Beauchamps Career, v1
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George Meredith >> Beauchamps Career, v1
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'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 naivete 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
RENEE
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 Renee. 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 Renee 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. Renee 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. Renee 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.
Renee 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.
Renee 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 Renee. 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.'
Renee 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 Renee, 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.
Renee added: 'Let us hope she will not escape being seen.'
'I give her my benediction,' said Nevil.
'And I,' said Renee; '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!'
Renee bent on Nevil one of her singular looks of raillery. She had
hitherto been fencing at a serious disadvantage.
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