawn.

A little observation of them warned her that something was wrong. There
was a vacant chair; Nevil took it in his hand at times, stamped it to
the ground, walked away and sharply back fronting his uncle, speaking
vehemently, she perceived, and vainly, as she judged by the cast of his
uncle’s figure. Mr. Romfrey’s head was bent, and wagged slightly, as he
screwed his brows up and shot his eyes, queerly at the agitated young
man. Colonel Halkett’s arms crossed his chest. Cecilia’s eyelids
drooped their lashes. Mr. Culbrett was balancing on the hind-legs of
his chair. No one appeared to be speaking but Nevil.

It became evident that Nevil was putting a series of questions to his
uncle. Mechanical nods were given him in reply.

Presently Mr. Romfrey rose, thundering out a word or two, without a
gesture.

Colonel Halkett rose.

Nevil flung his hand out straight to the house.

Mr. Romfrey seemed to consent; the colonel shook his head: Nevil
insisted.

A footman carrying a tea-tray to Miss Halkett received some commission
and swiftly disappeared, making Rosamund wonder whether sugar, milk or
cream had been omitted.

She met him on the first landing, and heard that Mr. Romfrey requested
her to step out on the lawn.

Expecting to hear of a piece of misconduct on the part of the household
servants, she hurried forth, and found that she had to traverse the
whole space of the lawn up to the tuliptree. Colonel Halkett and Mr.
Romfrey had resumed their seats. The colonel stood up and bowed to her.

Mr. Romfrey said: “One question to you, ma’am, and you shall not be
detained. Did not that man Shrapnel grossly insult you on the day you
called on him to see Captain Beauchamp about a couple of months before
the Election?”

“Look at me when you speak, ma’am,” said Beauchamp.

Rosamund looked at him.

The whiteness of his face paralyzed her tongue. A dreadful levelling of
his eyes penetrated and chilled her. Instead of thinking of her answer
she thought of what could possibly have happened.

“Did he insult you at all, ma’am?” said Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey reminded him that he was not a cross-examining criminal
barrister.

They waited for her to speak.

She hesitated, coloured, betrayed confusion; her senses telling her of
a catastrophe, her conscience accusing her as the origin of it.

“Did Dr. Shrapnel, to your belief, intentionally hurt your feelings or
your dignity?” said Beauchamp, and made the answer easier:

“Not intentionally, surely: not... I certainly do not accuse him.”

“Can you tell me you feel that he wounded you in the smallest degree?
And if so, how? I ask you this, because he is anxious, if he lives, to
apologize to you for any offence that he may have been guilty of: he
was ignorant of it. I have his word for that, and his commands to me to
bear it to you. I may tell you I have never known him injure the most
feeble thing—anything alive, or wish to.”

Beauchamp’s voice choked. Rosamund saw tears leap out of the stern face
of her dearest now in wrath with her.

“Is he ill?” she faltered.

“He is. You own to a strong dislike of him, do you not?”

“But not to desire any harm to him.”

“Not a whipping,” Mr. Culbrett murmured.

Everard Romfrey overheard it.

He had allowed Mrs. Culling to be sent for, that she might with a bare
affirmative silence Nevil, when his conduct was becoming intolerable
before the guests of the house.

“That will do, ma’am,” he dismissed her.

Beauchamp would not let her depart.

“I must have your distinct reply, and in Mr. Romfrey’s presence:—say,
that if you accused him you were mistaken, or that they were mistaken
who supposed you had accused him. I must have the answer before you
go.”

“Sir, will you learn manners!” Mr. Romfrey said to him, with a rattle
of the throat.

Beauchamp turned his face from her.

Colonel Halkett offered her his arm to lead her away.

“What is it? Oh, what is it?” she whispered, scarcely able to walk, but
declining the colonel’s arm.

“You ought not to have been dragged out here,” said he. “Any one might
have known there would be no convincing of Captain Beauchamp. That old
rascal in Bevisham has been having a beating; that’s all. And a very
beautiful day it is!—a little too hot, though. Before we leave, you
must give me a lesson or two in gardening.”

“Dr. Shrapnel—Mr. Romfrey!” said Rosamund half audibly under the
oppression of the more she saw than what she said.

The colonel talked of her renown in landscape-gardening. He added
casually: “They met the other day.”

“By accident?”

“By chance, I suppose. Shrapnel defends one of your Steynham poaching
vermin.”

“Mr. Romfrey struck him?—for that? Oh, never!” Rosamund exclaimed.

“I suppose he had a long account to settle.”

She fetched her breath painfully. “I shall never be forgiven.”

“And I say that a gentleman has no business with idols,” the colonel
fumed as he spoke. “Those letters of Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp are a
scandal on the name of Englishman.”

“You have read that shocking one, Colonel Halkett?”

“Captain Baskelett read it out to us.”

“He? Oh! then...” She stopped:—Then the author of this mischief is
clear to me! her divining hatred of Cecil would have said, but her
humble position did not warrant such speech. A consideration of the
lowliness necessitating this restraint at a moment when loudly to
denounce another’s infamy with triumphant insight would have solaced
and supported her, kept Rosamund dumb.

She could not bear to think of her part in the mischief.

She was not bound to think of it, knowing actually nothing of the
occurrence.

Still she felt that she was on her trial. She detected herself running
in and out of her nature to fortify it against accusations rather than
cleanse it for inspection. It was narrowing in her own sight. The
prospect of her having to submit to a further interrogatory, shut it up
entrenched in the declaration that Dr. Shrapnel had so far outraged her
sentiments as to be said to have offended her: not insulted, perhaps,
but certainly offended.

And this was a generous distinction. It was generous; and, having
recognized the generosity, she was unable to go beyond it.

She was presently making the distinction to Miss Halkett. The colonel
had left her at the door of the house: Miss Halkett sought admission to
her private room on an errand of condolence, for she had sympathized
with her very much in the semi-indignity Nevil had forced her to
undergo: and very little indeed had she been able to sympathize with
Nevil, who had been guilty of the serious fault of allowing himself to
appear moved by his own commonplace utterances; or, in other words, the
theme being hostile to his audience, he had betrayed emotion over it
without first evoking the spirit of pathos.

“As for me,” Rosamund replied, to some comforting remarks of Miss
Halkett’s, “I do not understand why I should be mixed up in Dr.
Shrapnel’s misfortunes: I really am quite unable to recollect his words
to me or his behaviour: I have only a positive impression that I left
his house, where I had gone to see Captain Beauchamp, in utter disgust,
so repelled by his language that I could hardly trust myself to speak
of the man to Mr. Romfrey when he questioned me. I did not volunteer
it. I am ready to say that I believe Dr. Shrapnel did not intend to be
insulting. I cannot say that he was not offensive.

You know, Miss Halkett, I would willingly, gladly have saved him from
anything like punishment.”

“You are too gentle to have thought of it,” said Cecilia.

“But I shall never be forgiven by Captain Beauchamp. I see in his eyes
that he accuses me and despises me.”

“He will not be so unjust, Mrs. Culling.”

Rosamund begged that she might hear what Nevil had first said on his
arrival.

Cecilia related that they had seen him walking swiftly across the park,
and that Mr. Romfrey had hailed him, and held his hand out; and that
Captain Beauchamp had overlooked it, saying he feared Mr. Romfrey’s
work was complete. He had taken her father’s hand and hers and his
touch was like ice.

“His worship of that Dr. Shrapnel is extraordinary,” quoth Rosamund.
“And how did Mr. Romfrey behave to him?”

“My father thinks, very forbearingly.”

Rosamund sighed and made a semblance of wringing her hands. “It seems
to me that I anticipated ever since I heard of the man... or at least
ever since I saw him and heard him, he would be the evil genius of us
all: if I dare include myself. But I am not permitted to escape! And,
Miss Halkett, can you tell me how it was that my name—that I became
involved? I cannot imagine the circumstances which would bring me
forward in this unhappy affair.”

Cecilia replied: “The occasion was, that Captain Beauchamp so
scornfully contrasted the sort of injury done by Dr. Shrapnel’s defence
of a poacher on his uncle’s estate, with the severe chastisement
inflicted by Mr. Romfrey in revenge for it. He would not leave the
subject.”

“I see him—see his eyes!” cried Rosamund, her bosom heaving and sinking
deep, as her conscience quavered within her. “At last Mr. Romfrey
mentioned me?”

“He stood up and said you had been personally insulted by Dr.
Shrapnel.”

Rosamund meditated in a distressing doubt of her conscientious
truthfulness.

“Captain Beauchamp will be coming to me; and how can I answer him?
Heaven knows I would have shielded the poor man, if possible—poor
wretch! Wicked though he is, one has only to hear of him suffering! But
what can I answer? I do recollect now that Mr. Romfrey compelled me
from question to question to confess that the man had vexed me.
Insulted, I never said. At the worst, I said vexed. I would not have
said insulted, or even offended, because Mr. Romfrey... ah! we know
him. What I did say, I forget. I have no guide to what I said but my
present feelings, and they are pity for the unfortunate man much more
than dislike.—Well, I must go through the scene with Nevil!” Rosamund
concluded her outcry of ostensible exculpation.

She asked in a cooler moment how it was that Captain Beauchamp had so
far forgotten himself as to burst out on his uncle before the guests of
the house. It appeared that he had wished his uncle to withdraw with
him, and Mr. Romfrey had bidden him postpone private communications.
Rosamund gathered from one or two words of Cecilia’s that Mr. Romfrey,
until finally stung by Nevil, had indulged in his best-humoured banter.




CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE FACE OF RENÉE


Shortly before the ringing of the dinner-bell Rosamund knocked at
Beauchamp’s dressing-room door, the bearer of a telegram from Bevisham.
He read it in one swift run of the eyes, and said: “Come in, ma’am, I
have something for you. Madame de Rouaillout sends you this.”

Rosamund saw her name written in a French hand on the back of the card.

“You stay with us, Nevil?”

“To-night and to-morrow, perhaps. The danger seems to be over.”

“Has Dr. Shrapnel been in danger?”

“He has. If it’s quite over now!”

“I declare to you, Nevil...”

“Listen to me, ma’am; I’m in the dark about this murderous business:—an
old man, defenceless, harmless as a child!—but I know this, that you
are somewhere in it.”

“Nevil, do you not guess at some one else?”

“He! yes, he! But Cecil Baskelett led no blind man to Dr. Shrapnel’s
gate.”

“Nevil, as I live, I knew nothing of it!”

“No, but you set fire to the train. You hated the old man, and you
taught Mr. Romfrey to think that you had been insulted. I see it all.
Now you must have the courage to tell him of your error. There’s no
other course for you. I mean to take Mr. Romfrey to Dr. Shrapnel, to
save the honour of our family, as far as it can be saved.”

“What? Nevil!” exclaimed Rosamund, gaping.

“It seems little enough, ma’am. But he must go. I will have the apology
spoken, and man to man.”

“But you would never tell your uncle that?”

He laughed in his uncle’s manner.

“But, Nevil, my dearest, forgive me, I think of you—why are the
Halketts here? It is not entirely with Colonel Halkett’s consent. It is
your uncle’s influence with him that gives you your chance. Do you not
care to avail yourself of it? Ever since he heard Dr. Shrapnel’s letter
to you, Colonel Halkett has, I am sure, been tempted to confound you
with him in his mind: ah! Nevil, but recollect that it is _only_ Mr.
Romfrey who can help to give you your Cecilia. There is no dispensing
with him. Postpone your attempt to humiliate—I mean, that is, Oh!
Nevil, whatever you intend to do to overcome your uncle, trust to time,
be friends with him; be a little worldly! for her sake! to ensure her
happiness!”

Beauchamp obtained the information that his cousin Cecil had read out
the letter of Dr. Shrapnel at Mount Laurels.

The bell rang.

“Do you imagine I should sit at my uncle’s table if I did not intend to
force him to repair the wrong he has done to himself and to us?” he
said.

“Oh! Nevil, do you not see Captain Baskelett at work here?”

“What amends can Cecil Baskelett make? My uncle is a man of honour: it
is in his power. There, I leave you to speak to him; you will do it
to-night, after we break up in the drawing-room.”

Rosamund groaned: “An apology to Dr. Shrapnel from Mr. Romfrey! It is
an impossibility, Nevil! utter!”

“So you say to sit idle: but do as I tell you.”

He went downstairs.

He had barely reproached her. She wondered at that; and then remembered
his alien sad half-smile in quitting the room.

Rosamund would not present herself at her lord’s dinner-table when
there were any guests at Steynham. She prepared to receive Miss Halkett
in the drawing-room, as the guests of the house this evening chanced to
be her friends.

Madame de Rouaillout’s present to her was a photograph of M. de
Croisnel, his daughter and son in a group. Rosamund could not bear to
look at the face of Renée, and she put it out of sight. But she had
looked. She was reduced to look again.

Roland stood beside his father’s chair; Renée sat at his feet, clasping
his right hand. M. de Croisnel’s fallen eyelids and unshorn white chin
told the story of the family reunion. He was dying: his two children
were nursing him to the end.

Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman than Renée: but on which
does the eye linger longest—which draws the heart? a radiant landscape,
where the tall ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the
stately march of Summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark
water?

Dark-eyed Renée was not beauty but attraction; she touched the double
chords within us which are we know not whether harmony or discord, but
a divine discord if an uncertified harmony, memorable beyond plain
sweetness or majesty. There are touches of bliss in anguish that
superhumanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of the eternal
in the variable. These two chords of poignant antiphony she struck
throughout the range of the hearts of men, and strangely intervolved
them in vibrating unison. Only to look at her face, without hearing her
voice, without the charm of her speech, was to feel it. On Cecilia’s
entering the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret,
Rosamund handed her the card of the photographic artist of Tours,
mentioning no names.

“I should say the portrait is correct. A want of spirituality,”
Rosamund said critically, using one of the insular commonplaces, after
that manner of fastening upon what there is _not_ in a piece of Art or
nature.

Cecilia’s avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher
mark.

She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was. She
sat over the portrait blushing burningly: “And that is a brother?” she
said.

“That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,”
said Rosamund.

Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features. Renée
enchained her. Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French
face came out surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew
from the tremulous mouth. The eyes? were they quivering with internal
light, or were they set to seem so in the sensitive strange curves of
the eyelids whose awakened lashes appeared to tremble on some
borderland between lustreful significance and the mists? She caught at
the nerves like certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of a
stringed instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable. Yet she
sat there at her father’s feet gazing out into the world indifferent to
spectators, indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness.
Her left hand clasped his right, and she supported herself on the floor
with the other hand leaning away from him, to the destruction of
conventional symmetry in the picture. None but a woman of consummate
breeding dared have done as she did. It was not Southern suppleness
that saved her from the charge of harsh audacity, but something of the
kind of genius in her mood which has hurried the greater poets of sound
and speech to impose their naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the
laws to have been our meagre limitations.

The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the
excellent body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our
ranks flapping their leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments
in imagery, will best be satisfied, by the statement that she was
indescribable: a term that exacts no labour of mind from him or from
them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it fills a vacuum.

That posture of Renée displeased Cecilia and fascinated her. In an
exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure
displeasure: but here was Nevil’s first love, the woman who loved him;
and she was French. After a continued study of her Cecilia’s growing
jealousy betrayed itself in a conscious rivalry of race, coming to the
admission that Englishwomen cannot fling themselves about on the floor
without agonizing the graces: possibly, too, they cannot look
singularly without risks in the direction of slyness and brazen
archness; or talk animatedly without dipping in slang. Conventional
situations preserve them and interchange dignity with them; still life
befits them; pre-eminently that judicial seat from which in briefest
speech they deliver their judgements upon their foreign sisters.
Jealousy it was that plucked Cecilia from her majestic place and caused
her to envy in Renée things she would otherwise have disapproved.

At last she had seen the French lady’s likeness! The effect of it was a
horrid trouble in Cecilia’s cool blood, abasement, a sense of eclipse,
hardly any sense of deserving worthiness: “What am I but an heiress!”
Nevil had once called her beautiful; his praise had given her beauty.
But what is beauty when it is outshone! Ask the owners of gems. You
think them rich; they are pining.

Then, too, this Renée, who looked electrical in repose, might really
love Nevil with a love that sent her heart out to him in his
enterprises, justifying and adoring him, piercing to the hero in his
very thoughts. Would she not see that his championship of the
unfortunate man Dr. Shrapnel was heroic?

Cecilia surrendered the card to Rosamund, and it was out of sight when
Beauchamp stepped in the drawing-room. His cheeks were flushed; he had
been one against three for the better part of an hour.

“Are you going to show me the downs to-morrow morning?” Cecilia said to
him; and he replied, “You will have to be up early.”

“What’s that?” asked the colonel, at Beauchamp’s heels.

He was volunteering to join the party of two for the early morning’s
ride to the downs. Mr. Romfrey pressed his shoulder, saying, “There’s
no third horse can do it in my stables.”

Colonel Halkett turned to him.

“I had your promise to come over the kennels with me and see how I
treat a cry of mad dog, which is ninety-nine times out of a hundred mad
fool man,” Mr. Romfrey added.

By that the colonel knew he meant to stand by Nevil still and offer him
his chance of winning Cecilia.

Having pledged his word not to interfere, Colonel Halkett submitted,
and muttered, “Ah! the kennels.” Considering however what he had been
witnessing of Nevil’s behaviour to his uncle, the colonel was amazed at
Mr. Romfrey’s magnanimity in not cutting him off and disowning him.

“Why the downs?” he said.

“Why the deuce, colonel?” A question quite as reasonable, and Mr.
Romfrey laughed under his breath. To relieve an uncertainty in
Cecilia’s face, that might soon have become confusion, he described the
downs fronting the paleness of earliest dawn, and then their arch and
curve and dip against the pearly grey of the half-glow; and then, among
their hollows, lo, the illumination of the East all around, and up and
away, and a gallop for miles along the turfy thymy rolling billows,
land to left, sea to right, below you. “It’s the nearest hit to wings
we can make, Cecilia.” He surprised her with her Christian name, which
kindled in her the secret of something he expected from that ride on
the downs. Compare you the Alps with them? If you could jump on the
back of an eagle, you might. The Alps have height. But the downs have
swiftness. Those long stretching lines of the downs are greyhounds in
full career. To look at them is to set the blood racing! Speed is on
the downs, glorious motion, odorous air of sea and herb, exquisite as
in the isles of Greece. And the Continental travelling ninnies leave
England for health!—run off and forth from the downs to the steamboat,
the railway, the steaming hotel, the tourist’s shivering mountain-top,
in search of sensations! There on the downs the finest and liveliest
are at their bidding ready to fly through them like hosts of angels.

He spoke somewhat in that strain, either to relieve Cecilia or prepare
the road for Nevil, not in his ordinary style; on the contrary, with a
swing of enthusiasm that seemed to spring of ancient heartfelt
fervours. And indeed soon afterward he was telling her that there on
those downs, in full view of Steynham, he and his wife had first joined
hands.

Beauchamp sat silent. Mr. Romfrey despatched orders to the stables, and
Rosamund to the kitchen. Cecilia was rather dismayed by the formal
preparations for the ride. She declined the early cup of coffee. Mr.
Romfrey begged her to take it. “Who knows the hour when you’ll be
back?” he said. Beauchamp said nothing.

The room grew insufferable to Cecilia. She would have liked to be
wafted to her chamber in a veil, so shamefully unveiled did she seem to
be. But the French lady would have been happy in her place! Her father
kissed her as fathers do when they hand the bride into the
travelling-carriage. His “Good-night, my darling!” was in the voice of
a soldier on duty. For a concluding sign that her dim apprehensions
pointed correctly, Mr. Romfrey kissed her on the forehead. She could
not understand how it had come to pass that she found herself suddenly
on this incline, precipitated whither she would fain be going, only
less hurriedly, less openly, and with her secret merely peeping, like a
dove in the breast.




CHAPTER XXXV.
THE RIDE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION


That pure opaque of the line of downs ran luminously edged against the
pearly morning sky, with its dark landward face crepusculine yet clear
in every combe, every dotting copse and furze-bush, every wavy fall,
and the ripple, crease, and rill-like descent of the turf. Beauty of
darkness was there, as well as beauty of light above.

Beauchamp and Cecilia rode forth before the sun was over the line,
while the West and North-west sides of the rolling downs were stamped
with such firmness of dusky feature as you see on the indentations of a
shield of tarnished silver. The mounting of the sun behind threw an
obscurer gloom, and gradually a black mask overcame them, until the
rays shot among their folds and windings, and shadows rich as the black
pansy, steady as on a dialplate rounded with the hour.

Mr. Everard Romfrey embraced this view from Steynham windows, and loved
it. The lengths of gigantic “greyhound backs” coursing along the South
were his vision of delight; no image of repose for him, but of the life
in swiftness. He had known them when the great bird of the downs was
not a mere tradition, and though he owned conscientiously to never
having beheld the bird, a certain mystery of holiness hung about the
region where the bird had been in his time. There, too, with a timely
word he had gained a wealthy and good wife. He had now sent Nevil to do
the same.

This astute gentleman had caught at the idea of a ride of the young
couple to the downs with his customary alacrity of perception as being
the very best arrangement for hurrying them to the point. At Steynham
Nevil was sure to be howling all day over his tumbled joss Shrapnel.
Once away in the heart of the downs, and Cecilia beside him, it was a
matter of calculation that two or three hours of the sharpening air
would screw his human nature to the pitch. In fact, unless each of them
was reluctant, they could hardly return unbetrothed. Cecilia’s consent
was foreshadowed by her submission in going: Mr. Romfrey had noticed
her fright at the suggestive formalities he cast round the expedition,
and felt sure of her. Taking Nevil for a man who could smell the
perfume of a ripe affirmative on the sweetest of lips, he was pretty
well sure of him likewise. And then a truce to all that Radical rageing
and hot-pokering of the country! and lie in peace, old Shrapnel! and
get on your legs when you can, and offend no more; especially be
mindful not to let fly one word against a woman! With Cecilia for wife,
and a year of marriage devoted to a son and heir, Nevil might be
expected to resume his duties as a naval officer, and win an honourable
name for the inheritance of the young one he kissed.

There was benevolence in these previsions of Mr. Romfrey, proving how
good it is for us to bow to despotic authority, if only we will bring
ourselves unquestioningly to accept the previous deeds of the directing
hand.

Colonel Halkett gave up his daughter for lost when she did not appear
at the breakfast-table: for yet more decidedly lost when the luncheon
saw her empty place; and as time drew on toward the dinner-hour, he
began to think her lost beyond hope, embarked for good and all with the
madbrain. Some little hope of a dissension between the pair, arising
from the natural antagonism of her strong sense to Nevil’s
extravagance, had buoyed him until it was evident that they must have
alighted at an inn to eat, which signified that they had overleaped the
world and its hurdles, and were as dreamy a leash of lovers as ever
made a dreamland of hard earth. The downs looked like dreamland through
the long afternoon. They shone as in a veil of silk—softly fair, softly
dark. No spot of harshness was on them save where a quarry
South-westward gaped at the evening sun.

Red light struck into that round chalk maw, and the green slopes and
channels and half-circle hollows were brought a mile-stride nigher
Steynham by the level beams.

The poor old colonel fell to a more frequent repetition of the “Well!”
with which he had been unconsciously expressing his perplexed mind in
the kennels and through the covers during the day. None of the
gentlemen went to dress. Mr. Culbrett was indoors conversing with
Rosamund Culling.

“What’s come to them?” the colonel asked of Mr. Romfrey, who said
shrugging, “Something wrong with one of the horses.” It had happened to
him on one occasion to set foot in the hole of a baked hedgehog that
had furnished a repast, not without succulence, to some shepherd of the
downs. Such a case might have recurred; it was more likely to cause an
upset at a walk than at a gallop: or perhaps a shoe had been cast; and
young people break no bones at a walking fall; ten to one if they do at
their top speed. Horses manage to kill their seniors for them: the
young are exempt from accident.

Colonel Halkett nodded and sighed: “I daresay they’re safe. It’s that
man Shrapnel’s letter—that letter, Romfrey! A private letter, I know;
but I’ve not heard Nevil disown the opinions expressed in it. I submit.
It’s no use resisting. I treat my daughter as a woman capable of
judging for herself. I repeat, I submit. I haven’t a word against Nevil
except on the score of his politics. I like him. All I have to say is,
I don’t approve of a republican and a sceptic for my son-in-law. I
yield to you, and my daughter, if she...!”

“I think she does, colonel. Marriage’ll cure the fellow. Nevil will
slough his craze. Off! old coat. Cissy will drive him in strings. ‘My
wife!’ I hear him.” Mr. Romfrey laughed quietly. “It’s all ‘my
country,’ now. The dog’ll be uxorious. He wants fixing; nothing worse.”

“How he goes on about Shrapnel!”

“I shouldn’t think much of him if he didn’t.”

“You’re one in a thousand, Romfrey. I object to seeing a man
worshipped.”

“It’s Nevil’s green-sickness, and Shrapnel’s the god of it.”

“I trust to heaven you’re right. It seems to me young fellows ought to
be out of it earlier.”

“They generally are.” Mr. Romfrey named some of the processes by which
they are relieved of brain-flightiness, adding philosophically, “This
way or that.”

His quick ear caught a sound of hoofs cantering down the avenue on the
Northern front of the house.

He consulted his watch. “Ten minutes to eight. Say a quarter-past for
dinner. They’re here, colonel.”

Mr. Romfrey met Nevil returning from the stables. Cecilia had
disappeared.

“Had a good day?” said Mr. Romfrey.

Beauchamp replied: “I’ll tell you of it after dinner,” and passed by
him.

Mr. Romfrey edged round to Colonel Halkett, conjecturing in his mind:
They have not hit it; as he remarked: “Breakfast and luncheon have been
omitted in this day’s fare,” which appeared to the colonel a
confirmation of his worst fears, or rather the extinction of his last
spark of hope.

He knocked at his daughter’s door in going upstairs to dress.

Cecilia presented herself and kissed him.

“Well?” said he.

“By-and-by, papa,” she answered. “I have a headache. Beg Mr. Romfrey to
excuse me.”

“No news for me?”

She had no news.

Mrs. Culling was with her. The colonel stepped on mystified to his
room.

When the door had closed Cecilia turned to Rosamund and burst into
tears. Rosamund felt that it must be something grave indeed for the
proud young lady so to betray a troubled spirit.

“He is ill—Dr. Shrapnel is very ill,” Cecilia responded to one or two
subdued inquiries in as clear a voice as she could command.

“Where have you heard of him?” Rosamund asked.

“We have been there.”

“Bevisham? to Bevisham?” Rosamund was considering the opinion Mr.
Romfrey would form of the matter from the point of view of his horses.

“It was Nevil’s wish,” said Cecilia.

“Yes? and you went with him,” Rosamund encouraged her to proceed,
gladdened at hearing her speak of Nevil by that name; “you have not
been on the downs at all?”

Cecilia mentioned a junction railway station they had ridden to; and
thence, boxing the horses, by train to Bevisham. Rosamund understood
that some haunting anxiety had fretted Nevil during the night; in the
morning he could not withstand it, and he begged Cecilia to change
their destination, apparently with a vehemence of entreaty that had
been irresistible, or else it was utter affection for him had reduced
her to undertake the distasteful journey. She admitted that she was not
the most sympathetic companion Nevil could have had on the way, either
going or coming. She had not entered Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage. Remaining
on horseback she had seen the poor man reclining in his garden chair.
Mr. Lydiard was with him, and also his ward Miss Denham, who had been
summoned by telegraph by one of the servants from Switzerland. And
Cecilia had heard Nevil speak of his uncle to her, and too humbly, she
hinted. Nor had the expression of Miss Denham’s countenance in
listening to him pleased her; but it was true that a heavily burdened
heart cannot be expected to look pleasing. On the way home Cecilia had
been compelled in some degree to defend Mr. Romfrey. Blushing through
her tears at the remembrance of a past emotion that had been mixed with
foresight, she confessed to Rosamund she thought it now too late to
prevent a rupture between Nevil and his uncle. Had some one whom Nevil
trusted and cared for taken counsel with him and advised him before
uncle and nephew met to discuss this most unhappy matter, then there
might have been hope. As it was, the fate of Dr. Shrapnel had gained
entire possession of Nevil. Every retort of his uncle’s in reference to
it rose up in him: he used language of contempt neighbouring
abhorrence: he stipulated for one sole thing to win back his esteem for
his uncle; and that was, the apology to Dr. Shrapnel.

“And to-night,” Cecilia concluded, “he will request Mr. Romfrey to
accompany him to Bevisham to-morrow morning, to make the apology in
person. He will not accept the slightest evasion. He thinks Dr.
Shrapnel may die, and the honour of the family—what is it he says of
it?” Cecilia raised her eyes to the ceiling, while Rosamund blinked in
impatience and grief, just apprehending the alien state of the young
lady’s mind in her absence of recollection, as well as her bondage in
the effort to recollect accurately.

“Have you not eaten any food to-day, Miss Halkett?” she said; for it
might be the want of food which had broken her and changed her manner.

Cecilia replied that she had ridden for an hour to Mount Laurels.

“Alone? Mr. Romfrey must not hear of that,” said Rosamund.

Cecilia consented to lie down on her bed. She declined the dainties
Rosamund pressed on her. She was feverish with a deep and unconcealed
affliction, and behaved as if her pride had gone. But if her pride had
gone she would have eased her heart by sobbing outright. A similar
division harassed her as when her friend Nevil was the candidate for
Bevisham. She condemned his extreme wrath with his uncle, yet was
attracted and enchained by the fire of passionate attachment which
aroused it: and she was conscious that she had but shown obedience to
his wishes throughout the day, not sympathy with his feelings. Under
cover of a patient desire to please she had nursed irritation and
jealousy; the degradation of the sense of jealousy increasing the
irritation. Having consented to the ride to Dr. Shrapnel, should she
not, to be consistent, have dismounted there? O half heart! A whole
one, though it be an erring, like that of the French lady, does at
least live, and has a history, and makes music: but the faint and
uncertain is jarred in action, jarred in memory, ever behind the day
and in the shadow of it! Cecilia reviewed herself: jealous,
disappointed, vexed, ashamed, she had been all day a graceless
companion, a bad actress: and at the day’s close she was loving Nevil
the better for what had dissatisfied, distressed, and wounded her. She
was loving him in emulation of his devotedness to another person: and
that other was a revolutionary common people’s doctor! an infidel, a
traitor to his country’s dearest interests! But Nevil loved him, and it
had become impossible for her not to covet the love, or to think of the
old offender without the halo cast by Nevil’s attachment being upon
him. So intensely was she moved by her intertwisting reflections that
in an access of bodily fever she stood up and moved before the glass,
to behold the image of the woman who could be the victim of these
childish emotions: and no wonderful contrast struck her eyes; she
appeared to herself as poor and small as they. How could she aspire to
a man like Nevil Beauchamp? If he had made her happy by wooing her she
would not have adored him as she did now. He likes my hair, she said,
smoothing it out, and then pressing her temples, like one insane. Two
minutes afterward she was telling Rosamund her head ached less.

“This terrible Dr. Shrapnel!” Rosamund exclaimed, but reported that no
loud voices were raised in the dining-room.

Colonel Halkett came to see his daughter, full of anxiety and
curiosity. Affairs had been peaceful below, for he was ignorant of the
expedition to Bevisham. On hearing of it he frowned, questioned Cecilia
as to whether she had set foot on that man’s grounds, then said: “Ah!
well, we leave to-morrow: I must go, I have business at home; I can’t
delay it. I sanctioned no calling there, nothing of the kind. From
Steynham to Bevisham? Goodness, it’s rank madness. I’m not astonished
you’re sick and ill.”

He waited till he was assured Cecilia had no special matter to relate,
and recommending her to drink the tea Mrs. Culling had made for her,
and then go to bed and sleep, he went down to the drawing-room, charged
with the worst form of hostility toward Nevil, the partly diplomatic.

Cecilia smiled at her father’s mention of sleep. She was in the contest
of the two men, however inanimately she might be lying overhead, and
the assurance in her mind that neither of them would give ground, so
similar were they in their tenacity of will, dissimilar in all else,
dragged her this way and that till she swayed lifeless between them.
One may be as a weed of the sea while one’s fate is being decided. To
love is to be on the sea, out of sight of land: to love a man like
Nevil Beauchamp is to be on the sea in tempest. Still to persist in
loving would be noble, and but for this humiliation of utter
helplessness an enviable power. Her thoughts ran thus in shame and
yearning and regret, dimly discerning where her heart failed in the
strength which was Nevil’s, though it was a full heart, faithful and
not void of courage. But he never brooded, he never blushed from
insufficiency—the faintness of a desire, the callow passion that cannot
fly and feed itself: he never tottered; he walked straight to his mark.
She set up his image and Renée’s, and cowered under the heroical shapes
till she felt almost extinct. With her weak limbs and head worthlessly
paining, the little infantile I within her ceased to wail, dwindled
beyond sensation. Rosamund, waiting on her in the place of her maid,
saw two big drops come through her closed eyelids, and thought that if
it could be granted to Nevil to look for a moment on this fair and
proud young lady’s loveliness in abandonment, it would tame, melt, and
save him. The Gods presiding over custom do not permit such renovating
sights to men.




CHAPTER XXXVI.
PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF Mr. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL


The contest, which was an alternation of hard hitting and close
wrestling, had recommenced when Colonel Halkett stepped into the
drawing-room.

“Colonel, I find they’ve been galloping to Bevisham and back,” said Mr.
Romfrey.

“I’ve heard of it,” the colonel replied. Not perceiving a sign of
dissatisfaction on his friend’s face, he continued: “To that man
Shrapnel.”

“Cecilia did not dismount,” said Beauchamp.

“You took her to that man’s gate. It was not with my sanction. You know
my ideas of the man.”

“If you were to see him now, colonel, I don’t think you would speak
harshly of him.”

“We’re not obliged to go and look on men who have had their measure
dealt them.”

“Barbarously,” said Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey in the most placid manner took a chair. “Windy talk, that!”
he said.

Colonel Halkett seated himself. Stukely Culbrett turned a sheet of
manuscript he was reading.

Beauchamp began a caged lion’s walk on the rug under the mantelpiece.

“I shall not spare you from hearing what I think of it, sir.”

“We’ve had what you think of it twice over,” said Mr. Romfrey. “I
suppose it was the first time for information, the second time for
emphasis, and the rest counts to keep it alive in your recollection.”

“This is what you have to take to heart, sir; that Dr. Shrapnel is now
seriously ill.”

“I’m sorry for it, and I’ll pay the doctor’s bill.”

“You make it hard for me to treat you with respect.”

“Fire away. Those Radical friends of yours have to learn a lesson, and
it’s worth a purse to teach them that a lady, however feeble she may
seem to them, is exactly of the strength of the best man of her
acquaintance.”

“That’s well said!” came from Colonel Halkett.

Beauchamp stared at him, amazed by the commendation of empty language.

“You acted in error; barbarously, but in error,” he addressed his
uncle.

“And you have got a fine topic for mouthing,” Mr. Romfrey rejoined.

“You mean to sit still under Dr. Shrapnel’s forgiveness?”

“He’s taken to copy the Christian religion, has he?”

“You know you were deluded when you struck him.”

“Not a whit.”

“Yes, you know it now: Mrs. Culling—”

“Drag in no woman, Nevil Beauchamp!”

“She has confessed to you that Dr. Shrapnel neither insulted her nor
meant to ruffle her.”

“She has done no such nonsense.”

“If she has not!—but I trust her to have done it.”

“You play the trumpeter, you terrorize her.”

“Into opening her lips wider; nothing else. I’ll have the truth from
her, and no mincing: and from Cecil Baskelett and Palmet.”

“Give Cecil a second licking, if you can, and have him off to
Shrapnel.”

“You!” cried Beauchamp.

At this juncture Stukely Culbrett closed the manuscript in his hands,
and holding it out to Beauchamp, said:

“Here’s your letter, Nevil. It’s tolerably hard to decipher. It’s mild
enough; it’s middling good pulpit. I like it.”

“What have you got there?” Colonel Halkett asked him.

“A letter of his friend Dr. Shrapnel on the Country. Read a bit,
colonel.”

“I? That letter! Mild, do you call it?” The colonel started back his
chair in declining to touch the letter.

“Try it,” said Stukely. “It’s the letter they have been making the
noise about. It ought to be printed. There’s a hit or two at the
middle-class that I should like to see in print. It’s really not bad
pulpit; and I suspect that what you object to, colonel, is only the
dust of a well-thumped cushion. Shrapnel thumps with his fist. He
doesn’t say much that’s new. If the parsons were men they’d be saying
it every Sunday. If they did, colonel, I should hear you saying, amen.”

“Wait till they do say it.”

“That’s a long stretch. They’re turn-cocks of one Water-company—to wash
the greasy citizens!”

“You’re keeping Nevil on the gape;” said Mr. Romfrey, with a whimsical
shrewd cast of the eye at Beauchamp, who stood alert not to be foiled,
arrow-like in look and readiness to repeat his home-shot. Mr. Romfrey
wanted to hear more of that unintelligible “You!” of Beauchamp’s. But
Stukely Culbrett intended that the latter should be foiled, and he
continued his diversion from the angry subject.

“We’ll drop the sacerdotals,” he said. “They’re behind a veil for us,
and so are we for them. I’m with you, colonel; I wouldn’t have them
persecuted; they sting fearfully when whipped. No one listens to them
now except the class that goes to sleep under them, to ‘set an example’
to the class that can’t understand them. Shrapnel is like the breeze
shaking the turf-grass outside the church-doors; a trifle fresher. He
knocks nothing down.”

“He can’t!” ejaculated the colonel.

“He sermonizes to shake, that’s all. I know the kind of man.”

“Thank heaven, it’s not a common species in England!”

“Common enough to be classed.”

Beauchamp struck through the conversation of the pair: “Can I see you
alone to-night, sir, or to-morrow morning?”

“You may catch me where you can,” was Mr. Romfrey’s answer.

“Where’s that? It’s for your sake and mine, not for Dr. Shrapnel’s. I
have to speak to you, and must. You have done your worst with him; you
can’t undo it. You have to think of your honour as a gentleman. I
intend to treat you with respect, but wolf is the title now, whether I
say it or not.”

“Shrapnel’s a rather long-legged sheep?”

“He asks for nothing from you.”

“He would have got nothing, at a cry of peccavi!”

“He was innocent, perfectly blameless; he would not lie to save
himself. You mistook that for—but you were an engine shot along a line
of rails. He does you the justice to say you acted in error.”

“And you’re his parrot.”

“He pardons you.”

“Ha! t’ other cheek!”

“You went on that brute’s errand in ignorance. Will you keep to the
character now you know the truth? Hesitation about it doubles the
infamy. An old man! the best of men! the kindest and truest! the most
unselfish!”

“He tops me by half a head, and he’s my junior.”

Beauchamp suffered himself to give out a groan of sick derision: “Ah!”

“And it was no joke holding him tight,” said Mr. Romfrey, “I’d as lief
snap an ash. The fellow (he leaned round to Colonel Halkett) must be a
fellow of a fine constitution. And he took his punishment like a man.
I’ve known worse: and far worse: gentlemen by birth. There’s the choice
of taking it upright or fighting like a rabbit with a weasel in his
hole. Leave him to think it over, he’ll come right. I think no harm of
him, I’ve no animus. A man must have his lesson at some time of life. I
did what I had to do.”

“Look here, Nevil,” Stukely Culbrett checked Beauchamp in season: “I
beg to inquire what Dr. Shrapnel means by ‘the people.’ We have in our
country the nobles and the squires, and after them, as I understand it,
the people: that’s to say, the middle-class and the working-class—fat
and lean. I’m quite with Shrapnel when he lashes the fleshpots. They
want it, and they don’t get it from ‘their organ,’ the Press. I fancy
you and I agree about their organ; the dismallest organ that ever
ground a hackneyed set of songs and hymns to madden the thoroughfares.”

“The Press of our country!” interjected Colonel Halkett in moaning
parenthesis.

“It’s the week-day Parson of the middle-class, colonel. They have their
thinking done for them as the Chinese have their dancing. But, Nevil,
your Dr. Shrapnel seems to treat the traders as identical with the
aristocracy in opposition to his ‘people.’ The traders are the cursed
middlemen, bad friends of the ‘people,’ and infernally treacherous to
the nobles till money hoists them. It’s they who pull down the country.
They hold up the nobles to the hatred of the democracy, and the
democracy to scare the nobles. One’s when they want to swallow a
privilege, and the other’s when they want to ring-fence their gains.
How is it Shrapnel doesn’t expose the trick? He must see through it. I
like that letter of his. People is one of your Radical big words that
burst at a query. He can’t mean Quince, and Bottom, and Starveling,
Christopher Sly, Jack Cade, Caliban, and poor old Hodge? No, no, Nevil.
Our clowns are the stupidest in Europe. They can’t cook their meals.
They can’t spell; they can scarcely speak. They haven’t a jig in their
legs. And I believe they’re losing their grin! They’re nasty when their
blood’s up. Shakespeare’s Cade tells you what he thought of
Radicalizing the people. ‘And as for your mother, I’ll make her a
duke’; that’s one of their songs. The word people, in England, is a
dyspeptic agitator’s dream when he falls nodding over the red chapter
of French history. Who won the great liberties for England? My book
says, the nobles. And who made the great stand later?—the squires. What
have the middlemen done but bid for the people they despise and fear,
dishonour us abroad and make a hash of us at home? Shrapnel sees that.
Only he has got the word people in his mouth. The people of England, my
dear fellow, want _heading_. Since the traders obtained power we have
been a country on all fours. Of course Shrapnel sees it: I say so. But
talk to him and teach him where to look for the rescue.”

Colonel Halkett said to Stukely: “If you have had a clear idea in what
you have just spoken, my head’s no place for it!”

Stukely’s unusually lengthy observations had somewhat heated him, and
he protested with earnestness: “It was pure Tory, my dear colonel.”

But the habitually and professedly cynical should not deliver
themselves at length: for as soon as they miss their customary incision
of speech they are apt to aim to recover it in loquacity, and thus it
may be that the survey of their ideas becomes disordered.

Mr. Culbrett endangered his reputation for epigram in a good cause, it
shall be said.

These interruptions were torture to Beauchamp. Nevertheless the end was
gained. He sank into a chair silent.

Mr. Romfrey wished to have it out with his nephew, of whose comic
appearance as a man full of thunder, and occasionally rattling, yet all
the while trying to be decorous and politic, he was getting tired. He
foresaw that a tussle between them in private would possibly be too hot
for his temper, admirably under control though it was.

“Why not drag Cecil to Shrapnel?” he said, for a provocation.

Beauchamp would not be goaded.

Colonel Halkett remarked that he would have to leave Steynham the next
day. His host remonstrated with him. The colonel said: “Early.” He had
very particular business at home. He was positive, and declined every
inducement to stay. Mr. Romfrey glanced at Nevil, thinking, You poor
fool! And then he determined to let the fellow have five minutes alone
with him.

This occurred at midnight, in that half-armoury, half-library, which
was his private room.

Rosamund heard their voices below. She cried out to herself that it was
her doing, and blamed her beloved, and her master, and Dr. Shrapnel, in
the breath of her self-recrimination. The demagogue, the
over-punctilious gentleman, the faint lover, surely it must be reason
wanting in the three for each of them in turn to lead the other, by an
excess of some sort of the quality constituting their men’s natures, to
wreck a calm life and stand in contention! Had Shrapnel been commonly
reasonable he would have apologized to Mr. Romfrey, or had Mr. Romfrey,
he would not have resorted to force to punish the supposed offender, or
had Nevil, he would have held his peace until he had gained his bride.
As it was; the folly of the three knocked at her heart, uniting to
bring the heavy accusation against one poor woman, quite in the old
way: the Who is she? of the mocking Spaniard at mention of a social
catastrophe. Rosamund had a great deal of the pride of her sex, and she
resented any slur on it. She felt almost superciliously toward Mr.
Romfrey and Nevil for their not taking hands to denounce the plotter,
Cecil Baskelett. They seemed a pair of victims to him, nearly as much
so as the wretched man Shrapnel. It was their senselessness which made
her guilty! And simply because she had uttered two or three
exclamations of dislike of a revolutionary and infidel she was
compelled to groan under her present oppression! Is there anything to
be hoped of men? Rosamund thought bitterly of Nevil’s idea of their
progress. Heaven help them! But the unhappy creatures have ceased to
look to a heaven for help.

We see the consequence of it in this Shrapnel complication.

Three men: and one struck down; the other defeated in his benevolent
intentions; the third sacrificing fortune and happiness: all three
owing their mischance to one or other of the vague ideas disturbing
men’s heads! Where shall we look for mother wit?—or say, common
suckling’s instinct? Not to men, thought Rosamund.

She was listening to the voices of Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp in a
fever. Ordinarily the lord of Steynham was not out of his bed later
than twelve o’clock at night. His door opened at half-past one. Not a
syllable was exchanged by the couple in the hall. They had fought it
out. Mr. Romfrey came upstairs alone, and on the closing of his
chamber-door she slipped down to Beauchamp and had a dreadful hour with
him that subdued her disposition to sit in judgement upon men. The
unavailing attempt to move his uncle had wrought him to the state in
which passionate thoughts pass into speech like heat to flame. Rosamund
strained her mental sight to gain a conception of his prodigious horror
of the treatment of Dr. Shrapnel that she might think him sane: and to
retain a vestige of comfort in her bosom she tried to moderate and make
light of as much as she could conceive. Between the two efforts she had
no sense but that of helplessness. Once more she was reduced to promise
that she would speak the whole truth to Mr. Romfrey, even to the fact
that she had experienced a common woman’s jealousy of Dr. Shrapnel’s
influence, and had alluded to him jealously, spitefully, and falsely.
There was no mercy in Beauchamp. He was for action at any cost, with
all the forces he could gather, and without delays. He talked of
Cecilia as his uncle’s bride to him. Rosamund could hardly trust her
ears when he informed her he had told his uncle of his determination to
compel him to accomplish the act of penitence. “Was it prudent to say
it, Nevil?” she asked. But, as in his politics, he disdained prudence.
A monstrous crime had been committed, involving the honour of the
family. No subtlety of insinuation, no suggestion, could wean him from
the fixed idea that the apology to Dr. Shrapnel must be spoken by his
uncle in person.

