Beauchamps Career, v2
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George Meredith >> Beauchamps Career, v2
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His Christian name was pleasant to hear from her lips. She held out a
bunch to him.
'Grapes take one back to the South,' said he. 'How do you bear
compliments? You have been in Italy some years, and it must be the South
that has worked the miracle.'
'In my growth?' said Cecilia, smiling. 'I have grown out of my
Circassian dress, Nevil.'
'You received it, then?'
'I wrote you a letter of thanks--and abuse, for your not coming to
Steynham. You may recognize these pearls.'
The pearls were round her right wrist. He looked at the blue veins.
'They're not pearls of price,' he said.
'I do not wear them to fascinate the jewellers,' rejoined Miss Halkett.
'So you are a candidate at an Election. You still have a tinge of
Africa, do you know? But you have not abandoned the navy?'
'--Not altogether.'
'Oh! no, no: I hope not. I have heard of you, . . . but who has not?
We cannot spare officers like you. Papa was delighted to hear of your
promotion. Parliament!'
The exclamation was contemptuous.
'It's the highest we can aim at,' Beauchamp observed meekly.
'I think I recollect you used to talk politics when you were a
midshipman,' she said. 'You headed the aristocracy, did you not?'
'The aristocracy wants a head,' said Beauchamp.
'Parliament, in my opinion, is the best of occupations for idle men,'
said she.
'It shows that it is a little too full of them.'
'Surely the country can go on very well without so much speech-making?'
'It can go on very well for the rich.'
Miss Halkett tapped with her foot.
'I should expect a Radical to talk in that way, Nevil.'
'Take me for one.'
'I would not even imagine it.'
'Say Liberal, then.'
'Are you not'--her eyes opened on him largely, and narrowed from surprise
to reproach, and then to pain--are you not one of us? Have you gone over
to the enemy, Nevil?'
'I have taken my side, Cecilia; but we, on our side, don't talk of an
enemy.'
'Most unfortunate! We are Tories, you know, Nevil. Papa is a thorough
Tory. He cannot vote for you. Indeed I have heard him say he is anxious
to defeat the plots of an old Republican in Bevisham--some doctor there;
and I believe he went to London to look out for a second Tory candidate
to oppose to the Liberals. Our present Member is quite safe, of course.
Nevil, this makes me unhappy. Do you not feel that it is playing traitor
to one's class to join those men?'
Such was the Tory way of thinking, Nevil Beauchamp said: the Tories
upheld their Toryism in the place of patriotism.
'But do we not owe the grandeur of the country to the Tories?' she said,
with a lovely air of conviction. 'Papa has told me how false the Whigs
played the Duke in the Peninsula: ruining his supplies, writing him down,
declaring, all the time he was fighting his first hard battles, that his
cause was hopeless--that resistance to Napoleon was impossible. The Duke
never, never had loyal support but from the Tory Government. The Whigs,
papa says, absolutely preached submission to Napoleon! The Whigs, I
hear, were the Liberals of those days. The two Pitts were Tories. The
greatness of England has been built up by the Tories. I do and will
defend them: it is the fashion to decry them now. They have the honour
and safety of the country at heart. They do not play disgracefully at
reductions of taxes, as the Liberals do. They have given us all our
heroes. Non fu mai gloria senza invidia. They have done service enough
to despise the envious mob. They never condescend to supplicate brute
force for aid to crush their opponents. You feel in all they do that the
instincts of gentlemen are active.'
Beauchamp bowed.
'Do I speak too warmly?' she asked. 'Papa and I have talked over it
often, and especially of late. You will find him your delighted host
and your inveterate opponent.'
'And you?'
'Just the same. You will have to pardon me; I am a terrible foe.'
'I declare to you, Cecilia, I would prefer having you against me to
having you indifferent.'
'I wish I had not to think it right that you should be beaten. And now--
can you throw off political Nevil, and be sailor Nevil? I distinguish
between my old friend, and my . . .our . . .'
'Dreadful antagonist?'
'Not so dreadful, except in the shock he gives us to find him in the
opposite ranks. I am grieved. But we will finish our sail in peace.
I detest controversy. I suppose, Nevil, you would have no such things
as yachts? they are the enjoyments of the rich!'
He reminded her that she wished to finish her sail in peace; and he
had to remind her of it more than once. Her scattered resources for
argumentation sprang up from various suggestions, such as the flight of
yachts, mention of the shooting season, sight of a royal palace; and
adopted a continually heightened satirical form, oddly intermixed with an
undisguised affectionate friendliness. Apparently she thought it
possible to worry him out of his adhesion to the wrong side in politics.
