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Beauchamp's Career — Complete

by George Meredith · English · Gutenberg #4460 · 1,106,074 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Beauchamp's Career — Complete

Author: George Meredith


        
Release date: November 4, 2004 [eBook #4460]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4460

Credits: David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER — COMPLETE ***




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
th

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