“If one could only imagine Mr. Romfrey doing it!” Rosamund groaned.

“He shall: and you will help him,” said Beauchamp.

“If you loved a woman half as much as you do that man!”

“If I knew a woman as good, as wise, as noble as he!”

“You are losing her.”

“You expect me to go through ceremonies of courtship at a time like
this! If she cares for me she will feel with me. Simple compassion—but
let Miss Halkett be. I’m afraid I overtasked her in taking her to
Bevisham. She remained outside the garden. Ma’am, she is unsullied by
contact with a single shrub of Dr. Shrapnel’s territory.”

“Do not be so bitterly ironical, Nevil. You have not seen her as I
have.”

Rosamund essayed a tender sketch of the fair young lady, and fancied
that she drew forth a sigh; she would have coloured the sketch, but he
commanded her to hurry off to bed, and think of her morning’s work.

A commission of which we feel we can accurately forecast the
unsuccessful end is not likely to be undertaken with an ardour that
might perhaps astound the presageing mind with unexpected issues.
Rosamund fulfilled hers in the style of one who has learnt a lesson,
and, exactly as she had anticipated, Mr. Romfrey accused her of coming
to him from a conversation with that fellow Nevil overnight. He
shrugged and left the house for his morning’s walk across the fields.

Colonel Halkett and Cecilia beheld him from the breakfast-room
returning with Beauchamp, who had waylaid him and was hammering his
part in the now endless altercation. It could be descried at any
distance; and how fine was Mr. Romfrey’s bearing!—truly noble by
contrast, as of a grave big dog worried by a small barking dog. There
is to an unsympathetic observer an intense vexatiousness in the
exhibition of such pertinacity. To a soldier accustomed at a glance to
estimate powers of attack and defence, this repeated puny assailing of
a fortress that required years of siege was in addition ridiculous. Mr.
Romfrey appeared impregnable, and Beauchamp mad. “He’s foaming again!”
said the colonel, and was only ultra-pictorial. “Before breakfast!” was
a further slur on Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey was elevated by the extraordinary comicality of the notion
of the proposed apology to heights of humour beyond laughter, whence we
see the unbounded capacity of the general man for folly, and rather
commiserate than deride him. He was quite untroubled. It demanded a
steady view of the other side of the case to suppose of one whose
control of his temper was perfect, that he could be in the wrong. He at
least did not think so, and Colonel Halkett relied on his common sense.
Beauchamp’s brows were smouldering heavily, except when he had to talk.
He looked paleish and worn, and said he had been up early. Cecilia
guessed that he had not been to bed.

It was dexterously contrived by her host, in spite of the colonel’s
manifest anxiety to keep them asunder, that she should have some
minutes with Beauchamp out in the gardens. Mr. Romfrey led them out,
and then led the colonel away to offer him a choice of pups of rare
breed.

“Nevil,” said Cecilia, “you will not think it presumption in me to give
you advice?”

Her counsel to him was, that he should leave Steynham immediately, and
trust to time for his uncle to reconsider his conduct.

Beauchamp urged the counter-argument of the stain on the family honour.

She hinted at expediency; he frankly repudiated it.

The downs faced them, where the heavenly vast “might have been” of
yesterday wandered thinner than a shadow of to-day; weaving a story
without beginning, crisis, or conclusion, flowerless and fruitless, but
with something of infinite in it sweeter to brood on than the future of
her life to Cecilia.

“If meanwhile Dr. Shrapnel should die, and repentance comes too late!”
said Beauchamp.

She had no clear answer to that, save the hope of its being an
unfounded apprehension. “As far as it is in my power, Nevil, I will
avoid injustice to him in my thoughts.”

He gazed at her thankfully. “Well,” said he, “that’s like sighting the
cliffs. But I don’t feel home round me while the colonel is so
strangely prepossessed. For a high-spirited gentleman like your father
to approve, or at least accept, an act so barbarous is
incomprehensible. Speak to him, Cecilia, will you? Let him know your
ideas.”

She assented. He said instantly, “Persuade him to speak to my uncle
Everard.”

She was tempted to smile.

“I must do only what I think wise, if I am to be of service, Nevil.”

“True, but paint that scene to him. An old man, utterly defenceless,
making no defence! a cruel error. The colonel can’t, or he doesn’t,
clearly get it inside him, otherwise I’m certain it would revolt him:
just as I am certain my uncle Everard is at this moment a stone-blind
man. If he has done a thing, he can’t question it, won’t examine it.
The thing becomes a part of him, as much as his hand or his head. He’s
a man of the twelfth century. Your father might be helped to understand
him first.”

“Yes,” she said, not very warmly, though sadly.

“Tell the colonel how it must have been brought about. For Cecil
Baskelett called on Dr. Shrapnel two days before Mr. Romfrey stood at
his gate.”

The name of Cecil caused her to draw in her shoulders in a
half-shudder. “It may indeed be Captain Baskelett who set this cruel
thing in motion!”

“Then point that out to your father, said he, perceiving a chance of
winning her to his views through a concrete object of her dislike, and
cooling toward the woman who betrayed a vulgar characteristic of her
sex; who was merely woman, unable sternly to recognize the doing of a
foul wrong because of her antipathy, until another antipathy
enlightened her.

He wanted in fact a ready-made heroine, and did not give her credit for
the absence of fire in her blood, as well as for the unexercised
imagination which excludes young women from the power to realize
unwonted circumstances. We men walking about the world have perhaps no
more imagination of matters not domestic than they; but what we have is
quick with experience: we see the thing we hear of: women come to it
how they can.

Cecilia was recommended to weave a narrative for her father, and
ultimately induce him, if she could, to give a gentleman’s opinion of
the case to Mr. Romfrey.

Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she
received. “Your father will say so and so: answer him with this and
that.” Beauchamp supplied her with phrases. She was to renew and renew
the attack; hammer as he did. Yesterday she had followed him: to-day
she was to march beside him—hardly as an equal. Patience! was the word
she would have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his
nature which this hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with
unusual perspicacity. Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit
that he had grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings.

He said: “I go to Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage, and don’t know how to hold up
my head before Miss Denham. She confided him to me when she left for
Switzerland!”

There was that to be thought of, certainly.

Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing
together in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny.

“I’ve been calling you several times, my dear,” he complained. “We
start in seven minutes. Bustle, and bonnet at once. Nevil, I’m sorry
for this business. Good-bye. Be a good boy, Nevil,” he murmured
kindheartedly, and shook Beauchamp’s hand with the cordiality of an
extreme relief in leaving him behind.

The colonel and Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp were standing on the
hall-steps when Rosamund beckoned the latter and whispered a request
for _that letter_ of Dr. Shrapnel’s. “It is for Miss Halkett, Nevil.”

He plucked the famous epistle from his bulging pocketbook, and added a
couple of others in the same handwriting.

“Tell her, a first reading—it’s difficult to read at first,” he said,
and burned to read it to Cecilia himself: to read it to her with his
comments and explanations appeared imperative. It struck him in a flash
that Cecilia’s counsel to him to quit Steynham for awhile was good. And
if he went to Bevisham he would be assured of Dr. Shrapnel’s condition:
notes and telegrams from the cottage were too much tempered to console
and deceive him.

“Send my portmanteau and bag after me to Bevisham,” he said to
Rosamund, and announced to the woefully astonished colonel that he
would have the pleasure of journeying in his company as far as the
town.

“Are you ready? No packing?” said the colonel.

“It’s better to have your impediments in the rear of you, and march!”
said Mr. Romfrey.

Colonel Halkett declined to wait for anybody. He shouted for his
daughter. The lady’s maid appeared, and then Cecilia with Rosamund.

“We can’t entertain you, Nevil; we’re away to the island: I’m sorry,”
said the colonel; and observing Cecilia’s face in full crimson, he
looked at her as if he had lost a battle by the turn of events at the
final moment.

Mr. Romfrey handed Cecilia into the carriage. He exchanged a friendly
squeeze with the colonel, and offered his hand to his nephew. Beauchamp
passed him with a nod and “Good-bye, sir.”

“Have ready at Holdesbury for the middle of the month,” said Mr.
Romfrey, unruffled, and bowed to Cecilia.

“If you think of bringing my cousin Baskelett, give me warning, sir,”
cried Beauchamp.

“Give me warning, if you want the house for Shrapnel,” replied his
uncle, and remarked to Rosamund, as the carriage wheeled round the
mounded laurels to the avenue, “He mayn’t be quite cracked. The fellow
seems to have a turn for catching his opportunity by the tail. He had
better hold fast, for it’s his last.”




CHAPTER XXXVII.
CECILIA CONQUERED


The carriage rolled out of the avenue and through the park, for some
time parallel with the wavy downs. Once away from Steynham Colonel
Halkett breathed freely, as if he had dropped a load: he was free of
his bond to Mr. Romfrey, and so great was the sense of relief in him
that he resolved to do battle against his daughter, supposing her still
lively blush to be the sign of the enemy’s flag run up on a surrendered
citadel. His authority was now to be thought of: his paternal sanction
was in his own keeping. Beautiful as she looked, it was hardly credible
that a fellow in possession of his reason could have let slip his
chance of such a prize; but whether he had or had not, the colonel felt
that he occupied a position enabling him either to out-manœuvre, or, if
need were, interpose forcibly and punish him for his half-heartedness.

Cecilia looked the loveliest of women to Beauchamp’s eyes, with her
blush, and the letters of Dr. Shrapnel in her custody, at her express
desire. Certain terms in the letters here and there, unsweet to ladies,
began to trouble his mind.

“By the way, colonel,” he said, “you had a letter of Dr. Shrapnel’s
read to you by Captain Baskelett.”

“Iniquitous rubbish!”

“With his comments on it, I dare say you thought it so. I won’t speak
of his right to make it public. He wanted to produce his impressions of
it and me, and that is a matter between him and me. Dr. Shrapnel makes
use of strong words now and then, but I undertake to produce a totally
different impression on you by reading the letter myself—sparing you”
(he turned to Cecilia) “a word or two, common enough to men who write
in black earnest and have humour.” He cited his old favourite, the
black and bright lecturer on Heroes. “You have read him, I know,
Cecilia. Well, Dr. Shrapnel is another, who writes in his own style,
not the leading-article style or modern pulpit stuff. He writes to
rouse.”

“He does that to my temper,” said the colonel.

“Perhaps here and there he might offend Cecilia’s taste,” Beauchamp
pursued for her behoof. “Everything depends on the mouthpiece. I should
not like the letter to be read without my being by;—except by men: any
just-minded man may read it: Seymour Austin, for example. Every line is
a text to the mind of the writer. Let me call on you to-morrow.”

“To-morrow?” Colonel Halkett put on a thoughtful air. “To-morrow we’re
off to the island for a couple of days; and there’s Lord Croyston’s
garden party, and the Yacht Ball. Come this evening-dine with us. No
reading of letters, please. I can’t stand it, Nevil.”

The invitation was necessarily declined by a gentleman who could not
expect to be followed by supplies of clothes and linen for evening wear
that day.

“Ah, we shall see you some day or other,” said the colonel.

Cecilia was less alive to Beauchamp’s endeavour to prepare her for the
harsh words in the letter than to her father’s insincerity. She would
have asked her friend to come in the morning next day, but for the
dread of deepening her blush.

“Do you intend to start so early in the morning, papa?” she ventured to
say; and he replied, “As early as possible.”

“I don’t know what news I shall have in Bevisham, or I would engage to
run over to the island,” said Beauchamp, with a flattering persistency
or singular obtuseness.

“You will dance,” he subsequently observed to Cecilia, out of the heart
of some reverie. He had been her admiring partner on the night before
the drive from Itchincope into Bevisham, and perhaps thought of her
graceful dancing at the Yacht Ball, and the contrast it would present
to his watch beside a sick man—struck down by one of his own family.

She could have answered, “Not if you wish me not to”; while smiling at
the quaint sorrowfulness of his tone.

“Dance!” quoth Colonel Halkett, whose present temper discerned a
healthy antagonism to misanthropic Radicals in the performance, “all
young people dance. Have you given over dancing?”

“Not entirely, colonel.”

Cecilia danced with Mr. Tuckham at the Yacht Ball, and was vividly
mindful of every slight incident leading to and succeeding her lover’s
abrupt, “You will dance”: which had all passed by her dream-like up to
that hour: his attempt to forewarn her of the phrases she would deem
objectionable in Dr. Shrapnel’s letter; his mild acceptation of her
father’s hostility; his adieu to her, and his melancholy departure on
foot from the station, as she drove away to Mount Laurels and gaiety.
Why do I dance? she asked herself. It was not in the spirit of
happiness. Her heart was not with Dr. Shrapnel, but very near him, and
heavy as a chamber of the sick. She was afraid of her father’s
favourite, imagining, from the colonel’s unconcealed opposition to
Beauchamp, that he had designs in the interests of Mr. Tuckham. But the
hearty gentleman scattered her secret terrors by his bluffness and
openness. He asked her to remember that she had recommended him to
listen to Seymour Austin, and he had done so, he said. Undoubtedly he
was much improved, much less overbearing.

He won her confidence by praising and loving her father, and when she
alluded to the wonderful services he had rendered on the Welsh estate,
he said simply that her father’s thanks repaid him. He recalled his
former downrightness only in speaking of the case of Dr. Shrapnel, upon
which, both with the colonel and with her, he was unreservedly
condemnatory of Mr. Romfrey. Colonel Halkett’s defence of the true
knight and guardian of the reputation of ladies, fell to pieces in the
presence of Mr. Tuckham. He had seen Dr. Shrapnel, on a visit to Mr.
Lydiard, whom he described as hanging about Bevisham, philandering as a
married man should not, though in truth he might soon expect to be
released by the death of his crazy wife. The doctor, he said, had been
severely shaken by the monstrous assault made on him, and had been most
unrighteously handled. The doctor was an inoffensive man in his private
life, detestable and dangerous though his teachings were. Outside
politics Mr. Tuckham went altogether with Beauchamp. He promised also
that old Mrs. Beauchamp should be accurately informed of the state of
matters between Captain Beauchamp and Mr. Romfrey. He left Mount
Laurels to go back in attendance on the venerable lady, without once
afflicting Cecilia with a shiver of well-founded apprehension, and she
was grateful to him almost to friendly affection in the vanishing of
her unjust suspicion, until her father hinted that there was the man of
his heart. Then she closed all avenues to her own.

A period of maidenly distress not previously unknown to her ensued.
Proposals of marriage were addressed to her by two untitled gentlemen,
and by the Earl of Lockrace: three within a fortnight. The recognition
of the young heiress’s beauty at the Yacht Ball was accountable for the
bursting out of these fires. Her father would not have deplored her
acceptance of the title of Countess of Lockrace. In the matter of
rejections, however, her will was paramount, and he was on her side
against relatives when the subject was debated among them. He called
her attention to the fact impressively, telling her that she should not
hear a syllable from him to persuade her to marry: the emphasis of
which struck the unspoken warning on her intelligence: Bring no man to
me of whom I do not approve!

“Worthier of you, _as I hope to become_,” Beauchamp had said. Cecilia
lit on that part of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter where “Fight this out within
you,” distinctly alluded to the unholy love. Could she think ill of the
man who thus advised him? She shared Beauchamp’s painful feeling for
him in a sudden tremour of her frame; as it were through his touch. To
the rest of the letter her judgement stood opposed, save when a
sentence here and there reminded her of Captain Baskelett’s insolent
sing-song declamation of it: and that would have turned Sacred Writing
to absurdity.

Beauchamp had mentioned Seymour Austin as one to whom he would
willingly grant a perusal of the letter. Mr. Austin came to Mount
Laurels about the close of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel
Halkett had spent his customary days of September shooting at Steynham.
Beauchamp’s folly was the colonel’s theme, for the fellow had dragged
Lord Palmet there, and driven his uncle out of patience. Mr. Romfrey’s
monumental patience had been exhausted by him. The colonel boiled over
with accounts of Beauchamp’s behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet,
and Baskelett, and Mrs. Culling: how he flew at and worried everybody
who seemed to him to have had a hand in the proper chastisement of that
man Shrapnel. That pestiferous letter of Shrapnel’s was animadverted
on, of course; and, “I should like you to have heard it, Austin,” the
colonel said, “just for you to have a notion of the kind of universal
blow-up those men are scheming, and would hoist us with, if they could
get a little more blasting-powder than they mill in their lunatic
heads.”

Now Cecilia wished for Mr. Austin’s opinion of Dr. Shrapnel; and as the
delicate state of her inclinations made her conscious that to give him
the letter covertly would be to betray them to him, who had once, not
knowing it, moved her to think of a possible great change in her life,
she mustered courage to say, “Captain Beauchamp at my request lent me
the letter to read; I have it, and others written by Dr. Shrapnel.”

Her father hummed to himself, and immediately begged Seymour Austin not
to waste his time on the stuff, though he had no idea that a perusal of
it could awaken other than the gravest reprehension in so rational a
Tory gentleman.

Mr. Austin read the letter through. He asked to see the other letters
mentioned by Cecilia, and read them calmly, without a frown or an
interjection. She sat sketching, her father devouring newspaper
columns.

“It’s the writing of a man who means well,” Mr. Austin delivered his
opinion.

“Why, the man’s an infidel!” Colonel Halkett exclaimed.

“There are numbers.”

“They have the grace not to confess, then.”

“It’s as well to know what the world’s made of, colonel. The clergy
shut their eyes. There’s no treating a disease without reading it; and
if we are to acknowledge a ‘vice,’ as Dr. Shrapnel would say of the
so-called middle-class, it is the smirking over what they think, or
their not caring to think at all. Too many time-servers rot the State.
I can understand the effect of such writing on a mind like Captain
Beauchamp’s. It would do no harm to our young men to have those letters
read publicly and lectured on—by competent persons. Half the thinking
world may think pretty much the same on some points as Dr. Shrapnel;
they are too wise or too indolent to say it: and of the other half,
about a dozen members would be competent to reply to him. He is the
earnest man, and flies at politics as uneasy young brains fly to
literature, fancying they can write because they can write with a pen.
He perceives a bad adjustment of things: which is correct. He is
honest, and takes his honesty for a virtue: and that entitles him to
believe in himself: and that belief causes him to see in all opposition
to him the wrong he has perceived in existing circumstances: and so in
a dream of power he invokes the people: and as they do not stir, he
takes to prophecy. This is the round of the politics of impatience. The
study of politics should be guided by some light of statesmanship,
otherwise it comes to this wild preaching.

These men are theory-tailors, not politicians. They are the men who
make the ‘strait-waistcoat for humanity.’ They would fix us to first
principles like tethered sheep or hobbled horses. I should enjoy
replying to him, if I had time. The whole letter is composed of
variations upon one idea. Still I must say the man interests me; I
should like to talk to him.”

Mr. Austin paid no heed to the colonel’s “Dear me! dear me!” of
amazement. He said of the style of the letters, that it was the puffing
of a giant: a strong wind rather than speech: and begged Cecilia to
note that men who labour to force their dreams on mankind and turn
vapour into fact, usually adopt such a style. Hearing that this private
letter had been deliberately read through by Mr. Romfrey, and handed by
him to Captain Baskelett, who had read it out in various places, Mr.
Austin said:

“A strange couple!” He appeared perplexed by his old friend’s approval
of them. “There we decidedly differ,” said he, when the case of Dr.
Shrapnel was related by the colonel, with a refusal to condemn Mr.
Romfrey. He pronounced Mr. Romfrey’s charges against Dr. Shrapnel,
taken in conjunction with his conduct, to be baseless, childish, and
wanton. The colonel would not see the case in that light; but Cecilia
did. It was a justification of Beauchamp; and how could she ever have
been blind to it?—scarcely blind, she remembered, but sensitively
blinking her eyelids to distract her sight in contemplating it, and to
preserve her repose. As to Beauchamp’s demand of the apology, Mr.
Austin considered that it might be an instance of his want of knowledge
of men, yet could not be called silly, and to call it insane was the
rhetoric of an adversary.

“I do call it insane,” said the colonel.

He separated himself from his daughter by a sharp division.

Had Beauchamp appeared at Mount Laurels, Cecilia would have been ready
to support and encourage him, boldly. Backed by Mr. Austin, she saw
some good in Dr. Shrapnel’s writing, much in Beauchamp’s devotedness.
He shone clear to her reason, at last: partly because her father in his
opposition to him did not, but was on the contrary unreasonable, cased
in mail, mentally clouded. She sat with Mr. Austin and her father,
trying repeatedly, in obedience to Beauchamp’s commands, to bring the
latter to a just contemplation of the unhappy case; behaviour on her
part which rendered the colonel inveterate.

Beauchamp at this moment was occupied in doing secretary’s work for Dr.
Shrapnel. So Cecilia learnt from Mr. Lydiard, who came to pay his
respects to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux at Mount Laurels. The pursuit of the
apology was continued in letters to his uncle and occasional interviews
with him, which were by no means instigated by the doctor, Mr. Lydiard
informed the ladies. He described Beauchamp as acting in the spirit of
a man who has sworn an oath to abandon every pleasure in life, that he
may, as far as it lies in his power, indemnify his friend for the wrong
done to him.

“Such men are too terrible for me,” said Mrs. Devereux.

Cecilia thought the reverse: Not for me! But she felt a strain upon her
nature, and she was miserable in her alienation from her father.
Kissing him one night, she laid her head on his breast, and begged his
forgiveness. He embraced her tenderly. “Wait, only wait; you will see I
am right,” he said, and prudently said no more, and did not ask her to
speak.

She was glad that she had sought the reconciliation from her heart’s
natural warmth, on hearing some time later that M. de Croisnel was
dead, and that Beauchamp meditated starting for France to console his
Renée. Her continual agitations made her doubtful of her human
feelings: she clung to that instance of her filial stedfastness.

The day before Cecilia and her father left Mount Laurels for their
season in Wales, Mr. Tuckham and Beauchamp came together to the house,
and were closeted an hour with her father. Cecilia sat in the
drawing-room, thinking that she did indeed wait, and had great
patience. Beauchamp entered the room alone. He looked worn and thin, of
a leaden colour, like the cloud that bears the bolt. News had reached
him of the death of Lord Avonley in the hunting-field, and he was going
on to Steynham to persuade his uncle to accompany him to Bevisham and
wash the guilt of his wrong-doing off him before applying for the
title. “You would advise me not to go?” he said. “I must. I should be
dishonoured myself if I let a chance pass. I run the risk of being a
beggar: I’m all but one now.”

Cecilia faltered: “Do you see a chance?”

“Hardly more than an excuse for trying it,” he replied.

She gave him back Dr. Shrapnel’s letters. “I have read them,” was all
she said. For he might have just returned from France, with the breath
of Renée about him, and her pride would not suffer her to melt him in
rivalry by saying what she had been led to think of the letters.

Hearing nothing from her, he silently put them in his pocket. The
struggle with his uncle seemed to be souring him or deadening him.

They were not alone for long. Mr. Tuckham presented himself to take his
leave of her. Old Mrs. Beauchamp was dying, and he had only come to
Mount Laurels on special business. Beauchamp was just as anxious to
hurry away.

Her father found her sitting in the solitude of a drawing-room at
midday, pale-faced, with unoccupied fingers, not even a book in her
lap.

He walked up and down the room until Cecilia, to say something, said:
“Mr. Tuckham could not stay.”

“No,” said her father; “he could not. He has to be back as quick as he
can to cut his legacy in halves!”

Cecilia looked perplexed.

“I’ll speak plainly,” said the colonel. “He sees that Nevil has ruined
himself with his uncle. The old lady won’t allow Nevil to visit her; in
her condition it would be an excitement beyond her strength to bear.
She sent Blackburn to bring Nevil here, and give him the option of
stating before me whether those reports about his misconduct in France
were true or not. He demurred at first: however, he says they are not
true. He would have run away with the Frenchwoman, and he would have
fought the duel: but he did neither. Her brother ran ahead of him and
fought for him: so he declares and she wouldn’t run. So the reports are
false. We shall know what Blackburn makes of the story when we hear of
the legacy. I have been obliged to write word to Mrs. Beauchamp that I
believe Nevil to have made a true statement of the facts. But I
distinctly say, and so I told Blackburn, I don’t think money will do
Nevil Beauchamp a farthing’s worth of good. Blackburn follows his own
counsel. He induced the old lady to send him; so I suppose he intends
to let her share the money between them. I thought better of him; I
thought him a wiser man.”

Gratitude to Mr. Tuckham on Beauchamp’s behalf caused Cecilia to praise
him, in the tone of compliments. The difficulty of seriously admiring
two gentlemen at once is a feminine dilemma, with the maidenly among
women.

“He has disappointed me,” said Colonel Halkett.

“Would you have had him allow a falsehood to enrich him and ruin Nevil,
papa?”

“My dear child, I’m sick to death of romantic fellows. I took Blackburn
for one of our solid young men. Why should he share his aunt’s
fortune?”

“You mean, why should Nevil have money?”

“Well, I do mean that. Besides, the story was not false as far as his
intentions went: he confessed it, and I ought to have put it in a
postscript. If Nevil wants money, let him learn to behave himself like
a gentleman at Steynham.”

“He has not failed.”

“I’ll say, then, behave himself, simply. He considers it a point of
honour to get his uncle Everard to go down on his knees to Shrapnel.
But he has no moral sense where I should like to see it: none: he
confessed it.”

“What were his words, papa?”

“I don’t remember words. He runs over to France, whenever it suits him,
to carry on there...” The colonel ended in a hum and buzz.

“Has he been to France lately?” asked Cecilia.

Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.

“The woman’s father is dead, I hear,” Colonel Halkett remarked.

“But he has not been there?”

“How can I tell? He’s anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.”

“No!”

“I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and
scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally,
infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.”

“Oh no!” exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast
her eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly
sure now that her idea of Nevil’s having gone over to France was
groundless; and feeling that she had been unworthy of him who strove to
be “worthier of her, as he hoped to become.”

Colonel Halkett scoffed at her “Oh no,” and called it woman’s logic.

She could not restrain herself. “Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa?
It is Nevil’s perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you
than men who are timeservers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr.
Austin said. Nevil is not one of them. I am not able to judge or
speculate whether he has a great brain or is likely to distinguish
himself out of his profession: I would rather he did not abandon it:
but Mr. Austin said to me in talking of him...”

“That notion of Austin’s of screwing women’s minds up to the pitch of
men’s!” interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.

“He said, papa, that honestly active men in a country, who decline to
practise hypocrisy, show that the blood runs, and are a sign of
health.”

“You misunderstood him, my dear.”

“I think I thoroughly understood him. He did not call them wise. He
said they might be dangerous if they were not met in debate. But he
said, and I presume to think truly, that the reason why they are
decried is, that it is too great a trouble for a lazy world to meet
them. And, he said, the reason why the honest factions agitate is
because they encounter sneers until they appear in force. If they were
met earlier, and fairly—I am only quoting him—they would not, I think
he said, or would hardly, or would not generally, fall into
professional agitation.”

“Austin’s a speculative Tory, I know; and that’s his weakness,”
observed the colonel. “But I’m certain you misunderstood him. He never
would have called us a lazy people.”

“Not in matters of business: in matters of thought.”

“My dear Cecilia! You’ve got hold of a language!... a way of speaking!
.... Who set you thinking on these things?”

“That I owe to Nevil Beauchamp!”

Colonel Halkett indulged in a turn or two up and down the room. He
threw open a window, sniffed the moist air, and went to his daughter to
speak to her resolutely.

“Between a Radical and a Tory, I don’t know where your head has been
whirled to, my dear. Your heart seems to be gone: more sorrow for us!
And for Nevil Beauchamp to be pretending to love you while carrying on
with this Frenchwoman!”

“He has never said that he loved me.”

The splendour of her beauty in humility flashed on her father, and he
cried out: “You are too good for any man on earth! We won’t talk in the
dark, my darling. You tell me he has never, as they say, made love to
you?”

“Never, papa.”

“Well, that proves the French story. At any rate, he’s a man of honour.
But you love him?”

“The French story is untrue, papa.”

Cecilia stood in a blush like the burning cloud of the sunset.

“Tell me frankly: I’m your father, your old dada, your friend, my dear
girl! do you think the man cares for you, loves you?”

She replied: “I know, papa, the French story is untrue.”

“But when I tell you, silly woman, he confessed it to me out of his own
mouth!”

“It is not true now.”

“It’s not going on, you mean? How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Has he been swearing it?”

“He has not spoken of it to me.”

“Here I am in a woman’s web!” cried the colonel. “Is it your instinct
tells you it’s not true? or what? what? You have not denied that you
love the man.”

“I know he is not immoral.”

“There you shoot again! Haven’t you a yes or a no for your father?”

Cecilia cast her arms round his neck, and sobbed.

She could not bring it to her lips to say (she would have shunned the
hearing) that her defence of Beauchamp, which was a shadowed avowal of
the state of her heart, was based on his desire to read to her the
conclusion of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter touching a passion to be overcome;
necessarily therefore a passion that was vanquished, and the fullest
and bravest explanation of his shifting treatment of her: nor would she
condescend to urge that her lover would have said he loved her when
they were at Steynham, but for the misery and despair of a soul too
noble to be diverted from his grief and sense of duty, and, as she
believed, unwilling to speak to win her while his material fortune was
in jeopardy.

The colonel cherished her on his breast, with one hand regularly
patting her shoulder: a form of consolation that cures the disposition
to sob as quickly as would the drip of water.

Cecilia looked up into his eyes, and said, “We will not be parted,
papa, ever.”

The colonel said absently: “No”; and, surprised at himself, added: “No,
certainly not. How can we be parted? You won’t run away from me? No,
you know too well I can’t resist you. I appeal to your judgement, and I
must accept what you decide. But he is immoral. I repeat that. He has
no roots. We shall discover it before it’s too late, I hope.”

Cecilia gazed away, breathing through tremulous dilating nostrils.

“One night after dinner at Steynham,” pursued the colonel, “Nevil was
rattling against the Press, with Stukely Culbrett to prime him: and he
said editors of papers were growing to be like priests, and as timid as
priests, and arrogant: and for one thing, it was because they supposed
themselves to be guardians of the national morality. I forget exactly
what the matter was: but he sneered at priests and morality.”

A smile wove round Cecilia’s lips, and in her towering superiority to
one who talked nonsense, she slipped out of maiden shame and said:
“Attack Nevil for his political heresies and his wrath with the Press
for not printing him. The rest concerns his honour, where he is quite
safe, and all are who trust him.”

“If you find out you’re wrong?”

She shook her head.

“But if you find out you’re wrong about him,” her father reiterated
piteously, “you won’t tear me to strips to have him in spite of it?”

“No, papa, not I. I will not.”

“Well, that’s something for me to hold fast to,” said Colonel Halkett,
sighing.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.
LORD AVONLEY


Mr. Everard Romfrey was now, by consent, Lord Avonley, mounted on his
direct heirship and riding hard at the earldom. His elevation occurred
at a period of life that would have been a season of decay with most
men; but the prolonged and lusty Autumn of the veteran took new fires
from a tangible object to live for. His brother Craven’s death had
slightly stupefied, and it had grieved him: it seemed to him peculiarly
pathetic; for as he never calculated on the happening of mortal
accidents to men of sound constitution, the circumstance imparted a
curious shake to his own solidity. It was like the quaking of earth,
which tries the balance of the strongest. If he had not been raised to
so splendid a survey of the actual world, he might have been led to
think of the imaginary, where perchance a man may meet his old dogs and
a few other favourites, in a dim perpetual twilight. Thither at all
events Craven had gone, and goodnight to him! The earl was a rapidly
lapsing invalid. There could be no doubt that Everard was to be the
head of his House.

Outwardly he was the same tolerant gentleman who put aside the poor
fools of the world to walk undisturbed by them in the paths he had
chosen: in this aspect he knew himself: nor was the change so great
within him as to make him cognizant of a change. It was only a secret
turn in the bent of the mind, imperceptible as the touch of the cunning
artist’s brush on a finished portrait, which will alter the expression
without discomposing a feature, so that you cannot say it is another
face, yet it is not the former one. His habits were invariable, as were
his meditations. He thought less of Romfrey Castle than of his dogs and
his devices for trapping vermin; his interest in birds and beasts and
herbs, “what ninnies call Nature in books,” to quote him, was
undiminished; imagination he had none to clap wings to his head and be
off with it. He betrayed as little as he felt that the coming Earl of
Romfrey was different from the cadet of the family.

A novel sharpness in the “Stop that,” with which he crushed Beauchamp’s
affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening of the vexed
Shrapnel question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and
breathed a different spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that
welcomed and lured on an adversary to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful
preoccupation is, however, to be expected in the man who has lost a
brother, and some degree of irritability at the intrusion of past
disputes. He chose to repeat a similar brief forbidding of the subject
before they started together for the scene of the accident and Romfrey
Castle. No notice was taken of Beauchamp’s remark, that he consented to
go though his duty lay elsewhere. Beauchamp had not the faculty of
reading inside men, or he would have apprehended that his uncle was
engaged in silently heaping aggravations to shoot forth one fine day a
thundering and astonishing counterstroke.

He should have known his uncle Everard better.

In this respect he seemed to have no memory. But who has much that has
given up his brains for a lodging to a single idea? It is at once a
devouring dragon, and an intractable steamforce; it is a tyrant that
has eaten up a senate, and a prophet with a message. Inspired of
solitariness and gigantic size, it claims divine origin. The world can
have no peace for it.

Cecilia had not pleased him; none had. He did not bear in mind that the
sight of Dr. Shrapnel sick and weak, which constantly reanimated his
feelings of pity and of wrath, was not given to the others of whom he
demanded a corresponding energy of just indignation and sympathy. The
sense that he was left unaided to the task of bending his tough uncle,
combined with his appreciation of the righteousness of the task to
embitter him and set him on a pedestal, from which he descended at
every sign of an opportunity for striking, and to which he retired
continually baffled and wrathful, in isolation.

Then ensued the dreadful division in his conception of his powers: for
he who alone saw the just and right thing to do, was incapable of
compelling it to be done. Lay on to his uncle as he would, that
wrestler shook him off. And here was one man whom he could not move!
How move a nation?

There came on him a thirst for the haranguing of crowds. They agree
with you or they disagree; exciting you to activity in either case.
They do not interpose cold Tory exclusiveness and inaccessibility. You
have them in the rough; you have nature in them, and all that is
hopeful in nature. You drive at, over, and through them, for their
good; you plough them. You sow them too. Some of them perceive that it
_is_ for their good, and what if they be a minority? Ghastly as a
minority is in an Election, in a lifelong struggle it is refreshing and
encouraging. The young world and its triumph is with the minority. Oh
to be speaking! Condemned to silence beside his uncle, Beauchamp chafed
for a loosed tongue and an audience tossing like the well-whipped
ocean, or open as the smooth sea-surface to the marks of the breeze.
Let them be hostile or amicable, he wanted an audience as hotly as the
humped Richard a horse.

At Romfrey Castle he fell upon an audience that became transformed into
a swarm of chatterers, advisers, and reprovers the instant his lips
were parted. The ladies of the family declared his pursuit of the
Apology to be worse and vainer than his politics. The gentlemen said
the same, but they were not so outspoken to him personally, and
indulged in asides, with quotations of some of his uncle Everard’s
recent observations concerning him: as for example, “Politically he’s a
mad harlequin jumping his tights and spangles when nobody asks him to
jump; and in private life he’s a mad dentist poking his tongs at my
sound tooth:” a highly ludicrous image of the persistent fellow, and a
reminder of situations in Molière, as it was acted by Cecil Baskelett
and Lord Welshpool. Beauchamp had to a certain extent restored himself
to favour with his uncle Everard by offering a fair suggestion on the
fatal field to account for the accident, after the latter had taken
measurements and examined the place in perplexity. His elucidation of
the puzzle was referred to by Lord Avonley at Romfrey, and finally
accepted as possible and this from a wiseacre who went quacking about
the county, expecting to upset the order of things in England! Such a
mixing of sense and nonsense in a fellow’s noddle was never before met
with, Lord Avonley said. Cecil took the hint. He had been unworried by
Beauchamp: Dr. Shrapnel had not been mentioned: and it delighted Cecil
to let it be known that he thought old Nevil had some good notions,
particularly as to the duties of the aristocracy—that first war-cry of
his when a midshipman. News of another fatal accident in the
hunting-field confirmed Cecil’s higher opinion of his cousin. On the
day of Craven’s funeral they heard at Romfrey that Mr. Wardour-Devereux
had been killed by a fall from his horse. Two English gentlemen
despatched by the same agency within a fortnight! “He smoked,” Lord
Avonley said of the second departure, to allay some perturbation in the
bosoms of the ladies who had ceased to ride, by accounting for this
particular mishap in the most reassuring fashion. Cecil’s immediate
reflection was that the unfortunate smoker had left a rich widow. Far
behind in the race for Miss Halkett, and uncertain of a settled
advantage in his other rivalry with Beauchamp, he fixed his mind on the
widow, and as Beauchamp did not stand in his way, but on the contrary
might help him—for she, like the generality of women, admired Nevil
Beauchamp in spite of her feminine good sense and conservatism—Cecil
began to regard the man he felt less opposed to with some recognition
of his merits. The two nephews accompanied Lord Avonley to London, and
slept at his town-house.

They breakfasted together the next morning on friendly terms. Half an
hour afterward there was an explosion; uncle and nephews were scattered
fragments: and if Cecil was the first to return to cohesion with his
lord and chief, it was, he protested energetically, common policy in a
man in his position to do so: all that he looked for being a decent
pension and a share in the use of the town-house. Old Nevil, he
related, began cross-examining him and entangling him with the cunning
of the deuce, in my lord’s presence, and having got him to make an
admission, old Nevil flung it at the baron, and even crossed him and
stood before him when he was walking out of the room. A furious wrangle
took place. Nevil and the baron gave it to one another unmercifully.
The end of it was that all three flew apart, for Cecil confessed to
having a temper, and in contempt of him for the admission wrung out of
him, Lord Avonley had pricked it. My lord went down to Steynham,
Beauchamp to Holdesbury, and Captain Baskelett to his quarters; whence
in a few days he repaired penitently to my lord—the most placable of
men when a full submission was offered to him.

Beauchamp did nothing of the kind. He wrote a letter to Steynham in the
form of an ultimatum.

This egregious letter was handed to Rosamund for a proof of her
darling’s lunacy. She in conversation with Stukely Culbrett
unhesitatingly accused Cecil of plotting his cousin’s ruin.

Mr. Culbrett thought it possible that Cecil had been a little more than
humorous in the part he had played in the dispute, and spoke to him.

Then it came out that Lord Avonley had also delivered an ultimatum to
Beauchamp.

Time enough had gone by for Cecil to forget his ruffling, and relish
the baron’s grandly comic spirit in appropriating that big word
Apology, and demanding it from Beauchamp on behalf of the lady ruling
his household. What could be funnier than the knocking of Beauchamp’s
blunderbuss out of his hands, and pointing the muzzle at him!

Cecil dramatized the fun to amuse Mr. Culbrett. Apparently Beauchamp
had been staggered on hearing himself asked for the definite article he
claimed. He had made a point of speaking of _the_ Apology. Lord Avonley
did likewise. And each professed to exact it for a deeply aggrieved
person: each put it on the ground that it involved the other’s rightful
ownership of the title of gentleman.

‘“An apology to the amiable and virtuous Mistress Culling?’ says old
Nevil: ‘an apology? what for?’—‘For unbecoming and insolent behaviour,’
says my lord.”

“I am that lady’s friend,” Stukely warned Captain Baskelett. “Don’t let
us have a third apology in the field.”

“Perfectly true; you are her friend, and you know what a friend of mine
she is,” rejoined Cecil. “I could swear ‘that lady’ flings the whole
affair at me. I give you my word, old Nevil and I were on a capital
footing before he and the baron broke up. I praised him for tickling
the aristocracy. I backed him heartily; I do now; I’ll do it in
Parliament. I know a case of a noble lord, a General in the army, and
he received an intimation that he might as well attend the Prussian
cavalry manœuvres last Autumn on the Lower Rhine or in Silesia—no
matter where. He couldn’t go: he was engaged to shoot birds! I give you
my word. Now there I see old Nevil’s right. It’s as well we should know
something about the Prussian and Austrian cavalry, and if our
aristocracy won’t go abroad to study cavalry, who is to? no class in
the kingdom understands horses as they do. My opinion is, they’re
asleep. Nevil should have stuck to that, instead of trying to galvanize
the country and turning against his class. But fancy old Nevil asked
for the Apology! It petrified him. ‘I’ve told her nothing but the
truth,’ says Nevil. ‘Telling the truth to women is an impertinence,’
says my lord. Nevil swore he’d have a revolution in the country before
he apologized.”

Mr. Culbrett smiled at the absurdity of the change of positions between
Beauchamp and his uncle Everard, which reminded him somewhat of the old
story of the highwayman innkeeper and the market farmer who had been
thoughtful enough to recharge his pistols after quitting the inn at
midnight. A practical “tu quoque” is astonishingly laughable, and
backed by a high figure and manner it had the flavour of triumphant
repartee. Lord Avonley did not speak of it as a retort upon Nevil,
though he reiterated the word Apology amusingly. He put it as due to
the lady governing his household; and his ultimatum was, that the
Apology should be delivered in terms to satisfy _him_ within three
months of the date of the demand for it: otherwise blank; but the
shadowy index pointed to the destitution of Nevil Beauchamp.

No stroke of retributive misfortune could have been severer to Rosamund
than to be thrust forward as the object of humiliation for the man she
loved. She saw at a glance how much more likely it was (remote as the
possibility appeared) that her lord would perform the act of penitence
than her beloved Nevil. And she had no occasion to ask herself why.
Lord Avonley had done wrong, and Nevil had not. It was inconceivable
that Nevil should apologize to her. It was horrible to picture the act
in her mind. She was a very rational woman, quite a woman of the world,
yet such was her situation between these two men that the childish tale
of a close and consecutive punishment for sins, down to our little
naughtinesses and naturalnesses, enslaved her intelligence, and amazed
her with the example made of her, as it were to prove the tale true of
our being surely hauled back like domestic animals learning the habits
of good society, to the rueful contemplation of certain of our deeds,
however wildly we appeal to nature to stand up for them.

But is it so with all of us? No, thought Rosamund, sinking dejectedly
from a recognition of the heavenliness of the justice which lashed her
and Nevil, and did not scourge Cecil Baskelett. That fine eye for
celestially directed consequences is ever haunted by shadows of unfaith
likely to obscure it completely when chastisement is not seen to fall
on the person whose wickedness is evident to us. It has been
established that we do not wax diviner by dragging down the Gods to our
level.

Rosamund knew Lord Avonley too well to harass him with further
petitions and explanations. Equally vain was it to attempt to persuade
Beauchamp. He made use of the house in London, where he met his uncle
occasionally, and he called at Steynham for money, that he could have
obtained upon the one condition, which was no sooner mentioned than
fiery words flew in the room, and the two separated. The leaden look in
Beauchamp, noticed by Cecilia Halkett in their latest interview, was
deepening, and was of itself a displeasure to Lord Avonley, who liked
flourishing faces, and said: “That fellow’s getting the look of a
sweating smith”: presumptively in the act of heating his poker at the
furnace to stir the country.

It now became an offence to him that Beauchamp should continue doing
this in the speeches and lectures he was reported to be delivering; he
stamped his foot at the sight of his nephew’s name in the daily
journals; a novel sentiment of social indignation was expressed by his
crying out, at the next request for money: “Money to prime you to turn
the country into a rat-hole? Not a square inch of Pennsylvanian
paper-bonds! What right have you to be lecturing and orationing? You’ve
no knowledge. All you’ve got is your instincts, and that you show in
your readiness to exhibit them like a monkey. You ought to be turned
inside out on your own stage. You’ve lumped your brains on a point or
two about Land, and Commonland, and the Suffrage, and you pound away
upon them, as if you had the key of the difficulty. It’s the
Scotchman’s metaphysics; you know nothing clear, and your
working-classes know nothing at all; and you blow them with wind like
an over-stuffed cow. What you’re driving at is to get hob-nail boots to
dance on our heads. Stukely says you should be off over to Ireland.
There you’d swim in your element, and have speechifying from instinct,
and howling and pummelling too, enough to last you out. I’ll hand you
money for that expedition. You’re one above the number wanted here.
You’ve a look of bad powder fit only to flash in the pan. I saved you
from the post of public donkey, by keeping you out of Parliament.
You’re braying and kicking your worst for it still at these meetings of
yours. A naval officer preaching about Republicanism and parcelling out
the Land!”

Beauchamp replied quietly, “The lectures I read are Dr. Shrapnel’s.
When I speak I have his knowledge to back my deficiencies. He is too
ill to work, and I consider it my duty to do as much of his work as I
can undertake.”

“Ha! You’re the old infidel’s Amen clerk. It would rather astonish
orthodox congregations to see clerks in our churches getting into the
pulpit to read the sermon for sick clergymen,” said Lord Avonley. His
countenance furrowed. “I’ll pay that bill,” he added.

“Pay down half a million!” thundered Beauchamp; and dropping his voice,
“or go to him.”

“You remind me,” his uncle observed. “I recommend you to ring that
bell, and have Mrs. Culling here.”

“If she comes she will hear what I think of her.”

“Then, out of the house!”

“Very well, sir. You decline to supply me with money?”

“I do.”

“I must have it!”

“I dare say. Money’s a chain-cable for holding men to their senses.”

“I ask you, my lord, how I am to carry on Holdesbury?”

“Give it up.”

“I shall have to,” said Beauchamp, striving to be prudent.

“There isn’t a doubt of it,” said his uncle, upon a series of nods
diminishing in their depth until his head assumed a droll interrogative
fixity, with an air of “What next?”




CHAPTER XXXIX.
BETWEEN BEAUCHAMP AND CECILIA


Beauchamp quitted the house without answering as to what next, and
without seeing Rosamund.

In the matter of money, as of his physical health, he wanted to do too
much at once; he had spent largely of both in his efforts to repair the
injury done to Dr. Shrapnel. He was overworked, anxious, restless,
craving for a holiday somewhere in France, possibly; he was all but
leaping on board the boat at times, and, unwilling to leave his dear
old friend who clung to him, he stayed, keeping his impulses below the
tide-mark which leads to action, but where they do not yield peace of
spirit. The tone of Renée’s letters filled him with misgivings. She
wrote word that she had seen M. d’Henriel for the first time since his
return from Italy, and he was much changed, and inclined to thank
Roland for the lesson he had received from him at the sword’s point.
And next she urged Beauchamp to marry, so that he and she might meet,
as if she felt a necessity for it. “I shall love your wife; teach her
to think amiably of me,” she said. And her letter contained womanly
sympathy for him in his battle with his uncle. Beauchamp thought of his
experiences of Cecilia’s comparative coldness. He replied that there
was no prospect of his marrying; he wished there were one of meeting!
He forbore from writing too fervently, but he alluded to happy days in
Normandy, and proposed to renew them if she would say she had need of
him. He entreated her to deal with him frankly; he reminded her that
she must constantly look to him, as she had vowed she would, when in
any kind of trouble; and he declared to her that he was unchanged. He
meant, of an unchanged disposition to shield and serve her; but the
review of her situation, and his knowledge of her quick blood, wrought
him to some jealous lover’s throbs, which led him to impress his
unchangeableness upon her, to bind her to that standard.

She declined his visit: not now; “not yet”: and for that he presumed to
chide her, half-sincerely. As far as he knew he stood against everybody
save his old friend and Renée; and she certainly would have refreshed
his heart for a day. In writing, however, he had an ominous vision of
the morrow to the day; and, both for her sake and his own, he was not
unrejoiced to hear that she was engaged day and night in nursing her
husband. Pursuing his vision of the morrow of an unreproachful day with
Renée, the madness of taking her to himself, should she surrender at
last to a third persuasion, struck him sharply, now that he and his
uncle were foot to foot in downright conflict, and money was the
question. He had not much remaining of his inheritance—about fifteen
hundred pounds. He would have to vacate Holdesbury and his uncle’s
town-house in a month. Let his passion be never so desperate, for a
beggared man to think of running away with a wife, or of marrying one,
the folly is as big as the worldly offence: no justification is to be
imagined. Nay, and there is no justification for the breach of a moral
law. Beauchamp owned it, and felt that Renée’s resistance to him in
Normandy placed her above him. He remembered a saying of his moralist:
“We who interpret things heavenly by things earthly must not hope to
juggle with them for our pleasures, and can look to no absolution of
evil acts.” The school was a hard one. It denied him holidays; it cut
him off from dreams. It ran him in heavy harness on a rough highroad,
allowing no turnings to right or left, no wayside croppings; with the
simple permission to him that he should daily get thoroughly tired. And
what was it Jenny Denham had said on the election day? “Does incessant
battling keep the intellect clear?”

His mind was clear enough to put the case, that either he beheld a
tremendous magnification of things, or else that other men did not
attach common importance to them; and he decided that the latter was
the fact.

An incessant struggle of one man with the world, which position usually
ranks his relatives against him, does not conduce to soundness of
judgement. He may nevertheless be right in considering that he is right
in the main. The world in motion is not so wise that it can pretend to
silence the outcry of an ordinarily generous heart even—the very infant
of antagonism to its methods and establishments. It is not so difficult
to be right against the world when the heart is really active; but the
world is our book of humanity, and before insisting that _his_
handwriting shall occupy the next blank page of it, the noble rebel is
bound for the sake of his aim to ask himself how much of a giant he is,
lest he fall like a blot on the page, instead of inscribing
intelligible characters there.

Moreover, his relatives are present to assure him that he did not jump
out of Jupiter’s head or come of the doctor. They hang on him like an
ill-conditioned prickly garment; and if he complains of the irritation
they cause him, they one and all denounce his irritable skin.

Fretted by his relatives he cannot be much of a giant.

Beauchamp looked from Dr. Shrapnel in his invalid’s chair to his uncle
Everard breathing robustly, and mixed his uncle’s errors with those of
the world which honoured and upheld him. His remainder of equability
departed; his impatience increased. His appetite for work at Dr.
Shrapnel’s writing-desk was voracious. He was ready for any labour, the
transcribing of papers, writing from dictation, whatsoever was of
service to Lord Avonley’s victim: and he was not like the Spartan boy
with the wolf at his vitals; he betrayed it in the hue his uncle
Everard detested, in a visible nervousness, and indulgence in fits of
scorn. Sharp epigrams and notes of irony provoked his laughter more
than fun. He seemed to acquiesce in some of the current contemporary
despair of our immoveable England, though he winced at a satire on his
country, and attempted to show that the dull dominant class of
moneymakers was the ruin of her. Wherever he stood to represent Dr.
Shrapnel, as against Mr. Grancey Lespel on account of the Itchincope
encroachments, he left a sting that spread the rumour of his having
become not only a black torch of Radicalism—our modern provincial
estateholders and their wives bestow that reputation lightly—but a
gentleman with the polish scratched off him in parts. And he, though
individually he did not understand how there was to be game in the land
if game-preserving was abolished, signed his name R. C. S. NEVIL
BEAUCHAMP for DR. SHRAPNEL, in the communications directed to
solicitors of the persecutors of poachers.

His behaviour to Grancey Lespel was eclipsed by his treatment of
Captain Baskelett. Cecil had ample reason to suppose his cousin to be
friendly with him. He himself had forgotten Dr. Shrapnel, and all other
dissensions, in a supremely Christian spirit. He paid his cousin the
compliment to think that he had done likewise. At Romfrey and in London
he had spoken to Nevil of his designs upon the widow: Nevil said
nothing against it and it was under Mrs. Wardour-Devereux’s eyes, and
before a man named Lydiard, that, never calling to him to put him on
his guard, Nevil fell foul of him with every capital charge that can be
brought against a gentleman, and did so abuse, worry, and disgrace him
as to reduce him to quit the house to avoid the scandal of a resort to
a gentleman’s last appeal in vindication of his character. Mrs.
Devereux spoke of the terrible scene to Cecilia, and Lydiard to Miss
Denham. The injured person communicated it to Lord Avonley, who told
Colonel Halkett emphatically that his nephew Cecil deserved well of him
in having kept command of his temper out of consideration for the
family. There was a general murmur of the family over this incident.
The widow was rich, and it ranked among the unwritten crimes against
blood for one offshoot of a great house wantonly to thwart another in
the wooing of her by humbling him in her presence, doing his utmost to
expose him as a schemer, a culprit, and a poltroon.

Could it be that Beauchamp had reserved his wrath with his cousin to
avenge Dr. Shrapnel upon him signally? Miss Denham feared her guardian
was the cause. Lydiard was indefinitely of her opinion. The idea struck
Cecilia Halkett, and as an example of Beauchamp’s tenacity of purpose
and sureness of aim it fascinated her. But Mrs. Wardour-Devereux did
not appear to share it. She objected to Beauchamp’s intemperateness and
unsparingness, as if she was for conveying a sisterly warning to
Cecilia; and that being off her mind, she added, smiling a little and
colouring a little: “We learn only from men what men are.” How the
scene commenced and whether it was provoked, she failed to recollect.
She described Beauchamp as very self-contained in manner throughout his
tongue was the scorpion. Cecilia fancied he must have resembled his
uncle Everard.

Cecilia was conquered, but unclaimed. While supporting and approving
him in her heart she was dreading to receive some new problem of his
conduct; and still while she blamed him for not seeking an interview
with her, she liked him for this instance of delicacy in the present
state of his relations with Lord Avonley.

A problem of her own conduct disturbed the young lady’s clear
conception of herself: and this was a ruffling of unfaithfulness in her
love of Beauchamp, that was betrayed to her by her forgetfulness of him
whenever she chanced to be with Seymour Austin. In Mr. Austin’s company
she recovered her forfeited repose, her poetry of life, her image of
the independent Cecilia throned above our dust of battle, gazing on
broad heaven. She carried the feeling so far that Blackburn Tuckham’s
enthusiasm for Mr. Austin gave him grace in her sight, and praise of
her father’s favourite from Mr. Austin’s mouth made him welcome to her.
The image of that grave capable head, dusty-grey about the temples, and
the darkly sanguine face of the tried man, which was that of a seasoned
warrior and inspired full trust in him, with his vivid look, his
personal distinction, his plain devotion to the country’s business, and
the domestic solitude he lived in, admired, esteemed, loved perhaps,
but unpartnered, was often her refuge and haven from tempestuous
Beauchamp. She could see in vision the pride of Seymour Austin’s mate.
It flushed her reflectively. Conquered but not claimed, Cecilia was
like the frozen earth insensibly moving round to sunshine in nature,
with one white flower in her breast as innocent a sign of strong sweet
blood as a woman may wear. She ascribed to that fair mate of Seymour
Austin’s many lofty charms of womanhood; above all, stateliness: her
especial dream of an attainable superlative beauty in women. And
supposing that lady to be accused of the fickle breaking of another
love, who walked beside him, matched with his calm heart and one with
him in counsel, would the accusation be repeated by them that beheld
her husband? might it not rather be said that she had not deviated, but
had only stepped higher? She chose no youth, no glistener, no idler: it
was her soul striving upward to air like a seed in the earth that
raised her to him: and she could say to the man once enchaining her:
Friend, by the good you taught me I was led to this!

Cecilia’s reveries fled like columns of mist before the gale when
tidings reached her of a positive rupture between Lord Avonley and
Nevil Beauchamp, and of the mandate to him to quit possession of
Holdesbury and the London house within a certain number of days,
because of his refusal to utter an apology to Mrs. Culling. Angrily on
his behalf she prepared to humble herself to him. Louise
Wardour-Devereux brought them to a meeting, at which Cecilia, with her
heart in her hand, was icy. Mr. Lydiard, prompted by Mrs. Devereux,
gave him better reasons for her singular coldness than Cecilia could
give to herself, and some time afterward Beauchamp went to Mount
Laurels, where Colonel Halkett mounted guard over his daughter, and
behaved, to her thinking, cruelly. “Now you have ruined yourself
there’s nothing ahead for you but to go to the Admiralty and apply for
a ship,” he said, sugaring the unkindness with the remark that the
country would be the gainer. He let fly a side-shot at London men
calling themselves military men who sought to repair their fortunes by
chasing wealthy widows, and complimented Beauchamp: “You’re not one of
that sort.”

Cecilia looked at Beauchamp stedfastly. “Speak,” said the look.

But he, though not blind, was keenly wounded.

“Money I must have,” he said, half to the colonel, half to himself.

Colonel Halkett shrugged. Cecilia waited for a directness in
Beauchamp’s eyes.

Her father was too wary to leave them.

Cecilia’s intuition told her that by leading to a discussion of
politics, and adopting Beauchamp’s views, she could kindle him. Why did
she refrain? It was that the conquered young lady was a captive, not an
ally. To touch the subject in cold blood, voluntarily to launch on
those vexed waters, as if his cause were her heart’s, as much as her
heart was the man’s, she felt to be impossible. He at the same time
felt that the heiress, endowing him with money to speed the good cause,
should be his match in ardour for it, otherwise he was but a common
adventurer, winning and despoiling an heiress.

They met in London. Beauchamp had not vacated either Holdesbury or the
town-house; he was defying his uncle Everard, and Cecilia thought with
him that it was a wise temerity. She thought with him passively
altogether. On this occasion she had not to wait for directness in his
eyes; she had to parry it. They were at a dinner-party at Lady Elsea’s,
generally the last place for seeing Lord Palmet, but he was present,
and arranged things neatly for them, telling Beauchamp that he acted
under Mrs. Wardour-Devereux’s orders. Never was an opportunity, more
propitious for a desperate lover. Had it been Renée next him, no petty
worldly scruples of honour would have held him back. And if Cecilia had
spoken feelingly of Dr. Shrapnel, or had she simulated a thoughtful
interest in his pursuits, his hesitations would have vanished. As it
was, he dared to look what he did not permit himself to speak. She was
nobly lovely, and the palpable envy of men around cried fool at his
delays. Beggar and heiress he said in his heart, to vitalize the
three-parts fiction of the point of honour which Cecilia’s beauty was
fast submerging. When she was leaving he named a day for calling to see
her. Colonel Halkett stood by, and she answered, “Come.”

Beauchamp kept the appointment. Cecilia was absent.

He was unaware that her father had taken her to old Mrs. Beauchamp’s
death-bed. Her absence, after she had said, “Come,” appeared a
confirmation of her glacial manner when they met at the house of Mrs.
Wardour-Devereux; and he charged her with waywardness. A wound of the
same kind that we are inflicting is about the severest we can feel.

Beauchamp received intelligence of his venerable great-aunt’s death
from Blackburn Tuckham, and after the funeral he was informed that
eighty thousand pounds had been bequeathed to him: a goodly sum of
money for a gentleman recently beggared; yet, as the political
enthusiast could not help reckoning (apart from a fervent sentiment of
gratitude toward his benefactress), scarcely enough to do much more
than start and push for three or more years a commanding daily
newspaper, devoted to Radical interests, and to be entitled THE DAWN.

True, he might now conscientiously approach the heiress, take her hand
with an open countenance, and retain it.

Could he do so quite conscientiously? The point of honour had been
centred in his condition of beggary. Something still was in his way. A
quick spring of his blood for air, motion, excitement, holiday freedom,
sent his thoughts travelling whither they always shot away when his
redoubtable natural temper broke loose.

In the case of any other woman than Cecilia Halkett he would not have
been obstructed by the minor consideration as to whether he was wholly
heart-free to ask her in marriage that instant; for there was no
hindrance, and she was beautiful. She was exceedingly beautiful; and
she was an unequalled heiress. She would be able with her wealth to
float his newspaper, THE DAWN, so desired of Dr. Shrapnel!—the best
restorative that could be applied to him! Every temptation came
supplicating him to take the step which indeed he wished for: one
feeling opposed. He really respected Cecilia: it is not too much to say
that he worshipped her with the devout worship rendered to the ideal
Englishwoman by the heart of the nation. For him she was purity,
charity, the keeper of the keys of whatsoever is held precious by men;
she was a midway saint, a light between day and darkness, in whom the
spirit in the flesh shone like the growing star amid thin sanguine
colour, the sweeter, the brighter, the more translucent the longer
known. And if the image will allow it, the nearer down to him the
holier she seemed.

How offer himself when he was not perfectly certain that he was worthy
of her?

Some jugglery was played by the adept male heart in these later
hesitations. Up to the extent of his knowledge of himself, the man was
fairly sincere. Passion would have sped him to Cecilia, but passion is
not invariably love; and we know what it can be.

The glance he cast over the water at Normandy was withdrawn. He went to
Bevisham to consult with Dr. Shrapnel about the starting of a weekly
journal, instead of a daily, and a name for it—a serious question: for
though it is oftener weekly than daily that the dawn is visible in
England, titles must not invite the public jest; and the glorious
project of the daily DAWN was prudently abandoned for by-and-by. He
thought himself rich enough to put a Radical champion weekly in the
field and this matter, excepting the title, was arranged in Bevisham.
Thence he proceeded to Holdesbury, where he heard that the house,
grounds, and farm were let to a tenant preparing to enter. Indifferent
to the blow, he kept an engagement to deliver a speech at the great
manufacturing town of Gunningham, and then went to London, visiting his
uncle’s town-house for recent letters. Not one was from Renée: she had
not written for six weeks, not once for his thrice! A letter from Cecil
Baskelett informed him that “my lord” had placed the town-house at his
disposal. Returning to dress for dinner on a thick and murky evening of
February, Beauchamp encountered his cousin on the steps. He said to
Cecil, “I sleep here to-night: I leave the house to you tomorrow.”

Cecil struck out his underjaw to reply: “Oh! good. You sleep here
to-night. You are a fortunate man. I congratulate you. I shall not
disturb you. I have just entered on my occupation of the house. I have
my key. Allow me to recommend you to go straight to the drawing-room.
And I may inform you that the Earl of Romfrey is at the point of death.
My lord is at the castle.”

Cecil accompanied his descent of the steps with the humming of an opera
melody: Beauchamp tripped into the hall-passage. A young maid-servant
held the door open, and she accosted him: “If you please, there is a
lady up-stairs in the drawing-room; she speaks foreign English, sir.”

Beauchamp asked if the lady was alone, and not waiting for the answer,
though he listened while writing, and heard that she was heavily
veiled, he tore a strip from his notebook, and carefully traced
half-a-dozen telegraphic words to Mrs. Culling at Steynham. His rarely
failing promptness, which was like an inspiration, to conceive and
execute measures for averting peril, set him on the thought of possibly
counteracting his cousin Cecil’s malignant tongue by means of a message
to Rosamund, summoning her by telegraph to come to town by the next
train that night. He despatched the old woman keeping the house, as
trustier than the young one, to the nearest office, and went up to the
drawing-room, with a quick thumping heart that was nevertheless as
little apprehensive of an especial trial and danger as if he had done
nothing at all to obviate it. Indeed he forgot that he had done
anything when he turned the handle of the drawing-room door.




CHAPTER XL.
A TRIAL OF HIM


A low-burning lamp and fire cast a narrow ring on the shadows of the
dusky London room. One of the window-blinds was drawn up. Beauchamp
discerned a shape at that window, and the fear seized him that it might
be Madame d’Auffray with evil news of Renée: but it was Renée’s name he
called. She rose from her chair, saying, “I!”

She was trembling.

Beauchamp asked her whisperingly if she had come alone.

“Alone; without even a maid,” she murmured.

He pulled down the blind of the window exposing them to the square, and
led her into the light to see her face.

The dimness of light annoyed him, and the miserable reception of her;
this English weather, and the gloomy house! And how long had she been
waiting for him? and what was the mystery? Renée in England seemed
magical; yet it was nothing stranger than an old dream realized. He
wound up the lamp, holding her still with one hand. She was woefully
pale; scarcely able to bear the increase of light.

“It is I who come to you”: she was half audible.

“This time!” said he. “You have been suffering?”

“No.”

Her tone was brief; not reassuring.

“You came straight to me?”

“Without a deviation that I know of.”

“From Tourdestelle?”

“You have not forgotten Tourdestelle, Nevil?”

The memory of it quickened his rapture in reading her features. It was
his first love, his enchantress, who was here: and how? Conjectures
shot through him like lightnings in the dark.

Irrationally, at a moment when reason stood in awe, he fancied it must
be that her husband was dead. He forced himself to think it, and could
have smiled at the hurry of her coming, one, without even a maid: and
deeper down in him the devouring question burned which dreaded the
answer.

But of old, in Normandy, she had pledged herself to join him with no
delay when free, if ever free!

So now she was free.

One side of him glowed in illumination; the other was black as Winter
night; but light subdues darkness; and in a situation like Beauchamp’s,
the blood is livelier than the prophetic mind.

“Why did you tell me to marry? What did that mean?” said he. “Did you
wish me to be the one in chains? And you have come quite alone!—you
will give me an account of everything presently:—You are here! in
England! and what a welcome for you! You are cold.”

“I am warmly clad,” said Renée, suffering her hand to be drawn to his
breast at her arm’s-length, not bending with it.

Alive to his own indirectness, he was conscious at once of the slight
sign of reservation, and said: “Tell me...” and swerved sheer away from
his question: “how is Madame d’Auffray?”

“Agnès? I left her at Tourdestelle,” said Renée.

“And Roland? He never writes to me.”

“Neither he nor I write much. He is at the military camp of instruction
in the North.”

“He will run over to us.”

“Do not expect it.”

“Why not?”

Renée sighed. “We shall have to live longer than I look for...” she
stopped. “Why do you ask me why not? He is fond of us both, and sorry
for us; but have you forgotten Roland that morning on the Adriatic?”

Beauchamp pressed her hand. The stroke of Then and Now rang in his
breast like a bell instead of a bounding heart. Something had stunned
his heart. He had no clear central feeling; he tried to gather it from
her touch, from his joy in beholding her and sitting with her alone,
from the grace of her figure, the wild sweetness of her eyes, and the
beloved foreign lips bewitching him with their exquisite French and
perfection of speech.

His nature was too prompt in responding to such a call on it for
resolute warmth.

“If I had been firmer then, or you one year older!” he said.

“That girl in Venice had no courage,” said Renée.

She raised her head and looked about the room.

Her instinct of love sounded her lover through, and felt the deficiency
or the contrariety in him, as surely as musical ears are pained by a
discord that they require no touchstone to detect. Passion has the
sensitiveness of fever, and is as cruelly chilled by a tepid air.

“Yes, a London house after Venice and Normandy!” said Beauchamp,
following her look.

“Sicily: do not omit Syracuse; you were in your naval uniform: Normandy
was our third meeting,” said Renée. “This is the fourth. I should have
reckoned that.”

“Why? Superstitiously?”

“We cannot be entirely wise when we have staked our fate. Sailors are
credulous: you know them. Women are like them when they embark... Three
chances! Who can boast of so many, and expect one more! Will you take
me to my hotel, Nevil?”

The fiction of her being free could not be sustained.

“Take you and leave you? I am absolutely at your command. But leave
you? You are alone: and you have told me nothing.”

What was there to tell? The desperate act was apparent, and told all.

Renée’s dark eyelashes lifted on him, and dropped.

“Then things are as I left them in Normandy?” said he.

She replied: “Almost.”

He quivered at the solitary word; for his conscience was on edge. It
ran the shrewdest irony through him, inexplicably. “Almost”: that is,
“with this poor difference of one person, now finding herself
worthless, subtracted from the list; no other; it should be little to
them as it is little to you”: or, reversing it, the substance of the
word became magnified and intensified by its humble slightness: “Things
are the same, but for the jewel of the province, a lustre of France,
lured hither to her eclipse”—meanings various, indistinguishable,
thrilling and piercing sad as the half-tones humming round the note of
a strung wire, which is a blunt single note to the common ear.

Beauchamp sprang to his feet and bent above her: “You have come to me,
for the love of me, to give yourself to me, and for ever, for good,
till death? Speak, my beloved Renée.”

Her eyes were raised to his: “You see me here. It is for you to speak.”

“I do. There’s nothing I ask for now—if the step can’t be retrieved.”

“The step retrieved, my friend? There is no step backward in life.”

“I am thinking of you, Renée.”

“Yes, I know,” she answered hurriedly.

“If we discover that the step is a wrong one?” he pursued: “why is
there no step backward?”

“I am talking of women,” said Renée.

“Why not for women?”

“Honourable women, I mean,” said Renée.

Beauchamp inclined to forget his position in finding matter to contest.

Yet it is beyond contest that there is no step backward in life. She
spoke well; better than he, and she won his deference by it. Not only
she spoke better: she was truer, distincter, braver: and a man ever on
the look-out for superior qualities, and ready to bow to them, could
not refuse her homage. With that a saving sense of power quitted him.

“You wrote to me that you were unchanged, Nevil.”

“I am.”

“So, then, I came.”

His rejoinder was the dumb one, commonly eloquent and satisfactory.

Renée shut her eyes with a painful rigour of endurance. She opened them
to look at him steadily.

The desperate act of her flight demanded immediate recognition from him
in simple language and a practical seconding of it. There was the test.

“I cannot stay in this house, Nevil; take me away.”

She named her hotel in her French English, and the sound of it
penetrated him with remorseful pity. It was for him, and of his doing,
that she was in an alien land and an outcast!

“This house is wretched for you,” said he: “and you must be hungry. Let
me...”

“I cannot eat. I will ask you”: she paused, drawing on her energies,
and keeping down the throbs of her heart: “this: do you love me?”

“I love you with all my heart and soul.”

“As in Normandy?”

“Yes.”

“In Venice?”

“As from the first, Renée! That I can swear.”

“Oaths are foolish. I meant to ask you—my friend, there is no question
in my mind of any other woman: I see you love me: I am so used to
consider myself the vain and cowardly creature, and you the boldest and
faithfullest of men, that I could not abandon the habit if I would: I
started confiding in you, sure that I should come to land. But I have
to ask you: to me you are truth: I have no claim on my lover for
anything but the answer to this:—Am I a burden to you?”

His brows flew up in furrows. He drew a heavy breath, for never had he
loved her more admiringly, and never on such equal terms. She was his
mate in love and daring at least. A sorrowful comparison struck him, of
a little boat sailing out to a vessel in deep seas and left to founder.

Without knotting his mind to acknowledge or deny the burden, for he
could do neither, he stood silent, staring at her, not so much in
weakness as in positive mental division. No, would be false; and Yes,
not less false; and if the step was irretrievable, to say Yes would be
to plunge a dagger in her bosom; but No was a vain deceit involving a
double wreck. Assuredly a man standing against the world in a good
cause, with a runaway wife on his hands, carries a burden, however
precious it be to him.

A smile of her lips, parted in an anguish of expectancy, went to death
over Renée’s face. She looked at him tenderly. “The truth,” she
murmured to herself, and her eyelids fell.

“I am ready to bear anything,” said Beauchamp. “I weigh what you ask
me, that is all. You a burden to me? But when you ask me, you make me
turn round and inquire how we stand before the world.”

“The world does not stone men,” said Renée.

“Can’t I make you feel that I am not thinking of myself?” Beauchamp
stamped in his extreme perplexity. He was gagged; he could not possibly
talk to her, who had cast the die, of his later notions of morality and
the world’s dues, fees, and claims on us.

“No, friend, I am not complaining.” Renée put out her hand to him; with
compassionate irony feigning to have heard excuses. “What right have I
to complain? I have not the sensation. I could not expect you to be
everlastingly the sentinel of love. Three times I rejected you! Now
that I have lost my father—Oh! poor father: I trifled with my lover, I
tricked him that my father might live in peace. He is dead. I wished
you to marry one of your own countrywomen, Nevil. You said it was
impossible; and I, with my snake at my heart, and a husband grateful
for nursing and whimpering to me for his youth like a beggar on the
road, I thought I owed you this debt of body and soul, to prove to you
I have some courage; and for myself, to reward myself for my long
captivity and misery with one year of life: and adieu to Roland my
brother! adieu to friends! adieu to France! Italy was our home. I
dreamed of one year in Italy; I fancied it might be two; more than that
was unimaginable. Prisoners of long date do not hope; they do not
calculate: air, light, they say; to breathe freely and drop down! They
are reduced to the instincts of the beasts. I thought I might give you
happiness, pay part of my debt to you. Are you remembering Count Henri?
That paints what I was! I could fly to that for a taste of life! a
dance to death! And again you ask: Why, if I loved you then, not turn
to you in preference? No, you have answered it yourself, Nevil;—on that
day in the boat, when generosity in a man so surprised me, it seemed a
miracle to me; and it was, in its divination. How I thank my dear
brother Roland for saving me the sight of you condemned to fight,
against your conscience! He taught poor M. d’Henriel his lesson. You,
Nevil, were my teacher. And see how it hangs: there was mercy for me in
not having drawn down my father’s anger on my heart’s beloved. He loved
you. He pitied us. He reproached himself. In his last days he was
taught to suspect our story: perhaps from Roland; perhaps I breathed it
without speaking. He called heaven’s blessings on you. He spoke of you
with tears, clutching my hand. He made me feel he would have cried out:
‘If I were leaving her with Nevil Beauchamp!’ and ‘Beauchamp,’ I heard
him murmuring once: ‘take down Froissart’: he named a chapter. It was
curious: if he uttered my name Renée, yours, ‘Nevil,’ soon followed.
That was noticed by Roland. Hope for us, he could not have had; as
little as I! But we were his two: his children. I buried him—I thought
he would know our innocence, and now pardon our love. I read your
letters, from my name at the beginning, to yours at the end, and from
yours back to mine, and between the lines, for any doubtful spot: and
oh, rash! But I would not retrace the step for my own sake. I am
certain of your love for me, though...” She paused: “Yes, I am certain
of it. And if I am a burden to you?”

“About as much as the air, which I can’t do without since I began to
breathe it,” said Beauchamp, more clear-mindedly now that he supposed
he was addressing a mind, and with a peril to himself that escaped his
vigilance. There was a secret intoxication for him already in the
half-certainty that the step could not be retraced. The idea that he
might reason with her, made her seductive to the heart and head of him.

“I am passably rich, Nevil,” she said. “I do not care for money, except
that it gives wings. Roland inherits the château in Touraine. I have
one in Burgundy, and rentes and shares, my notary informs me.”

“I have money,” said he. His heart began beating violently. He lost
sight of his intention of reasoning. “Good God! if you were free!”

She faltered: “At Tourdestelle...”

“Yes, and I _am_ unchanged,” Beauchamp cried out. “Your life there was
horrible, and mine’s intolerable.” He stretched his arms cramped like
the yawning of a wretch in fetters. That which he would and would not
became so intervolved that he deemed it reasonable to instance their
common misery as a ground for their union against the world. And what
has that world done for us, that a joy so immeasurable should be
rejected on its behalf? And what have we succeeded in doing, that the
childish effort to move it should be continued at such a cost?

For years, down to one year back, and less—yesterday, it could be
said—all human blessedness appeared to him in the person of Renée,
given him under any condition whatsoever. She was not less adorable
now. In her decision, and a courage that he especially prized in women,
she was a sweeter to him than when he was with her in France: too sweet
to be looked at and refused.

“But we must live in England,” he cried abruptly out of his inner mind.

“Oh! not England, Italy, Italy!” Renée exclaimed: “Italy, or Greece:
anywhere where we have sunlight. Mountains and valleys are my dream.
Promise it, Nevil. I will obey you; but this is my wish. Take me
through Venice, that I may look at myself and wonder. We can live at
sea, in a yacht; anywhere with you but in England. This country frowns
on me; I can hardly fetch my breath here, I am suffocated. The people
all walk in lines in England. Not here, Nevil! They are good people, I
am sure; and it is your country: but their faces chill me, their voices
grate; I should never understand them; they would be to me like their
fogs eternally; and I to them? O me! it would be like hearing sentence
in the dampness of the shroud perpetually. Again I say I do not doubt
that they are very good: they claim to be; they judge others; they may
know how to make themselves happy in their climate; it is common to
most creatures to do so, or to imagine it. Nevil! not England!”

Truly “the mad commander and his French marquise” of the Bevisham
Election ballad would make a pretty figure in England!

His friends of his own class would be mouthing it. The story would be a
dogging shadow of his public life, and, quite as bad, a reflection on
his party. He heard the yelping tongues of the cynics. He saw the
consternation and grief of his old Bevisham hero, his leader and his
teacher.

“Florence,” he said, musing on the prospect of exile and idleness:
“there’s a kind of society to be had in Florence.”

Renée asked him if he cared so much for society.

He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.

“Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.”

“Young women, Renée.”

She signified no.

He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.

Her instinct of comedy set a dimple faintly working in her cheek.

“Not if they love, Nevil.”

“At least,” said he, “a man does not like to see the woman he loves
banished by society and browbeaten.”

“Putting me aside, do you care for it, Nevil?”

“Personally not a jot.”

“I am convinced of that,” said Renée.

She spoke suspiciously sweetly, appearing perfect candour.

The change in him was perceptible to her. The nature of the change was
unfathomable.

She tried her wits at the riddle. But though she could be an actress
before him with little difficulty, the torment of her situation roused
the fever within her at a bare effort to think acutely. Scarlet
suffused her face: her brain whirled.

“Remember, dearest, I have but offered myself: you have your choice. I
can pass on. Yes, I know well I speak to Nevil Beauchamp; you have
drilled me to trust you and your word as a soldier trusts to his
officer—once a faint-hearted soldier! I need not remind you: fronting
the enemy now, in hard truth. But I want your whole heart to decide.
Give me no silly compassion! Would it have been better to me to have
written to you? If I had written I should have clipped my glorious
impulse, brought myself down to earth with my own arrow. I did not
write, for I believed in you.”

So firm had been her faith in him that her visions of him on the
passage to England had resolved all to one flash of blood-warm welcome
awaiting her: and it says much for her natural generosity that the
savage delicacy of a woman placed as she now was, did not take a mortal
hurt from the apparent voidness of this home of his bosom. The
passionate gladness of the lover was wanting: the chivalrous valiancy
of manful joy.

Renée shivered at the cloud thickening over her new light of intrepid
defiant life.

“Think it not improbable that I have weighed everything I surrender in
quitting France,” she said.

Remorse wrestled with Beauchamp and flung him at her feet.

Renée remarked on the lateness of the hour.

He promised to conduct her to her hotel immediately.

“And to-morrow?” said Renée, simply, but breathlessly.

“To-morrow, let it be Italy! But first I telegraph to Roland and
Tourdestelle. I can’t run and hide. The step may be retrieved: or no,
you are right; the step cannot, but the next to it may be stopped—that
was the meaning I had! I’ll try. It’s cutting my hand off, tearing my
heart out; but I will. O that you were free! You left your husband at
Tourdestelle?”

“I presume he is there at present: he was in Paris when I left.”

Beauchamp spoke hoarsely and incoherently in contrast with her
composure: “You will misunderstand me for a day or two, Renée. I say if
you were free I should have my first love mine for ever. Don’t fear me:
I have no right even to press your fingers. He may throw you into my
arms. Now you are the same as if you were in your own home: and you
must accept me for your guide. By all I hope for in life, I’ll see you
through it, and keep the dogs from barking, if I can. Thousands are
ready to give tongue. And if they can get me in the character of a
law-breaker!—I hear them.”

“Are you imagining, Nevil, that there is a possibility of my returning
to him?”

“To your place in the world! You have not had to endure tyranny?”

“I should have had a certain respect for a tyrant, Nevil. At least I
should have had an occupation in mocking him and conspiring against
him. Tyranny! There would have been some amusement to me in that.”

“It was neglect.”

“If I could still charge it on neglect, Nevil! Neglect is very
endurable. He rewards me for nursing him... he rewards me with a little
persecution: wives should be flattered by it: it comes late.”

“What?” cried Beauchamp, oppressed and impatient.

Renée sank her voice.

Something in the run of the unaccented French: “Son amour, mon ami”:
drove the significance of the bitterness of the life she had left
behind her burningly through him. This was to have fled from a dragon!
was the lover’s thought: he perceived the motive of her flight: and it
was a vindication of it that appealed to him irresistibly. The proposal
for her return grew hideous: and this ever multiplying horror and sting
of the love of a married woman came on him with a fresh throbbing
shock, more venom.

He felt for himself now, and now he was full of feeling for her.
Impossible that she should return! Tourdestelle shone to him like a
gaping chasm of fire. And becoming entirely selfish he impressed his
total abnegation of self upon Renée so that she could have worshipped
him. A lover that was like a starry frost, froze her veins, bewildered
her intelligence. She yearned for meridian warmth, for repose in a
directing hand; and let it be hard as one that grasps a sword: what
matter? unhesitatingness was the warrior virtue of her desire. And for
herself the worst might happen if only she were borne along. Let her
life be torn and streaming like the flag of battle, it must be forward
to the end.

That was a quality of godless young heroism not unexhausted in
Beauchamp’s blood. Reanimated by him, she awakened his imagination of
the vagrant splendours of existence and the rebel delights which have
their own laws and “nature” for an applauding mother. Radiant Alps rose
in his eyes, and the morning born in the night suns that from mountain
and valley, over sea and desert, called on all earth to witness their
death. The magnificence of the contempt of humanity posed before him
superbly satanesque, grand as thunder among the crags and it was not a
sensual cry that summoned him from his pedlar labours, pack on back
along the level road, to live and breathe deep, gloriously mated: Renée
kindled his romantic spirit, and could strike the feeling into him that
to be proud of his possession of her was to conquer the fretful vanity
to possess. She was not a woman of wiles and lures.

Once or twice she consulted her watch: but as she professed to have no
hunger, Beauchamp’s entreaty to her to stay prevailed, and the subtle
form of compliment to his knightly manliness in her remaining with him,
gave him a new sense of pleasure that hung round her companionable
conversation, deepening the meaning of the words, or sometimes
contrasting the sweet surface commonplace with the undercurrent of
strangeness in their hearts, and the reality of a tragic position. Her
musical volubility flowed to entrance and divert him, as it did.

Suddenly Beauchamp glanced upward.

Renée turned from a startled contemplation of his frown, and beheld
Mrs. Rosamund Culling in the room.




CHAPTER XLI.
A LAME VICTORY


The intruder was not a person that had power to divide them; yet she
came between their hearts with a touch of steel.

“I am here in obedience to your commands in your telegram of this
evening,” Rosamund replied to Beauchamp’s hard stare at her; she
courteously spoke French, and acquitted herself demurely of a bow to
the lady present.

Renée withdrew her serious eyes from Beauchamp. She rose and
acknowledged the bow.

“It is my first visit to England, madame!”

“I could have desired, Madame la marquise, more agreeable weather for
you.”

“My friends in England will dispel the bad weather for me, madame”;
Renée smiled softly: “I have been studying my French-English
phrase-book, that I may learn how dialogues are conducted in your
country to lead to certain ceremonies when old friends meet, and
without my book I am at fault. I am longing to be embraced by you... if
it will not be offending your rules?”

Rosamund succumbed to the seductive woman, whose gentle tooth bit
through her tutored simplicity of manner and natural graciousness,
administering its reproof, and eluding a retort or an excuse.

She gave the embrace. In doing so she fell upon her conscious
awkwardness for an expression of reserve that should be as good as
irony for irony, though where Madame de Rouaillout’s irony lay, or
whether it was irony at all, our excellent English dame could not have
stated, after the feeling of indignant prudery responding to it so
guiltily had subsided.

Beauchamp asked her if she had brought servants with her; and it
gratified her to see that he was no actor fitted to carry a scene
through in virtue’s name and vice’s mask with this actress.

She replied, “I have brought a man and a maid-servant. The
establishment will be in town the day after tomorrow, in time for my
lord’s return from the Castle.”

“You can have them up to-morrow morning.”

“I could,” Rosamund admitted the possibility. Her idolatry of him was
tried on hearing him press the hospitality of the house upon Madame de
Rouaillout, and observing the lady’s transparent feint of a reluctant
yielding. For the voluble Frenchwoman scarcely found a word to utter:
she protested languidly that she preferred the independence of her
hotel, and fluttered a singular look at him, as if overcome by his
vehement determination to have her in the house. Undoubtedly she had a
taking face and style. His infatuation, nevertheless, appeared to
Rosamund utter dementedness, considering this woman’s position, and
Cecilia Halkett’s beauty and wealth, and that the house was no longer
at his disposal. He was really distracted, to judge by his forehead, or
else he was over-acting his part.

The absence of a cook in the house, Rosamund remarked, must prevent her
from seconding Captain Beauchamp’s invitation.

He turned on her witheringly. “The telegraph will do that. You’re in
London; cooks can be had by dozens. Madame de Rouaillout is alone here;
she has come to see a little of England, and you will do the honours of
the house.”

“M. le marquis is not in London?” said Rosamund, disregarding the dumb
imprecation she saw on Beauchamp’s features.

“No, madame, my husband is not in London,” Renée rejoined collectedly.

“See to the necessary comforts of the house instantly,” said Beauchamp,
and telling Renée, without listening to her, that he had to issue
orders, he led Rosamund, who was out of breath at the effrontery of the
pair, toward the door. “Are you blind, ma’am? Have you gone foolish?
What should I have sent for you for, but to protect her? I see your
mind; and off with the prude, pray! Madame will have my room; clear
away every sign of me there. I sleep out; I can find a bed anywhere.
And bolt and chain the house-door to-night against Cecil Baskelett; he
informs me that he has taken possession.”

Rosamund’s countenance had become less austere.

“Captain Baskelett!” she exclaimed, leaning to Beauchamp’s views on the
side of her animosity to Cecil; “he has been promised by his uncle the
use of a set of rooms during the year, when the mistress of the house
is not in occupation. I stipulated expressly that he was to see you and
suit himself to your convenience, and to let me hear that you and he
had agreed to an arrangement, before he entered the house. He has no
right to be here, and I shall have no hesitation in locking him out.”

Beauchamp bade her go, and not be away more than five minutes; and then
he would drive to the hotel for the luggage.

She scanned him for a look of ingenuousness that might be trusted, and
laughed in her heart at her credulity for expecting it of a man in such
a case. She saw Renée sitting stonily, too proudly self-respecting to
put on a mask of flippant ease. These lovers might be accomplices in
deceiving her; they were not happy ones, and that appeared to her to be
some assurance that she did well in obeying him.

Beauchamp closed the door on her. He walked back to Renée with a
thoughtful air that was consciously acted; his only thought being—now
she knows me!

Renée looked up at him once. Her eyes were unaccusing, unquestioning.

With the violation of the secresy of her flight she had lost her
initiative and her intrepidity. The world of human eyes glared on her
through the windows of the two she had been exposed to, paralyzing her
brain and caging her spirit of revolt. That keen wakefulness of her
self-defensive social instinct helped her to an understanding of her
lover’s plan to preserve her reputation, or rather to give her a corner
of retreat in shielding the worthless thing—twice detested as her cloak
of slavery coming from him! She comprehended no more. She was a house
of nerves crowding in against her soul like fiery thorns, and had no
space within her torture for a sensation of gratitude or suspicion; but
feeling herself hurried along at lightning speed to some dreadful
shock, her witless imagination apprehended it in his voice: not what he
might say, only the sound. She feared to hear him speak, as the
shrinking ear fears a thunder at the cavity; yet suspense was worse
than the downward-driving silence.

The pang struck her when he uttered some words about Mrs. Culling, and
protection, and Roland.

She thanked him.

So have common executioners been thanked by queenly ladies baring their
necks to the axe.

He called up the pain he suffered to vindicate him; and it was really
an agony of a man torn to pieces.

“I have done the best.”

This dogged and stupid piece of speech was pitiable to hear from Nevil
Beauchamp.

“You think so?” said she; and her glass-like voice rang a tremour in
its mildness that swelled through him on the plain submissive note,
which was more assent than question.

“I am sure of it. I believe it. I see it. At least I hope so.”

“We are chiefly led by hope,” said Renée.

“At least, if not!” Beauchamp cried. “And it’s not too late. I have no
right—I do what I can. I am at your mercy. Judge me later. If I am ever
to know what happiness is, it will be with you. It’s not too late
either way. There is Roland—my brother as much as if you were my wife!”

He begged her to let him have Roland’s exact address.

She named the regiment, the corps d’armée, the postal town, and the
department.

“Roland will come at a signal,” he pursued; “we are not bound to
consult others.”

Renée formed the French word of “we” on her tongue.

He talked of Roland and Roland, his affection for him as a brother and
as a friend, and Roland’s love of them both.

“It is true,” said Renée.

“We owe him this; he represents your father.”

“All that you say is true, my friend.”

“Thus, you have come on a visit to madame, your old friend here—oh!
your hand. What have I done?”

Renée motioned her hand as if it were free to be taken, and smiled
faintly to make light of it, but did not give it.

“If you had been widowed!” he broke down to the lover again.

“That man is attached to the remnant of his life: I could not wish him
dispossessed of it,” said Renée.

“Parted! who parts us? It’s for a night. Tomorrow!”

She breathed: “To-morrow.”

To his hearing it craved an answer. He had none. To talk like a lover,
or like a man of honour, was to lie. Falsehood hemmed him in to the
narrowest ring that ever statue stood on, if he meant to be stone.

“That woman will be returning,” he muttered, frowning at the vacant
door. “I could lay out my whole life before your eyes, and show you I
am unchanged in my love of you since the night when Roland and I walked
on the Piazzetta...”

“Do not remind me; let those days lie black!” A sympathetic vision of
her maiden’s tears on the night of wonderful moonlight when, as it
seemed to her now, San Giorgio stood like a dark prophet of her present
abasement and chastisement, sprang tears of a different character, and
weak as she was with her soul’s fever and for want of food, she was
piteously shaken. She said with some calmness: “It is useless to look
back. I have no reproaches but for myself. Explain nothing to me.
Things that are not comprehended by one like me are riddles I must put
aside. I know where I am: I scarcely know more. Here is madame.”

The door had not opened, and it did not open immediately.

Beauchamp had time to say, “Believe in me.” Even that was false to his
own hearing, and in a struggle with the painful impression of
insincerity which was denied and scorned by his impulse to fling his
arms round her and have her his for ever, he found himself
deferentially accepting her brief directions concerning her boxes at
the hotel, with Rosamund Culling to witness.

She gave him her hand.

He bowed over the fingers. “Until to-morrow, madame.”

“Adieu!” said Renée.




CHAPTER XLII.
THE TWO PASSIONS


The foggy February night refreshed his head, and the business of
fetching the luggage from the hotel—a commission that necessitated the
delivery of his card and some very commanding language—kept his mind in
order. Subsequently he drove to his cousin Baskelett’s Club, where he
left a short note to say the house was engaged for the night and
perhaps a week further. Concise, but sufficient: and he stated a hope
to his cousin that he would not be inconvenienced. This was courteous.

He had taken a bed at Renée’s hotel, after wresting her boxes from the
vanquished hotel proprietor, and lay there, hearing the clear sound of
every little sentence of hers during the absence of Rosamund: her
“_Adieu_,” and the strange “_Do you think so?_” and “_I know where I
am; I scarcely know more_.” Her eyes and their darker lashes, and the
fitful little sensitive dimples of a smile without joy, came with her
voice, but hardened to an aspect unlike her. Not a word could he
recover of what she had spoken before Rosamund’s intervention. He
fancied she must have related details of her journey. Especially there
must have been mention, he thought, of her drive to the station from
Tourdestelle; and this flashed on him the scene of his ride to the
château, and the meeting her on the road, and the white light on the
branching river, and all that was Renée in the spirit of the place she
had abandoned for him, believing in him. She had proved that she
believed in him. What in the name of sanity had been the meaning of his
language? and what was it between them that arrested him and caused him
to mumble absurdly of “doing best,” when in fact he was her bondman,
rejoiced to be so, by his pledged word? and when she, for some reason
that he was sure she had stated, though he could recollect no more than
the formless hideousness of it, was debarred from returning to
Tourdestelle?

He tossed in his bed as over a furnace, in the extremity of perplexity
of one accustomed to think himself ever demonstrably in the right, and
now with his whole nature in insurrection against that legitimate
claim. It led him to accuse her of a want of passionate warmth, in her
not having supplicated and upbraided him—not behaving theatrically, in
fine, as the ranting pen has made us expect of emergent ladies that
they will naturally do. Concerning himself, he thought commendingly, a
tear would have overcome him. She had not wept. The kaleidoscope was
shaken in his fragmentary mind, and she appeared thrice adorable for
this noble composure, he brutish.

Conscience and reason had resolved to a dead weight in him, like an
inanimate force, governing his acts despite the man, while he was with
Renée. Now his wishes and waverings conjured up a semblance of a
conscience and much reason to assure him that he had done foolishly as
well as unkindly, most unkindly: that he was even the ghastly spectacle
of a creature attempting to be more than he can be. Are we never to
embrace our inclinations? Are the laws regulating an old dry man like
his teacher and guide to be the same for the young and vigorous?

Is a good gift to be refused? And this was his first love! The
brilliant Renée, many-hued as a tropic bird! his lady of shining grace,
with her sole fault of want of courage devotedly amended! his pupil, he
might say, of whom he had foretold that she must come to such a pass,
at the same time prefixing his fidelity. And he was handing her over
knowingly to one kind of wretchedness—“_son amour, mon ami_,” shot
through him, lighting up the gulfs of a mind in wreck;—and one kind of
happiness could certainly be promised her!

All these and innumerable other handsome pleadings of the simulacra of
the powers he had set up to rule, were crushed at daybreak by the
realities in a sense of weight that pushed him mechanically on. He
telegraphed to Roland, and mentally gave chase to the message to recall
it. The slumberer roused in darkness by the relentless insane-seeming
bell which hales him to duty, melts at the charms of sleep, and feels
that logic is with him in his preference of his pillow; but the
tireless revolving world outside, nature’s pitiless antagonist, has
hung one of its balances about him, and his actions are directed by the
state of the scales, wherein duty weighs deep and desireability swings
like a pendant doll: so he throws on his harness, astounded, till his
blood quickens with work, at the round of sacrifices demanded of
nature: which is indeed curious considering what we are taught here and
there as to the infallibility of our august mother. Well, the world of
humanity had done this for Beauchamp. His afflicted historian is
compelled to fling his net among prosaic similitudes for an
illustration of one thus degradedly in its grip. If he had been off
with his love like the rover! why, then the Muse would have loosened
her lap like May showering flower-buds, and we might have knocked great
nature up from her sleep to embellish his desperate proceedings with
hurricanes to be danced over, to say nothing of imitative spheres
dashing out into hurly-burly after his example.

Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the well-behaved AEneas
quitting the fair bosom of Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an
example to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his backbone and put
a crown upon his brows. It happened with him that his original training
rather imposed the idea that he was a figure to be derided. The
approval of him by the prudent was a disgust, and by the pious
tasteless. He had not any consolation in reverting to Dr. Shrapnel’s
heavy Puritanism. On the contrary, such a general proposition as that
of the sage of Bevisham could not for a moment stand against the
pathetic special case of Renée: and as far as Beauchamp’s active mind
went, he was for demanding that Society should take a new position in
morality, considerably broader, and adapted to very special cases.

Nevertheless he was hardly grieved in missing Renée at Rosamund’s
breakfast-table. Rosamund informed him that Madame de Rouaillout’s door
was locked. Her particular news for him was of a disgraceful alarum
raised by Captain Baskelett in the night, to obtain admission; and of
an interview she had with him in the early morning, when he subjected
her to great insolence. Beauchamp’s attention was drawn to her
repetition of the phrase “mistress of the house.” However, she did him
justice in regard to Renée, and thoroughly entered into the fiction of
Renée’s visit to her as her guest: he passed over everything else.

To stop the mouth of a scandal-monger, he drove full speed to Cecil’s
Club, where he heard that the captain had breakfasted and had just
departed for Romfrey Castle. He followed to the station. The train had
started. So mischief was rolling in that direction.

Late at night Rosamund was allowed to enter the chill unlighted
chamber, where the unhappy lady had been lying for hours in the gloom
of a London Winter’s daylight and gaslight.

“Madame de Rouaillout is indisposed with headache,” was her report to
Beauchamp.

The conventional phraseology appeased him, though he saw his grief
behind it.

Presently he asked if Renée had taken food.

“No: you know what a headache is,” Rosamund replied.

It is true that we do not care to eat when we are in pain.

He asked if she looked ill.

“She will not have lights in the room,” said Rosamund.

Piecemeal he gained the picture of Renée in an image of the death
within which welcomed a death without.

Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid. These men!
She remarked very honestly:

“Oh, no; doctors are not needed.”

“Has she mentioned me?”

“Not once.”

“Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma’am?” cried Beauchamp, bounding
off his chair.

He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it;
and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs—accompanied by
her, of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer
to a message was to satisfy him.

“Any message would trouble her: what message would you send?” Rosamund
asked him.

The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be
thought of.

“You are unused to real suffering—that is for women!—and want to be
doing instead of enduring,” said Rosamund.

She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally
sick lovers. Beauchamp’s outcries against himself gave her the shadows
of their story. He stood in tears—a thing to see to believe of Nevil
Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken
her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past
midnight. Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate
knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him
compassionately.

In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to
England. Rosamund tempered her report of Renée by saying of her, that
she was very quiet. He turned to the window.

“Look, what a climate ours is!” Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.
“Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe! This is what she has
come to! Has she spoken of me yet?”

“No.”

“Is she dead silent?”

“She answers, if I speak to her.”

“I believe, ma’am,” said Beauchamp, “that we are the coldest-hearted
people in Europe.”

Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog. Consequently nothing was left
for him to abuse but himself. In that she tried to moderate him, and
drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the
speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another
evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renée, would
for love’s sake be friendly to them.

“I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,”
said Rosamund.

“Her brother will be here to-day; he can’t be later than the evening,”
said Beauchamp. “Get her to eat, ma’am; you must. Command her to eat.
This terrible starvation!”

“You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.”

He surveyed the table. “You have your cook in town, I see. Here’s a
breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields. Where does
the mass of meat go? One excess feeds another. You’re overdone with
servants. Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of
unmanageable footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they’re idle
and immoral. If—I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel
Halkett, or any one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the
income-tax, or some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation,
they yell as if they were thumb-screwed: but five shillings in the
pound goes to the kitchen as a matter of course—to puff those pompous
idiots! and the parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer
waste of food and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public
sin, are maundering about schism. There’s another idle army! Then we
have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors—the honourable professions! all
hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour!
it’s incubus on incubus. In point of fact, the rider’s too heavy for
the horse in England.”

He began to nibble at bread.

Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of
her own invention, such as no house in the county of Sussex could
produce or imitate.

“What would you have the parsons do?” she said.

“Take the rich by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that
they’re swine running down to the sea with a devil in them.” She had
set him off again, but she had enticed him to eating. “Pooh! it has all
been said before. Stones are easier to move than your English. May I be
forgiven for saying it! an invasion is what they want to bring them to
their senses. I’m sick of the work. Why should I be denied—am I to kill
the woman I love that I may go on hammering at them? Their idea of
liberty is, an evasion of public duty. Dr. Shrapnel’s right—it’s a
money-logged Island! Men like the Earl of Romfrey, who have never done
work in their days except to kill bears and birds, I say they’re
stifled by wealth: and he at least would have made an Admiral of mark,
or a General: not of much value, but useful in case of need. But he,
like a pretty woman, was under no obligation to contribute more than an
ornamental person to the common good. As to that, we count him by tens
of thousands now, and his footmen and maids by hundreds of thousands.
The rich love the nation through their possessions; otherwise they have
no country. If they loved the country they would care for the people.
Their hearts are eaten up by property. I am bidden to hold my tongue
because I have no knowledge. When men who have this ‘knowledge’ will go
down to the people, speak to them, consult and argue with them, and
come into suitable relations with them—I don’t say of lords and
retainers, but of knowers and doers, leaders and followers—out of
consideration for public safety, if not for the common good, I shall
hang back gladly; though I won’t hear misstatements. My fault is, that
I am too moderate. I should respect myself more if I deserved their
hatred. This flood of luxury, which is, as Dr. Shrapnel says, the
body’s drunkenness and the soul’s death, cries for execration. I’m too
moderate. But I shall quit the country: I’ve no place here.”

Rosamund ahemed. “France, Nevil? I should hardly think that France
would please you, in the present state of things over there.”

Half cynically, with great satisfaction, she had watched him fretting
at the savoury morsels of her pie with a fork like a sparrow-beak
during the monologue that would have been so dreary to her but for her
appreciation of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and
her admiration of the fire of his eyes. After finishing his plate he
had less the look of a ship driving on to reef—some of his images of
the country. He called for claret and water, sighing as he munched
bread in vast portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unbuttered
bread was to abstain from luxury. He praised passingly the quality of
the bread. It came from Steynham, and so did the milk and cream, the
butter, chicken and eggs. He was good enough not to object to the
expenditure upon the transmission of the accustomed dainties.
Altogether the gradual act of nibbling had conduced to his eating
remarkably well—royally. Rosamund’s more than half-cynical ideas of
men, and her custom of wringing unanimous verdicts from a jury of
temporary impressions, inclined her to imagine him a lover that had not
to be so very much condoled with, and a politician less alarming in
practice than in theory:—somewhat a gentleman of domestic tirades on
politics: as it is observed of your generous young Radical of birth and
fortune, that he will become on the old high road to a round
Conservatism.

He pitched one of the morning papers to the floor in disorderly sheets,
muttering: “So they’re at me!”

“Is Dr. Shrapnel better?” she asked. “I hold to a good appetite as a
sign of a man’s recovery.”

Beauchamp was confronting the fog at the window. He swung round: “Dr.
Shrapnel is better. He has a particularly clever young female cook.”

“Ah! then...”

“Yes, then, naturally! He would naturally hasten to recover to partake
of the viands, ma’am.”

Rosamund murmured of her gladness that he should be able to enjoy them.

“Oddly enough, he is not an eater of meat,” said Beauchamp.

“A vegetarian!”

“I beg you not to mention the fact to my lord. You see, you yourself
can scarcely pardon it. He does not exclude flesh from his table.
Blackburn Tuckham dined there once. ‘You are a thorough revolutionist,
Dr. Shrapnel,’ he observed. The doctor does not exclude wine, but he
does not drink it. Poor Tuckham went away entirely opposed to a Radical
he could not even meet as a boon-fellow. I begged him not to mention
the circumstances, as I have begged you. He pledged me his word to that
effect solemnly; he correctly felt that if the truth were known, there
would be further cause for the reprobation of the man who had been his
host.”

“And that poor girl, Nevil?”

“Miss Denham? She contracted the habit of eating meat at school, and
drinking wine in Paris, and continues it, occasionally. Now run
upstairs. Insist on food. Inform Madame de Rouaillout that her brother
M. le comte de Croisnel will soon be here, and should not find her ill.
Talk to her as you women can talk. Keep the blinds down in her room;
light a dozen wax-candles. Tell her I have no thought but of her. It’s
a lie: of no woman but of her: that you may say. But that you can’t
say. You can say I am devoted—ha, what stuff! I’ve only to open my
mouth!—say nothing of me: let her think the worst—unless it comes to a
question of her life: then be a merciful good woman...” He squeezed her
fingers, communicating his muscular tremble to her sensitive woman’s
frame, and electrically convincing her that he was a lover.

She went up-stairs. In ten minutes she descended, and found him pacing
up and down the hall. “Madame de Rouaillout is much the same,” she
said. He nodded, looked up the stairs, and about for his hat and
gloves, drew on the gloves, fixed the buttons, blinked at his watch,
and settled his hat as he was accustomed to wear it, all very
methodically, and talking rapidly, but except for certain precise
directions, which were not needed by so careful a housekeeper and nurse
as Rosamund was known to be, she could not catch a word of meaning. He
had some appointment, it seemed; perhaps he was off for a doctor—a
fresh instance of his masculine incapacity to understand patient
endurance. After opening the housedoor, and returning to the foot of
the stairs, listening and sighing, he disappeared.

It struck her that he was trying to be two men at once.

The litter of newspaper sheets in the morning-room brought his
exclamation to her mind: “They’re at me!” Her eyes ran down the
columns, and were seized by the print of his name in large type. A
leading article was devoted to Commander’s Beauchamp’s recent speech
delivered in the great manufacturing town of Gunningham, at a meeting
under the presidency of the mayor, and his replies to particular
questions addressed to him; one being, what right did he conceive
himself to have to wear the Sovereign’s uniform in professing
Republican opinions? Rosamund winced for her darling during her first
perusal of the article. It was of the sarcastically caressing kind,
masterly in ease of style, as the flourish of the executioner well may
be with poor Bare-back hung up to a leisurely administration of the
scourge. An allusion to “Jack on shore” almost persuaded her that his
uncle Everard had inspired the writer of the article. Beauchamp’s reply
to the question of his loyalty was not quoted: he was, however,
complimented on his frankness. At the same time he was assured that his
error lay in a too great proneness to make distinctions, and that there
was no distinction between sovereign and country in a loyal and
contented land, which could thank him for gallant services in war,
while taking him for the solitary example to be cited at the present
period of the evils of a comparatively long peace.

“Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of
the gallant commander,” etc., the termination of the article was
indulgent. Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and
though she loved Beauchamp, the test of her representative feminine
sentiment regarding his political career, when personal feeling on his
behalf had subsided, was, that the writer of the article must have
received an intimation to deal both smartly and forbearingly with the
offender: and from whom but her lord? Her notions of the conduct of the
Press were primitive. In a summary of the article Beauchamp was treated
as naughty boy, formerly brave boy, and likely by-and-by to be good
boy. Her secret heart would have spoken similarly, with more emphasis
on the flattering terms.

A telegram arrived from her lord. She was bidden to have the house
clear for him by noon of the next day.

How could that be done?

But to write blankly to inform the Earl of Romfrey that he was excluded
from his own house was another impossibility.

“Hateful man!” she apostrophized Captain Baskelett, and sat down,
supporting her chin in a prolonged meditation.

The card of a French lady, bearing the name of Madame d’Auffray, was
handed to her.

Beauchamp had gone off to his friend Lydiard, to fortify himself in his
resolve to reply to that newspaper article by eliciting counsel to the
contrary. Phrase by phrase he fought through the first half of his
composition of the reply against Lydiard, yielding to him on a point or
two of literary judgement, only the more vehemently to maintain his
ideas of discretion, which were, that he would not take shelter behind
a single subterfuge; that he would try this question nakedly, though he
should stand alone; that he would stake his position on it, and
establish his right to speak his opinions: and as for unseasonable
times, he protested it was the cry of a gorged middle-class, frightened
of further action, and making snug with compromise. Would it be a
seasonable time when there was uproar? Then it would be a time to be
silent on such themes: they could be discussed calmly now, and without
danger; and whether he was hunted or not, he cared nothing. He declined
to consider the peculiar nature of Englishmen: they must hear truth or
perish.

Knowing the difficulty once afflicting Beauchamp in the art of speaking
on politics tersely, Lydiard was rather astonished at his
well-delivered cannonade; and he fancied that his modesty had been
displaced by the new acquirement; not knowing the nervous fever of his
friend’s condition, for which the rattle of speech was balm, and
contention a native element, and the assumption of truth a necessity.
Beauchamp hugged his politics like some who show their love of the
pleasures of life by taking to them angrily. It was all he had: he had
given up all for it. He forced Lydiard to lay down his pen and walk
back to the square with him, and went on arguing, interjecting,
sneering, thumping the old country, raising and oversetting her,
treating her alternately like a disrespected grandmother, and like a
woman anciently beloved; as a dead lump, and as a garden of seeds;
reviewing prominent political men, laughing at the dwarf-giants;
finally casting anchor on a Mechanics’ Institute that he had recently
heard of, where working men met weekly for the purpose of reading the
British poets.

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard of late,” he said, shaking Lydiard’s
hand on the door-steps.

“Ah! You’re Commander Beauchamp; I think I know you. I’ve seen you on a
platform,” cried a fresh-faced man in decent clothes, halting on his
way along the pavement; “and if you were in your uniform, you damned
Republican dog! I’d strip you with my own hands, for the disloyal
scoundrel you are, with your pimping Republicanism and capsizing
everything in a country like Old England. It’s the cat-o’-nine-tails
you want, and the bosen to lay on; and I’d do it myself. And mind me,
when next I catch sight of you in blue and gold lace, I’ll compel you
to show cause why you wear it, and prove your case, or else I’ll make a
Cupid of you, and no joke about it. I don’t pay money for a nincompoop
to outrage my feelings of respect and loyalty, when he’s in my pay, d’
ye hear? You’re in my pay: and you do your duty, or I’ll kick ye out of
it. It’s no empty threat. You look out for your next public speech, if
it’s anywhere within forty mile of London. Get along.”

With a scowl, and a very ugly “yah!” worthy of cannibal jaws, the man
passed off.

Beauchamp kept eye on him. “What class does a fellow like that come
of?”

“He’s a harmless enthusiast,” said Lydiard. “He has been reading the
article, and has got excited over it.”

“I wish I had the fellow’s address.” Beauchamp looked wistfully at
Lydiard, but he did not stimulate the generous offer to obtain it for
him. Perhaps it was as well to forget the fellow.

“You see the effect of those articles,” he said.

“You see what I mean by unseasonable times,” Lydiard retorted.

“He didn’t talk like a tradesman,” Beauchamp mused.

“He may be one, for all that. It’s better to class him as an
enthusiast.”

“An enthusiast!” Beauchamp stamped: “for what?”

“For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles
he is accustomed to read in the papers. You don’t study your
countrymen.”

“I’d study that fellow, if I had the chance.”

“You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse
temper than most of them.”

Beauchamp shook Lydiard’s hand, saying, “The widow?”

“There’s no woman like her!”

“Well, now you’re free—why not? I think I put one man out of the
field.”

“Too early! Besides—”

“Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.”

“When shall you go down to Bevisham?”

“When? I can’t tell: when I’ve gone through fire. There never was a
home for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good
girl—the best of girls! if you hadn’t a little spoilt her with your
philosophy of the two sides of the case.”

“I’ve not given her the brains.”

“She’s always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action: she has no will.
So she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her
submitting, as if she must submit to me, because I’m overbearing,
instead of accepting the fact.”

“She feels your influence.”

“She’s against the publication of THE DAWN—for the present. It’s an
‘unseasonable time.’ I argue with her: I don’t get hold of her mind a
bit; but at last she says, ‘very well.’ She has your head.”

And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.

They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other’s task of
endurance.

As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore
walking past.

“Jack!” he called.

Wilmore glanced round. “How do you do, Beauchamp?”

“Where are you off to, Jack?”

“Down to the Admiralty. I’m rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.”

“Can’t you stop just a minute?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. Good morning.”

It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive,
retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.

“That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,” Beauchamp
said to Lydiard, who answered:

“The article did not put the idea of you into men’s minds, but gave
tongue to it: you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the
Press.”

“You wouldn’t take that man and me to have been messmates for years!
Old Jack Wilmore! Don’t go, Lydiard.”

Lydiard declared that he was bound to go: he was engaged to read
Italian for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

“Then go, by all means,” Beauchamp dismissed him.

He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the
door-step, and found them of one colour. If it was an accident
befalling him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an
hour, what of the sentiments of universal England? Lady Barbara’s
elopement with Lord Alfred last year did not rouse much execration;
hardly worse than gossip and compassion. Beauchamp drank a great deal
of bitterness from his reflections.

They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over
themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts
from their mischances and from most occurrences. So does the world they
combat win on them.

“For,” says Dr. Shrapnel, “the world and nature, which are opposed in
relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect
victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the
victory over the world, as over nature, is over self: and this victory
lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature:
for the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.”

The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp.
He had never before said to himself, “I have done my best, and I am
beaten!” Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but
here, within the walls where Renée lay silently breathing, barely
breathing, it might be dying, he was overcome, and left it to
circumstance to carry him to a conclusion. He went up-stairs to the
drawing-room, where he beheld Madame d’Auffray in conversation with
Rosamund.

“I was assured by Madame la Comtesse that I should see you to-day,” the
French lady said as she swam to meet him; “it is a real pleasure”: and
pressing his hand she continued, “but I fear you will be disappointed
of seeing my sister. She would rashly try your climate at its worst
period. Believe me, I do not join in decrying it, except on her
account: I could have forewarned her of an English Winter and early
Spring. You know her impetuosity; suddenly she decided on accepting the
invitation of Madame la Comtesse; and though I have no fears of her
health, she is at present a victim of the inclement weather.”

“You have seen her, madame?” said Beauchamp. So well had the clever
lady played the dupe that he forgot there was a part for him to play.
Even the acquiescence of Rosamund in the title of countess bewildered
him.

“Madame d’Auffray has been sitting for an hour with Madame de
Rouaillout,” said Rosamund.

He spoke of Roland’s coming.

“Ah?” said Madame d’Auffray, and turned to Rosamund: “you have
determined to surprise us: then you will have a gathering of the whole
family in your hospitable house, Madame la Comtesse.”

“If M. la Marquis will do it that honour, madame.”

“My brother is in London,” Madame d’Auffray said to Beauchamp.

The shattering blow was merited by one who could not rejoice that he
had acted rightly.




CHAPTER XLIII.
THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS


An extraordinary telegraphic message, followed by a still more
extraordinary letter the next morning, from Rosamund Culling, all but
interdicted the immediate occupation of his house in town to Everard,
now Earl of Romfrey. She begged him briefly not to come until after the
funeral, and proposed to give him good reasons for her request at their
meeting. “I repeat, I pledge myself to satisfy you on this point,” she
wrote. Her tone was that of one of your heroic women of history
refusing to surrender a fortress.

Everard’s wrath was ever of a complexion that could suffer
postponements without his having to fear an abatement of it. He had no
business to transact in London, and he had much at the Castle, so he
yielded himself up to his new sensations, which are not commonly the
portion of gentlemen of his years. He anticipated that Nevil would at
least come down to the funeral, but there was no appearance of him, nor
a word to excuse his absence. Cecil was his only supporter. They walked
together between the double ranks of bare polls of the tenantry and
peasantry, resembling in a fashion old Froissart engravings the earl
used to dote on in his boyhood, representing bodies of manacled
citizens, whose humbled heads looked like nuts to be cracked, outside
the gates of captured French towns, awaiting the disposition of their
conqueror, with his banner above him and prancing knights around. That
was a glory of the past. He had no successor. The thought was chilling;
the solitariness of childlessness to an aged man, chief of a most
ancient and martial House, and proud of his blood, gave him the
statue’s outlook on a desert, and made him feel that he was no more
than a whirl of the dust, settling to the dust.

He listened to the parson curiously and consentingly. We are ashes. Ten
centuries had come to an end in him to prove the formula correct. The
chronicle of the House would state that the last Earl of Romfrey left
no heir.

Cecil was a fine figure walking beside him. Measured by feet, he might
be a worthy holder of great lands. But so heartily did the earl despise
this nephew that he never thought of trying strength with the fellow,
and hardly cared to know what his value was, beyond his immediate uses
as an instrument to strike with. Beauchamp of Romfrey had been his
dream, not Baskelett: and it increased his disgust of Beauchamp that
Baskelett should step forward as the man. No doubt Cecil would hunt the
county famously: he would preserve game with the sleepless eye of a
General of the Jesuits. These things were to be considered.

Two days after the funeral Lord Romfrey proceeded to London. He was met
at the station by Rosamund, and informed that his house was not yet
vacated by the French family.

“And where have you arranged for me to go, ma’am?” he asked her
complacently.

She named an hotel where she had taken rooms for him.

He nodded, and was driven to the hotel, saying little on the road.

As she expected, he was heavily armed against her and Nevil.

“You’re the slave of the fellow, ma’am. You are so infatuated that you
second his amours, in my house. I must wait for a clearance, it seems.”

He cast a comical glance of disapprobation on the fittings of the hotel
apartment, abhorring gilt.

“They leave us the day after to-morrow,” said Rosamund, out of breath
with nervousness at the commencement of the fray, and skipping over the
opening ground of a bold statement of facts. “Madame de Rouaillout has
been unwell. She is not yet recovered; she has just risen. Her
sister-in-law has nursed her. Her husband seems much broken in health;
he is perfect on the points of courtesy.”

“That is lucky, ma’am.”

“Her brother, Nevil’s comrade in the war, was there also.”

“Who came first?”

“My lord, you have only heard Captain Baskelett’s version of the story.
She has been my guest since the first day of her landing in England.
There cannot possibly be an imputation on her.”

“Ma’am, if her husband manages to be satisfied, what on earth have I to
do with it?”

“I am thinking of Nevil, my lord.”

“You’re never thinking of any one else, ma’am.”

“He sleeps here, at this hotel. He left the house to Madame de
Rouaillout. I bear witness to that.”

“You two seem to have made your preparations to stand a criminal
trial.”

“It is pure truth, my lord.”

“Do you take me to be anxious about the fellow’s virtue?”

“She is a lady who would please you.”

“A scandal in my house does not please me.”

“The only approach to a scandal was made by Captain Baskelett.”

“A poor devil locked out of his bed on a Winter’s night hullabaloos
with pretty good reason. I suppose he felt the contrast.”

“My lord, this lady did me the honour to come to me on a visit. I have
not previously presumed to entertain a friend. She probably formed no
estimate of my exact position.”

The earl with a gesture implied Rosamund’s privilege to act the hostess
to friends.

“You invited her?” he said.

“That is, I had told her I hoped she would come to England.”

“She expected you to be at the house in town on her arrival?”

“It was her impulse to come.”

“She came alone?”

“She may have desired to be away from her own people for a time: there
may have been domestic differences. These cases are delicate.”

“This case appears to have been so delicate that you had to lock out a
fourth party.”

“It is indelicate and base of Captain Baskelett to complain and to
hint. Nevil had to submit to the same; and Captain Baskelett took his
revenge on the housedoor and the bells. The house was visited by the
police next morning.”

“Do you suspect him to have known you were inside the house that
night?”

She could not say so: but hatred of Cecil urged her past the bounds of
habitual reticence to put it to her lord whether he, imagining the
worst, would have behaved like Cecil.

To this he did not reply, but remarked, “I am sorry he annoyed you,
ma’am.”

“It is not the annoyance to me; it is the shocking, the unmanly
insolence to a lady, and a foreign lady.”

“That’s a matter between him and Nevil. I uphold him.”

“Then, my lord, I am silent.”

Silent she remained; but Lord Romfrey was also silent: and silence
being a weapon of offence only when it is practised by one out of two,
she had to reflect whether in speaking no further she had finished her
business.

“Captain Baskelett stays at the Castle?” she asked.

“He likes his quarters there.”

“Nevil could not go down to Romfrey, my lord. He was obliged to wait,
and see, and help me to entertain, her brother and her husband.”

“Why, ma’am? But I have no objection to his making the marquis a happy
husband.”

“He has done what few men would have done, that she may be a
self-respecting wife.”

“The parson’s in that fellow!” Lord Romfrey exclaimed. “Now I have the
story. She came to him, he declined the gift, and you were turned into
the curtain for them. If he had only been off with her, he would have
done the country good service. Here he’s a failure and a nuisance; he’s
a common cock-shy for the journals. I’m tired of hearing of him; he’s a
stench in our nostrils. He’s tired of the woman.”

“He loves her.”

“Ma’am, you’re hoodwinked. If he refused to have her, there’s a
something he loves better. I don’t believe we’ve bred a downright
lackadaisical donkey in our family: I know him. He’s not a fellow for
abstract morality: I know him. It’s bargain against bargain with him;
I’ll do him that justice. I hear he has ordered the removal of the
Jersey bull from Holdesbury, and the beast is mine,” Lord Romfrey
concluded in a lower key.

“Nevil has taken him.”

“Ha! pull and pull, then!”

“He contends that he is bound by a promise to give an American
gentleman the refusal of the bull, and you must sign an engagement to
keep the animal no longer than two years.”

“I sign no engagement. I stick to the bull.”

“Consent to see Nevil to-night, my lord.”

“When he has apologized to you, I may, ma’am.”

“Surely he did more, in requesting me to render him a service.”

“There’s not a creature living that fellow wouldn’t get to serve him,
if he knew the trick. We should all of us be marching on London at
Shrapnel’s heels. The political mania is just as incurable as
hydrophobia, and he’s bitten. That’s clear.”

“Bitten perhaps: but not mad. As you have always contended, the true
case is incurable, but it is very rare: and is this one?”

“It’s uncommonly like a true case, though I haven’t seen him foam at
the mouth, and shun water—as his mob does.”

Rosamund restrained some tears, betraying the effort to hide the
moisture. “I am no match for you, my lord. I try to plead on his
behalf;—I do worse than if I were dumb. This I most earnestly say: he
is the Nevil Beauchamp who fought for his country, and did not abandon
her cause, though he stood there—we had it from Colonel Halkett—a
skeleton: and he is the Nevil who—I am poorly paying my debt to
him!—defended me from the aspersions of his cousin.”

“Boys!” Lord Romfrey ejaculated.

“It is the same dispute between them as men.”

“Have you forgotten my proposal to shield you from liars and
scandalmongers?”

“Could I ever forget it?” Rosamund appeared to come shining out of a
cloud. “Princeliest and truest gentleman, I thought you then, and I
know you to be, my dear lord. I fancied I had lived the scandal down. I
was under the delusion that I had grown to be past backbiting: and that
no man could stand before me to insult and vilify me. But, for a woman
in any so-called doubtful position, it seems that the coward will not
be wanting to strike her. In quitting your service, I am able to affirm
that only once during the whole term of it have I consciously
overstepped the line of my duties: it was for Nevil: and Captain
Baskelett undertook to defend your reputation, in consequence.”

“Has the rascal been questioning your conduct?” The earl frowned.

“Oh, no! not questioning: he does not question, he accuses: he never
doubted: and what he went shouting as a boy, is plain matter of fact to
him now. He is devoted to you. It was for your sake that he desired me
to keep my name from being mixed up in a scandal he foresaw the
occurrence of in your house.”

“He permitted himself to sneer at you?”

“He has the art of sneering. On this occasion he wished to be direct
and personal.”

“What sort of hints were they?”

Lord Romfrey strode away from her chair that the answer might be easy
to her, for she was red, and evidently suffering from shame as well as
indignation.

“The hints we call distinct.” said Rosamund.

“In words?”

“In hard words.”

“Then you won’t meet Cecil?”

Such a question, and the tone of indifference in which it came,
surprised and revolted her so that the unreflecting reply leapt out:

“I would rather meet a devil.”

Of how tremblingly, vehemently, and hastily she had said it, she was
unaware. To her lord it was an outcry of nature, astutely touched by
him to put her to proof.

He continued his long leisurely strides, nodding over his feet.

Rosamund stood up. She looked a very noble figure in her broad
black-furred robe. “I have one serious confession to make, sir.”

“What’s that?” said he.

“I would avoid it, for it cannot lead to particular harm; but I have an
enemy who may poison your ear in my absence. And first I resign my
position. I have forfeited it.”

“Time goes forward, ma’am, and you go round. Speak to the point. Do you
mean that you toss up the reins of my household?”

“I do. You trace it to Nevil immediately?”

“I do. The fellow wants to upset the country, and he begins with me.”

“You are wrong, my lord. What I have done places me at Captain
Baskelett’s mercy. It is too loathsome to think of: worse than the
whip; worse than your displeasure. It might never be known; but the
thought that it might gives me courage. You have said that to protect a
woman everything is permissible. It is your creed, my lord, and because
the world, I have heard you say, is unjust and implacable to women. In
some cases, I think so too. In reality I followed your instructions; I
mean, your example. Cheap chivalry on my part! But it pained me not a
little. I beg to urge that in my defence.”

“Well, ma’am, you have tied the knot tight enough; perhaps now you’ll
cut it,” said the earl.

Rosamund gasped softly. “M. le Marquis is a gentleman who, after a life
of dissipation, has been reminded by bad health that he has a young and
beautiful wife.”

“He dug his pit to fall into it:—he’s jealous?”

She shook her head to indicate the immeasurable.

“Senile jealousy is anxious to be deceived. He could hardly be deceived
so far as to imagine that Madame la Marquise would visit me, such as I
am, as my guest. Knowingly or not, his very clever sister, a good
woman, and a friend to husband and wife—a Frenchwoman of the purest
type—gave me the title. She insisted on it, and I presumed to guess
that she deemed it necessary for the sake of peace in that home.”

Lord Romfrey appeared merely inquisitive; his eyebrows were lifted in
permanence; his eyes were mild.

She continued: “They leave England in a few hours. They are not likely
to return. I permitted him to address me with the title of countess.”

“Of Romfrey?” said the earl.

Rosamund bowed.

His mouth contracted. She did not expect thunder to issue from it, but
she did fear to hear a sarcasm, or that she would have to endure a
deadly silence: and she was gathering her own lips in imitation of his,
to nerve herself for some stroke to come, when he laughed in his
peculiar close-mouthed manner.

“I’m afraid you’ve dished yourself.”

“You cannot forgive me, my lord?”

He indulged in more of his laughter, and abruptly summoning gravity,
bade her talk to him of affairs. He himself talked of the condition of
the Castle, and with a certain off-hand contempt of the ladies of the
family, and Cecil’s father, Sir John. “What are they to me?” said he,
and he complained of having been called Last Earl of Romfrey.

“The line ends undegenerate,” said Rosamund fervidly, though she knew
not where she stood.

“Ends!” quoth the earl.

“I must see Stukely,” he added briskly, and stooped to her: “I beg you
to drive me to my Club, countess.”

“Oh! sir.”

“Once a countess, always a countess!”

“But once an impostor, my lord?”

“Not always, we’ll hope.”

He enjoyed this little variation in the language of comedy; letting it
drop, to say: “Be here to-morrow early. Don’t chase that family away
from the house. Do as you will, but not a word of Nevil to me: he’s a
bad mess in any man’s porringer; it’s time for me to claim exemption of
him from mine.”

She dared not let her thoughts flow, for to think was to triumph, and
possibly to be deluded. They came in copious volumes when Lord Romfrey,
alighting at his Club, called to the coachman: “Drive the countess
home.”

They were not thoughts of triumph absolutely. In her cooler mind she
felt that it was a bad finish of a gallant battle. Few women had risen
against a tattling and pelting world so stedfastly; and would it not
have been better to keep her own ground, which she had won with tears
and some natural strength, and therewith her liberty, which she prized?
The hateful Cecil, a reminder of whom set her cheeks burning and turned
her heart to serpent, had forced her to it. So she honestly conceived,
owing to the circumstance of her honestly disliking the pomps of life
and not desiring to occupy any position of brilliancy. She thought
assuredly of her hoard of animosity toward the scandalmongers, and of
the quiet glance she would cast behind on them, and below. That thought
came as a fruit, not as a reflection.

But if ever two offending young gentlemen, nephews of a long-suffering
uncle, were circumvented, undermined, and struck to earth, with one
blow, here was the instance. This was accomplished by Lord Romfrey’s
resolution to make the lady he had learnt to esteem his countess: and
more, it fixed to him for life one whom he could not bear to think of
losing: and still more, it might be; but what more was unwritten on his
tablets.

Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step
without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.




CHAPTER XLIV.
THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO PASSIONS IN
BEAUCHAMP


It was now the season when London is as a lighted tower to her
provinces, and, among other gentlemen hurried thither by attraction,
Captain Baskelett arrived. Although not a personage in the House of
Commons, he was a vote; and if he never committed himself to the perils
of a speech, he made himself heard. His was the part of chorus, which
he performed with a fairly close imitation of the original cries of
periods before parliaments were instituted, thus representing a stage
in the human development besides the borough of Bevisham. He arrived in
the best of moods for the emission of high-pitched vowel-sounds;
otherwise in the worst of tempers. His uncle had notified an addition
of his income to him at Romfrey, together with commands that he should
quit the castle instantly: and there did that woman, Mistress Culling,
do the honours to Nevil Beauchamp’s French party. He assured Lord
Palmet of his positive knowledge of the fact, incredible as the
sanction of such immoral proceedings by the Earl of Romfrey must appear
to that young nobleman. Additions to income are of course acceptable,
but in the form of a palpable stipulation for silence, they neither
awaken gratitude nor effect their purpose. Quite the contrary; they
prick the moral mind to sit in judgement on the donor. It means, she
fears me! Cecil confidently thought and said of the intriguing woman
who managed his patron.

The town-house was open to him. Lord Romfrey was at Steynham. Cecil
could not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it. He
happened to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for
his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English
nobility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the
people. She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the
door against him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered
courage to go down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Culling’s orders.
The old woman lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior
had permitted the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess.
This she knew for a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but
the French lady who came second brought a maid who knew English a
little, and she said the very words—the countess, and said also that
her party took Mrs. Culling for the Countess of Romfrey. What was more,
my lord’s coachman caught it up, and he called her countess, and he had
a quarrel about it with the footman Kendall; and the day after a
dreadful affair between them in the mews, home drives madam, and
Kendall is to go up to her, and down the poor man comes, and not a word
to be got out of him, but as if he had seen a ghost. “She have such
power,” Cecil’s admirer concluded.

“I wager I match her,” Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands
and letting his lower teeth shine out. The means of matching her were
not so palpable as the resolution. First he took men into his
confidence. Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the
question, “What ought I to do?” In consideration for the Earl of
Romfrey he ought not to pass it over, he suggested. The ladies of the
family urged him to go to Steynham and boldly confront the woman. He
was not prepared for that. Better, it seemed to him, to blow the
rumour, and make it the topic of the season, until Lord Romfrey should
hear of it. Cecil had the ear of the town for a month. He was in the
act of slicing the air with his right hand in his accustomed style, one
evening at Lady Elsea’s, to protest how vast was the dishonour done to
the family by Mistress Culling, when Stukely Culbrett stopped him,
saying, “The lady you speak of is the Countess of Romfrey. I was
present at the marriage.”

Cecil received the shock in the attitude of those martial figures we
see wielding two wooden swords in provincial gardens to tell the
disposition of the wind: abruptly abandoned by it, they stand
transfixed, one sword aloft, the other at their heels. The resemblance
extended to his astonished countenance. His big chest heaved. Like many
another wounded giant before him, he experienced the insufficiency of
interjections to solace pain. For them, however, the rocks were handy
to fling, the trees to uproot; heaven’s concave resounded companionably
to their bellowings. Relief of so concrete a kind is not to be obtained
in crowded London assemblies.

“You are jesting?—you are a jester,” he contrived to say.

“It was a private marriage, and I was a witness,” replied Stukely.

“Lord Romfrey has made an honest woman of her, has he?”

“A peeress, you mean.”

Cecil bowed. “Exactly. I am corrected. I mean a peeress.”

He got out of the room with as high an air as he could command, feeling
as if a bar of iron had flattened his head.

Next day it was intimated to him by one of the Steynham servants that
apartments were ready for him at the residence of the late earl: Lord
Romfrey’s house was about to be occupied by the Countess of Romfrey.
Cecil had to quit, and he chose to be enamoured of that dignity of
sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man.

Rosamund, Countess of Romfrey, had worse to endure from Beauchamp. He
indeed came to the house, and he went through the formalities of
congratulation, but his opinion of her step was unconcealed, that she
had taken it for the title. He distressed her by reviving the case of
Dr. Shrapnel, as though it were a matter of yesterday, telling her she
had married a man with a stain on him; she should have exacted the
Apology as a nuptial present; ay, and she would have done it if she had
cared for the earl’s honour or her own. So little did he understand
men! so tenacious was he of his ideas! She had almost forgotten the
case of Dr. Shrapnel, and to see it shooting up again in the new path
of her life was really irritating.

Rosamund did not defend herself.

“I am very glad you have come, Nevil,” she said; “your uncle holds to
the ceremony. I may be of real use to you now; I wish to be.”

“You have only to prove it,” said he. “If you can turn his mind to
marriage, you can send him to Bevisham.”

“My chief thought is to serve you.”

“I know it is, I know it is,” he rejoined with some fervour. “You have
served me, and made me miserable for life, and rightly. Never mind,
all’s well while the hand’s to the axe.” Beauchamp smoothed his
forehead roughly, trying hard to inspire himself with the tonic
draughts of sentiments cast in the form of proverbs. “Lord Romfrey saw
her, you say?”

“He did, Nevil, and admired her.”

“Well, if I suffer, let me think of _her!_ For courage and nobleness I
shall never find her equal. Have you changed your ideas of Frenchwomen
now? Not a word, you say, not a look, to show her disdain of me
whenever my name was mentioned!”

“She could scarcely feel disdain. She was guilty of a sad error.”

“Through trusting in me. Will nothing teach you where the fault lies?
You women have no mercy for women. She went through the parade to
Romfrey Castle and back, and she must have been perishing at heart.
That, you English call acting. In history you have a respect for such
acting up to the scaffold. Good-bye to her! There’s a story ended. One
thing you must promise: you’re a peeress, ma’am: the story’s out,
everybody has heard of it; that babbler has done his worst: if you have
a becoming appreciation of your title, you will promise me honestly—no,
give me your word as a woman I can esteem—that you will not run about
excusing me. Whatever you hear said or suggested, say nothing yourself.
I insist on your keeping silence. Press my hand.”

“Nevil, how foolish!”

“It’s my will.”

“It is unreasonable. You give your enemies licence.”

“I know what’s in your head. Take my hand, and let me have your word
for it.”

“But if persons you like very much, Nevil, should hear?”

“Promise. You are a woman not to break your word.”

“If I decline?”

“Your hand! I’ll kiss it.”

“Oh! my darling.” Rosamund flung her arms round him and strained him an
instant to her bosom. “What have I but you in the world? My comfort was
the hope that I might serve you.”

“Yes! by slaying one woman as an offering to another. It would be
impossible for you to speak the truth. Don’t you see, it would be a lie
against her, and making a figure of me that a man would rather drop to
the ground than have shown of him? I was to blame, and only I. Madame
de Rouaillout was as utterly deceived by me as ever a trusting woman by
a brute. I look at myself and hardly believe it’s the same man. I wrote
to her that I was unchanged—and I was entirely changed, another
creature, anything Lord Romfrey may please to call me.”

“But, Nevil, I repeat, if Miss Halkett should hear...?”

“She knows by this time.”

“At present she is ignorant of it.”

“And what is Miss Halkett to me?”

“More than you imagined in that struggle you underwent, I think, Nevil.
Oh! if only to save her from Captain Baskelett! He gained your uncle’s
consent when they were at the Castle, to support him in proposing for
her. He is persistent. Women have been snared without loving. She is a
great heiress. Reflect on his use of her wealth. You respect her, if
you have no warmer feeling. Let me assure you that the husband of
Cecilia, if he is of Romfrey blood, has the fairest chance of the
estates. That man will employ every weapon. He will soon be here bowing
to me to turn me to his purposes.”

“Cecilia can see through Baskelett,” said Beauchamp.

“Single-mindedly selfish men may be seen through and through, and still
be dangerous, Nevil. The supposition is, that we know the worst of
them. He carries a story to poison her mind. She could resist it, if
you and she were in full confidence together. If she did not love you,
she could resist it. She does, and for some strange reason beyond my
capacity to fathom, you have not come to an understanding. Sanction my
speaking to her, just to put her on her guard, privately: not to injure
that poor lady, but to explain. Shall she not know the truth? I need
say but very little. Indeed, all I can say is, that finding the
marquise in London one evening, you telegraphed for me to attend on
her, and I joined you. You shake your head. But surely it is due to
Miss Halkett. She should be protected from what will certainly wound
her deeply. Her father is afraid of you, on the score of your theories.
I foresee it: he will hear the scandal: he will imagine you as bad in
morals as in politics. And you have lost your friend in Lord
Romfrey—though he shall not be your enemy. Colonel Halkett and Cecilia
called on us at Steynham. She was looking beautiful; a trifle
melancholy. The talk was of your—that—I do not like it, but you hold
those opinions—the Republicanism. She had read your published letters.
She spoke to me of your sincerity. Colonel Halkett of course was vexed.

It is the same with all your friends. She, however, by her tone, led me
to think that she sees you as you are, more than in what you do. They
are now in Wales. They will be in town after Easter. Then you must
expect that her feeling for you will be tried, unless but you will! You
will let me speak to her, Nevil. My position allows me certain
liberties I was previously debarred from. You have not been so very
tender to your Cecilia that you can afford to give her fresh reasons
for sorrowful perplexity. And why should you stand to be blackened by
scandalmongers when a few words of mine will prove that instead of weak
you have been strong, instead of libertine blameless? I am not using
fine phrases: I would not. I would be as thoughtful of you as if you
were present. And for her sake, I repeat, the truth should be told to
her. I have a lock of her hair.”

“Cecilia’s? Where?” said Beauchamp.

“It is at Steynham.” Rosamund primmed her lips at the success of her
probing touch; but she was unaware of the chief reason for his doting
on those fair locks, and how they coloured his imagination since the
day of the drive into Bevisham.

“Now leave me, my dear Nevil,” she said. “Lord Romfrey will soon be
here, and it is as well for the moment that you should not meet him, if
it can be avoided.”

Beauchamp left her, like a man out-argued and overcome. He had no wish
to meet his uncle, whose behaviour in contracting a misalliance and
casting a shadow on the family, in a manner so perfectly objectless and
senseless, appeared to him to call for the reverse of compliments.
Cecilia’s lock of hair lying at Steynham hung in his mind. He saw the
smooth flat curl lying secret like a smile.

The graceful head it had fallen from was dimmer in his mental eye. He
went so far in this charmed meditation as to feel envy of the possessor
of the severed lock: passingly he wondered, with the wonder of
reproach, that the possessor should deem it enough to possess the lock,
and resign it to a drawer or a desk. And as when life rolls back on us
after the long ebb of illness, little whispers and diminutive images of
the old joys and prizes of life arrest and fill our hearts; or as, to
men who have been beaten down by storms, the opening of a daisy is
dearer than the blazing orient which bids it open; so the visionary
lock of Cecilia’s hair became Cecilia’s self to Beauchamp, yielding him
as much of her as he could bear to think of, for his heart was
shattered.

Why had she given it to his warmest friend? For the asking, probably.

This question was the first ripple of the breeze from other emotions
beginning to flow fast.

He walked out of London, to be alone, and to think and from the palings
of a road on a South-western run of high land, he gazed, at the great
city—a place conquerable yet, with the proper appliances for
subjugating it: the starting of his daily newspaper, THE DAWN, say, as
a commencement. It began to seem a possible enterprise. It soon seemed
a proximate one. If Cecilia! He left the exclamation a blank, but not
an empty dash in the brain; rather like the shroud of night on a vast
and gloriously imagined land.

Nay, the prospect was partly visible, as the unknown country becomes by
degrees to the traveller’s optics on the dark hill-tops. It is much, of
course, to be domestically well-mated: but to be fortified and armed by
one’s wife with a weapon to fight the world, is rare good fortune; a
rapturous and an infinite satisfaction. He could now support of his own
resources a weekly paper. A paper published weekly, however, is a poor
thing, out of the tide, behind the date, mainly a literary periodical,
no foremost combatant in politics, no champion in the arena; hardly
better than a commentator on the events of the six past days; an echo,
not a voice. It sits on a Saturday bench and pretends to sum up. Who
listens? The verdict knocks dust out of a cushion. It has no steady
continuous pressure of influence. It is the organ of sleepers. Of all
the bigger instruments of money, it is the feeblest, Beauchamp thought.
His constant faith in the good effects of utterance naturally inclined
him to value six occasions per week above one; and in the fight he was
for waging, it was necessary that he should enter the ring and hit blow
for blow sans intermission. A statement that he could call false must
be challenged hot the next morning. The covert Toryism, the fits of
flunkeyism, the cowardice, of the relapsing middle-class, which is now
England before mankind, because it fills the sails of the Press, must
be exposed. It supports the Press in its own interests, affecting to
speak for the people. It belies the people. And this Press, declaring
itself independent, can hardly walk for fear of treading on an interest
here, an interest there. It cannot have a conscience. It is a bad
guide, a false guardian; its abject claim to be our national and
popular interpreter—even that is hollow and a mockery! It is powerful
only while subservient. An engine of money, appealing to the
sensitiveness of money, it has no connection with the mind of the
nation. And that it is not of, but apart from, the people, may be seen
when great crises come. Can it stop a war? The people would, and with
thunder, had they the medium. But in strong gales the power of the
Press collapses; it wheezes like a pricked pigskin of a piper. At its
best Beauchamp regarded our lordly Press as a curiously diapered
curtain and delusive mask, behind which the country struggles vainly to
show an honest feature; and as a trumpet that deafened and terrorized
the people; a mere engine of leaguers banded to keep a smooth face upon
affairs, quite soullessly: he meanwhile having to be dumb.

But a Journal that should be actually independent of circulation and
advertisements: a popular journal in the true sense, very lungs to the
people, for them to breathe freely through at last, and be heard out of
it, with well-paid men of mark to head and aid them;—the establishment
of such a Journal seemed to him brave work of a life, though one should
die early. The money launching it would be coin washed pure of its
iniquity of selfish reproduction, by service to mankind. This DAWN of
his conception stood over him like a rosier Aurora for the country. He
beheld it in imagination as a new light rising above hugeous London.
You turn the sheets of THE DAWN, and it is the manhood of the land
addressing you, no longer that alternately puling and insolent cry of
the coffers. The health, wealth, comfort, contentment of the greater
number are there to be striven for, in contempt of compromise and
“unseasonable times.”

Beauchamp’s illuminated dream of the power of his DAWN to vitalize old
England, liberated him singularly from his wearing regrets and
heart-sickness.

Surely Cecilia, who judged him sincere, might be bent to join hands
with him for so good a work! She would bring riches to her husband:
sufficient. He required the ablest men of the country to write for him,
and it was just that they should be largely paid. They at least in
their present public apathy would demand it. To fight the brewers,
distillers, publicans, the shopkeepers, the parsons, the landlords, the
law limpets, and also the indifferents, the logs, the cravens and the
fools, high talent was needed, and an ardour stimulated by rates of pay
outdoing the offers of the lucre-journals. A large annual outlay would
therefore be needed; possibly for as long as a quarter of a century.
Cecilia and her husband would have to live modestly. But her
inheritance would be immense. Colonel Halkett had never spent a tenth
of his income. In time he might be taught to perceive in THE DAWN the
one greatly beneficent enterprise of his day. He might through his
daughter’s eyes, and the growing success of the Journal. Benevolent and
gallant old man, patriotic as he was, and kind at heart, he might learn
to see in THE DAWN a broader channel of philanthropy and chivalry than
any we have yet had a notion of in England!—a school of popular
education into the bargain.

Beauchamp reverted to the shining curl. It could not have been clearer
to vision if it had lain under his eyes.

Ay, that first wild life of his was dead. He had slain it. Now for the
second and sober life! Who can say? The Countess of Romfrey suggested
it:—Cecilia may have prompted him in his unknown heart to the sacrifice
of a lawless love, though he took it for simply barren iron duty.
Brooding on her, he began to fancy the victory over himself less and
less a lame one: for it waxed less and less difficult in his
contemplation of it. He was looking forward instead of back.

Who cut off the lock? Probably Cecilia herself; and thinking at the
moment that he would see it, perhaps beg for it. The lustrous little
ring of hair wound round his heart; smiled both on its emotions and its
aims; bound them in one.

But proportionately as he grew tender to Cecilia, his consideration for
Renée increased; that became a law to him: pity nourished it, and
glimpses of self-contempt, and something like worship of her
high-heartedness.

He wrote to the countess, forbidding her sharply and absolutely to
attempt a vindication of him by explanations to any persons whomsoever;
and stating that he would have no falsehoods told, he desired her to
keep to the original tale of the visit of the French family to her as
guests of the Countess of Romfrey. Contradictory indeed. Rosamund shook
her head over him. For a wilful character that is guilty of issuing
contradictory commands to friends who would be friends in spite of him,
appears to be expressly angling for the cynical spirit, so surely does
it rise and snap at such provocation. He was even more emphatic when
they next met. He would not listen to a remonstrance; and though, of
course, her love of him granted him the liberty to speak to her in what
tone he pleased, there were sensations proper to her new rank which his
intemperateness wounded and tempted to revolt when he vexed her with
unreason. She had a glimpse of the face he might wear to his enemies.

He was quite as resolute, too, about that slight matter of the Jersey
bull. He had the bull in Bevisham, and would not give him up without
the sign manual of Lord Romfrey to an agreement to resign him over to
the American Quaker gentleman, after a certain term. Moreover, not once
had he, by exclamation or innuendo, during the period of his recent
grief for the loss of his first love, complained of his uncle Everard’s
refusal in the old days to aid him in suing for Renée. Rosamund had
expected that he would. She thought it unloverlike in him not to stir
the past, and to bow to intolerable facts. This idea of him, coming in
conjunction with his present behaviour, convinced her that there
existed a contradiction in his nature: whence it ensued that she lost
her warmth as an advocate designing to intercede for him with Cecilia;
and warmth being gone, the power of the scandal seemed to her
unassailable. How she could ever have presumed to combat it, was an
astonishment to her. Cecilia might be indulgent, she might have faith
in Nevil. Little else could be hoped for.

The occupations, duties, and ceremonies of her new position contributed
to the lassitude into which Rosamund sank. And she soon had a
communication to make to her lord, the nature of which was more
startling to herself, even tragic. The bondwoman is a free woman
compared with the wife.

Lord Romfrey’s friends noticed a glow of hearty health in the splendid
old man, and a prouder animation of eye and stature; and it was agreed
that matrimony suited him well. Luckily for Cecil he did not sulk very
long. A spectator of the earl’s first introduction to the House of
Peers, he called on his uncle the following day, and Rosamund accepted
his homage in her husband’s presence. He vowed that my lord was the
noblest figure in the whole assembly; that it had been to him the most
moving sight he had ever witnessed; that Nevil should have been there
to see it and experience what he had felt; it would have done old Nevil
incalculable good! and as far as his grief at the idea and some
reticence would let him venture, he sighed to think of the last Earl of
Romfrey having been seen by him taking the seat of his fathers.

Lord Romfrey shouted “Ha!” like a checked peal of laughter, and glanced
at his wife.




CHAPTER XLV.
A LITTLE PLOT AGAINST CECILIA


Some days before Easter week Seymour Austin went to Mount Laurels for
rest, at an express invitation from Colonel Halkett. The working
barrister, who is also a working member of Parliament, is occasionally
reminded that this mortal machine cannot adapt itself in perpetuity to
the long hours of labour by night in the House of Commons as well as by
day in the Courts, which would seem to have been arranged by a
compliant country for the purpose of aiding his particular, and most
honourable, ambition to climb, while continuing to fill his purse. Mr.
Austin broke down early in the year. He attributed it to a cold. Other
representative gentlemen were on their backs, of whom he could admit
that the protracted nightwork had done them harm, with the reservation
that their constitutions were originally unsound. But the House cannot
get on without lawyers, and lawyers must practise their profession, and
if they manage both to practise all day and sit half the night, others
should be able to do the simple late sitting; and we English are an
energetic people, we must toil or be beaten: and besides, “night brings
counsel,” men are cooler and wiser by night. Any amount of work can be
performed by careful feeders: it is the stomach that kills the
Englishman. Brains are never the worse for activity; they subsist on
it.

These arguments and citations, good and absurd, of a man more at home
in his harness than out of it, were addressed to the colonel to stop
his remonstrances and idle talk about burning the candle at both ends.
To that illustration Mr. Austin replied that he did not burn it in the
middle.

“But you don’t want money, Austin.”

“No; but since I’ve had the habit of making it I have taken to like
it.”

“But you’re not ambitious.”

“Very little; but I should be sorry to be out of the tideway.”

“I call it a system of slaughter,” said the colonel; and Mr. Austin
said, “The world goes in that way—love and slaughter.”

“Not suicide though,” Colonel Halkett muttered.

“No, that’s only incidental.”

The casual word “love” led Colonel Halkett to speak to Cecilia of an
old love-affair of Seymour Austin’s, in discussing the state of his
health with her. The lady was the daughter of a famous admiral,
handsome, and latterly of light fame. Mr. Austin had nothing to regret
in her having married a man richer than himself.

“I wish he had married a good woman,” said the colonel.

“He looks unwell, papa.”

“He thinks you’re looking unwell, my dear.”

“He thinks that of me?”

Cecilia prepared a radiant face for Mr. Austin.

She forgot to keep it kindled, and he suspected her to be a victim of
one of the forms of youthful melancholy, and laid stress on the benefit
to health of a change of scene.

“We have just returned from Wales,” she said.

He remarked that it was hardly a change to be within shot of our
newspapers.

The colour left her cheeks. She fancied her father had betrayed her to
the last man who should know her secret. Beauchamp and the newspapers
were rolled together in her mind by the fever of apprehension wasting
her ever since his declaration of Republicanism, and defence of it, and
an allusion to one must imply the other, she feared: feared, but far
from quailingly. She had come to think that she could read the man she
loved, and detect a reasonableness in his extravagance. Her father had
discovered the impolicy of attacking Beauchamp in her hearing. The
fever by which Cecilia was possessed on her lover’s behalf, often
overcame discretion, set her judgement in a whirl, was like a delirium.
How it had happened she knew not. She knew only her wretched state; a
frenzy seized her whenever his name was uttered, to excuse, account
for, all but glorify him publicly. And the immodesty of her conduct was
perceptible to her while she thus made her heart bare. She exposed
herself once of late at Itchincope, and had tried to school her tongue
before she went there. She felt that she should inevitably be seen
through by Seymour Austin if he took the world’s view of Beauchamp, and
this to her was like a descent on the rapids to an end one shuts eyes
from.

He noticed her perturbation, and spoke of it to her father.

“Yes, I’m very miserable about her,” the colonel confessed. “Girls
don’t see... they can’t guess... they have no idea of the right kind of
man for them. A man like Blackburn Tuckham, now, a man a father could
leave his girl to, with confidence! He works for me like a slave; I
can’t guess why. He doesn’t look as if he were attracted. There’s a
man! but, no; harum-scarum fellows take their fancy.”

“Is _she_ that kind of young lady?” said Mr. Austin.

“No one would have thought so. She pretends to have opinions upon
politics now. It’s of no use to talk of it!”

But Beauchamp was fully indicated.

Mr. Austin proposed to Cecilia that they should spend Easter week in
Rome.

Her face lighted and clouded.

“I should like it,” she said, negatively.

“What’s the objection?”

“None, except that Mount Laurels in Spring has grown dear to me; and we
have engagements in London. I am not quick, I suppose, at new projects.
I have ordered the yacht to be fitted out for a cruise in the
Mediterranean early in the Summer. There is an objection, I am
sure—yes; papa has invited Mr. Tuckham here for Easter.”

“We could carry him with us.”

“Yes, but I should wish to be entirely under your tutelage in Rome.”

“We would pair: your father and he; you and I.”

“We might do that. But Mr. Tuckham is like you, devoted to work; and,
unlike you, careless of Antiquities and Art.”

“He is a hard and serious worker, and therefore the best of companions
for a holiday. At present he is working for the colonel, who would
easily persuade him to give over, and come with us.”

“He certainly does love papa,” said Cecilia.

Mr. Austin dwelt on that subject.

Cecilia perceived that she had praised Mr. Tuckham for his devotedness
to her father without recognizing the beauty of nature in the young man
who could voluntarily take service under the elder he esteemed, in
simple admiration of him. Mr. Austin scarcely said so much, or expected
her to see the half of it, but she wished to be extremely grateful, and
could only see at all by kindling altogether.

“He does himself injustice in his manner,” said Cecilia.

“That has become somewhat tempered,” Mr. Austin assured her, and he
acknowledged what it had been with a smile that she reciprocated.

A rough man of rare quality civilizing under various influences, and
half ludicrous, a little irritating, wholly estimable, has frequently
won the benign approbation of the sex. In addition, this rough man over
whom she smiled was one of the few that never worried her concerning
her hand. There was not a whisper of it in him. He simply loved her
father.

Cecilia welcomed him to Mount Laurels with grateful gladness. The
colonel had hastened Mr. Tuckham’s visit in view of the expedition to
Rome, and they discoursed of it at the luncheon table. Mr. Tuckham let
fall that he had just seen Beauchamp.

“Did he thank you for his inheritance?” Colonel Halkett inquired.

“Not he!” Tuckham replied jovially.

Cecilia’s eyes, quick to flash, were dropped.

The colonel said: “I suppose you told him nothing of what you had done
for him?” and said Tuckham: “Oh no: what anybody else would have done”;
and proceeded to recount that he had called at Dr. Shrapnel’s on the
chance of an interview with his friend Lydiard, who used generally to
be hanging about the cottage. “But now he’s free: his lunatic wife is
dead, and I’m happy to think I was mistaken as to Miss Denham. Men
practising literature should marry women with money. The poor girl
changed colour when I informed her he had been released for upwards of
three months. The old Radical’s not the thing in health. He’s anxious
about leaving her alone in the world; he said so to me. Beauchamp’s for
rigging out a yacht to give him a sail. It seems that salt water did
him some good last year. They’re both of them rather the worse for a
row at one of their meetings in the North in support of that public
nuisance, the democrat and atheist Roughleigh. The Radical doctor lost
a hat, and Beauchamp almost lost an eye. He would have been a Nelson of
politics, if he had been a monops, with an excuse for not seeing. It’s
a trifle to them; part of their education. They call themselves
students. Rome will be capital, Miss Halkett. You’re an Italian
scholar, and I beg to be accepted as a pupil.”

“I fear we have postponed the expedition too long,” said Cecilia. She
could have sunk with languor.

“Too long?” cried Colonel Halkett, mystified.

“Until too late, I mean, papa. Do you not think, Mr. Austin, that a
fortnight in Rome is too short a time?”

“Not if we make it a month, my dear Cecilia.”

“Is not our salt air better for you? The yacht shall be fitted out.”

“I’m a poor sailor!”

“Besides, a hasty excursion to Italy brings one’s anticipated regrets
at the farewell too close to the pleasure of beholding it, for the
enjoyment of that luxury of delight which I associate with the name of
Italy.”

“Why, my dear child,” said her father, “you were all for going, the
other day.”

“I do not remember it,” said she. “One plans agreeable schemes. At
least we need not hurry from home so very soon after our return. We
have been travelling incessantly. The cottage in Wales is not home. It
is hardly fair to Mount Laurels to quit it without observing the
changes of the season in our flowers and birds here. And we have
visitors coming. Of course, papa, I would not chain you to England. If
I am not well enough to accompany you, I can go to Louise for a few
weeks.”

Was ever transparency so threadbare? Cecilia shrank from herself in
contemplating it when she was alone; and Colonel Halkett put the
question to Mr. Austin, saying to him privately, with no further
reserve: “It’s that fellow Beauchamp in the neighbourhood; I’m not so
blind. He’ll be knocking at my door, and I can’t lock him out. Austin,
would you guess it was my girl speaking? I never in my life had such an
example of intoxication before me. I’m perfectly miserable at the
sight. You know her; she was the proudest girl living. Her ideas were
orderly and sound; she had a good intellect. Now she more than half
defends him—a naval officer! good Lord!—for getting up in a public room
to announce that he’s a Republican, and writing heaps of mad letters to
justify himself. He’s ruined in his profession: hopeless! He can never
get a ship: his career’s cut short, he’s a rudderless boat. A gentleman
drifting to Bedlam, his uncle calls him. I call his treatment of
Grancey Lespel anything but gentlemanly. This is the sort of fellow my
girl worships! What can I do? I can’t interdict the house to him: it
would only make matters worse. Thank God, the fellow hangs fire
somehow, and doesn’t come to me. I expect it every day, either in a
letter or the man in person. And I declare to heaven I’d rather be
threading a Khyber Pass with my poor old friend who fell to a shot
there.”

“She certainly has another voice,” Mr. Austin assented gravely.

He did not look on Beauchamp as the best of possible husbands for
Cecilia.

“Let her see that you’re anxious, Austin,” said the colonel. “I’m her
old opponent in this affair. She loves me, but she’s accustomed to
think me prejudiced: you she won’t. You may have a good effect.”

“Not by speaking.”

“No, no; no assault: not a word, and not a word against him. Lay the
wind to catch a gossamer. I’ve had my experience of blowing cold, and
trying to run her down. He’s at Shrapnel’s. He’ll be up here to-day,
and I have an engagement in the town. Don’t quit her side. Let her
fancy you are interested in some discussion—Radicalism, if you like.”

Mr. Austin readily undertook to mount guard over her while her father
rode into Bevisham on business.

The enemy appeared.

Cecilia saw him, and could not step to meet him for trouble of heart.
It was bliss to know that he lived and was near.

A transient coldness following the fit of ecstasy enabled her to swim
through the terrible first minutes face to face with him.

He folded her round like a mist; but it grew a problem to understand
why Mr. Austin should be perpetually at hand, in the garden, in the
woods, in the drawing-room, wheresoever she wakened up from one of her
trances to see things as they were.

Yet Beauchamp, with a daring and cunning at which her soul exulted, and
her feminine nature trembled, as at the divinely terrible, had managed
to convey to her no less than if they had been alone together.

His parting words were: “I must have five minutes with your father
to-morrow.”

How had she behaved? What could be Seymour Austin’s idea of her?

She saw the blind thing that she was, the senseless thing, the
shameless; and vulture-like in her scorn of herself, she alighted on
that disgraced Cecilia and picked her to pieces hungrily. It was clear:
Beauchamp had meant nothing beyond friendly civility: it was only her
abject greediness pecking at crumbs. No! he loved her. Could a woman’s
heart be mistaken? She melted and wept, thanking him: she offered him
her remnant of pride, pitiful to behold.

And still she asked herself between-whiles whether it could be true of
an English lady of our day, that she, the fairest stature under sun,
was ever knowingly twisted to this convulsion. She seemed to look forth
from a barred window on flower, and field, and hill. Quietness existed
as a vision. Was it impossible to embrace it? How pass into it? By
surrendering herself to the flames, like a soul unto death! For why, if
they were overpowering, attempt to resist them? It flattered her to
imagine that she had been resisting them in their present burning might
ever since her lover stepped on the _Esperanza’s_ deck at the mouth of
Otley River. How foolish, seeing that they are fatal! A thrill of
satisfaction swept her in reflecting that her ability to reason was
thus active. And she was instantly rewarded for surrendering; pain
fled, to prove her reasoning good; the flames devoured her gently they
cared not to torture so long as they had her to themselves.

At night, candle in hand, on the corridor, her father told her he had
come across Grancey Lespel in Bevisham, and heard what he had not quite
relished of the Countess of Romfrey. The glittering of Cecilia’s eyes
frightened him. Taking her for the moment to know almost as much as he,
the colonel doubted the weight his communication would have on her; he
talked obscurely of a scandalous affair at Lord Romfrey’s house in
town, and Beauchamp and that Frenchwoman. “But,” said he, “Mrs. Grancey
will be here to-morrow.”

“So will Nevil, papa,” said Cecilia.

“Ah! he’s coming, yes; well!” the colonel puffed. “Well, I shall see
him, of course, but I... I can only say that if his oath’s worth
having, I ... and I think you too, my dear, if you... but it’s no use
anticipating. I shall stand out for your honour and happiness. There,
your cheeks are flushed. Go and sleep.”

Some idle tale! Cecilia murmured to herself a dozen times, undisturbed
by the recurrence of it. Nevil was coming to speak to her father
tomorrow! Adieu to doubt and division! Happy to-morrow! and dear Mount
Laurels! The primroses were still fair in the woods: and soon the
cowslips would come, and the nightingale; she lay lapt in images of
everything innocently pleasing to Nevil. Soon the _Esperanza_ would be
spreading wings. She revelled in a picture of the yacht on a tumbling
Mediterranean Sea, meditating on the two specks near the tiller,—who
were blissful human creatures, blest by heaven and in themselves—with
luxurious Olympian benevolence.

For all that, she awoke, starting up in the first cold circle of
twilight, her heart in violent action. She had dreamed that the vessel
was wrecked. “I did not think myself so cowardly,” she said aloud,
pressing her side and then, with the dream in her eyes, she gasped: “It
would be together!”

Strangely chilled, she tried to recover some fallen load. The birds of
the dawn twittered, chirped, dived aslant her window, fluttered back.
Instead of a fallen load, she fancied presently that it was an
expectation she was desiring to realize: but what? What could be
expected at that hour? She quitted her bed, and paced up and down the
room beneath a gold-starred ceiling. Her expectation, she resolved to
think, was of a splendid day of the young Spring at Mount Laurels—a day
to praise to Nevil.

She raised her window-blind at a window letting in sweet air, to gather
indications of promising weather. Her lover stood on the grass-plot
among the flower-beds below, looking up, as though it had been his
expectation to see her which had drawn her to gaze out with an idea of
some expectation of her own. So visionary was his figure in the grey
solitariness of the moveless morning that she stared at the apparition,
scarce putting faith in him as man, until he kissed his hand to her,
and had softly called her name.

Impulsively she waved a hand from her lips.

Now there was no retreat for either of them!

She awoke to this conviction after a flight of blushes that burnt her
thoughts to ashes as they sprang. Thoughts born blushing, all of the
crimson colour, a rose-garden, succeeded, and corresponding with their
speed her feet paced the room, both slender hands crossed at her throat
under an uplifted chin, and the curves of her dark eyelashes dropped as
in a swoon.

“He loves me!” The attestation of it had been visible. “No one but me!”
Was that so evident?

Her father picked up silly stories of him—a man who made enemies
recklessly!

Cecilia was petrified by a gentle tapping at her door. Her father
called to her, and she threw on her dressing-gown, and opened the door.

The colonel was in his riding-suit.

“I haven’t slept a wink, and I find it’s the same with you,” he said,
paining her with his distressed kind eyes. “I ought not to have hinted
anything last night without proofs. Austin’s as unhappy as I am.”

“At what, my dear papa, at what?” cried Cecilia.

“I ride over to Steynham this morning, and I shall bring you proofs, my
poor child, proofs. That foreign tangle of his...”

“You speak of Nevil, papa?”

“It’s a common scandal over London. That Frenchwoman was found at Lord
Romfrey’s house; Lady Romfrey cloaked it. I believe the woman would
swear black’s white to make Nevil Beauchamp appear an angel; and he’s a
desperately cunning hand with women. You doubt that.”

She had shuddered slightly.

“You won’t doubt if I bring you proofs. Till I come back from Steynham,
I ask you not to see him alone: not to go out to him.”

The colonel glanced at her windows.

Cecilia submitted to the request, out of breath, consenting to feel
like a tutored girl, that she might conceal her guilty knowledge of
what was to be seen through the windows.

“Now I’m off,” said he, and kissed her.

“If you would accept Nevil’s word!” she murmured.

“Not where women are concerned!”

He left her with this remark, which found no jealous response in her
heart, yet ranged over certain dispersed inflammable grains, like a
match applied to damp powder; again and again running in little leaps
of harmless firm keeping her alive to its existence, and surprising her
that it should not have been extinguished.

Beauchamp presented himself rather late in the afternoon, when Mr.
Austin and Blackburn Tuckham were sipping tea in Cecilia’s boudoir with
that lady, and a cousin of her sex, by whom she was led to notice a
faint discoloration over one of his eyes, that was, considering whence
it came, repulsive to compassion. A blow at a Radical meeting! He spoke
of Dr. Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the
latter was unsympathetic in regard to the old man’s health, though when
he said, “Poor old man! he fears he will die!” Tuckham rejoined: “He
had better make his peace.”

“He fears he will die, because of his leaving Miss Denham unprotected,”
said Beauchamp.

“Well, she’s a good-looking girl: he’ll be able to leave her something,
and he might easily get her married, I should think,” said Tuckham.

“He’s not satisfied with handing her to any kind of man.”

“If the choice is to be among Radicals and infidels, I don’t wonder. He
has come to one of the tests.”

Cecilia heard Beauchamp speaking of a newspaper. A great Radical
Journal, unmatched in sincerity, superior in ability, soon to be equal
in power, to the leader and exemplar of the lucre-Press, would some day
see the light.

“You’ll want money for that,” said Tuckham.

“I know,” said Beauchamp.

“Are you prepared to stand forty or fifty thousand a year?”

“It need not be half so much.”

“Counting the libels, I rate the outlay rather low.”

“Yes, lawyers, judges, and juries of tradesmen, dealing justice to a
Radical print!”

Tuckham brushed his hand over his mouth and ahemed. “It’s to be a penny
journal?”

“Yes, a penny. I’d make it a farthing—”

“Pay to have it read?”

“Willingly.”

Tuckham did some mental arithmetic, quaintly, with rapidly blinking
eyelids and open mouth. “You may count it at the cost of two paying
mines,” he said firmly. “That is, if it’s to be a consistently Radical
Journal, at law with everybody all round the year. And by the time it
has won a reputation, it will be undermined by a radicaller Radical
Journal. That’s how we’ve lowered the country to this level. That’s an
Inferno of Circles, down to the ultimate mire. And what on earth are
you contending for?”

“Freedom of thought, for one thing.”

“We have quite enough free-thinking.”

“There’s not enough if there’s not perfect freedom.”

“Dangerous!” quoth Mr. Austin.

“But it’s that danger which makes men, sir; and it’s fear of the danger
that makes our modern Englishman.”

“Oh! Oh!” cried Tuckham in the voice of a Parliamentary Opposition.
“Well, you start your paper, we’ll assume it: what class of men will
you get to write?”

“I shall get good men for the hire.”

“You won’t get the best men; you may catch a clever youngster or two,
and an old rogue of talent; you won’t get men of weight. They’re
prejudiced, I dare say. The Journals which are commercial speculations
give us a guarantee that they mean to be respectable; they must, if
they wouldn’t collapse. That’s why the best men consent to write for
them.”

“Money will do it,” said Beauchamp.

Mr. Austin disagreed with that observation.

“Some patriotic spirit, I may hope, sir.”

Mr. Austin shook his head. “We put different constructions upon
patriotism.”

“Besides—fiddle! nonsense!” exclaimed Tuckham in the mildest
interjections he could summon for a vent in society to his offended
common sense; “the better your men the worse your mark. You’re not
dealing with an intelligent people.”

“There’s the old charge against the people.”

“But they’re not. You can madden, you can’t elevate them by writing and
writing. Defend us from the uneducated English! The common English are
doltish; except in the North, where you won’t do much with them.
Compare them with the Yankees for shrewdness, the Spaniards for
sobriety, the French for ingenuity, the Germans for enlightenment, the
Italians in the Arts; yes, the Russians for good-humour and
obedience—where are they? They’re only worth something when they’re
led. They fight well; there’s good stuff in them.”

“I’ve heard all that before,” returned Beauchamp, unruffled. “You don’t
know them. I mean to educate them by giving them an interest in their
country. At present they have next to none. Our governing class is
decidedly unintelligent, in my opinion brutish, for it’s indifferent.
My paper shall render your traders justice for what they do, and
justice for what they don’t do.”

“My traders, as you call them, are the soundest foundation for a
civilized state that the world has yet seen.”

“What is your paper to be called?” said Cecilia.

“The DAWN,” Beauchamp answered.

She blushed fiery red, and turned the leaves of a portfolio of
drawings.

“The DAWN!” ejaculated Tuckham. “The grey-eyed, or the red?
Extraordinary name for a paper, upon my word!”

“A paper that doesn’t devote half its columns to the vices of the
rich—to money-getting, spending and betting—will be an extraordinary
paper.”

“I have it before me now!—two doses of flattery to one of the whip. No,
no; you haven’t hit the disease. We want union, not division. Turn your
mind to being a moralist, instead of a politician.”

“The distinction shouldn’t exist!”

“Only it does!”

Mrs. Grancey Lespel’s entrance diverted their dialogue from a theme
wearisome to Cecilia, for Beauchamp shone but darkly in it, and Mr.
Austin did not join in it. Mrs. Grancey touched Beauchamp’s fingers.
“Still political?” she said. “You have been seen about London with a
French officer in uniform.”

“It was M. le comte de Croisnel, a very old friend and comrade of
mine,” Beauchamp replied.

“Why do those Frenchmen everlastingly wear their uniforms?—tell me!
Don’t you think it detestable style?”

“He came over in a hurry.”

“Now, don’t be huffed. I know you, for defending your friends, Captain
Beauchamp! Did he not come over with ladies?”

“With relatives, yes.”

“Relatives of course. But when British officers travel with ladies,
relatives or other, they prefer the simplicity of mufti, and so do I,
as a question of taste, I must say.”

“It was quite by misadventure that M. de Croisnel chanced to come in
his uniform.”

“Ah! I know you, for defending your friends, Captain Beauchamp. He was
in too great a hurry to change his uniform before he started, or en
route?”

“So it happened.”

Mrs. Grancey let a lingering eye dwell maliciously on Beauchamp, who
said, to shift the burden of it: “The French are not so jealous of
military uniforms as we are. M. de Croisnel lost his portmanteau.”

“Ah! lost it! Then of course he is excuseable, except to the naked eye.
Dear me! you have had a bruise on yours. Was Monsieur votre ami in the
Italian campaign?”

“No, poor fellow, he was not. He is not an Imperialist; he had to
remain in garrison.”

“He wore a multitude of medals, I have been told. A cup of tea,
Cecilia. And how long did he stay in England with his relatives?”

“Two days.”

“Only two days! A very short visit indeed—singularly short. Somebody
informed me of their having been seen at Romfrey Castle, which cannot
have been true.”

She turned her eyes from Beauchamp silent to Cecilia’s hand on the
teapot. “Half a cup,” she said mildly, to spare the poor hand its
betrayal of nervousness, and relapsed from her air of mistress of the
situation to chatter to Mr. Austin.

Beauchamp continued silent. He took up a book, and presently a pencil
from his pocket, then talked of the book to Cecilia’s cousin; and
leaving a paper-cutter between the leaves, he looked at Cecilia and
laid the book down.

She proceeded to conduct Mrs. Grancey Lespel to her room.

“I do admire Captain Beauchamp’s cleverness; he is as good as a French
romance!” Mrs. Grancey exclaimed on the stairs. “He fibs charmingly. I
could not help drawing him out. Two days! Why, my dear, his French
party were a fortnight in the country. It was the marquise, you
know—the old affair; and one may say he’s a constant man.”

“I have not heard Captain Beauchamp’s cleverness much praised,” said
Cecilia. “This is your room, Mrs. Grancey.”

“Stay with me a moment. It is the room I like. Are we to have him at
dinner?”

Cecilia did not suppose that Captain Beauchamp would remain to dine.
Feeling herself in the clutches of a gossip, she would fain have gone.

“I am just one bit glad of it, though I can’t dislike him personally,”
said Mrs. Grancey, detaining her and beginning to whisper. “It was
really too bad. There was a French _party_ at the end, but there was
only _one_ at the commencement. The brother was got over for a curtain,
before the husband arrived in pursuit. They say the trick Captain
Beauchamp played his cousin Cecil, to get him out of the house when he
had made a discovery, was monstrous—fiendishly cunning. However, Lady
Romfrey, as that woman appears to be at last, covered it all. You know
she has one of those passions for Captain Beauchamp which completely
blind women to right and wrong. He is her saint, let him sin ever so!
The story’s in everybody’s mouth. By the way, Palmet saw her. He
describes her pale as marble, with dark long eyes, the most innocent
look in the world, and a walk, the absurd fellow says, like a statue
set gliding. No doubt Frenchwomen do walk well. He says her eyes are
terrible traitors; I need not quote Palmet. The sort of eyes that would
look fondly on a stone, you know. What her reputation is in France I
have only indistinctly heard. She has one in England by this time, I
can assure you. She found her match in Captain Beauchamp for boldness.
Where any other couple would have seen danger, _they_ saw safety; and
they contrived to accomplish it, according to those horrid talebearers.
You have plenty of time to dress, my dear; I have an immense deal to
talk about. There are half-a-dozen scandals in London already, and you
ought to know them, or you will be behind the tittle-tattle when you go
to town; and I remember, as a girl, I knew nothing so excruciating as
to hear blanks, dashes, initials, and half words, without the key.
Nothing makes a girl look so silly and unpalatable. Naturally, the
reason why Captain Beauchamp is more talked about than the rest is the
politics. Your grand reformer should be careful. Doubly heterodox will
not do! It makes him interesting to women, if you like, but he won’t
soon hear the last of it, if he is for a public career. Grancey
literally crowed at the story. And the wonderful part of it is, that
Captain Beauchamp refused to be present at the earl’s first ceremonial
dinner in honour of his countess. Now, that, we all think, was
particularly ungrateful: now, was it not?”

“If the countess—if ingratitude had anything to do with it,” said
Cecilia.

She escaped to her room and dressed impatiently.

Her boudoir was empty: Beauchamp had departed. She recollected his look
at her, and turned over the leaves of the book he had been hastily
scanning, and had condescended to approve of. On the two pages where
the paper-cutter was fixed she perceived small pencil dots under
certain words. Read consecutively, with a participle termination struck
out to convey his meaning, they formed the pathetically ungrammatical
line:

“Hear: none: but: accused: false.”

Treble dots were under the word “to-morrow.” He had scored the margin
of the sentences containing his dotted words, as if in admiration of
their peculiar wisdom.

She thought it piteous that he should be reduced to such means of
communication. The next instant Cecilia was shrinking from the adept
intriguer—French-taught!

In the course of the evening her cousin remarked:

“Captain Beauchamp must see merit in things undiscoverable by my poor
faculties. I will show you a book he has marked.”

“Did you see it? I was curious to examine it,” interposed Cecilia; “and
I am as much at a loss as you to understand what could have attracted
him. One sentence...”

“About the sheikh in the stables, where he accused the pretended
physician? Yes, what was there in that?”

“Where is the book?” said Mrs. Grancey.

“Not here, I think.” Cecilia glanced at the drawing-room book-table,
and then at Mr. Austin, the victim of an unhappy love in his youth, and
unhappy about her, as her father had said. Seymour Austin was not one
to spread the contagion of intrigue! She felt herself caught by it,
even melting to feel enamoured of herself in consequence, though not
loving Beauchamp the more.

“This newspaper, if it’s not merely an airy project, will be
ruination,” said Tuckham. “The fact is, Beauchamp has no _bend_ in him.
He can’t meet a man without trying a wrestle, and as long as he keeps
his stiffness, he believes he has won. I’ve heard an oculist say that
the eye that doesn’t blink ends in blindness, and he who won’t bend
breaks. It’s a pity, for he’s a fine fellow. A Radical daily Journal of
Shrapnel’s colour, to educate the people by giving them an interest in
the country! Goodness, what a delusion! and what a waste of money!
He’ll not be able to carry it on a couple of years. And there goes his
eighty thousand!”

Cecilia’s heart beat fast. She had no defined cause for its excitement.

Colonel Halkett returned to Mount Laurels close upon midnight, very
tired, coughing and complaining of the bitter blowing East. His guests
shook hands with him, and went to bed.

“I think I’ll follow their example,” he said to Cecilia, after drinking
a tumbler of mulled wine.

“Have you nothing to tell me, dear papa?” said she, caressing him
timidly.

“A confirmation of the whole story from Lord Romfrey in person—that’s
all. He says Beauchamp’s mad. I begin to believe it. You must use your
judgement. I suppose I must not expect you to consider me. You might
open your heart to Austin. As to my consent, knowing what I do, you
will have to tear it out of me. Here’s a country perfectly contented,
and that fellow at work digging up grievances to persuade the people
they’re oppressed by us. Why should I talk of it? He can’t do much
harm; unless he has money—money! Romfrey says he means to start a
furious paper. He’ll make a bonfire of himself. I can’t stand by and
see you in it too. I may die; I may be spared the sight.”

Cecilia flung her arms round his neck. “Oh! papa.”

“I don’t want to make him out worse than he is, my dear. I own to his
gallantry—in the French sense as well as the English, it seems! It’s
natural that Romfrey should excuse his wife. She’s another of the women
who are crazy about Nevil Beauchamp. She spoke to me of the ‘pleasant
visit of her French friends,’ and would have enlarged on it, but
Romfrey stopped her. By the way, he proposes Captain Baskelett for you,
and we’re to look for Baskelett’s coming here, backed by his uncle.
There’s no end to it; there never will be till you’re married: and no
peace for me! I hope I shan’t find myself with a cold to-morrow.”

The colonel coughed, and perhaps exaggerated the premonitory symptoms
of a cold.

“Italy, papa, would do you good,” said Cecilia.

“It might,” said he.

“If we go immediately, papa; to-morrow, early in the morning, before
there is a chance of any visitors coming to the house.”

“From Bevisham?”

“From Steynham. I cannot endure a second persecution.”

“But you have a world of packing, my dear.”

“An hour before breakfast will be sufficient for me.”

“In that case, we might be off early, as you say, and have part of the
Easter week in Rome.”

“Mr. Austin wishes it greatly, papa, though he has not mentioned it.”

“Austin, my darling girl, is not one of your impatient men who burst
with everything they have in their heads or their hearts.”

“Oh! but I know him so well,” said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent
enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp
suffering. The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an
enigma concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had
not hitherto known at all. Her curiosity to pierce it faded. She and
her maid were packing through the night. At dawn she requested her maid
to lift the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather. “Grey,
Miss,” the maid reported. It signified to Cecilia: no one roaming
outside.

The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she
commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil’s
disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and
motives.—“I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my
weakness.”—Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be
jealous, nor any right to reproach him. Her task was to climb back to
those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her
down.

Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.




CHAPTER XLVI.
AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN


It was in Italy that Cecilia’s maiden dreams of life had opened. She
hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind
untainted. Italy was to be her reviving air.

While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at
speed to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France—she simply
remembered Nevil: he was distant; he had no place in the storied
landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men
who bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth’s for those
adoring them. If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted
her through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her
flight released her. France, too, her rival!—the land of France,
personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative
gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.—“She knew him first: she
was his first love.” The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below
them, renewed Cecilia’s lofty-perching youth. Then—I am in Italy! she
sighed with rapture. The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.

But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on
over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful
to the soul. In Rome Cecilia’s vision of her track to Rome was of a run
of fire over a heath. She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome.
It seemed burnt out.

Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment
she had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it
like nothing she had yet experienced. Previous pains were but Summer
lightnings, passing shadows. She could have believed in sorcery: the
man had eaten her heart!

A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the
notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird. It
served to veil her dulness. An ultra-English family in Rome, composed,
shocking to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced
girls, and a young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a
light-limbed boy, chose to be followed by their footman in the
melancholy pomp of state livery. Wherever she encountered them Cecilia
talked Nevil Beauchamp. Even Mr. Tuckham perceived it. She was
extremely uncharitable: she extended her ungenerous criticism to the
institution of the footman: England, and the English, were lashed.

“These people are caricatures,” Tuckham said, in apology for poor
England burlesqued abroad. “You must not generalize on them. Footmen
are footmen all the world over. The cardinals have a fine set of
footmen.”

“They are at home. Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe. We
cannot but be despised. One comes abroad foredoomed to share the
sentiment. This is your middle-class! What society can they move in,
that sanctions a vulgarity so perplexing? They have the air of
ornaments on a cottager’s parlour mantelpiece.”

Tuckham laughed. “Something of that,” he said.

“Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,” she
continued. “It is not wonderful that we have so much satirical writing
in England, with such objects of satire. It may be as little wonderful
that the satire has no effect. Immense wealth and native obtuseness
combine to disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say
monstrosity. I fall in love with the poor, and think they have a cause
to be pleaded, when I look at those people. We scoff at the vanity of
the French, but it is a graceful vanity; pardonable compared with
ours.”

“I’ve read all that a hundred times,” quoth Tuckham bluntly.

“So have I. I speak of it because I see it. We scoff at the simplicity
of the Germans.”

“The Germans live in simple fashion, because they’re poor. French
vanity’s pretty and amusing. I don’t know whether it’s deep in them,
for I doubt their depth; but I know it’s in their joints. The first
spring of a Frenchman comes of vanity. That you can’t say of the
English. Peace to all! but I abhor cosmopolitanism. No man has a firm
foothold who pretends to it. None despises the English in reality.
Don’t be misled, Miss Halkett. We’re solid: that is the main point. The
world feels our power, and has confidence in our good faith. I ask for
no more.”

“With Germans we are supercilious Celts; with Frenchmen we are sneering
Teutons:—Can we be loved, Mr. Tuckham?”

“That’s a quotation from my friend Lydiard. Loved? No nation ever was
loved while it lived. As Lydiard says, it may be a good beast or a bad,
but a beast it is. A nation’s much too big for refined feelings and
affections. It must be powerful or out of the way, or down it goes.
When a nation’s dead you may love it; but I don’t see the use of dying
to be loved. My aim for my country is to have the land respected. For
that purpose we must have power; for power wealth; for wealth industry;
for industry internal peace: therefore no agitation, no artificial
divisions. All’s plain in history and fact, so long as we do not
obtrude sentimentalism. Nothing mixes well with that stuff—except
poetical ideas!”

Contrary to her anticipation, Cecilia was thrown more into
companionship with Mr. Tuckham than with Mr. Austin; and though it
often vexed her, she acknowledged that she derived a benefit from his
robust antagonism of opinion. And Italy had grown tasteless to her. She
could hardly simulate sufficient curiosity to serve for a vacant echo
to Mr. Austin’s historic ardour. Pliny the Younger might indeed be the
model of a gentleman of old Rome; there might be a scholarly pleasure
in calculating, as Mr. Austin did, the length of time it took Pliny to
journey from the city to his paternal farm, or villa overlooking the
lake, or villa overlooking the bay, and some abstruse fun in the tender
ridicule of his readings of his poems to friends; for Mr. Austin smiled
effusively in alluding to the illustrious Roman pleader’s foible of
verse: but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil
Beauchamp: she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer,
student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern
English gentleman, though he was. “Yes!” she would reply encouragingly
to Seymour Austin’s fond brooding hum about his hero; and “Yes!”
conclusively: like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in
monosyllables. She was unworthy of the society of a scholar. Nor could
she kneel at the feet of her especial heroes: Dante, Raphael,
Buonarotti: she was unworthy of them. She longed to be at Mount
Laurels. Mr. Tuckham’s conversation was the nearest approach to it—as
it were round by Greenland; but it was homeward.

She was really grieved to lose him. Business called him to England.

“What business can it be, papa?” she inquired: and the colonel replied
briefly: “Ours.”

Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in
the ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy,
Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning
the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no
jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle
cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and
laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome: she pulled
for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome
of the wise and clement emperors. To Cecilia’s mind Rome rocked at a
period so closely neighbouring her decay: to him, with an imagination
brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the
sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished
supreme, and men eminent for culture: the finest flowers of our race,
he thought them: and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.

Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not have
framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and
elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism
of the Roman pattern:—he rejected the French. She mused on dim old
thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman’s life under high
governorship. Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step. The
trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for
women aspiring to moral beauty and distinction. Beside such they should
be planted, if they would climb! Her walks and conversations with
Seymour Austin charmed her as the haze of a summer evening charms the
sight.

Upon the conclusion of her term of exile Cecilia would gladly have
remained in Italy another month. An appointment of her father’s with
Mr. Tuckham at Mount Laurels on a particular day she considered as of
no consequence whatever, and she said so, in response to a meaningless
nod. But Mr. Austin was obliged to return to work. She set her face
homeward with his immediately, and he looked pleased: he did not try to
dissuade her from accompanying him by affecting to think it a
sacrifice: clearly he knew that to be near him was her greatest
delight.

Thus do we round the perilous headland called love by wooing a good man
for his friendship, and requiting him with faithful esteem for the
grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth!

Cecilia would not suffer her fancy to go very far in pursuit of the
secret of Mr. Austin’s present feelings. Until she reached Mount
Laurels she barely examined her own. The sight of the house warned her
instantly that she must have a defence: and then, in desperation but
with perfect distinctness, she entertained the hope of hearing him
speak the protecting words which could not be broken through when
wedded to her consent.

If Mr. Austin had no intentions, it was at least strange that he did
not part from her in London.

He whose coming she dreaded had been made aware of the hour of her
return, as his card, with the pencilled line, “Will call on the 17th,”
informed her. The 17th was the morrow.

After breakfast on the morning of the 17th Seymour Austin looked her in
the eyes longer than it is customary for ladies to have to submit to
keen inspection.

“Will you come into the library?” he said.

She went with him into the library.

Was it to speak of his anxiousness as to the state of her father’s
health that he had led her there, and that he held her hand? He alarmed
her, and he pacified her alarm, yet bade her reflect on the matter,
saying that her father, like other fathers, would be more at peace upon
the establishment of his daughter. Mr. Austin remarked that the colonel
was troubled.

“Does he wish for my pledge never to marry without his approval? I will
give it,” said Cecilia.

“He would like you to undertake to marry the man of his choice.”
Cecilia’s features hung on an expression equivalent to:—“I could almost
do that.”

At the same time she felt it was not Seymour Austin’s manner of
speaking. He seemed to be praising an unknown person—some gentleman who
was rough, but of solid promise and singular strength of character.

The house-bell rang. Believing that Beauchamp had now come, she showed
a painful ridging of the brows, and Mr. Austin considerately mentioned
the name of the person he had in his mind.

She readily agreed with him regarding Mr. Tuckham’s excellent
qualities—if that was indeed the name; and she hastened to recollect
how little she had forgotten Mr. Tuckham’s generosity to Beauchamp, and
confessed to herself it might as well have been forgotten utterly for
the thanks he had received. While revolving these ideas she was
listening to Mr. Austin; gradually she was beginning to understand that
she was parting company with her original conjectures, but going at so
swift a pace in so supple and sure a grasp, that, like the speeding
train slipped on new lines of rails by the pointsman, her hurrying
sensibility was not shocked, or the shock was imperceptible, when she
heard him proposing Mr. Tuckham to her for a husband, by her father’s
authority, and with his own warm seconding. He had not dropped her
hand: he was very eloquent, a masterly advocate: he pleaded her
father’s cause; it was not put to her as Mr. Tuckham’s: her father had
set his heart on this union: he was awaiting her decision.

“Is it so urgent?” she asked.

“It is urgent. It saves him from an annoyance. He requires a son-in-law
whom he can confidently rely on to manage the estates, which you are
woman of the world enough to know should be in strong hands. He gives
you to a man of settled principles. It is urgent, because he may wish
to be armed with your answer at any instant.”

Her father entered the library. He embraced her, and “Well?” he said.

“I must think, papa, I must think.”

She pressed her hand across her eyes. Disillusioned by Seymour Austin,
she was utterly defenceless before Beauchamp: and possibly Beauchamp
was in the house. She fancied he was, by the impatient brevity of her
father’s voice.

Seymour Austin and Colonel Halkett left the room, and Blackburn Tuckham
walked in, not the most entirely self-possessed of suitors, puffing
softly under his breath, and blinking eyes as rapidly as a skylark
claps wings on the ascent.

Half an hour later Beauchamp appeared. He asked to see the colonel,
delivered himself of his pretensions and wishes to the colonel, and was
referred to Cecilia; but Colonel Halkett declined to send for her.
Beauchamp declined to postpone his proposal until the following day. He
went outside the house and walked up and down the grass-plot.

Cecilia came to him at last.

“I hear, Nevil, that you are waiting to speak to me.”

“I’ve been waiting some weeks. Shall I speak here?”

“Yes, here, quickly.”

“Before the house? I have come to ask you for your hand.”

“Mine? I cannot...”

“Step into the park with me. I ask you to marry me.”

“It is too late.”




CHAPTER XLVII.
THE REFUSAL OF HIM


Passing from one scene of excitement to another, Cecilia was perfectly
steeled for her bitter task; and having done that which separated her a
sphere’s distance from Beauchamp, she was cold, inaccessible to the
face of him who had swayed her on flood and ebb so long, incapable of
tender pity, even for herself. All she could feel was a harsh joy to
have struck off her tyrant’s fetters, with a determination to cherish
it passionately lest she should presently be hating herself: for the
shadow of such a possibility fell within the narrow circle of her
strung sensations. But for the moment her delusion reached to the idea
that she had escaped from him into freedom, when she said, “It is too
late.” Those words were the sum and voice of her long term of
endurance. She said them hurriedly, almost in a whisper, in the manner
of one changeing a theme of conversation for subjects happier and
livelier, though none followed.

The silence bore back on her a suspicion of a faint reproachfulness in
the words; and perhaps they carried a poetical tone, still more
distasteful.

“You have been listening to tales of me,” said Beauchamp.

“Nevil, we can always be friends, the best of friends.”

“Were you astonished at my asking you for your hand? You said ‘mine?’
as if you wondered. You have known my feelings for you. Can you deny
that? I have reckoned on yours—too long?—But not falsely? No, hear me
out. The truth is, I cannot lose you. And don’t look so resolute.
Overlook little wounds: I was never indifferent to you. How could I
be—with eyes in my head? The colonel is opposed to me of course: he
will learn to understand me better: but you and I! we cannot be mere
friends. It’s like daylight blotted out—or the eyes gone blind:—Too
late? Can you repeat it? I tried to warn you before you left England: I
should have written a letter to put you on your guard against my
enemies:—I find I have some: but a letter is sure to stumble; I should
have been obliged to tell you that I do not stand on my defence; and I
thought I should see you the next day. You went: and not a word for me!
You gave me no chance. If you have no confidence in me I must bear it.
I may say the story is false. With your hand in mine I would swear it.”

“Let it be forgotten,” said Cecilia, surprised and shaken to think that
her situation required further explanations; fascinated and unnerved by
simply hearing him. “We are now—we are walking away from the house.”

“Do you object to a walk with me?”

They had crossed the garden plot and were at the gate of the park
leading to the Western wood. Beauchamp swung the gate open. He cast a
look at the clouds coming up from the South-west in folds of grey and
silver.

“Like the day of our drive into Bevisham!—without the storm behind,” he
said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of her
hair in sunless light. “There are flowers that grow only in certain
valleys, and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for
Italy. You colour the whole region for me. When you were absent, you
were here. I called here six times, and walked and talked with you.”

Cecilia set her face to the garden. Her heart had entered on a course
of heavy thumping, like a sapper in the mine.

Pain was not unwelcome to her, but this threatened weakness.

What plain words could she use? If Mr. Tuckham had been away from the
house, she would have found it easier to speak of her engagement; she
knew not why. Or if the imperative communication could have been
delivered in Italian or French, she was as little able to say why it
should have slipped from her tongue without a critic shudder to arrest
it. She was cold enough to revolve the words: betrothed, affianced,
plighted: and reject them, pretty words as they are. Between the
vulgarity of romantic language, and the baldness of commonplace, it
seemed to her that our English gives us no choice; that we cannot be
dignified in simplicity. And for some reason, feminine and remote, she
now detested her “hand” so much as to be unable to bring herself to the
metonymic mention of it. The lady’s difficulty was peculiar to sweet
natures that have no great warmth of passion; it can only be indicated.
Like others of the kind, it is traceable to the most delicate of
sentiments, and to the flattest:—for Mr. Blackburn’s Tuckham’s figure
was (she thought of it with no personal objection) not of the graceful
order, neither cavalierly nor kingly: and imagining himself to say, “I
am engaged,” and he suddenly appearing on the field, Cecilia’s whole
mind was shocked in so marked a way did he contrast with Beauchamp.

This was the effect of Beauchamp’s latest words on her. He had disarmed
her anger.

“We _must_ have a walk to-day,” he said commandingly, but it had stolen
into him that he and she were not walking on the same bank of the
river, though they were side by side: a chill water ran between them.
As in other days, there hung her hand: but not to be taken. Incredible
as it was, the icy sense of his having lost her benumbed him. Her
beautiful face and beautiful tall figure, so familiar to him that they
were like a possession, protested in his favour while they snatched her
from him all the distance of the words “too late.”

“Will you not give me one half-hour?”

“I am engaged,” Cecilia plunged and extricated herself, “I am engaged
to walk with Mr. Austin and papa.”

Beauchamp tossed his head. Something induced him to speak of Mr.
Tuckham. “The colonel has discovered his Tory young man! It’s an object
as incomprehensible to me as a Tory working-man. I suppose I must take
it that they exist. As for Blackburn Tuckham, I have nothing against
him. He’s an honourable fellow enough, and would govern Great Britain
as men of that rich middle-class rule their wives—with a strict regard
for ostensible humanity and what the law allows them. His manners have
improved. Your cousin Mary seems to like him: it struck me when I saw
them together. Cecilia! one half-hour! You refuse me: you have not
heard me. You will not say too late.”

“Nevil, I have said it finally. I have no longer the right to conceive
it unsaid.”

“So we speak! It’s the language of indolence, temper, faint hearts.
‘Too late’ has no meaning. Turn back with me to the park. I offer you
my whole heart; I love you. There’s no woman living who could be to me
the wife you would be. I’m like your male nightingale that you told me
of: I must have my mate to sing to—that is, work for and live for; and
she must not delay too long. Did _I?_ Pardon me if you think I did. You
have known I love you. I have been distracted by things that kept me
from thinking of myself and my wishes: and love’s a selfish business
while... while one has work in hand. It’s clear I can’t do two things
at a time—make love and carry on my taskwork. I have been idle for
weeks. I believed you were mine and wanted no lovemaking. There’s no
folly in that, if you understand me at all. As for vanity about women,
I’ve outlived it. In comparison with you I’m poor, I know:—you look
distressed, but one has to allude to it:—I admit that wealth would help
me. To see wealth supporting the cause of the people for once would—but
you say, too late! Well, I don’t renounce you till I see you giving
your hand to a man who’s not myself. You have been offended:
groundlessly, on my honour! You are the woman of all women in the world
to hold me fast in faith and pride in you. It’s useless to look icy:
you feel what I say.”

“Nevil, I feel grief, and beg you to cease. I am——It is——”

“‘Too late’ has not a rag of meaning, Cecilia! I love your name. I love
this too: this is mine, and no one can rob me of it.”

He drew forth a golden locket and showed her a curl of her hair.

Crimsoning, she said instantly: “Language of the kind I used is open to
misconstruction, I fear. I have not even the right to listen to you. I
am ... You ask me for what I have it no longer in my power to give. I
am engaged.”

The shot rang through him and partly stunned him; but incredulity made
a mocking effort to sustain him. The greater wounds do not immediately
convince us of our fate, though we may be conscious that we have been
hit.

“Engaged in earnest?” said he.

“Yes.”

“Of your free will?”

“Yes.”

Her father stepped out on the terrace, from one of the open windows,
trailing a newspaper like a pocket-handkerchief. Cecilia threaded the
flower-beds to meet him.

“Here’s an accident to one of our ironclads,” he called to Beauchamp.

“Lives lost, sir?”

“No, thank heaven! but, upon my word, it’s a warning. Read the
telegram; it’s the _Hastings_. If these are our defences, at a cost of
half a million of money, each of them, the sooner we look to our land
forces the better.”

“The Shop will not be considered safe!” said Beauchamp, taking in the
telegram at a glance. “Peppel’s a first-rate officer too: she couldn’t
have had a better captain. Ship seriously damaged!”

He handed back the paper to the colonel.

Cecilia expected him to say that he had foreseen such an event.

He said nothing; and with a singular contraction of the heart she
recollected how he had denounced our system of preparing mainly for the
defensive in war, on a day when they stood together in the park,
watching the slow passage of that very ship, the _Hastings_, along the
broad water, distant below them. The “_swarms of swift vessels of
attack_,” she recollected particularly, and “_small wasps and rams
under mighty steam-power_,” that he used to harp on when declaring that
England must be known for the assailant in war: she was to “ray out”
her worrying fleets. “_The defensive is perilous policy in war:_” he
had said it. She recollected also her childish ridicule of his excess
of emphasis: he certainly had foresight.”

Mr. Austin and Mr. Tuckham came strolling in conversation round the
house to the terrace. Beauchamp bowed to the former, nodded to the
latter, scrutinizing him after he had done so, as if the flash of a
thought were in his mind. Tuckham’s radiant aspect possibly excited it:
“Congratulate me!” was the honest outcry of his face and frame. He was
as over-flowingly rosy as a victorious candidate at the hustings
commencing a speech. Cecilia laid her hand on an urn, in dread of the
next words from either of the persons present. Her father put an arm in
hers, and leaned on her. She gazed at her chamber window above, wishing
to be wafted thither to her seclusion within. The trembling limbs of
physical irresoluteness was a new experience to her.

“Anything else in the paper, colonel? I’ve not seen it to-day,” said
Beauchamp, for the sake of speaking.

“No, I don’t think there’s anything,” Colonel Halkett replied. “Our
diplomatists haven’t been shining much: that’s not our forte.”

“No: it’s our field for younger sons.”

“Is it? Ah! There’s an expedition against the hilltribes in India, and
we’re such a peaceful nation, eh? We look as if we were in for a
complication with China.”

“Well, sir, we must sell our opium.”

“Of course we must. There’s a man writing about surrendering
Gibraltar!”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

“But where do you draw the line?” quoth Tuckham, very susceptible to a
sneer at the colonel, and entirely ignorant of the circumstances
attending Beauchamp’s position before him. “You defend the Chinaman;
and it’s questionable if his case is as good as the Spaniard’s.”

“The Chinaman has a case against our traders. Gibraltar concerns our
imperial policy.”

“As to the case against the English merchants, the Chinaman is for
shutting up his millions of acres of productive land, and the action of
commerce is merely a declaration of a universal public right, to which
all States must submit.”

“Immorality brings its punishment, be sure of that. Some day we shall
have enough of China. As to the Rock, I know the argument; I may be
wrong. I’ve had the habit of regarding it as necessary to our naval
supremacy.”

“Come! there we agree.”

“I’m not so certain.”

“The counter-argument, I call treason.”

“Well,” said Beauchamp, “there’s a broad policy, and a narrow. There’s
the Spanish view of the matter—if you are for peace and harmony and
disarmament.”

“I’m not.”

“Then strengthen your forces.”

“Not a bit of it!”

“Then bully the feeble and truckle to the strong; consent to be hated
till you have to stand your ground.”

“Talk!”

“It seems to me logical.”

“That’s the French notion—c’est lodgique!”

Tuckham’s pronunciation caused Cecilia to level her eyes at him
passingly.

“By the way,” said Colonel Halkett, “there are lots of horrors in the
paper to-day; wife kickings, and starvations—oh, dear me! and the
murder of a woman: two columns to that.”

“That, the Tory reaction is responsible for!” said Tuckham, rather by
way of a joke than a challenge.

Beauchamp accepted it as a challenge. Much to the benevolent amusement
of Mr. Austin and Colonel Halkett, he charged the responsibility of
every crime committed in the country, and every condition of misery,
upon the party which declined to move in advance, and which _therefore_
apologized for the perpetuation of knavery, villany, brutality,
injustice, and foul dealing.

“Stick to your laws and systems and institutions, and so long as you
won’t stir to amend them, I hold you accountable for that long
newspaper list daily.”

He said this with a visible fire of conviction.

Tuckham stood bursting at the monstrousness of such a statement.

He condensed his indignant rejoinder to: “Madness can’t go farther!”

“There’s an idea in it,” said Mr. Austin.

“It’s an idea foaming at the mouth, then.”

“Perhaps it has no worse fault than that of not marching parallel with
the truth,” said Mr. Austin, smiling. “The party accusing in those
terms ... what do you say, Captain Beauchamp?—supposing us to be
pleading before a tribunal?”

Beauchamp admitted as much as that he had made the case gigantic,
though he stuck to his charge against the Tory party. And moreover: the
Tories—and the old Whigs, now Liberals, ranked under the heading of
Tories—those Tories possessing and representing the wealth of the
country, yet had not started one respectable journal that a lady could
read through without offence to her, or a gentleman without disgust! If
there was not one English newspaper in existence independent of
circulation and advertisements, and of the tricks to win them, the
Tories were answerable for the vacancy. They, being the rich who, if
they chose, could set an example to our Press by subscribing to
maintain a Journal superior to the flattering of vile appetites—“all
that nauseous matter,” Beauchamp stretched his fingers at the sheets
Colonel Halkett was holding, and which he had not read—“those Tories,”
he bowed to the colonel, “I’m afraid I must say you, sir, are
answerable for it.”

“I am very well satisfied with my paper,” said the colonel.

Beauchamp sighed to himself. “We choose to be satisfied,” he said. His
pure and mighty DAWN was in his thoughts: the unborn light of a day
denied to earth!

One of the doctors of Bevisham, visiting a sick maid of the house,
trotted up the terrace to make his report to her master of the state of
her health. He hoped to pull her through with the aid of high feeding.
He alluded cursorily to a young girl living on the outskirts of the
town, whom he had been called in to see at the eleventh hour, and had
lost, owing to the lowering of his patient from a prescription of a
vegetable diet by a certain Dr. Shrapnel.

That ever-explosive name precipitated Beauchamp to the front rank of
the defence.

“I happen to be staying with Dr. Shrapnel,” he observed. “I don’t eat
meat there because he doesn’t, and I am certain I take no harm by
avoiding it. I think vegetarianism a humaner system, and hope it may be
wise. I should like to set the poor practising it, for their own sakes;
and I have half an opinion that it would be good for the rich—if we are
to condemn gluttony.”

“Ah? Captain Beauchamp!” the doctor bowed to him. “But my case was one
of poor blood requiring to be strengthened. The girl was allowed to
sink so low that stimulants were ineffective when I stepped in. There’s
the point. It’s all very well while you are in health. You may do
without meat till your system demands the stimulant, or else—as with
this poor girl! And, indeed, Captain Beauchamp, if I may venture the
remark—I had the pleasure of seeing you during the last Election in our
town—and if I may be so bold, I should venture to hint that the
avoidance of animal food—to judge by appearances—has not been quite
wholesome for you.”

Eyes were turned on Beauchamp.




CHAPTER XLVIII.
OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY


Cecilia softly dropped her father’s arm, and went into the house. The
exceeding pallor of Beauchamp’s face haunted her in her room. She heard
the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn
Tuckham’s: “Immorality of meat-eating? What nonsense are they up to
now?”

Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two. As usual, he was the
solitary minority.

But how mournfully changed he was! She had not noticed it, agitated by
her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen.
He was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of
the _Esperanza_ out of Lieutenant Wilmore’s boat, that sunny breezy day
which was the bright first chapter of her new life—of her late life, as
it seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the
coldest of the women of earth. She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth,
flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden
and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had
ceased to speak.

How much he must have suffered of late! The room she had looked to as a
refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had
incredibly accepted. She remained there, the victim of a heart malady,
under the term of headache. Feeling entrapped, she considered that she
must have been encircled and betrayed. She looked back on herself as a
giddy figure falling into a pit: and in the pit she lay.

And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the
generous and stedfast man of earth! He never abandoned a common
friendship. His love of his country was love still, whatever the form
it had taken. His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for
which men laughed at him, was beautiful.

Where am I? she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by
his wan features. She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave. Even Mr.
Austin had conspired against him: for only she read Nevil justly. His
defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned
the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to
creep into sunshine.

The only worthy thing she could think of doing was (it must be
mentioned for a revelation of her fallen state, and, moreover, she was
not lusty of health at the moment) to abjure meat. The body loathed it,
and consequently the mind of the invalided lady shrank away in horror
of the bleeding joints, and the increasingly fierce scramble of
Christian souls for the dismembered animals: she saw the innocent
pasturing beasts, she saw the act of slaughter. She had actually
sweeping before her sight a spectacle of the ludicrous-terrific, in the
shape of an entire community pursuing countless herds of poor
scampering animal life for blood: she, meanwhile, with Nevil and Dr.
Shrapnel, stood apart contemning. For whoso would not partake of flesh
in this kingdom of roast beef must be of the sparse number of Nevil’s
execrated minority in politics.

The example will show that she touched the borders of delirium.
Physically, the doctor pronounces her bilious. She was in earnest so
far as to send down to the library for medical books, and books upon
diet. These, however, did not plead for the beasts. They treated the
subject without question of man’s taking that which he has conquered.
Poets and philosophers did the same. Again she beheld Nevil Beauchamp
solitary in the adverse rank to the world;—to his countrymen
especially. But that it was no material cause which had wasted his
cheeks and lined his forehead, she was sure: and to starve with him, to
embark with him in his little boat on the seas he whipped to frenzy,
would have been a dream of bliss, had she dared to contemplate herself
in a dream as his companion.

It was not to be thought of.

No: but this was, and to be thought of seriously: Cecilia had said to
herself for consolation that Beauchamp was no spiritual guide; he had
her heart within her to plead for him, and the reflection came to her,
like a bubble up from the heart, that most of our spiritual guides
neglect the root to trim the flower: and thence, turning sharply on
herself, she obtained a sudden view of her allurement and her sin in
worshipping herself, and recognized that the aim at an ideal life
closely approaches, or easily inclines, to self-worship; to which the
lady was woman and artist enough to have had no objection, but that
therein visibly she discerned the retributive vain longings, in the
guise of high individual superiority and distinction, that had thwarted
her with Nevil Beauchamp, never permitting her to love single-mindedly
or whole-heartedly, but always in reclaiming her rights and sighing for
the loss of her ideal; adoring her own image, in fact, when she
pretended to cherish, and regret that she could not sufficiently
cherish, the finer elements of nature. What was this ideal she had
complained of losing? It was a broken mirror: she could think of it in
no other form.

Dr. Shrapnel’s “Ego-Ego” yelped and gave chase to her through the pure
beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets. It hunted
all the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their
heads—her favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.

The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a
consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. “The very family to
require strong nourishment,” said the doctor.

Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world’s weight.
Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp’s track to experience that.
She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
Homoeopathy, hydropathy,—the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.
Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her
Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of
their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount
Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one
deposited on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her
father had seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her
personal dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal
of her feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her
where she now lay helpless, almost inanimate.

She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a
marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear of
death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than
Cecilia’s shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood
like a snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and,
happily for Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels,
were few and short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming
subjection to him to alarm her.

Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge,
or at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed. He
was never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he
absolutely trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself
that she belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon
Beauchamp. With a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a
collection of treatises on diet, classed _pro_ and _con_, and paged and
pencil-marked to simplify her study of the question. They sketched in
company; she played music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it
well. He seemed to feel the beauty of it sensitively, as she did
critically. In other days the positions had been reversed. He
invariably talked of Beauchamp with kindness, deploring only that he
should be squandering his money on workmen’s halls and other hazy
projects down in Bevisham.

“Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and
has actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten
thousand pounds on a single building outside the town, and he’ll have
to endow it to support it—a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he
wants to jam the business of two or three centuries into a life-time.
These men of their so-called progress are like the majority of
religious minds: they can’t believe without seeing and touching. That
is to say, they don’t believe in the abstract at all, but they go to
work blindly by agitating, and proselytizing, and persecuting to get
together a mass they can believe in. You see it in their way of
arguing; it’s half done with the fist. Lydiard tells me he left him
last in a horrible despondency about progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp’s no
Radical. He hasn’t forgiven the Countess of Romfrey for marrying above
her rank. He may be a bit of a Republican: but really in this country
Republicans are fighting with the shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse.
I beg to state that I have a reverence for constituted authority: I
speak of what those fellows are contending with.”

“Right,” said Colonel Halkett. “But ‘the shadow of an old hat and a
cockhorse’: what does that mean?”

“That’s what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.”

“Ah! so; yes,” quoth the colonel. “And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
that what we’ve grown up well with, powerfully with, it’s base
ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.”

He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he
affirmed of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect
Beauchamp’s interests.

A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement
of the earl’s expectations of a son and heir. The earl wrote to Colonel
Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time
there.

“Now, that’s brave news!” the colonel exclaimed.

He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so
to Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord’s hand and congratulate him
with all his heart. Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of
any description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in
the peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day
to be fixed. Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at
wonderful colours of a Western sky: an oblivion of earthly dates and
obligations. What mattered it that there were gales in August? She
loved the sea, and the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and
plunging gannet, the sun on the waves, and the torn cloud. The
revelling libertine open sea wedded her to Beauchamp in that veiled
cold spiritual manner she could muse on as a circumstance out of her
life.

Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind. The gales of August
mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped
at a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon
as they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw
beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting
sea. Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof. As the
Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself
through her love of it; quite to herself. It was delicious to look
round and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her
from thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was
abroad.

The hard dry gale increased. Her father, stretched beside her, drew her
attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib
on the _Esperanza’s_ weather bow—a gallant boat carefully handled. She
watched it with some anxiety, but the _Esperanza_ was bound for a Devon
bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the
little cutter to run into haven if she pleased. The passing her was no
event.—In a representation of the common events befalling us in these
times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at
whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect
tense. For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with
Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened
to cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened? Cecilia
gathered it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and
pleasure, she found at Romfrey Castle. Her friend Louise received a
letter from Mr. Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman’s log of
a cruise of a fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch
of Beauchamp standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up
to nine at night, munching a biscuit for nourishment. The beautiful
widow prepared the way for what was very soon to be publicly known
concerning herself by reading out this passage of her correspondent’s
letter in the breakfast room.

“Yes, the fellow’s a sailor!” said Lord Romfrey.

The countess rose from her chair and walked out.

“Now, was that abuse of the fellow?” the old lord asked Colonel
Halkett. “I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else. He is a sailor,
and he’s fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends
his neck never ’s nearer it.”

He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.

Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window
overlooking the swelling woods of Romfrey. She praised the loveliness
of the view.

“It is fire to me,” said Rosamund.

Cecilia looked at her, startled. Rosamund said no more.

She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in
company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp’s name was mentioned
did she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a
shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of
mordant pain.

We will make no mystery about it. I would I could. Those happy tales of
mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of
bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the
attentive mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep,
the familiar urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise.
And oh, the refreshment there is in dealing with characters either
contemptibly beneath us or supernaturally above! My way is like a Rhone
island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between
the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight
mankind—honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none;
they are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that
they are directed to set in motion, and—poor troop of actors to vacant
benches!—the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would
appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them, we are lost: back I
go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the
habit of listening to my own voice more than is good:—

The burden of a child in her bosom had come upon Rosamund with the
visage of the Angel of Death fronting her in her path. She believed
that she would die; but like much that we call belief, there was a
kernel of doubt in it, which was lively when her frame was enlivened,
and she then thought of the giving birth to this unloved child, which
was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose interest solely (so she
could presume to think, because it had been her motive reason) she had
married the earl. She had no wish to be a mother; but that prospect,
and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she could have
submitted to for Lord Romfrey’s sake. It struck her like a scoffer’s
blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have become
the instrument for dispossessing him. The revulsion of her feelings
enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to fathom
him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had been
his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a woman
to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the trifles
daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her resentment,
like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines. Nevil’s
loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she was
lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham. Lord Romfrey had
repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental
questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was
more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor. Latterly, with
the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of
hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking
the hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her. Now
and then they occurred perforce. The presence of Cecilia exasperated
Rosamund’s peculiar sensitiveness. It required Louise
Wardour-Devereux’s apologies and interpretations to account for what
appeared to Cecilia strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady
Romfrey’s behaviour. The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady
Romfrey had paid Mrs. Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly
one Sunday in the London season, for the purpose, as it became evident,
of meeting Mr. Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr.
Tuckham would be there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was,
Louise assured Cecilia, purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were
present: but the countess obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr.
Tuckham came from it declaring it to have been more terrible than any
he had ever been called upon to endure. The object of the countess was
to persuade him to renounce his bride.

Louise replied to the natural inquiry—“Upon what plea?” with a
significant evasiveness. She put her arms round Cecilia’s neck: “I
trust you are not unhappy. You will get no release from him.”

“I am not unhappy,” said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her
friend.

She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining
her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of
marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her
weep. Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had
been more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the
deeps, perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her
tears—for Lady Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she
could hope for no release, gave her some of the firmness which her
nature craved in this trial.

From saying quietly to her: “I thought once you loved him,” when
alluding to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by
degrees on to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renée
in England, and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at
Cecilia’s mildness after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined
that she had no moral sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the
poor lady’s mind was distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp.
Cecilia’s high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of
our English civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not
explain it. She bowed to Lady Romfrey’s praises of Nevil, suffered her
hands to be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her
love of him to be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her
cold resolution to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In
truth, it was too late to speak of Renée to her now. It did not beseem
Cecilia to remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and
while confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a
necessary strength from them—in the comfort of the consciousness of
pain, for example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in her own
breast might deaden her to Nevil’s jealousy, the meanest of the errors
of a lofty soul, yielded no extract beyond the bare humiliation proper
to an acknowledgement that it had existed: so she discarded the
recollection of the passion which had wrought the mischief. Since we
cannot have a peerless flower of civilization without artificial aid,
it may be understood how it was that Cecilia could extinguish some
lights in her mind and kindle others, and wherefore what it was not
natural for her to do, she did. She had, briefly, a certain control of
herself.

Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot
and measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful
of the effect of that story of Renée. A wooden young woman, or a
galvanized (sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader—so
moveable they are!) would have seen her business at this point, and
have glided melting to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic
fiction ends joyously. Rosamund had counted on it.

She looked intently at Cecilia. “He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he
has lost you—I am the cause!” she cried in a convulsion of grief.

“Dear Lady Romfrey!” Cecilia would have consoled her. “There is nothing
to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame
for anything: how can you be?”

“I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause. It lies on me! it
pursues me. Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as
I do, to get nearer to Nevil—I cannot have peace! His heart has turned
from me. He despises me. If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham,
as he commanded me, you and he—Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is
the chief evil in the world. He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will
die.”

“Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?”

“No! no!” Rosamund exclaimed; “it is by not hearing that I _know_ it!”

With the assistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to
what was going on in the house. There had been a correspondence between
Miss Denham and the countess. Letters from Bevisham had suddenly
ceased. Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have
been for a tragic reason.

Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.

He pressed her hand and said: “You don’t know what that man suffers.
Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact
is Nevil is down with fever. It’s in the papers now; he may be able to
conceal it, and I hope he will. There’ll be a crisis, and then he can
tell her good news—a little illness and all right now! Of course,” the
colonel continued buoyantly, “Nevil will recover; he’s a tough wiry
young fellow, but poor Romfrey’s fears are natural enough about the
countess. Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there—Shrapnel, I
mean; and she’s exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst—in case
of any accident in Bevisham.”

“Is it not a kind of cowardice to conceal it?” Cecilia suggested.

“It saves her from fretting,” said the colonel.

“But she is fretting! If Lord Romfrey would confide in her and trust to
her courage, papa, it would be best.”

Colonel Halkett thought that Lord Romfrey was the judge.

Cecilia wished to leave a place where this visible torture of a human
soul was proceeding, and to no purpose. She pointed out to her father,
by a variety of signs, that Lady Romfrey either knew or suspected the
state of affairs in Bevisham, and repeated her remarks upon Nevil’s
illness. But Colonel Halkett was restrained from departing by the
earl’s constant request to him to stay. Old friendship demanded it of
him. He began to share his daughter’s feelings at the sight of Lady
Romfrey. She was outwardly patient and submissive; by nature she was a
strong healthy woman; and she attended to all her husband’s
prescriptions for the regulating of her habits, walked with him, lay
down for the afternoon’s rest, appeared amused when he laboured to that
effect, and did her utmost to subdue the worm devouring her heart but
the hours of the delivery of the letter-post were fatal to her. Her
woeful: “No letter for me!” was piteous. When that was heard no longer,
her silence and famished gaze chilled Cecilia. At night Rosamund eyed
her husband expressionlessly, with her head leaning back in her chair,
to the sorrow of the ladies beholding her. Ultimately the contagion of
her settled misery took hold of Cecilia. Colonel Halkett was induced by
his daughter and Mrs. Devereux to endeavour to combat a system that
threatened consequences worse than those it was planned to avert. He by
this time was aware of the serious character of the malady which had
prostrated Nevil. Lord Romfrey had directed his own medical man to go
down to Bevisham, and Dr. Gannet’s report of Nevil was grave. The
colonel made light of it to his daughter, after the fashion he
condemned in Lord Romfrey, to whom however he spoke earnestly of the
necessity for partially taking his wife into his confidence to the
extent of letting her know that a slight fever was running its course
with Nevil.

“There will be no slight fever in my wife’s blood,” said the earl. “I
stand to weather the cape or run to wreck, and it won’t do to be taking
in reefs on a lee-shore. You don’t see what frets her, colonel. For
years she has been bent on Nevil’s marriage. It’s off: but if you catch
Cecilia by the hand and bring her to us—I swear she loves the
fellow!—that’s the medicine for my wife. Say: will you do it? Tell Lady
Romfrey it shall be done. We shall stand upright again!”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Romfrey,” said the colonel.

“Play at it, then! Let her think it. You’re helping me treat an
invalid. Colonel! my old friend! You save my house and name if you do
that. It’s a hand round a candle in a burst of wind. There’s Nevil
dragged by a woman into one of their reeking hovels—so that Miss Denham
at Shrapnel’s writes to Lady Romfrey—because the woman’s drunken
husband voted for him at the Election, and was kicked out of
employment, and fell upon the gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died
starving, and the man sickened of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits
with him! Out of that tangle of folly is my house to be struck down? It
looks as if the fellow with his infernal ‘humanity,’ were the bad
genius of an old nurse’s tale. He’s a good fellow, colonel, he means
well. This fever will cure him, they say it sobers like bloodletting.
He’s a gallant fellow; you know that. He fought to the skeleton in our
last big war. On my soul, I believe he’s good for a husband.
Frenchwoman or not, that affair’s over. He shall have Steynham and
Holdesbury. Can I say more? Now, colonel, you go in to the countess.
Grasp my hand. Give me that help, and God bless you! You light up my
old days. She’s a noble woman: I would not change her against the best
in the land. She has this craze about Nevil. I suppose she’ll never get
over it. But there it is: and we must feed her with the spoon.”

Colonel Halkett argued stutteringly with the powerful man: “It’s the
truth she ought to hear, Romfrey; indeed it is, if you’ll believe me.
It’s his life she is fearing for. She knows half.”

“She knows positively nothing, colonel. Miss Denham’s first letter
spoke of the fellow’s having headaches, and staggering. He was out on a
cruise, and saw your schooner pass, and put into some port, and began
falling right and left, and they got him back to Shrapnel’s: and here
it is—that if you go to him you’ll save him, and if you go to my wife
you’ll save her: and there you have it: and I ask my old friend, I beg
him to go to them both.”

“But you can’t surely expect me to force my daughter’s inclinations, my
dear Romfrey?”

“Cecilia loves the fellow!”

“She is engaged to Mr. Tuckham.”

“I’ll see the man Tuckham.”

“Really, my dear lord!”

“Play at it, Halkett, play at it! Tide us over this! Talk to her: hint
it and nod it. We have to round November. I could strangle the world
till that month’s past. You’ll own,” he added mildly after his thunder,
“I’m not much of the despot Nevil calls me. She has not a wish I don’t
supply. I’m at her beck, and everything that’s mine. She’s a brave good
woman. I don’t complain. I run my chance. But if we lose the child—good
night! Boy or girl!—boy!”

Lord Romfrey flung an arm up. The child of his old age lived for him
already: he gave it all the life he had. This miracle, this young son
springing up on an earth decaying and dark, absorbed him. This reviver
of his ancient line must not be lost. Perish every consideration to
avert it! He was ready to fear, love, or hate terribly, according to
the prospects of his child.

Colonel Halkett was obliged to enter into a consultation, of a shadowy
sort, with his daughter, whose only advice was that they should leave
the castle. The penetrable gloom there, and the growing apprehension
concerning the countess and Nevil, tore her to pieces. Even if she
could have conspired with the earl to hoodwink his wife, her strong
sense told her it would be fruitless, besides base. Father and daughter
had to make the stand against Lord Romfrey. He saw their departure from
the castle gates, and kissed his hand to Cecilia, courteously, without
a smile.

“He may well praise the countess, papa,” said Cecilia, while they were
looking back at the castle and the moveless flag that hung in folds by
the mast above it. “She has given me her promise to avoid questioning
him and to accept his view of her duty. She said to me that if Nevil
should die she...”

Cecilia herself broke down, and gave way to sobs in her father’s arms.




CHAPTER XLIX.
A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLES


The earl’s precautions did duty night and day in all the avenues
leading to the castle and his wife’s apartments; and he could believe
that he had undertaken as good a defence as the mountain guarding the
fertile vale from storms: but him the elements pelted heavily. Letters
from acquaintances of Nevil, from old shipmates and from queer
political admirers and opponents, hailed on him; things not to be
frigidly read were related of the fellow.

Lord Romfrey’s faith in the power of constitution to beat disease
battled sturdily with the daily reports of his physician and friends,
whom he had directed to visit the cottage on the common outside
Bevisham, and with Miss Denham’s intercepted letters to the countess.
Still he had to calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his
constitution, which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle
of life and death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the
war. That latest freak of the fellow’s, the abandonment of our natural
and wholesome sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the
reckoning. Dr. Gannet did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did;
and the earl meditated with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that
such a folly as this of one old vegetable idiot influencing a younger
noodle, might strike his House to the dust.

His watch over his wife had grown mechanical: he failed to observe that
her voice was missing. She rarely spoke. He lost the art of observing
himself: the wrinkling up and dropping of his brows became his habitual
language. So long as he had not to meet inquiries or face tears, he
enjoyed the sense of security. He never quitted his wife save to walk
to the Southern park lodge, where letters and telegrams were piled
awaiting him; and she was forbidden to take the air on the castle
terrace without his being beside her, lest a whisper, some accident of
the kind that donkeys who nod over their drowsy nose-length-ahead
precautions call fatality, should rouse her to suspect, and in a turn
of the hand undo his labour: for the race was getting terrible: Death
had not yet stepped out of that evil chamber in Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage
to aim his javelin at the bosom containing the prized young life to
come, but, like the smoke of waxing fire, he shadowed forth his
presence in wreaths blacker and thicker day by day: and Everard Romfrey
knew that the hideous beast of darkness had only to spring up and pass
his guard to deal a blow to his House the direr from all he supposed
himself to have gained by masking it hitherto. The young life he looked
to for renewal swallowed him: he partly lost human feeling for his wife
in the tremendous watch and strain to hurry her as a vessel round the
dangerous headland. He was oblivious that his eyebrows talked, that his
head was bent low, that his mouth was shut, and that where a doubt had
been sown, silence and such signs are like revelations in black night
to the spirit of a woman who loves.

One morning after breakfast Rosamund hung on his arm, eyeing him
neither questioningly nor invitingly, but long. He kissed her forehead.
She clung to him and closed her eyes, showing him a face of slumber,
like a mask of the dead.

Mrs. Devereux was present. Cecilia had entreated her to stay with Lady
Romfrey. She stole away, for the time had come which any close observer
of the countess must have expected.

The earl lifted his wife, and carried her to her sitting-room. A
sunless weltering September day whipped the window-panes and brought
the roar of the beaten woods to her ears. He was booted and gaitered
for his customary walk to the park lodge, and as he bent a knee beside
her, she murmured: “Don’t wait; return soon.”

He placed a cord attached to the bellrope within her reach. This utter
love of Nevil Beauchamp was beyond his comprehension, but there it was,
and he had to submit to it and manœuvre. His letters and telegrams told
the daily tale. “He’s better,” said the earl, preparing himself to
answer what his wife’s look had warned him would come.

She was an image of peace, in the same posture on the couch where he
had left her, when he returned. She did not open her eyes, but felt
about for his hand, and touching it, she seemed to weigh the fingers.

At last she said: “The fever should be at its height.”

“Why, my dear brave girl, what ails you?” said he.

“Ignorance.”

She raised her eyelids. His head was bent down over her, like a raven’s
watching, a picture of gravest vigilance.

Her bosom rose and sank. “What has Miss Denham written to-day?”

“To-day?” he asked her gently.

“I shall bear it,” she answered. “You were my master before you were my
husband. I bear anything you think is good for my government. Only, my
ignorance is fever; I share Nevil’s.”

“Have you been to my desk at all?”

“No. I read your eyes and your hands: I have been living on them.
To-day I find that I have not gained by it, as I hoped I should.
Ignorance kills me. I really have courage to bear to hear—just at this
moment I have.”

“There’s no bad news, my love,” said the earl.

“High fever, is it?”

“The usual fever. Gannet’s with him. I sent for Gannet to go there, to
satisfy you.”

“Nevil is not dead?”

“Lord! ma’am, my dear soul!”

“He is alive?”

“Quite: certainly alive; as much alive as I am; only going a little
faster, as fellows do in the jumps of a fever. The best doctor in
England is by his bed. He’s doing fairly. You should have let me know
you were fretting, my Rosamund.”

“I did not wish to tempt you to lie, my dear lord.”

“Well, there are times when a woman... as you are: but you’re a brave
woman, a strong heart, and my wife. You want some one to sit with you,
don’t you? Louise Devereux is a pleasant person, but you want a man to
amuse you. I’d have sent to Stukely, but you want a serious man, I
fancy.”

So much had the earl been thrown out of his plan for protecting his
wife, that he felt helpless, and hinted at the aids and comforts of
religion. He had not rejected the official Church, and regarding it now
as in alliance with great Houses, he considered that its ministers
might also be useful to the troubled women of noble families. He
offered, if she pleased, to call in the rector to sit with her—the
bishop of the diocese, if she liked.

“But just as you like, my love,” he added. “You know you have to avoid
fretting. I’ve heard my sisters talk of the parson doing them good off
and on about the time of their being brought to bed. He elevated their
minds, they said. I’m sure I’ve no objection. If he can doctor the
minds of women he’s got a profession worth something.”

Rosamund smothered an outcry. “You mean that Nevil is past hope!”

“Not if he’s got a fair half of our blood in him. And Richard Beauchamp
gave the fellow good stock. He has about the best blood in England.
That’s not saying much when they’ve taken to breed as they build—stuff
to keep the plasterers at work; devil a thought of posterity!”

“There I see you and Nevil one, my dear lord,” said Rosamund. “You
think of those that are to follow us. Talk to me of him. Do not say,
‘the fellow.’ Say ‘Nevil.’ No, no; call him ‘the fellow.’ He was alive
and well when you used to say it. But smile kindly, as if he made you
love him down in your heart, in spite of you. We have both known that
love, and that opposition to him; not liking his ideas, yet liking him
so: we were obliged to laugh—I have seen you! as love does laugh! If I
am not crying over his grave, Everard? Oh!”

The earl smoothed her forehead. All her suspicions were rekindled.
“Truth! truth! give me truth. Let me know what world I am in.”

“My dear, a ship’s not lost because she’s caught in a squall; nor a man
buffeting the waves for an hour. He’s all right: he keeps up.”

“He is delirious? I ask you—I have fancied I heard him.”

Lord Romfrey puffed from his nostrils: but in affecting to blow to the
winds her foolish woman’s wildness of fancy, his mind rested on Nevil,
and he said: “Poor boy! It seems he’s chattering hundreds to the
minute.”

His wife’s looks alarmed him after he had said it, and he was for
toning it and modifying it, when she gasped to him to help her to her
feet; and standing up, she exclaimed: “O heaven! now I hear _you;_ now
I know he lives. See how much better it is for me to know the real
truth. It takes me to his bedside. Ignorance and suspense have been
poison. I have been washed about like a dead body. Let me read all my
letters now. Nothing will harm me now. You will do your best for me, my
husband, will you not?” She tore at her dress at her throat for
coolness, panting and smiling. “For me—us—yours—ours! Give me my
letters, lunch with me, and start for Bevisham. Now you see how good it
is for me to hear the very truth, you will give me your own report, and
I shall absolutely trust in it, and go down with it if it’s false! But
you see I am perfectly strong for the truth. It must be you or I to go.
I burn to go; but your going will satisfy me. If _you_ look on him, I
look. I feel as if I had been nailed down in a coffin, and have got
fresh air. I pledge you my word, sir, my honour, my dear husband, that
I will think first of my duty. I know it would be Nevil’s wish. He has
not quite forgiven me—he thought me ambitious—ah! stop: he said that
the birth of our child would give him greater happiness than he had
known for years: he begged me to persuade you to call a boy Nevil
Beauchamp, and a girl Renée. He has never believed in his own long
living.”

Rosamund refreshed her lord’s heart by smiling archly as she said: “The
boy to be _educated_ to take the side of the people, of course! The
girl is to learn a profession.”

“Ha! bless the fellow!” Lord Romfrey interjected. “Well, I might go
there for an hour. Promise me, no fretting! You have hollows in your
cheeks, and your underlip hangs: I don’t like it. I haven’t seen that
before.”

“We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive,” said Rosamund.
“My letters! my letters!”

Lord Romfrey went to fetch them. They were intact in his desk. His
wife, then, had actually been reading the facts through a wall! For he
was convinced of Mrs. Devereux’s fidelity, as well as of the colonel’s
and Cecilia’s. He was not a man to be disobeyed: nor was his wife the
woman to court or to acquiesce in trifling acts of disobedience to him.
He received the impression, consequently, that this matter of the visit
to Nevil was one in which the poor loving soul might be allowed to
guide him, singular as the intensity of her love of Nevil Beauchamp
was, considering that they were not of kindred blood.

He endeavoured to tone her mind for the sadder items in Miss Denham’s
letters.

“Oh!” said Rosamund, “what if I shed the ‘screaming eyedrops,’ as you
call them? They will not hurt me, but relieve. I was sure I should
someday envy that girl! If he dies she will have nursed him and had the
last of him.”

“He’s not going to die!” said Everard powerfully.

“We must be prepared. These letters will do that for me. I have written
out the hours of your trains. Stanton will attend on you. I have
directed him to telegraph to the Dolphin in Bevisham for rooms for the
night: that is to-morrow night. To-night you sleep at your hotel in
London, which will be ready to receive you, and is more comfortable
than the empty house. Stanton takes wine, madeira and claret, and other
small necessaries. If Nevil should be _very_ unwell, you will not leave
him immediately. I shall look to the supplies. You will telegraph to me
twice a day, and write once. We lunch at half-past twelve, so that you
may hit the twenty-minutes-to-two o’clock train. And now I go to see
that the packing is done.”

She carried off her letters to her bedroom, where she fell upon the
bed, shutting her eyelids hard before she could suffer her eyes to be
the intermediaries of that fever-chamber in Bevisham and her bursting
heart. But she had not positively deceived her husband in the
reassurance she had given him by her collectedness and by the precise
directions she had issued for his comforts, indicating a mind so much
more at ease. She was firmer to meet the peril of her beloved: and
being indeed, when thrown on her internal resources, one among the
brave women of earth, though also one who required a lift from
circumstances to take her stand calmly fronting a menace to her heart,
she saw the evidence of her influence with Lord Romfrey: the level she
could feel that they were on together so long as she was courageous,
inspirited her sovereignly.

He departed at the hour settled for him. Rosamund sat at her boudoir
window, watching the carriage that was conducting him to the railway
station. Neither of them had touched on the necessity of his presenting
himself at the door of Dr. Shrapnel’s house. That, and the disgust
belonging to it, was a secondary consideration with Lord Romfrey, after
he had once resolved on it as the right thing to do: and his wife
admired and respected him for so supreme a loftiness. And fervently she
prayed that it might not be her evil fate to disappoint his hopes.
Never had she experienced so strong a sense of devotedness to him as
when she saw the carriage winding past the middle oak-wood of the park,
under a wet sky brightened from the West, and on out of sight.




CHAPTER L.
AT THE COTTAGE ON THE COMMON


Rain went with Lord Romfrey in a pursuing cloud all the way to
Bevisham, and across the common to the long garden and plain little
green-shuttered, neat white cottage of Dr. Shrapnel. Carriages were
driving from the door; idle men with hands deep in their pockets hung
near it, some women pointing their shoulders under wet shawls, and
boys. The earl was on foot. With no sign of discomposure, he stood at
the half-open door and sent in his card, bearing the request for
permission to visit his nephew. The reply failing to come to him
immediately, he began striding to and fro. That garden gate where he
had flourished the righteous whip was wide. Foot-farers over the sodden
common were attracted to the gateway, and lingered in it, looking at
the long, green-extended windows, apparently listening, before they
broke away to exchange undertone speech here and there. Boys had pushed
up through the garden to the kitchen area. From time to time a woman in
a dripping bonnet whimpered aloud.

An air of a country churchyard on a Sunday morning when the curate has
commenced the service prevailed. The boys were subdued by the moisture,
as they are when they sit in the church aisle or organ-loft, before
their members have been much cramped.

The whole scene, and especially the behaviour of the boys, betokened to
Lord Romfrey that an event had come to pass.

In the chronicle of a sickness the event is death.

He bethought him of various means of stopping the telegraph and
smothering the tale, if matters should have touched the worst here. He
calculated abstrusely the practicable shortness of the two routes from
Bevisham to Romfrey, by post-horses on the straightest line of road, or
by express train on the triangle of railway, in case of an extreme need
requiring him to hasten back to his wife and renew his
paternal-despotic system with her. She had but persuaded him of the
policy of a liberal openness and confidence for the moment’s occasion:
she could not turn his nature, which ran to strokes of craft and blunt
decision whenever the emergency smote him and he felt himself hailed to
show generalship.

While thus occupied in thoughtfulness he became aware of the monotony
of a tuneless chant, as if, it struck him, an insane young chorister or
canon were galloping straight on end hippomaniacally through the
Psalms. There was a creak at intervals, leading him to think it a
machine that might have run away with the winder’s arm.

The earl’s humour proposed the notion to him that this perhaps was one
of the forms of Radical lamentation, ululation, possibly practised by a
veteran impietist like Dr. Shrapnel for the loss of his youngster, his
political cub—poor lad!

Deriding any such paganry, and aught that could be set howling, Lord
Romfrey was presently moved to ask of the small crowd at the gate what
that sound was.

“It’s the poor commander, sir,” said a wet-shawled woman, shivering.

“He’s been at it twenty hours already, sir,” said one of the boys.

“Twenty-foor hour he’ve been at it,” said another.

A short dispute grew over the exact number of hours. One boy declared
that thirty hours had been reached. “Father heerd ’n yesterday morning
as he was aff to ’s work in the town afore six: that brings ’t nigh
thirty and he ha’n’t stopped yet.”

The earl was invited to step inside the gate, a little way up to the
house, and under the commander’s window, that he might obtain a better
hearing.

He swung round, walked away, walked back, and listened.

If it was indeed a voice, the voice, he would have said, was travelling
high in air along the sky.

Yesterday he had described to his wife Nevil’s chattering of hundreds
to the minute. He had not realized the description, which had been only
his manner of painting delirium: there had been no warrant for it. He
heard the wild scudding voice imperfectly: it reminded him of a string
of winter geese changeing waters. Shower gusts, and the wail and hiss
of the rows of fir-trees bordering the garden, came between, and
allowed him a moment’s incredulity as to its being a human voice. Such
a cry will often haunt the moors and wolds from above at nightfall. The
voice hied on, sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a
hush of wind and trees. The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice
drowned; once more to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a
high-pitched key, thin, shrill, weird, interminable, like winds through
a crazy chamber-door at midnight.

The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and
stranger: Lord Romfrey had some such thought.

Dr. Gannet was the bearer of Miss Denham’s excuses to Lord Romfrey for
the delay in begging him to enter the house: in the confusion of the
household his lordship’s card had been laid on the table below, and she
was in the sick-room.

“Is my nephew a dead man?” said the earl.

The doctor weighed his reply. “He lives. Whether he will, after the
exhaustion of this prolonged fit of raving, I don’t dare to predict. In
the course of my experience I have never known anything like it. He
lives: there’s the miracle, but he lives.”

“On brandy?”

“That would soon have sped him.”

“Ha. You have everything here that you want?”

“Everything.”

“He’s in your hands, Gannet.”

The earl was conducted to a sitting-room, where Dr. Gannet left him for
a while.

Mindful that he was under the roof of his enemy, he remained standing,
observing nothing.

The voice overheard was off at a prodigious rate, like the far sound of
a yell ringing on and on.

The earl unconsciously sought a refuge from it by turning the leaves of
a book upon the table, which was a complete edition of Harry Denham’s
Poems, with a preface by a man named Lydiard; and really, to read the
preface one would suppose that these poets were the princes of the
earth. Lord Romfrey closed the volume. It was exquisitely bound, and
presented to Miss Denham by the Mr. Lydiard. “The works of your
illustrious father,” was written on the title-page. These writers deal
queerly with their words of praise of one another. There is no law to
restrain them. Perhaps it is the consolation they take for the poor
devil’s life they lead!

A lady addressing him familiarly, invited him to go upstairs.

He thanked her. At the foot of the stairs he turned; he had recognized
Cecilia Halkett.

Seeing her there was more strange to him than being there himself; but
he bowed to facts.

“What do you think?” he said.

She did not answer intelligibly.

He walked up.

The crazed gabbling tongue had entire possession of the house, and rang
through it at an amazing pitch to sustain for a single minute.

A reflection to the effect that dogs die more decently than we men,
saddened the earl. But, then, it is true, we shorten their pangs by
shooting them.

A dismal figure loomed above him at the head of the stairs.

He distinguished it in the vast lean length he had once whipped and
flung to earth.

Dr. Shrapnel was planted against the wall outside that raving chamber,
at the salient angle of a common prop or buttress. The edge of a
shoulder and a heel were the supports to him sideways in his distorted
attitude. His wall arm hung dead beside his pendent frock-coat; the
hair of his head had gone to wildness, like a field of barley whipped
by tempest. One hand pressed his eyeballs: his unshaven jaw dropped.

Lord Romfrey passed him by.

The dumb consent of all present affirmed the creature lying on the bed
to be Nevil Beauchamp.

Face, voice, lank arms, chicken neck: what a sepulchral sketch of him!

It was the revelry of a corpse.

Shudders of alarm for his wife seized Lord Romfrey at the sight. He
thought the poor thing on the bed must be going, resolving to a cry,
unwinding itself violently in its hurricane of speech, that was not
speech nor exclamation, rather the tongue let loose to run to the
death. It seemed to be out in mid-sea, up wave and down wave.

A nurse was at the pillow smoothing it. Miss Denham stood at the foot
of the bed.

“Is that pain?” Lord Romfrey said low to Dr. Gannet.

“Unconscious,” was the reply.

Miss Denham glided about the room and disappeared.

Her business was to remove Dr. Shrapnel, that he might be out of the
way when Lord Romfrey should pass him again: but Dr. Shrapnel heard one
voice only, and moaned, “My Beauchamp!” She could not get him to stir.

Miss Denham saw him start slightly as the earl stepped forth and,
bowing to him, said: “I thank you, sir, for permitting me to visit my
nephew.”

Dr. Shrapnel made a motion of the hand, to signify freedom of access to
his house. He would have spoken, the effort fetched a burst of terrible
chuckles. He covered his face.

Lord Romfrey descended. The silly old wretch had disturbed his
equanimity as a composer of fiction for the comfort and sustainment of
his wife: and no sooner had he the front door in view than the
calculation of the three strides requisite to carry him out of the
house plucked at his legs, much as young people are affected by a
dancing measure; for he had, without deigning to think of matters
disagreeable to him in doing so, performed the duty imposed upon him by
his wife, and now it behoved him to ward off the coming blow from that
double life at Romfrey Castle.

He was arrested in his hasty passage by Cecilia Halkett.

She handed him a telegraphic message: Rosamund requested him to stay
two days in Bevisham. She said additionally: “Perfectly well. Shall
fear to see you returning yet. Have sent to Tourdestelle. All his
friends. Ni espoir, ni crainte, mais point de déceptions. Lumière. Ce
sont les ténèbres qui tuent.”

Her nimble wits had spied him on the road he was choosing, and outrun
him.

He resigned himself to wait a couple of days at Bevisham. Cecilia
begged him to accept a bed at Mount Laurels. He declined, and asked
her: “How is it you are here?”

“I called here,” said she, compressing her eyelids in anguish at a
wilder cry of the voice overhead, and forgetting to state why she had
called at the house and what services she had undertaken. A heap of
letters in her handwriting explained the nature of her task.

Lord Romfrey asked her where the colonel was.

“He drives me down in the morning and back at night, but they will give
me a bed or a sofa here to-night—I can’t...” Cecilia stretched her hand
out, blinded, to the earl.

He squeezed her hand.

“These letters take away my strength: crying is quite useless, I know
that,” said she, glancing at a pile of letters that she had partly
replied to. “Some are from people who can hardly write. There were
people who distrusted him! Some are from people who abused him and
maltreated him. See those poor creatures out in the rain!”

Lord Romfrey looked through the venetian blinds of the parlour window.

“It’s as good as a play to them,” he remarked.

Cecilia lit a candle and applied a stick of black wax to the flame,
saying: “Envelopes have fallen short. These letters will frighten the
receivers. I cannot help it.”

“I will bring letter paper and envelopes in the afternoon,” said Lord
Romfrey. “Don’t use black wax, my dear.”

“I can find no other: I do not like to trouble Miss Denham. Letter
paper has to be sealed. These letters must go by the afternoon post: I
do not like to rob the poor anxious people of a little hope while he
lives. Let me have note paper and envelopes quickly: not black-edged.”

“Plain; that’s right,” said Lord Romfrey.

Black appeared to him like the torch of death flying over the country.

“There may be hope,” he added.

She sighed: “Oh! yes.”

“Gannet will do everything that man can do to save him.”

“He will, I am sure.”

“You don’t keep watch in the room, my dear, do you?”

“Miss Denham allows me an hour there in the day: it is the only rest
she takes. She gives me her bedroom.”

“Ha: well: women!” ejaculated the earl, and paused. “That sounded like
him!”

“At times,” murmured Cecilia. “All yesterday! all through the night!
and to-day!”

“He’ll be missed.”

Any sudden light of happier expectation that might have animated him
was extinguished by the flight of chatter following the cry which had
sounded like Beauchamp.

He went out into the rain, thinking that Beauchamp would be missed. The
fellow had bothered the world, but the world without him would be heavy
matter.

The hour was mid-day, workmen’s meal-time. A congregation of shipyard
workmen and a multitude of children crowded near the door. In passing
through them, Lord Romfrey was besought for the doctor’s report of
Commander Beauchamp, variously named Beesham, Bosham, Bitcham, Bewsham.
The earl heard his own name pronounced as he particularly disliked to
hear it—Rumfree. Two or three men scowled at him.

It had not occurred to him ever before in his meditations to separate
his blood and race from the common English; and he was not of a
character to dwell on fantastical and purposeless distinctions, but the
mispronunciation of his name and his nephew’s at an instant when he was
thinking of Nevil’s laying down his life for such men as these gross
excessive breeders, of ill shape and wooden countenance, pushed him to
reflections on the madness of Nevil in endeavouring to lift them up and
brush them up; and a curious tenderness for Nevil’s madness worked in
his breast as he contrasted this much-abused nephew of his with our
general English—the so-called nobles, who were sunk in the mud of the
traders: the traders, who were sinking in the mud of the workmen: the
workmen, who were like harbour-flats at ebb tide round a stuck-fast
fleet of vessels big and little.

Decidedly a fellow like Nevil would be missed by _him!_

These English, huddling more and more in flocks, turning to lumps,
getting to be cut in a pattern and marked by a label—how they bark and
snap to rend an obnoxious original! One may chafe at the botheration
everlastingly raised by the fellow; but if our England is to keep her
place she must have him, and many of him. Have him? He’s gone!

Lord Romfrey reasoned himself into pathetic sentiment by degrees.

He purchased the note paper and envelopes in the town for Cecilia. Late
in the afternoon he deposited them on the parlour table at Dr.
Shrapnel’s. Miss Denham received him. She was about to lie down for her
hour of rest on the sofa. Cecilia was upstairs. He inquired if there
was any change in his nephew’s condition.

“Not any,” said Miss Denham.

The voice was abroad for proof of that.

He stood with a swelling heart.

Jenny flung out a rug to its length beside the sofa, and; holding it by
one end, said: “I must have my rest, to be of service, my lord.”

He bowed. He was mute and surprised.

The young lady was like no person of her age and sex that he remembered
ever to have met.

“I will close the door,” he said, retiring softly.

“Do not, my lord.”

The rug was over her, up to her throat, and her eyes were shut. He
looked back through the doorway in going out. She was asleep.

“Some delirium. Gannet of good hope. All in the usual course”; he
transmitted intelligence to his wife.

A strong desire for wine at his dinner-table warned him of something
wrong with his iron nerves.




CHAPTER LI.
IN THE NIGHT


The delirious voice haunted him. It came no longer accompanied by
images and likenesses to this and that of animate nature, which were
relieving and distracting; it came to him in its mortal nakedness—an
afflicting incessant ringing peal, bare as death’s ribs in telling of
death. When would it stop? And when it stopped, what would succeed?
What ghastly silence!

He walked to within view of the lights of Dr. Shrapnel’s at night: then
home to his hotel.

Miss Denham’s power of commanding sleep, as he could not, though
contrary to custom he tried it on the right side and the left, set him
thinking of her. He owned she was pretty. But that, he contended, was
not the word; and the word was undiscoverable. Not Cecilia Halkett
herself had so high-bred an air, for Cecilia had not her fineness of
feature and full quick eyes, of which the thin eyelids were part of the
expression. And Cecilia sobbed, sniffled, was patched about the face,
reddish, bluish. This girl was pliable only to service, not to grief:
she did her work for three-and-twenty hours, and fell to her sleep of
one hour like a soldier. Lord Romfrey could not recollect anything in a
young woman that had taken him so much as the girl’s tossing out of the
rug and covering herself, lying down and going to sleep under his nose,
absolutely independent of his presence.

She had not betrayed any woman’s petulance with him for his conduct to
her uncle or guardian. Nor had she hypocritically affected the reverse,
as ductile women do, when they feel wanting in force to do the other.
She was not unlike Nevil’s marquise in face, he thought: less foreign
of course; looking thrice as firm. Both were delicately featured.

He had a dream.

It was of an interminable procession of that odd lot called the People.
All of them were quarrelling under a deluge. One party was for
umbrellas, one was against them: and sounding the dispute with a
question or two, Everard held it logical that there should be
protection from the wet: just as logical on the other hand that so
frail a shelter should be discarded, considering the tremendous
downpour. But as he himself was dry, save for two or three drops, he
deemed them all lunatics. He requested them to gag their empty
chatter-boxes, and put the mother upon that child’s cry.

He was now a simple unit of the procession. Asking naturally whither
they were going, he saw them point. “St. Paul’s,” he heard. In his own
bosom it was, and striking like the cathedral big bell.

Several ladies addressed him sorrowfully. He stood alone. It had become
notorious that he was to do battle, and no one thought well of his
chances. Devil an enemy to be seen! he muttered. Yet they said the
enemy was close upon him. His right arm was paralyzed. There was the
enemy hard in front, mailed, vizored, gauntleted. He tried to lift his
right hand, and found it grasping an iron ring at the bottom of the
deep Steynham well, sunk one hundred feet through the chalk. But the
unexampled cunning of his left arm was his little secret; and, acting
upon this knowledge, he telegraphed to his first wife at Steynham that
Dr. Gannet was of good hope, and thereupon he re-entered the ranks of
the voluminous procession, already winding spirally round the dome of
St. Paul’s. And there, said he, is the tomb of Beauchamp. Everything
occurred according to his predictions, and he was entirely devoid of
astonishment. Yet he would fain have known the titles of the slain
admiral’s naval battles. He protested he had a right to know, for he
was the hero’s uncle, and loved him. He assured the stupid scowling
people that he loved Nevil Beauchamp, always loved the boy, and was the
staunchest friend the fellow had. And saying that, he certainly felt
himself leaning up against the cathedral rails in the attitude of Dr.
Shrapnel, and crying, “Beauchamp! Beauchamp!” And then he walked firmly
out of Romfrey oakwoods, and, at a mile’s distance from her, related to
his countess Rosamund that the burial was over without much silly
ceremony, and that she needed to know nothing of it whatever.

Rosamund’s face awoke him. It was the face of a chalk-quarry,
featureless, hollowed, appalling.

The hour was no later than three in the morning. He quitted the
detestable bed where a dream—one of some half-dozen in the course of
his life—had befallen him. For the maxim of the healthy man is: up, and
have it out in exercise when sleep is for foisting base coin of dreams
upon you! And as the healthy only are fit to live, their maxims should
be law. He dressed and directed his leisurely steps to the common,
under a black sky, and stars of lively brilliancy. The lights of a
carriage gleamed on Dr. Shrapnel’s door. A footman informed Lord
Romfrey that Colonel Halkett was in the house, and soon afterward the
colonel appeared.

“Is it over? I don’t hear him,” said Lord Romfrey.

Colonel Halkett grasped his hand. “Not yet,” he said. “Cissy can’t be
got away. It’s killing her. No, he’s alive. You may hear him now.”

Lord Romfrey bent his ear.

“It’s weaker,” the colonel resumed. “By the way, Romfrey, step out with
me. My dear friend, the circumstances will excuse me: you know I’m not
a man to take liberties. I’m bound to tell you what your wife writes to
me. She says she has it on her conscience, and can’t rest for it. You
know women. She wants you to speak to the man here—Shrapnel. She wants
Nevil to hear that you and he were friendly before he dies; thinks it
would console the poor dear fellow. That’s only an idea; but it
concerns her, you see. I’m shocked to have to talk to you about it.”

“My dear colonel, I have no feeling against the man,” Lord Romfrey
replied. “I spoke to him when I saw him yesterday. I bear no grudges.
Where is he? You can send to her to say I have spoken to him twice.”

“Yes, yes,” the colonel assented.

He could not imagine that Lady Romfrey required more of her husband.
“Well, I must be off. I leave Blackburn Tuckham here, with a friend of
his; a man who seems to be very sweet with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.”

“Ha! Fetch him to me, colonel; I beg you to do that,” said Lord
Romfrey.

The colonel brought out Lydiard to the earl.

“You have been at my nephew’s bedside, Mr. Lydiard?”

“Within ten minutes, my lord.”

“What is your opinion of the case?”

“My opinion is, the chances are in his favour.”

“Lay me under obligation by communicating that to Romfrey Castle at the
first opening of the telegraph office to-morrow morning.”

Lydiard promised.

“The raving has ended?”

“Hardly, sir, but the exhaustion is less than we feared it would be.”

“Gannet is there?”

“He is in an arm-chair in the room.”

“And Dr. Shrapnel?”

“He does not bear speaking to; he is quiet.”

“He is attached to my nephew?”

“As much as to life itself.”

Lord Romfrey thanked Lydiard courteously. “Let us hope, sir, that some
day I shall have the pleasure of entertaining you, as well as another
friend of yours.”

“You are very kind, my lord.”

The earl stood at the door to see Colonel Halkett drive off: he
declined to accompany him to Mount Laurels.

In the place of the carriage stood a man, who growled “Where’s your
horsewhip, butcher?”

He dogged the earl some steps across the common. Everard returned to
his hotel and slept soundly during the remainder of the dark hours.




CHAPTER LII.
QUESTION OF A PILGRIMAGE AND AN ACT OF PENANCE


Then came a glorious morning for sportsmen. One sniffed the dews, and
could fancy fresh smells of stubble earth and dank woodland grass in
the very streets of dirty Bevisham. Sound sleep, like hearty dining,
endows men with a sense of rectitude, and sunlight following the
former, as a pleasant spell of conversational ease or sweet music the
latter, smiles a celestial approval of the performance: Lord Romfrey
dismissed his anxieties. His lady slightly ruffled him at breakfast in
a letter saying that she wished to join him. He was annoyed at noon by
a message, wherein the wish was put as a request. And later arrived
another message, bearing the character of an urgent petition. True, it
might be laid to the account of telegraphic brevity.

He saw Dr. Shrapnel, and spoke to him, as before, to thank him for the
permission to visit his nephew. Nevil he contemplated for the space of
five minutes. He cordially saluted Miss Denham. He kissed Cecilia’s
hand.

“All here is going on so well that I am with you for a day or two
to-morrow,” he despatched the message to his wife.

Her case was now the gravest. He could not understand why she desired
to be in Bevisham. She must have had execrable dreams!—rank poison to
mothers.

However, her constitutional strength was great, and his pride in the
restoration of his House by her agency flourished anew, what with fair
weather and a favourable report from Dr. Gannet: The weather was most
propitious to the hopes of any soul bent on dispersing the shadows of
death, and to sportsmen. From the windows of his railway carriage he
beheld the happy sportsmen stalking afield. The birds whirred and
dropped just where he counted on their dropping. The smoke of the guns
threaded to dazzling silver in the sunshine. Say what poor old Nevil
will, or _did_ say, previous to the sobering of his blood, where is
there a land like England? Everard rejoiced in his country temperately.
Having Nevil as well,—of which fact the report he was framing in his
mind to deliver to his wife assured him—he was rich. And you that put
yourselves forward for republicans and democrats, do you deny the
aristocracy of an oaklike man who is young upon the verge of eighty?

These were poetic flights, but he knew them not by name, and had not to
be ashamed of them.

Rosamund met him in the hall of the castle. “You have not deceived me,
my dear lord,” she said, embracing him. “You have done what you could
for me. The rest is for me to do.”

He reciprocated her embrace warmly, in commendation of her fresher good
looks.

She asked him, “You have spoken to Dr. Shrapnel?”

He answered her, “Twice.”

The word seemed quaint. She recollected that he was quaint.

He repeated, “I spoke to him the first day I saw him, and the second.”

“We are so much indebted to him,” said Rosamund. “His love of Nevil
surpasses ours. Poor man! poor man! At least we may now hope the blow
will be spared him which would have carried off his life with Nevil’s.
I have later news of Nevil than you.”

“Good, of course?”

“Ah me! the pleasure of the absence of pain. He is not gone.”

Lord Romfrey liked her calm resignation.

“There’s a Mr. Lydiard,” he said, “a friend of Nevil’s, and a friend of
Louise Devereux’s.”

“Yes; we hear from him every four hours,” Rosamund rejoined. “Mention
him to her before me.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to tell you to do before me,” said her
husband, smiling.

“Because, Everard, is it not so?—widows... and she loves this
gentleman!”

“Certainly, my dear; I think with you about widows. The world asks them
to practise its own hypocrisy. Louise Devereux was married to a pipe;
she’s the widow of tobacco ash. We’ll make daylight round her.”

“How good, how kind you are, my lord! I did not think so shrewd! But
benevolence is almost all-seeing: You said you spoke to Dr. Shrapnel
twice. Was he... polite?”

“Thoroughly upset, you know.”

“What did he say?”

“What was it? ‘Beauchamp! Beauchamp!’ the first time; and the second
time he said he thought it had left off raining.”

“Ah!” Rosamund drooped her head.

She looked up. “Here is Louise. My lord has had a long conversation
with Mr. Lydiard.”

“I trust he will come here before you leave us,” added the earl.

Rosamund took her hand. “My lord has been more acute than I, or else
your friend is less guarded than you.”

“What have you seen?” said the blushing lady.

“Stay. I have an idea you are one of the women I promised to Cecil
Baskelett,” said the earl. “Now may I tell him there’s _no_ chance?”

“Oh! do.”

They spent so very pleasant an evening that the earl settled down into
a comfortable expectation of the renewal of his old habits in the
September and October season. Nevil’s frightful cry played on his
ear-drum at whiles, but not too affectingly. He conducted Rosamund to
her room, kissed her, hoped she would sleep well, and retired to his
good hard bachelor’s bed, where he confidently supposed he would sleep.
The sleep of a dyspeptic, with a wilder than the monstrous Bevisham
dream, befell him, causing him to rise at three in the morning and
proceed to his lady’s chamber, to assure himself that at least she
slept well. She was awake.

“I thought you might come,” she said.

He reproached her gently for indulging foolish nervous fears.

She replied, “No, I do not; I am easier about Nevil. I begin to think
he will live. I have something at my heart that prevents me from
sleeping. It concerns me. Whether he is to live or die, I should like
him to know he has not striven in vain—not in everything: not where my
conscience tells me he was right, and we, I, wrong—utterly wrong,
wickedly wrong.”

“My dear girl, you are exciting yourself.”

“No; feel my pulse. The dead of night brings out Nevil to me like the
Writing on the Wall. It shall not be said he failed in everything.
Shame to us if it could be said! He tried to make me see what my duty
was, and my honour.”

“He was at every man Jack of us.”

“I speak of one thing. I thought I might not have to go. Now I feel I
must. I remember him at Steynham, when Colonel Halkett and Cecilia were
there. But for me, Cecilia would now be his wife. Of that there is no
doubt; that is not the point; regrets are fruitless. I see how the
struggle it cost him to break with his old love—that endearing Madame
de Rouaillout, his Renée—broke his heart; and then his loss of Cecilia
Halkett. But I do believe, true as that I am lying here, and you hold
my hand, my dear husband, those losses were not so fatal to him as his
sufferings he went through on account of his friend Dr. Shrapnel. I
will not keep you here.

Go and have some rest. What I shall beg of you tomorrow will not injure
my health in the slightest: the reverse: it will raise me from a bitter
depression. It shall not be said that those who loved him were unmoved
by him. Before he comes back to life, or is carried to his grave, he
shall know that I was not false to my love of him.”

“My dear, your pulse is at ninety,” said the earl.

“Look lenient, be kind, be just, my husband. Oh! let us cleanse our
hearts. This great wrong was my doing. I am not only quite strong
enough to travel to Bevisham, I shall be happy in going: and when I
have done it—said: ‘The wrong was all mine,’ I shall rejoice like the
pure in spirit. Forgiveness does not matter, though I now believe that
poor loving old man who waits outside his door weeping, is wrong-headed
only in his political views. We women can read men by their power to
love. Where love exists there is goodness. But it is not for the sake
of the poor old man himself that I would go: it is for Nevil’s; it is
for ours, chiefly for me, for my child’s, if ever...!” Rosamund turned
her head on her pillow.

The earl patted her cheek. “We’ll talk it over in the morning,” he
said. “Now go to sleep.”

He could not say more, for he did not dare to attempt cajolery with
her. Shading his lamp he stepped softly away to wrestle with a worse
nightmare than sleep’s. Her meaning was clear: and she was a woman to
insist on doing it. She was nevertheless a woman not impervious to
reason, if only he could shape her understanding to perceive that the
state of her nerves, incident to her delicate situation and the shock
of that fellow Nevil’s illness—poor lad!—was acting on her mind,
rendering her a victim of exaggerated ideas of duty, and so forth.

Naturally, apart from allowing her to undertake the journey by rail, he
could not sanction his lady’s humbling of herself so egregiously and
unnecessarily. Shrapnel had behaved unbecomingly, and had been punished
for it. He had spoken to Shrapnel, and the affair was virtually at an
end. With his assistance she would see that, when less excited. Her
eternal brooding over Nevil was the cause of these mental vagaries.

Lord Romfrey was for postponing the appointed discussion in the morning
after breakfast. He pleaded business engagements.

“None so urgent as this of mine,” said Rosamund.

“But we have excellent news of Nevil: you have Gannet’s word for it,”
he argued. “There’s really nothing to distress you.”

“My heart: I must be worthy of good news, to know happiness,” she
answered. “I will say, let me go to Bevisham two, three, four days
hence, if you like, but there is peace for me, and nowhere else.”

“My precious Rosamund! have you set your two eyes on it? What you are
asking, is for permission to make an _apology_ to Shrapnel!”

“That is the word.”

“That’s Nevil’s word.”

“It is a prescription to me.”

“An apology?”

The earl’s gorge rose. Why, such an act was comparable to the circular
mission of the dog!

“If I do not make the apology, the mother of your child is a coward,”
said Rosamund.

“She’s not.”

“I trust not.”

“You are a reasonable woman, my dear. Now listen: the man insulted you.
It’s past: done with. He insulted you...”

“He did not.”

“What?”

“He was courteous to me, hospitable to me, kind to me. He did not
insult me. I belied him.”

“My dear saint, you’re dreaming. He spoke insultingly of you to Cecil.”

“Is my lord that man’s dupe? I would stand against him before the
throne of God, with what little I know of his interview with Dr.
Shrapnel, to confront him and expose his lie. Do not speak of him. He
stirs my evil passions, and makes me feel myself the creature I was
when I returned to Steynham from my first visit to Bevisham, enraged
with jealousy of Dr. Shrapnel’s influence over Nevil, spiteful,
malicious: Oh! such a nest of vileness as I pray to heaven I am not
now, if it is granted me to give life to another. Nevil’s misfortunes
date from that,” she continued, in reply to the earl’s efforts to
soothe her. “Not the loss of the Election: that was no misfortune, but
a lesson. He would not have shone in Parliament: he runs too much from
first principles to extremes. You see I am perfectly reasonable,
Everard: I can form an exact estimate of character and things.” She
smiled in his face. “And I know my husband too: what he will grant;
what he would not, and justly would not. I know to a certainty that
vexatious as I must be to you now, you are conscious of my having
reason for being so.”

“You carry it so far—fifty miles beyond the mark,” said he. “The man
roughed you, and I taught him manners.”

“No!” she half screamed her interposition. “I repeat, he was in no way
discourteous or disobliging to me. He offered me a seat at his table,
and, heaven forgive me! I believe a bed in his house, that I might wait
and be sure of seeing Nevil, because I was very anxious to see him.”

“All the same, you can’t go to the man.”

“I should have said so too, before my destiny touched me.”

“A certain dignity of position, my dear, demands a corresponding
dignity of conduct: you can’t go.”

“If I am walking in the very eye of heaven, and feeling it shining on
me where I go, there is no question for me of human dignity.”

Such flighty talk offended Lord Romfrey.

“It comes to this: you’re in want of a parson.”

Rosamund was too careful to hint that she would have expected succour
and seconding from one or other of the better order of clergymen.

She shook her head. “To this, my dear lord: I have a troubled mind; and
it is not to listen nor to talk, that I am in need of, but to act.”

“Yes, my dear girl, but not to act insanely. I do love soundness of
head. You have it, only just now you’re a little astray. We’ll leave
this matter for another time.”

Rosamund held him by the arm. “Not too long!”

Both of them applied privately to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux for her opinion
and counsel on the subject of the proposal to apologize to Dr.
Shrapnel. She was against it with the earl, and became Rosamund’s echo
when with her. When alone, she was divided into two almost equal
halves: deeming that the countess should not insist, and the earl
should not refuse: him she condemned for lack of sufficient spiritual
insight to perceive the merits of his wife’s request: her she accused
of some vestige of something underbred in her nature, for putting such
fervid stress upon the supplication: i.e. making too much of it—a trick
of the vulgar: and not known to the languid.

She wrote to Lydiard for advice.

He condensed a paragraph into a line:

“It should be the earl. She is driving him to it, intentionally or
not.”

Mrs. Devereux doubted that the countess could have so false an idea of
her husband’s character as to think it possible he would ever be bent
to humble himself to the man he had castigated. She was right. It was
by honestly presenting to his mind something more loathsome still, the
humbling of herself, that Rosamund succeeded in awakening some remote
thoughts of a compromise, in case of necessity. Better I than she!

But the necessity was inconceivable.

He had really done everything required of him, if anything was really
required, by speaking to Shrapnel civilly. He had spoken to Shrapnel
twice.

Besides, the castle was being gladdened by happier tidings of
Beauchamp. Gannet now pledged his word to the poor fellow’s recovery,
and the earl’s particular friends arrived, and the countess entertained
them. October passed smoothly.

She said once: “Ancestresses of yours, my lord, have undertaken
pilgrimages as acts of penance for sin, to obtain heaven’s intercession
in their extremity.”

“I dare say they did,” he replied. “The monks got round them.”

“It is not to be laughed at, if it eased their hearts.”

Timidly she renewed her request for permission to perform the
pilgrimage to Bevisham.

“Wait,” said he, “till Nevil is on his legs.”

“Have you considered where I may then be, Everard?”

“My love, you sleep well, don’t you?”

“You see me every night.”

“I see you sound asleep.”

“I see you watching me.”

“Let’s reason,” said the earl; and again they went through the argument
upon the apology to Dr. Shrapnel.

He was willing to indulge her in any amount of it: and she perceived
why. Fox! she thought. Grand fox, but fox downright. For her time was
shortening to days that would leave her no free-will.

On the other hand, the exercise of her free-will in a fast resolve, was
growing all the more a privilege that he was bound to respect. As she
became sacreder and doubly precious to him, the less would he venture
to thwart her, though he should think her mad. There would be an
analogy between his manner of regarding her and the way that
superstitious villagers look on their crazy innocents, she thought
sadly. And she bled for him too: she grieved to hurt his pride. But she
had come to imagine that there was no avoidance of this deed of
personal humiliation.

Nevil had scrawled a note to her. She had it in her hand one forenoon
in mid November, when she said to her husband: “I have ordered the
carriage for two o’clock to meet the quarter to three train to London,
and I have sent Stanton on to get the house ready for us tonight.”

Lord Romfrey levelled a marksman’s eye at her.

“Why London? You know my wish that it should be here at the castle.”

“I have decided to go to Bevisham. I have little time left.”

“None, to my thinking.”

“Oh I yes; my heart will be light. I shall gain. You come with me to
London?”

“You can’t go.”

“Don’t attempt to reason with me, please, please!”

“I command, madam.”

“My lord, it is past the hour of commanding.”

He nodded his head, with the eyes up amid the puckered brows, and
blowing one of his long nasal expirations, cried, “Here we are, in for
another bout of argument.”

“No; I can bear the journey, rejoice in confessing my fault, but more
argument I cannot bear. I will reason with you when I can: submit to me
in this.”

“Feminine reasoning!” he interjected.

“I have nothing better to offer. It will be prudent to attend to me.
Take my conduct for the portion I bring you. Before I put myself in
God’s care I must be clean. I am unclean. Language like that offends
you. I have no better. My reasoning has not touched you; I am helpless,
except in this determination that my contrition shall be expressed to
Dr. Shrapnel. If I am to have life, to be worthy of living and being a
mother, it must be done. Now, my dear lord, see that, and submit.
You’re but one voice: I am two.”

He jumped off his chair, frowning up his forehead, and staring awfully
at the insulting prospect. “An apology to the man? By you? Away with
it.”

“Make allowances for me if you can, my dear lord that is what I am
going to do.”

“My wife going there?” He strode along furiously. “No!”

“You will not stop her.”

“There’s a palsy in my arm if I don’t.”

She plucked at her watch.

“Why, ma’am, I don’t know you,” he said, coming close to her. “Let “s
reason. Perhaps you overshot it; you were disgusted with Shrapnel.
Perhaps I was hasty; I get fired by an insult to a woman. There was a
rascal kissed a girl once against her will, and I heard her cry out; I
laid him on his back for six months; just to tell you; I’d do the same
to lord or beggar. Very well, my dear heart, we’ll own I might have
looked into the case when that dog Cecil... what’s the matter?”

“Speak on, my dear husband,” said Rosamund, panting.

“But your making the journey to Bevisham is a foolish notion.”

“Yes? well?”

“Well, we’ll wait.”

“Oh! have we to travel over it all again?” she exclaimed in despair at
the dashing out of a light she had fancied. “You see the wrong. You
know the fever it is in my blood, and you bid me wait.”

“Drop a line to Nevil.”

“To trick my conscience! I might have done that, and done well, once.
Do you think I dislike the task I propose to myself? It is for your
sake that I would shun it. As for me, the thought of going there is an
ecstasy. I shall be with Nevil, and be able to look in his face. And
how can I be actually abasing you when I am so certain that I am
worthier of you in what I do?”

Her exaltation swept her on. “Hurry there, my lord, if you will. If you
think it prudent that you should go in my place, go: you deprive me of
a great joy, but I will not put myself in your way, and I consent. The
chief sin was mine; remember that. I rank it viler than Cecil
Baskelett’s. And listen: when—can you reckon?—when will he confess his
wickedness? We separate ourselves from a wretch like that.”

“Pooh,” quoth the earl.

“But you will go?” She fastened her arms round the arm nearest: “You or
I! Does it matter which? We are one. You speak for me; I should have
been forced to speak for you. You spare me the journey. I do not in
truth suppose it would have injured me; but I would not run one
unnecessary risk.”

Lord Romfrey sighed profoundly. He could not shake her off. How could
he refuse her?

How on earth had it come about that suddenly he was expected to be the
person to go?

She would not let him elude her; and her stained cheeks and her
trembling on his arm pleaded most pressingly and masteringly. It might
be that she spoke with a knowledge of her case. Positive it undoubtedly
was that she meant to go if he did not. Perhaps the hopes of his House
hung on it. Having admitted that a wrong had been done, he was not the
man to leave it unamended; only he would have chosen his time, and the
manner. Since Nevil’s illness, too, he had once or twice been clouded
with a little bit of regret at the recollection of poor innocent old
Shrapnel posted like a figure of total inebriation beside the doorway
of the dreadful sickroom.

There had been women of the earl’s illustrious House who would have
given their hands to the axe rather than conceal a stain and have to
dread a scandal. His Rosamund, after all, was of their pattern; even
though she blew that conscience she prattled of into trifles, and
swelled them, as women of high birth in this country, out of the
clutches of the priests, do not do.

She clung to him for his promise to go.

He said: “Well, well.”

“That means, you will,” said she.

His not denying it passed for the affirmative.

Then indeed she bloomed with love of him.

“Yet do say yes,” she begged.

“I’ll go, ma’am,” shouted the earl. “I’ll go, my love,” he said softly.




CHAPTER LIII.
THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL


“You and Nevil are so alike,” Lady Romfrey said to her lord, at some
secret resemblance she detected and dwelt on fondly, when the earl was
on the point of starting a second time for Bevisham to perform what she
had prompted him to conceive his honourable duty, without a single
intimation that he loathed the task, neither shrug nor grimace.

“Two ends of a stick are pretty much alike: they’re all that length
apart,” said he, very little in the humour for compliments, however
well braced for his work.

His wife’s admiring love was pleasant enough. He preferred to have it
unspoken. Few of us care to be eulogized in the act of taking a
nauseous medical mixture.

For him the thing was as good as done, on his deciding to think it both
adviseable and right: so he shouldered his load and marched off with
it. He could have postponed the right proceeding, even after the
partial recognition of his error:—one drops a word or two by hazard,
one expresses an anxiety to afford reparation, one sends a message, and
so forth, for the satisfaction of one’s conventionally gentlemanly
feeling: but the adviseable proceeding under stress of peculiar
circumstances, his clearly-awakened recognition of that, impelled him
unhesitatingly. His wife had said it was the portion she brought him.
Tears would not have persuaded him so powerfully, that he might prove
to her he was glad of her whatever the portion she brought. She was a
good wife, a brave woman, likely to be an incomparable mother. At
present her very virtues excited her to fancifulness nevertheless she
was in his charge, and he was bound to break the neck of his will, to
give her perfect peace of wind. The child suffers from the mother’s
mental agitation. It might be a question of a nervous or an idiot
future Earl of Romfrey. Better death to the House than such a mockery
of his line! These reflections reminded him of the heartiness of his
whipping of that poor old tumbled signpost Shrapnel, in the name of
outraged womankind. If there was no outrage?

Assuredly if there was no outrage, consideration for the state of his
wife would urge him to speak the apology in the most natural manner
possible. She vowed there was none.

He never thought of blaming her for formerly deceiving him, nor of
blaming her for now expediting him.

In the presence of Colonel Halkett, Mr. Tuckham, and Mr. Lydiard, on a
fine November afternoon, standing bareheaded in the fir-bordered garden
of the cottage on the common, Lord Romfrey delivered his apology to Dr.
Shrapnel, and he said:

“I call you to witness, gentlemen, I offer Dr. Shrapnel the fullest
reparation he may think fit to demand of me for an unprovoked assault
on him, that I find was quite unjustified, and for which I am here to
ask his forgiveness.”

Speech of man could not have been more nobly uttered.

Dr. Shrapnel replied:

“To the half of that, sir—“tis over! What remains is done with the
hand.”

He stretched his hand out.

Lord Romfrey closed his own on it.

The antagonists, between whom was no pretence of their being other
after the performance of a creditable ceremony, bowed and exchanged
civil remarks: and then Lord Romfrey was invited to go into the house
and see Beauchamp, who happened to be sitting with Cecilia Halkett and
Jenny Denham. Beauchamp was thin, pale, and quiet; but the sight of him
standing and conversing after that scene of the skinny creature
struggling with bareribbed obstruction on the bed, was an example of
constitutional vigour and a compliment to the family very gratifying to
Lord Romfrey. Excepting by Cecilia, the earl was coldly received. He
had to leave early by special express for London to catch the last
train to Romfrey. Beauchamp declined to fix a day for his visit to the
castle with Lydiard, but proposed that Lydiard should accompany the
earl on his return. Lydiard was called in, and at once accepted the
earl’s invitation, and quitted the room to pack his portmanteau.

A faint sign of firm-shutting shadowed the corners of Jenny’s lips.

“You have brought my nephew to life,” Lord Romfrey said to her.

“My share in it was very small, my lord.”

“Gannet says that your share in it was very great.”

“And I say so, with the authority of a witness,” added Cecilia.

“And I, from my experience,” came from Beauchamp.

His voice had a hollow sound, unlike his natural voice.

The earl looked at him remembering the bright laughing lad he had once
been, and said: “Why not try a month of Madeira? You have only to step
on board the boat.”

“I don’t want to lose a month of my friend,” said Beauchamp.

“Take your friend with you. After these fevers our Winters are bad.”

“I’ve been idle too long.”

“But, Captain Beauchamp,” said Jenny, “you proposed to do nothing but
read for a couple of years.”

“Ay, there’s the voyage!” sighed he, with a sailor-invalid’s vision of
sunny seas dancing in the far sky.

“You must persuade Dr. Shrapnel to come; and he will not come unless
you come too, and you won’t go anywhere but to the Alps!” She bent her
eyes on the floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from
the Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia:
granite, as he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of
despair seemed to tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had
made in life, and cry failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not
been created for failure.

He touched his uncle’s hand indifferently: “My love to the countess:
let me hear of her, sir, if you please.”

“You shall,” said the earl. “But, off to Madeira, and up Teneriffe:
sail the Azores. I’ll hire you a good-sized schooner.”

“There is the _Esperanza_,” said Cecilia. “And the vessel is lying
_idle_, Nevil! Can you allow it?”

He consented to laugh at himself, and fell to coughing.

Jenny Denham saw a real human expression of anxiety cross the features
of the earl at the sound of the cough.

Lord Romfrey said “Adieu,” to her.

He offered her his hand, which she contrived to avoid taking by
dropping a formal half-reverence.

“Think of the _Esperanza;_ she will be coasting her nominal native
land! and adieu for to-day,” Cecilia said to Beauchamp.

Jenny Denham and he stood at the window to watch the leave-taking in
the garden, for a distraction. They interchanged no remark of surprise
at seeing the earl and Dr. Shrapnel hand-locked: but Jenny’s heart
reproached her uncle for being actually servile, and Beauchamp accused
the earl of aristocratic impudence.

Both were overcome with remorse when Colonel Halkett, putting his head
into the room to say good-bye to Beauchamp and place the _Esperanza_ at
his disposal for a Winter cruise, chanced to mention in two or three
half words the purpose of the earl’s visit, and what had occurred. He
took it for known already.

To Miss Denham he remarked: “Lord Romfrey is very much concerned about
your health; he fears you have overdone it in nursing Captain
Beauchamp.”

“I must be off after him,” said Beauchamp, and began trembling so that
he could not stir.

The colonel knew the pain and shame of that condition of weakness to a
man who has been strong and swift, and said: “Seven-league boots are
not to be caught. You’ll see him soon. Why, I thought some letter of
yours had fetched him here! I gave you all the credit of it.”

“No, he deserves it all himself—all,” said Beauchamp and with a dubious
eye on Jenny Denham: “You see, we were unfair.”

The “we” meant “you” to her sensitiveness; and probably he did mean it
for “you”: for as he would have felt, so he supposed that his uncle
must have felt, Jenny’s coldness was much the crueller. Her features,
which in animation were summer light playing upon smooth water, could
be exceedingly cold in repose: the icier to those who knew her, because
they never expressed disdain. No expression of the baser sort belonged
to them. Beauchamp was intimate with these delicately-cut features; he
would have shuddered had they chilled on him. He had fallen in love
with his uncle; he fancied she ought to have done so too; and from his
excess of sympathy he found her deficient in it.

He sat himself down to write a hearty letter to his “dear old uncle
Everard.”

Jenny left him, to go to her chamber and cry.




CHAPTER LIV.
THE FRUITS OF THE APOLOGY


This clear heart had cause for tears. Her just indignation with Lord
Romfrey had sustained her artificially hitherto: now that it was
erased, she sank down to weep. Her sentiments toward Lydiard had been
very like Cecilia Halkett’s in favour of Mr. Austin; with something
more to warm them on the part of the gentleman. He first had led her
mind in the direction of balanced thought, when, despite her affection
for Dr. Shrapnel, her timorous maiden wits, unable to contend with the
copious exclamatory old politician, opposed him silently. Lydiard had
helped her tongue to speak, as well as her mind to rational views; and
there had been a bond of union in common for them in his admiration of
her father’s writings. She had known that he was miserably yoked, and
had respected him when he seemed inclined for compassion without wooing
her for tenderness. He had not trifled with her, hardly flattered; he
had done no more than kindle a young girl’s imaginative liking. The
pale flower of imagination, fed by dews, not by sunshine, was born
drooping, and hung secret in her bosom, shy as a bell of the frail
wood-sorrel. Yet there was pain for her in the perishing of a thing so
poor and lowly. She had not observed the change in Lydiard after
Beauchamp came on the scene: and that may tell us how passionlessly
pure the little maidenly sentiment was. For do but look on the dewy
wood-sorrel flower; it is not violet or rose inviting hands to pluck
it: still it is there, happy in the woods. And Jenny’s feeling was that
a foot had crushed it.

She wept, thinking confusedly of Lord Romfrey; trying to think he had
made his amends tardily, and that Beauchamp prized him too highly for
the act. She had no longer anything to resent: she was obliged to weep.
In truth, as the earl had noticed, she was physically depressed by the
strain of her protracted watch over Beauchamp, as well as rather
heartsick.

But she had been of aid and use in saving him! She was not quite a
valueless person; sweet, too, was the thought that he consulted her,
listened to her, weighed her ideas. He had evidently taken to study
her, as if dispersing some wonderment that one of her sex should have
ideas. He had repeated certain of her own which had been forgotten by
her. His eyes were often on her with this that she thought humorous
intentness. She smiled. She had assisted in raising him from his bed of
sickness, whereof the memory affrighted her and melted her. The
difficulty now was to keep him indoors, and why he would not go even
temporarily to a large house like Mount Laurels, whither Colonel
Halkett was daily requesting him to go, she was unable to comprehend.
His love of Dr. Shrapnel might account for it.

“Own, Jenny,” said Beauchamp, springing up to meet her as she entered
the room where he and Dr. Shrapnel sat discussing Lord Romfrey’s
bearing at his visit, “own that my uncle Everard is a true nobleman. He
has to make the round to the right mark, but he comes to it. _I_ could
not move him—and I like him the better for that. He worked round to it
himself. I ought to have been sure he would. You’re right: I break my
head with impatience.”

“No; you sowed seed,” said Dr. Shrapnel. “Heed not that girl, my
Beauchamp. The old woman’s in the Tory, and the Tory leads the young
maid. Here’s a fable I draw from a Naturalist’s book, and we’ll set it
against the dicta of Jenny Do-nothing, Jenny Discretion, Jenny
Wait-for-the-Gods: Once upon a time in a tropical island a man lay
sick; so ill that he could not rise to trouble his neighbours for help;
so weak that it was lifting a mountain to get up from his bed; so
hopeless of succour that the last spark of distraught wisdom perching
on his brains advised him to lie where he was and trouble not himself,
since peace at least he could command, before he passed upon the black
highroad men call our kingdom of peace: ay, he lay there. Now it
chanced that this man had a mess to cook for his nourishment. And life
said, Do it, and death said, To what end? He wrestled with the stark
limbs of death, and cooked the mess; and that done he had no strength
remaining to him to consume it, but crept to his bed like the toad into
winter. Now, meanwhile a steam arose from the mess, and he lay
stretched. So it befel that the birds of prey of the region scented the
mess, and they descended and thronged at that man’s windows. And the
man’s neighbours looked up at them, for it was the sign of one who is
fit for the beaks of birds, lying unburied. Fail to spread the pall one
hour where suns are decisive, and the pall comes down out of heaven!
They said, The man is dead within. And they went to his room, and saw
him and succoured him. They lifted him out of death by the last uncut
thread.

“Now, my Jenny Weigh-words, Jenny Halt-there! was it they who saved the
man, or he that saved himself? The man taxed his expiring breath to sow
seed of life. Lydiard shall put it into verse for a fable in song for
our people. I say it is a good fable, and sung spiritedly may serve for
nourishment, and faith in work, to many of our poor fainting fellows!
Now you?”

Jenny said: “I think it is a good fable of self-help. Does it quite
illustrate the case? I mean, the virtue of impatience. But I like the
fable and the moral; and I think it would do good if it were made
popular, though it would be hard to condense it to a song.”

“It would be hard! ay, then we do it forthwith. And you shall compose
the music. As for the ‘case of impatience,’ my dear, you tether the
soaring universal to your pet-lamb’s post, the special. I spoke of seed
sown. I spoke of the fruits of energy and resolution. Cared I for an
apology? I took the blows as I take hail from the clouds—which
apologize to you the moment you are in shelter, if you laugh at them.
So, good night to that matter! Are we to have rain this evening? I must
away into Bevisham to the Workmen’s Hall, and pay the men.”

“There will not be rain; there will be frost, and you must be well
wrapped if you must go,” said Jenny. “And tell them not to think of
deputations to Captain Beauchamp yet.”

“No, no deputations; let them send Killick, if they want to say
anything,” said Beauchamp.

“Wrong!” the doctor cried; “wrong! wrong! Six men won’t hurt you more
than one. And why check them when their feelings are up? They burn to
be speaking some words to you. Trust me, Beauchamp, if we shun to
encounter the good warm soul of numbers, our hearts are narrowed to
them. The business of our modern world is to open heart and stretch out
arms to numbers. In numbers we have our sinews; they are our iron and
gold. Scatter them not; teach them the secret of cohesion. Practically,
since they gave you not their entire confidence once, you should not
rebuff them to suspicions of you as aristocrat, when they rise on the
effort to believe a man of, as “tis called, birth their undivided
friend. Meet them!”

“Send them,” said Beauchamp.

Jenny Denham fastened a vast cloak and a comforter on the doctor’s
heedless shoulders and throat, enjoining on him to return in good time
for dinner.

He put his finger to her cheek in reproof of such supererogatory
counsel to a man famous for his punctuality.

The day had darkened.

Beauchamp begged Jenny to play to him on the piano.

“Do you indeed care to have music?” said she. “I did not wish you to
meet a deputation, because your strength is not yet equal to it. Dr.
Shrapnel dwells on principles, forgetful of minor considerations.”

“I wish thousands did!” cried Beauchamp. “When you play I seem to hear
ideas. Your music makes me think.”

Jenny lit a pair of candles and set them on the piano. “Waltzes?” she
asked.

“Call in a puppet-show at once!”

She smiled, turned over some leaves, and struck the opening notes of
the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, and made her selections.

At the finish he said: “Now read me your father’s poem, ‘_The Hunt of
the Fates._’”

She read it to him.

“Now read, ‘_The Ascent from the Inferno._’”

That she read: and also “_Soul and Brute_,” another of his favourites.

He wanted more, and told her to read “_First Love—Last Love._”

“I fear I have not the tone of voice for love-poems,” Jenny said,
returning the book to him.

“I’ll read it,” said he.

He read with more impressiveness than effect. Lydiard’s reading
thrilled her: Beauchamp’s insisted too much on particular lines. But it
was worth while observing him. She saw him always as in a picture,
remote from herself. His loftier social station and strange character
precluded any of those keen suspicions by which women learn that a fire
is beginning to glow near them.

“How I should like to have known your father!” he said. “I don’t wonder
at Dr. Shrapnel’s love of him. Yes, he was one of the great men of his
day! and it’s a higher honour to be of his blood than any that rank can
give. You were ten years old when you lost him. Describe him to me.”

“He used to play with me like a boy,” said Jenny. She described her
father from a child’s recollection of him.

“Dr. Shrapnel declares he would have been one of the first surgeons in
Europe: and he was one of the first of poets,” Beauchamp pursued with
enthusiasm. “So he was doubly great. I hold a good surgeon to be in the
front rank of public benefactors—where they put rich brewers, bankers,
and speculative manufacturers now. Well! the world is young. We shall
alter that in time. Whom did your father marry?”

Jenny answered, “My mother was the daughter of a London lawyer. She
married without her father’s approval of the match, and he left her
nothing.”

Beauchamp interjected: “Lawyer’s money!”

“It would have been useful to my mother’s household when I was an
infant,” said Jenny.

“Poor soul! I suppose so. Yes; well,” Beauchamp sighed. “Money! never
mind how it comes. We’re in such a primitive condition that we catch at
anything to keep us out of the cold; dogs with a bone!—instead of
living, as Dr. Shrapnel prophecies, for and, with one another. It’s war
now, and money’s the weapon of war. And we’re the worst nation in
Europe for that. But if we fairly recognize it, we shall be the first
to alter our ways. There’s the point. Well, Jenny, I can look you in
the face to-night. Thanks to my uncle Everard at last!”

“Captain Beauchamp, you have never been blamed.”

“I am Captain Beauchamp by courtesy, in public. My friends call me
Nevil. I think I have heard the name on your lips?”

“When you were very ill.”

He stood closer to her, very close.

“Which was the arm that bled for me? May I look at it? There was a
bruise.”

“Have you not forgotten that trifle? There is the faintest possible
mark of it left.”

“I wish to see.”

She gently defended the arm, but he made it so much a matter of earnest
to see the bruise of the old Election missile on her fair arm, that,
with a pardonable soft blush, to avoid making much of it herself, she
turned her sleeve a little above the wrist. He took her hand.

“It was for me!”

“It was quite an accident: no harm was intended.”

“But it was in my cause—for me!”

“Indeed, Captain Beauchamp...”

“Nevil, we say indoors.”

“Nevil—but is it not wiser to say what comes naturally to us?”

“Who told you to-day that you had brought me to life? I am here to
prove it true. If I had paid attention to your advice, I should not
have gone into the cottage of those poor creatures and taken away the
fever. I did no good there. But the man’s wife said her husband had
been ruined by voting for me: and it was a point of honour to go in and
sit with him. You are not to have your hand back: it is mine. Don’t you
remember, Jenny, how you gave me your arm on the road when I staggered;
two days before the fever knocked me over? Shall I tell you what I
thought then? I thought that he who could have you for a mate would
have the bravest and helpfullest wife in all England. And not a mere
beauty, for you have good looks: but you have the qualities I have been
in search of. Why do your eyes look so mournfully at me? I am full of
hope. We’ll sail the _Esperanza_ for the Winter: you and I, and our
best friend with us. And you shall have a voice in the council, be
sure.”

“If you are two to one?” Jenny said quickly, to keep from faltering.

Beauchamp pressed his mouth to the mark of the bruise on her arm. He
held her fast.

“I mean it, if you will join me, that you and I should rejoice the
heart of the dear old man—will you? He has been brooding over your
loneliness here if you are unmarried, ever since his recovery. I owe my
life to you, and every debt of gratitude to him. Now, Jenny!”

“Oh! Captain Beauchamp—Nevil, if you will... if I may have my hand. You
exaggerate common kindness. He loves you. We both esteem you.”

“But you don’t love me?”

“Indeed I have no fear that I shall be unable to support myself, if I
am left alone.”

“But I want your help. I wake from illness with my eyes open. I must
have your arm to lean on now and then.”

Jenny dropped a shivering sigh.

“Uncle is long absent!” she said.

Her hand was released. Beauchamp inspected his watch.

“He may have fallen! He may be lying on the common!”

“Oh!” cried Jenny, “why did I let him go out without me?”

“Let me have his lantern; I’ll go and search over the common.”

“You must not go out,” said she.

“I must. The old man may be perishing.”

“It will be death to you... Nevil!”

“That’s foolish. I can stand the air for a few minutes.”

“I’ll go,” said Jenny.

“Unprotected? No.”

“Cook shall come with me.”

“Two women!”

“Nevil, if you care a little for me, be good, be kind, submit.”

“He is half an hour behind dinner-time, and he’s never late. Something
must have happened to him. Way for me, my dear girl.”

She stood firm between him and the door. It came to pass that she
stretched her hands to arrest him, and he seized the hands.

“Rather than you should go out in this cold weather, anything!” she
said, in the desperation of physical inability to hold him back.

“Ah!” Beauchamp crossed his arms round her. “I’ll wait for five
minutes.”

One went by, with Jenny folded, broken and sobbing, senseless, against
his breast.

They had not heard Dr. Shrapnel quietly opening the hall door and
hanging up his hat. He looked in.

“Beauchamp!” he exclaimed.

“Come, doctor,” said Beauchamp, and loosened his clasp of Jenny
considerately.

She disengaged herself.

“Beauchamp! now I die a glad man.”

“Witness, doctor, she’s mine by her own confession.”

“Uncle!” Jenny gasped. “Oh! Captain Beauchamp, what an error! what
delusion!... Forget it. I will. Here are more misunderstandings! You
shall be excused. But be...”

“Be you the blessedest woman alive on this earth, my Jenny!” shouted
Dr. Shrapnel. “You have the choice man on all the earth for husband,
sweetheart! Ay, of all the earth! I go with a message for my old friend
Harry Denham, to quicken him in the grave; for the husband of his girl
is Nevil Beauchamp! The one thing I dared not dream of thousands is
established. Sunlight, my Jenny!”

Beauchamp kissed her hand.

She slipped away to her chamber, grovelling to find her diminished self
somewhere in the mid-thunder of her amazement, as though it were to
discover a pin on the floor by the flash of lightning. Where was she!

This ensued from the apology of Lord Romfrey to Dr. Shrapnel.




CHAPTER LV.
WITHOUT LOVE


At the end of November, Jenny Denham wrote these lines to Mr. Lydiard,
in reply to his request that she should furnish the latest particulars
of Nevil Beauchamp, for the satisfaction of the Countess of Romfrey:

“There is everything to reassure Lady Romfrey in the state of Captain
Beauchamp’s health, and I have never seen him so placidly happy as he
has been since the arrival, yesterday morning, of a lady from France,
Madame la Marquise de Rouaillout, with her brother, M. le Comte de
Croisnel. Her husband, I hear from M. de Croisnel, dreads our climate
and coffee too much to attempt the voyage. I understand that she writes
to Lady Romfrey to-day. Lady Romfrey’s letter to her, informing her of
Captain Beauchamp’s alarming illness, went the round from Normandy to
Touraine and Dauphiny, otherwise she would have come over earlier.

“Her first inquiry of me was, ‘Il est mort?’ You would have supposed
her disappointed by my answer. A light went out in her eyes, like that
of a veilleuse in the dawn. She looked at me without speaking, while
her beautiful eyes regained their natural expression. She shut them and
sighed. ‘Tell him that M. de Croisnel and his sister are here.’

“This morning her wish to see Miss Halkett was gratified. You know my
taste was formed in France; I agree with Captain Beauchamp in his more
than admiration of Frenchwomen; ours, though more accomplished, are
colder and less plastic. But Miss Halkett is surpassingly beautiful,
very amiable, very generous, a perfect friend. She is our country at
its best. Probably she is shy of speaking French; she frequently puts
the Italian accent. Madame de Rouaillout begged to speak with her
alone: I do not know what passed. Miss Halkett did not return to us.

“Dr. Shrapnel and Captain Beauchamp have recently been speculating on
our becoming a nation of artists, and authorities in science and
philosophy, by the time our coalfields and material wealth are
exhausted. That, and the cataclysm, are their themes.

“They say, will things end utterly?—all our gains be lost? The question
seems to me to come of that love of earth which is recognition of God:
for if they cannot reconcile themselves to believe in extinction, to
what must they be looking? It is a confirmation of your saying, that
love leads to God, through art or in acts.

“You will regret to hear that the project of Captain Beauchamp’s voyage
is in danger of being abandoned. A committee of a vacant Radical
borough has offered to nominate him. My influence is weak; madame would
have him go back with her and her brother to Normandy. My influence is
weak, I suppose, because he finds me constantly leaning to expediency—I
am your pupil. It may be quite correct that powder is intended for
explosion: we do not therefore apply a spark to the barrel. I ventured
on that. He pitied me in the snares of simile and metaphor. He is the
same, you perceive. How often have we not discussed what would have
become of him, with that ‘rocket brain’ of his, in less quiet times!
Yet, when he was addressing a deputation of workmen the other day, he
recommended patience to them as one of the virtues that count under
wisdom. He is curiously impatient for knowledge. One of his reasons for
not accepting Colonel Halkett’s offer of his yacht is, that he will not
be able to have books enough on board. Definite instead of vast and
hazy duties are to be desired for him, I think. Most fervently I pray
that he will obtain a ship and serve some years. At the risk of your
accusing me of ‘sententious posing,’ I would say, that men who do not
live in the present chiefly, but hamper themselves with giant tasks in
excess of alarm for the future, however devoted and noble they may
be—and he is an example of one that is—reduce themselves to the
dimensions of pigmies; they have the cry of infants. You reply,
Foresight is an element of love of country and mankind. But how often
is not the foresight guess-work?

“He has not spoken of the DAWN project. To-day he is repeating one of
uncle’s novelties—‘Sultry Tories.’ The sultry Tory sits in the sun and
prophecies woefully of storm, it appears. Your accusation that I am one
at heart amuses me; I am not quite able to deny it. ‘Sultriness’ I am
not conscious of. But it would appear to be an epithet for the
Conservatives of wealth. So that England, being very wealthy, we are to
call it a sultry country? You are much wanted, for where there is no
‘middleman Liberal’ to hold the scales for them, these two have it all
their own way, which is not good for them.

Captain Beauchamp quotes you too. It seems that you once talked to him
of a machine for measuring the force of blows delivered with the fist,
and compared his efforts to those of one perpetually practising at it:
and this you are said to have called ‘The case of the Constitutional
Realm and the extreme Radical.’ Elsewhere the Radical smites at iron or
rotten wood; _in England it is a cushion on springs_. Did you say it?
He quotes it as yours, half acquiescingly, and ruefully.

“For visitors, we have had Captain Baskelett for two minutes, and Lord
Palmet, who stayed longer, and seems to intend to come daily. He
attempts French with Madame de R., and amuses her a little: a silver
foot and a ball of worsted. Mr. and Mrs. Grancey Lespel have called,
and Lord and Lady Croyston. Colonel Halkett, Miss Halkett, and Mr.
Tuckham come frequently. Captain Beauchamp spoke to her yesterday of
her marriage. “Madame de R. leaves us to-morrow. Her brother is a
delightful, gay-tempered, very handsome boyish Frenchman—not her equal,
to my mind, for I do not think Frenchmen comparable to the women of
France; but she is exceedingly grave, with hardly a smile, and his high
spirits excite Nevil’s, so it is pleasant to see them together.”

The letter was handed to Lady Romfrey. She read through it thoughtfully
till she came to the name of Nevil, when she frowned. On the morrow she
pronounced it a disingenuous letter. Renée had sent her these lines:

“I should come to you if my time were not restricted; my brother’s
leave of absence is short. I have done here what lay in my power, to
show you I have learnt something in the school of self-immolation. I
have seen Mlle. Halkett. She is a beautiful young woman, deficient only
in words, doubtless. My labour, except that it may satisfy you, was the
vainest of tasks. She marries a ruddy monsieur of a name that I forget,
and of the bearing of a member of the gardes du corps, without the
stature. Enfin, madame, I have done my duty, and do not regret it,
since I may hope that it will win for me some approbation and a portion
of the esteem of a lady to whom I am indebted for that which is now the
best of life to me: and I do not undervalue it in saying I would gladly
have it stamped on brass and deposited beside my father’s. I have my
faith. I would it were Nevil’s too—and yours, should you be in need of
it.

“He will marry Mlle. Denham. If I may foretell events, she will steady
him. She is a young person who will not feel astray in society of his
rank; she possesses the natural grace we do not expect to see out of
our country—from sheer ignorance of what is beyond it. For the moment
she affects to consider herself unworthy; and it is excuseable that she
should be slightly alarmed at her prospect. But Nevil must have a wife.
I presume to think that he could not have chosen better. Above all,
make him leave England for the Winter. Adieu, dear countess. Nevil
promises me a visit after his marriage. I shall not set foot on England
again: but you, should you ever come to our land of France, will find
my heart open to you at the gates of undying grateful recollection. I
am not skilled in writing. You have looked into me once; look now; I am
the same. Only I have succeeded in bringing myself to a greater
likeness to the dead, as it becomes a creature to be who is coupled
with one of their body. Meanwhile I shall have news of you. I trust
that soon I may be warranted in forwarding congratulations to Lord
Romfrey.”

Rosamund handed the letters to her husband. Not only did she think Miss
Denham disingenuous, she saw that the girl was not in love with
Beauchamp: and the idea of a loveless marriage for him threw the
mournfullest of Hecate’s beams along the course of a career that the
passionate love of a bride, though she were not well-born and not
wealthy, would have rosily coloured.

“Without love!” she exclaimed to herself. She asked the earl’s opinion
of the startling intelligence, and of the character of that Miss
Denham, who could pen such a letter, after engaging to give her hand to
Nevil.

Lord Romfrey laughed in his dumb way. “If Nevil must have a wife—and
the marquise tells you so, and she ought to know—he may as well marry a
girl who won’t go all the way down hill with him at his pace. He’ll be
cogged.”

“You do not object to such an alliance?”

“I’m past objection. There’s no law against a man’s marrying his
nurse.”

“But she is not even in love with him!”

“I dare say not. He wants a wife: she accepts a husband. The two women
who were in love with him he wouldn’t have.”

Lady Romfrey sighed deeply: “He has lost Cecilia! She might still have
been his: but he has taken to that girl. And Madame de Rouaillout
praises the girl because—oh! I see it—she has less to be jealous of in
Miss Denham: of whose birth and blood we know nothing. Let that pass!
If only she loved him! I cannot endure the thought of his marrying a
girl who is not in love with him.”

“Just as you like, my dear.”

“I used to suspect Mr. Lydiard.”

“Perhaps he’s the man.”

“Oh, what an end of so brilliant a beginning!”

“It strikes me, my dear,” said the earl, “it’s the proper common sense
beginning that may have a fairish end.”

“No, but what I feel is that he—our Nevil!—has accomplished hardly
anything, if anything!”

“He hasn’t marched on London with a couple of hundred thousand men: no,
he hasn’t done that,” the earl said, glancing back in his mind through
Beauchamp’s career. “And he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s
scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No:
we haven’t had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did
do: _he got me down on my knees!_”

Lord Romfrey pronounced these words with a sober emphasis that struck
the humour of it sharply into Rosamund’s heart, through some contrast
it presented between Nevil’s aim at the world and hit of a man: the
immense deal thought of it by the earl, and the very little that Nevil
would think of it—the great domestic achievement to be boasted of by an
enthusiastic devotee of politics!

She embraced her husband with peals of loving laughter: the last
laughter heard in Romfrey Castle for many a day.




CHAPTER LVI.
THE LAST OF NEVIL BEAUCHAMP


Not before Beauchamp was flying with the Winter gales to warmer climes
could Rosamund reflect on his career unshadowed by her feminine
mortification at the thought that he was unloved by the girl he had
decided to marry. But when he was away and winds blew, the clouds which
obscured an embracing imagination of him—such as, to be true and full
and sufficient, should stretch like the dome of heaven over the
humblest of lives under contemplation—broke, and revealed him to her as
one who had other than failed: rather as one in mid career, in mid
forest, who, by force of character, advancing in self-conquest, strikes
his impress right and left around him, because of his aim at stars. He
had faults, and she gloried to think he had; for the woman’s heart
rejoiced in his portion of our common humanity while she named their
prince to men: but where was he to be matched in devotedness and in
gallantry? and what man of blood fiery as Nevil’s ever fought so to
subject it? Rosamund followed him like a migratory bird, hovered over
his vessel, perched on deck beside the helm, where her sailor was sure
to be stationed, entered his breast, communed with him, and wound him
round and round with her love. He has mine! she cried. Her craving that
he should be blest in the reward, or flower-crown, of his wife’s love
of him lessened in proportion as her brooding spirit vividly realized
his deeds. In fact it had been but an example of our very general
craving for a climax, palpable and scenic. She was completely satisfied
by her conviction that his wife would respect and must be subordinate
to him. So it had been with her. As for love, let him come to his
Rosamund for love, and appreciation, adoration!

Rosamund drew nigh to her hour of peril with this torch of her love of
Beauchamp to illuminate her.

There had been a difficulty in getting him to go. One day Cecilia
walked down to Dr. Shrapnel’s with Mr. Tuckham, to communicate that the
_Esperanza_ awaited Captain Beauchamp, manned and provisioned, off the
pier. Now, he would not go without Dr. Shrapnel, nor the doctor without
Jenny; and Jenny could not hold back, seeing that the wish of her heart
was for Nevil to be at sea, untroubled by political questions and
prowling Radical deputies. So her consent was the seal of the voyage.
What she would not consent to, was the proposal to have her finger
ringed previous to the voyage, altogether in the manner of a sailor’s
bride. She seemed to stipulate for a term of courtship. Nevil frankly
told the doctor that he was not equal to it; anything that was kind he
was quite ready to say; and anything that was pretty: but nothing
particularly kind and pretty occurred to him: he was exactly like a
juvenile correspondent facing a blank sheet of letter paper:—he really
did not know what to say, further than the uncomplicated exposition of
his case, that he wanted a wife and had found the very woman. How,
then, fathom Jenny’s mood for delaying? Dr. Shrapnel’s exhortations
were so worded as to induce her to comport herself like a Scriptural
woman, humbly wakeful to the surpassing splendour of the high fortune
which had befallen her in being so selected, and obedient at a sign.
But she was, it appeared that she was, a maid of scaly vision, not
perceptive of the blessedness of her lot. She could have been very
little perceptive, for she did not understand his casual allusion to
Beauchamp’s readiness to overcome “a natural repugnance,” for the
purpose of making her his wife.

Up to the last moment, before Cecilia Halkett left the deck of the
_Esperanza_ to step on the pier, Jenny remained in vague but excited
expectation of something intervening to bring Cecilia and Beauchamp
together. It was not a hope; it was with pure suspense that she awaited
the issue. Cecilia was pale. Beauchamp shook Mr. Tuckham by the hand,
and said: “I shall not hear the bells, but send me word of it, will
you?” and he wished them both all happiness.

The sails of the schooner filled. On a fair frosty day, with a light
wind ruffling from the North-west, she swept away, out of sight of
Bevisham, and the island, into the Channel, to within view of the coast
of France. England once below the water-line, alone with Beauchamp and
Dr. Shrapnel, Jenny Denham knew her fate.

As soon as that grew distinctly visible in shape and colour, she ceased
to be reluctant. All about her, in air and sea and unknown coast, was
fresh and prompting. And if she looked on Beauchamp, the thought—my
husband! palpitated, and destroyed and re-made her. Rapidly she
underwent her transformation from doubtfully-minded woman to woman
awakening clear-eyed, and with new sweet shivers in her temperate
blood, like the tremulous light seen running to the morn upon a quiet
sea. She fell under the charm of Beauchamp at sea.

In view of the island of Madeira, Jenny noticed that some trouble had
come upon Dr. Shrapnel and Beauchamp, both of whom had been hilarious
during the gales; but sailing into Summer they began to wear that look
which indicated one of their serious deliberations. She was not taken
into their confidence, and after awhile they recovered partially.

The truth was, they had been forced back upon old English ground by a
recognition of the absolute necessity, for her sake, of handing
themselves over to a parson. In England, possibly, a civil marriage
might have been proposed to the poor girl. In a foreign island, they
would be driven not simply to accept the services of a parson, but to
seek him and solicit him: otherwise the knot, faster than any sailor’s
in binding, could not be tied. Decidedly it could not; and how submit?
Neither Dr. Shrapnel nor Beauchamp were of a temper to deceive the
clerical gentleman; only they had to think of Jenny’s feelings. Alas
for us!—this our awful baggage in the rear of humanity, these women who
have not moved on their own feet one step since the primal mother
taught them to suckle, are perpetually pulling us backward on the
march. Slaves of custom, forms, shows and superstitions, they are
slaves of the priests. “They are so in gratitude perchance, as the
matter works,” Dr. Shrapnel admitted. For at one period the priests did
cherish and protect the weak from animal man. But we have entered a
broader daylight now, when the sun of high heaven has crowned our
structure with the flower of brain, like him to scatter mists, and
penetrate darkness, and shoot from end to end of earth; and must we
still be grinning subserviently to ancient usages and stale forms,
because of a baggage that it is, woe to us! too true, we cannot cut
ourselves loose from? Lydiard might say we are compelling the priests
to fight, and that they are compact foemen, not always passive. Battle,
then!—The cry was valiant. Nevertheless, Jenny would certainly insist
upon the presence of a parson, in spite of her bridegroom’s “natural
repugnance.” Dr. Shrapnel offered to argue it with her, being of
opinion that a British consul could satisfactorily perform the
ceremony. Beauchamp knew her too well. Moreover, though tongue-tied as
to love-making, he was in a hurry to be married. Jenny’s eyes were
lovely, her smiles were soft; the fair promise of her was in bloom on
her face and figure. He could not wait; he must off to the parson.

Then came the question as to whether honesty and honour did not impose
it on them to deal openly with that gentle, and on such occasions
unobtrusive official, by means of a candid statement to him overnight,
to the effect that they were the avowed antagonists of his Church,
which would put him on his defence, and lead to an argument that would
accomplish his overthrow. You parsons, whose cause is good, marshal out
the poor of the land, that we may see the sort of army your stewardship
has gained for you. What! no army? only women and hoary men? And in the
rear rank, to support you as an institution, none but fanatics,
cowards, white-eyeballed dogmatists, timeservers, money-changers,
mockers in their sleeves? What is this?

But the prospect of so completely confounding the unfortunate parson
warned Beauchamp that he might have a shot in his locker: the parson
heavily trodden on will turn. “I suppose we must be hypocrites,” he
said in dejection. Dr. Shrapnel was even more melancholy. He again
offered to try his persuasiveness upon Jenny. Beauchamp declined to let
her be disturbed.

She did not yield so very lightly to the invitation to go before a
parson. She had to be wooed after all; a Harry Hotspur’s wooing. Three
clergymen of the Established Church were on the island: “And where
won’t they be, where there’s fine scenery and comforts abound?”
Beauchamp said to the doctor ungratefully.

“Whether a celibate clergy ruins the Faith faster than a non-celibate,
I won’t dispute,” replied the doctor; “but a non-celibate interwinds
with us, and is likely to keep up a one-storied edifice longer.”

Jenny hesitated. She was a faltering unit against an ardent and
imperative two in the council. And Beauchamp had shown her a letter of
Lady Romfrey’s very clearly signifying that she and her lord
anticipated tidings of the union. Marrying Beauchamp was no simple
adventure. She feared in her bosom, and resigned herself.

She had a taste of what it was to be, at the conclusion of the service.
Beauchamp thanked the good-natured clergyman, and spoke approvingly of
him to his bride, as an agreeable well-bred gentlemanly person. Then,
fronting her and taking both her hands: “Now, my darling,” he said:
“you must pledge me your word to this: I have stooped my head to the
parson, and I am content to have done that to win you, though I don’t
think much of myself for doing it. I can’t look so happy as I am. And
this idle ceremony—however, I thank God I have you, and I thank you for
taking me. But you won’t expect me to give in to the parson again.”

“But, Nevil,” she said, fearing what was to come: “they are gentlemen,
good men.”

“Yes, yes.”

“They are educated men, Nevil.”

“Jenny! Jenny Beauchamp, they’re not men, they’re Churchmen. My
experience of the priest in our country is, that he has abandoned—he’s
dead against the only cause that can justify and keep up a Church: the
cause of the poor—the people. He is a creature of the moneyed class. I
look on him as a pretender. I go through his forms, to save my wife
from annoyance, but there’s the end of it: and if ever I’m helpless,
unable to resist him, I rely on your word not to let him intrude; he’s
to have nothing to do with the burial of me. He’s against the cause of
the people. Very well: I make my protest to the death against him. When
he’s a Christian instead of a Churchman, then may my example not be
followed. It’s little use looking for that.”

Jenny dropped some tears on her bridal day. She sighed her submission.
“So long as you do not change,” said she.

“Change!” cried Nevil. “That’s for the parson. Now it’s over: we start
fair. My darling! I have you. I don’t mean to bother you. I’m sure
you’ll see that the enemies of Reason are the enemies of the human
race; you will see that. I can wait.”

“If we can be sure that we ourselves are using reason rightly,
Nevil!—not prejudice.”

“Of course. But don’t you see, my Jenny, we have no interest in
opposing reason?”

“But have we not all grown up together? And is it just or wise to
direct our efforts to overthrow a solid structure that is a part...?”

He put his legal right in force to shut her mouth, telling her
presently she might _Lydiardize_ as much as she liked. While practising
this mastery, he assured her he would always listen to her: yes,
whether she Lydiardized, or what Dr. Shrapnel called Jenny-prated.

“That is to say, dear Nevil, that you have quite made up your mind to a
toddling chattering little nursery wife?”

Very much the contrary to anything of the sort, he declared; and he
proved his honesty by announcing an immediate reflection that had come
to him: “How oddly things are settled! Cecilia Halkett and Tuckham; you
and I! Now, I know for certain that I have brought Cecilia Halkett out
of her woman’s Toryism, and given her at least liberal views, and she
goes and marries an arrant Tory; while you, a bit of a Tory at heart,
more than anything else, have married an ultra.”

“Perhaps we may hope that the conflict will be seasonable on both
sides?—if you give me fair play, Nevil!”

As fair play as a woman’s lord could give her, she was to have; with
which, adieu to argumentation and controversy, and all the thanks in
life to the parson! On a lovely island, free from the seductions of
care, possessing a wife who, instead of starting out of romance and
poetry with him to the supreme honeymoon, led him back to those
forsaken valleys of his youth, and taught him the joys of colour and
sweet companionship, simple delights, a sister mind, with a loveliness
of person and nature unimagined by him, Beauchamp drank of a happiness
that neither Renée nor Cecilia had promised. His wooing of Jenny
Beauchamp was a flattery richer than any the maiden Jenny Denham could
have deemed her due; and if his wonder in experiencing such strange
gladness was quaintly ingenuous, it was delicious to her to see and
know full surely that he who was at little pains to court, or please,
independently of the agency of the truth in him, had come to be her
lover through being her husband.

Here I would stop. It is Beauchamp’s career that carries me on to its
close, where the lanterns throw their beams off the mudbanks by the
black riverside; when some few English men and women differed from the
world in thinking that it had suffered a loss.

They sorrowed for the earl when tidings came to them of the loss of his
child, alive one hour in his arms. Rosamund caused them to be deceived
as to her condition. She survived; she wrote to Jenny, bidding her keep
her husband cruising. Lord Romfrey added a brief word: he told Nevil
that he would see no one for the present; hoped he would be absent a
year, not a day less. To render it the more easily practicable, in the
next packet of letters Colonel Halkett and Cecilia begged them not to
bring the _Esperanza_ home for the yachting season: the colonel said
his daughter was to be married in April, and that bridegroom and bride
had consented to take an old man off with them to Italy; perhaps in the
autumn all might meet in Venice.

“And you’ve never seen Venice,” Beauchamp said to Jenny.

“Everything is new to me,” said she, penetrating and gladly joining the
conspiracy to have him out of England.

Dr. Shrapnel was not so compliant as the young husband. Where he could
land and botanize, as at Madeira, he let time fly and drum his wings on
air, but the cities of priests along the coast of Portugal and Spain
roused him to a burning sense of that flight of time and the vacuity it
told of in his labours. Greatly to his astonishment, he found that it
was no longer he and Beauchamp against Jenny, but Jenny and Beauchamp
against him.

“What!” he cried, “to draw breath day by day, and not to pay for it by
striking daily at the rock Iniquity? Are you for that, Beauchamp? And
in a land where these priests walk with hats curled like the
water-lily’s leaf without the flower? How far will you push indolent
unreason to gain the delusion of happiness? There is no such thing: but
there’s trance. That talk of happiness is a carrion clamour of the
creatures of prey. Take it—and you’re helping tear some poor wretch to
pieces, whom you might be constructing, saving perchance: some one?
some thousands! You, Beauchamp, when I met you first, you were for
England, England! for a breadth of the palm of my hand
comparatively—the round of a copper penny, no wider! And from that you
jumped at a bound to the round of this earth: you were for humanity.
Ay, we sailed our planet among the icy spheres, and were at blood-heat
for its destiny, you and I! And now you hover for a wind to catch you.
So it is for a soul rejecting prayer. This wind and that has it: the
well-springs within are shut down fast! I pardon my Jenny, my Harry
Denham’s girl. She is a woman, and has a brain like a bell that rings
all round to the tongue. It is her kingdom, of the interdicted
untraversed frontiers. But what cares she, or any woman, that this Age
of ours should lie like a carcase against the Sun? What cares any woman
to help to hold up Life to him? He breeds divinely upon life, filthy
upon stagnation. Sail you away, if you will, in your trance. I go. I go
home by land alone, and I await you. Here in this land of moles
upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of curses.
Counter-anathema, you might call me.”

“Oh! I feel the comparison so, for England shining spiritually bright,”
said Jenny, and cut her husband adrift with the exclamation, and saw
him float away to Dr. Shrapnel.

“_Spiritually_ bright!”

“By comparison, Nevil.”

“There’s neither spiritual nor political brightness in England, but a
common resolution to eat of good things and stick to them,” said the
doctor: “and we two out of England, there’s barely a voice to cry scare
to the feeders. I’m back! I’m home!”

They lost him once in Cadiz, and discovered him on the quay, looking
about for a vessel. In getting him to return to the _Esperanza_, they
nearly all three fell into the hands of the police. Beauchamp gave him
a great deal of his time, reading and discussing with him on deck and
in the cabin, and projecting future enterprises, to pacify his
restlessness. A translation of Plato had become Beauchamp’s
intellectual world. This philosopher singularly anticipated his ideas.
Concerning himself he was beginning to think that he had many years
ahead of him for work. He was with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and
with Jenny as to the delay in recommencing it. Both the men laughed at
the constant employment she gave them among the Greek islands in
furnishing her severely accurate accounts of sea-fights and
land-fights: and the scenes being before them they could neither of
them protest that their task-work was an idle labour. Dr. Shrapnel
assisted in fighting Marathon and Salamis over again cordially—to
shield Great Britain from the rule of a satrapy.

Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife. On grave
subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between
grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her
nobly poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and
to elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard
call her whimsically, “Portia disrobing.”

Portia half in her doctor’s gown, half out of it. They met Lydiard and
his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the
first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son. The
thrilling mother did not perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast
over the father of the child and Dr. Shrapnel. The youngster would
insist on his right to be sprinkled by the parson, to get a legal name
and please his mother. At all turns in the history of our healthy
relations with women we are confronted by the parson! “And, upon my
word, I believe,” Beauchamp said to Lydiard, “those parsons—not bad
creatures in private life: there was one in Madeira I took a personal
liking to—but they’re utterly ignorant of what men feel to them—more
ignorant than women!” Mr. Tuckham and Mrs. Lydiard would not listen to
his foolish objections; nor were they ever mentioned to Jenny.
Apparently the commission of the act of marriage was to force Beauchamp
from all his positions one by one.

“The education of that child?” Mrs. Lydiard said to her husband.

He considered that the mother would prevail.

Cecilia feared she would not.

“Depend upon it, he’ll make himself miserable if he can,” said Tuckham.

That gentleman, however, was perpetually coming fuming from arguments
with Beauchamp, and his opinion was a controversialist’s. His common
sense was much afflicted. “I thought marriage would have stopped all
those absurdities,” he said, glaring angrily, laughing, and then
frowning. “I’ve warned him I’ll go out of my way to come across him if
he carries on his headlong folly. A man should accept his country for
what it is when he’s born into it. Don’t tell me he’s a good fellow. I
know he is, but there’s an ass mounted on the good fellow. Talks of the
parsons! Why, they’re men of education.”

“They couldn’t steer a ship in a gale, though.”

“Oh! he’s a good sailor. And let him go to sea,” said Tuckham. “His
wife’s a prize. He’s hardly worthy of her. If she manages him she’ll
deserve a monument for doing a public service.”

How fortunate it is for us that here and there we do not succeed in
wresting our temporary treasure from the grasp of the Fates!

This good old commonplace reflection came to Beauchamp while clasping
his wife’s hand on the deck of the _Esperanza_, and looking up at the
mountains over the Gulf of Venice. The impression of that marvellous
dawn when he and Renée looked up hand-in-hand was ineffaceable, and
pity for the tender hand lost to him wrought in his blood, but Jenny
was a peerless wife; and though not in the music of her tongue, or in
subtlety of delicate meaning did she excel Renée, as a sober adviser
she did, and as a firm speaker; and she had homelier deep eyes,
thoughtfuller brows. The father could speculate with good hope of
Jenny’s child. Cecilia’s wealth, too, had gone over to the Tory party,
with her incomprehensible espousal of Tuckham. Let it go; let all go
for dowerless Jenny!

It was (she dared to recollect it in her anguish) Jenny’s choice to go
home in the yacht that decided her husband not to make the journey by
land in company with the Lydiards.

The voyage was favourable. Beauchamp had a passing wish to land on the
Norman coast, and take Jenny for a day to Tourdestelle. He deferred to
her desire to land baby speedily, now they were so near home. They ran
past Otley river, having sight of Mount Laurels, and on to Bevisham,
with swelling sails. There they parted. Beauchamp made it one of his
“points of honour” to deliver the vessel where he had taken her, at her
moorings in the Otley. One of the piermen stood before Beauchamp, and
saluting him, said he had been directed to inform him that the Earl of
Romfrey was with Colonel Halkett, expecting him at Mount Laurels.
Beauchamp wanted his wife to return in the yacht. She turned her eyes
to Dr. Shrapnel. It was out of the question that the doctor should
think of going. Husband and wife parted. She saw him no more.

This is no time to tell of weeping. The dry chronicle is fittest. Hard
on nine o’clock in the December darkness, the night being still and
clear, Jenny’s babe was at her breast, and her ears were awake for the
return of her husband. A man rang at the door of the house, and asked
to see Dr. Shrapnel. This man was Killick, the Radical Sam of politics.
He said to the doctor: “I’m going to hit you sharp, sir; I’ve had it
myself: please put on your hat and come out with me; and close the
door. They mustn’t hear inside. And here’s a fly. I knew you’d be off
for the finding of the body. Commander Beauchamp’s drowned.”

Dr. Shrapnel drove round by the shore of the broad water past a great
hospital and ruined abbey to Otley village. Killick had lifted him into
the conveyance, and he lifted him out. Dr. Shrapnel had not spoken a
word. Lights were flaring on the river, illuminating the small craft
sombrely. Men, women, and children crowded the hard and landing-places,
the marshy banks and the decks of colliers and trawlers. Neither
Killick nor Dr. Shrapnel questioned them. The lights were torches and
lanterns; the occupation of the boats moving in couples was the
dragging for the dead.

“O God, let’s find his body,” a woman called out.

“Just a word; is it Commander Beauchamp?” Killick said to her.

She was scarcely aware of a question. “Here, this one,” she said, and
plucked a little boy of eight by the hand close against her side, and
shook him roughly and kissed him.

An old man volunteered information. “That’s the boy. That boy was in
his father’s boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and he
and another older than him fell overboard; and just then Commander
Beauchamp was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood,
jump up and dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him
in safe: that boy: and he dived again after the other, and was down a
long time. Either he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he’d been
rowing himself from the schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and
must have been hot when he jumped in: either way, he fetched the second
up, and sank with him. Down he went.”

A fisherman said to Killick: “Do you hear that voice thundering? That’s
the great Lord Romfrey. He’s been directing the dragging since five o’
the evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body.”

“O God, let’s find the body!” the woman with the little boy called out.

A torch lit up Lord Romfrey’s face as he stepped ashore. “The flood has
played us a trick,” he said. “We want more drags, or with the next ebb
the body may be lost for days in this infernal water.”

The mother of the rescued boy sobbed, “Oh, my lord, my lord!”

The earl caught sight of Dr. Shrapnel, and went to him.

“My wife has gone down to Mrs. Beauchamp,” he said. “She will bring her
and the baby to Mount Laurels. The child will have to be hand-fed. I
take you with me. You must not be alone.”

He put his arm within the arm of the heavily-breathing man whom he had
once flung to the ground, to support him.

“My lord! my lord!” sobbed the woman, and dropped on her knees.

“What’s this?” the earl said, drawing his hand away from the woman’s
clutch at it.

“She’s the mother, my lord,” several explained to him.

“Mother of what?”

“My boy,” the woman cried, and dragged the urchin to Lord Romfrey’s
feet, cleaning her boy’s face with her apron.

“It’s the boy Commander Beauchamp drowned to save,” said a man.

All the lights of the ring were turned on the head of the boy. Dr.
Shrapnel’s eyes and Lord Romfrey’s fell on the abashed little creature.
The boy struck out both arms to get his fists against his eyelids.

This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp!

It was not uttered, but it was visible in the blank stare at one
another of the two men who loved Beauchamp, after they had examined the
insignificant bit of mudbank life remaining in this world in the place
of him.