She certainly had no conception of the nature of his political views,
for one or two extreme propositions flung to him in jest, he swallowed
with every sign of a perfect facility, as if the Radical had come to
regard stupendous questions as morsels barely sufficient for his daily
sustenance. Cecilia reflected that he must be playing, and as it was
not a subject for play she tacitly reproved him by letting him be the
last to speak of it. He may not have been susceptible to the delicate
chastisement, probably was not, for when he ceased it was to look on the
beauty of her lowered eyelids, rather with an idea that the weight of his
argument lay on them. It breathed from him; both in the department of
logic and of feeling, in his plea for the poor man and his exposition of
the poor man's rightful claims, he evidently imagined that he had spoken
overwhelmingly; and to undeceive him in this respect, for his own good,
Cecilia calmly awaited the occasion when she might show the vanity of
arguments in their effort to overcome convictions. He stood up to take
his leave of her, on their return to the mouth of the Otley river,
unexpectedly, so that the occasion did not arrive; but on his mentioning
an engagement he had to give a dinner to a journalist and a tradesman of
the town of Bevisham, by way of excuse for not complying with her gentle
entreaty that he would go to Mount Laurels and wait to see the colonel
that evening, 'Oh! then your choice must be made irrevocably, I am sure,'
Miss Halkett said, relying upon intonation and manner to convey a great
deal more, and not without a minor touch of resentment for his having
dragged her into the discussion of politics, which she considered as a
slime wherein men hustled and tussled, no doubt worthily enough, and as
became them; not however to impose the strife upon the elect ladies of
earth. What gentleman ever did talk to a young lady upon the dreary
topic seriously? Least of all should Nevil Beauchamp have done it. That
object of her high imagination belonged to the exquisite sphere of the
feminine vision of the pure poetic, and she was vexed by the discord he
threw between her long-cherished dream and her unanticipated realization
of him:, if indeed it was he presenting himself to her in his own
character, and not trifling, or not passing through a phase of young
man's madness.
Possibly he might be the victim of the latter and more pardonable state,
and so thinking she gave him her hand.
'Good-bye, Nevil. I may tell papa to expect you tomorrow?'
'Do, and tell him to prepare for a field-day.'
She smiled. 'A sham fight that will not win you a vote! I hope you will
find your guests this evening agreeable companions.'
Beauchamp half-shrugged involuntarily. He obliterated the piece of
treason toward them by saying that he hoped so; as though the meeting
them, instead of slipping on to Mount Laurels with her, were an enjoyable
prospect.
He was dropped by the Esperanza's boat near Otley ferry, to walk along
the beach to Bevisham, and he kept eye on the elegant vessel as she
glided swan-like to her moorings off Mount Laurels park through dusky
merchant craft, colliers, and trawlers, loosely shaking her towering
snow-white sails, unchallenged in her scornful supremacy; an image of a
refinement of beauty, and of a beautiful servicelessness.
As the yacht, so the mistress: things of wealth, owing their graces to
wealth, devoting them to wealth--splendid achievements of art both! and
dedicated to the gratification of the superior senses.
Say that they were precious examples of an accomplished civilization; and
perhaps they did offer a visible ideal of grace for the rough world to
aim at. They might in the abstract address a bit of a monition to the
uncultivated, and encourage the soul to strive toward perfection, in
beauty: and there is no contesting the value of beauty when the soul is
taken into account. But were they not in too great a profusion in
proportion to their utility? That was the question for Nevil Beauchamp.
The democratic spirit inhabiting him, temporarily or permanently, asked
whether they were not increasing to numbers which were oppressive? And
further, whether it was good, for the country, the race, ay, the species,
that they should be so distinctly removed from the thousands who fought
the grand, and the grisly, old battle with nature for bread of life.
Those grimy sails of the colliers and fishing-smacks, set them in a great
sea, would have beauty for eyes and soul beyond that of elegance and
refinement. And do but look on them thoughtfully, the poor are
everlastingly, unrelievedly, in the abysses of the great sea . . . .
One cannot pursue to conclusions a line of meditation that is half-built
on the sensations as well as on the mind. Did Beauchamp at all desire to
have those idly lovely adornments of riches, the Yacht and the Lady,
swept away? Oh, dear, no. He admired them, he was at home with them.
They were much to his taste. Standing on a point of the beach for a last
look at them before he set his face to the town, he prolonged the look in
a manner to indicate that the place where business called him was not in
comparison at all so pleasing: and just as little enjoyable were his
meditations opposed to predilections. Beauty plucked the heart from his
breast. But he had taken up arms; he had drunk of the questioning cup,
that which denieth peace to us, and which projects us upon the missionary
search of the How, the Wherefore, and the Why not, ever afterward. He
questioned his justification, and yours, for gratifying tastes in an ill-
regulated world of wrong-doing, suffering, sin, and bounties
unrighteously dispensed--not sufficiently dispersed. He said by-and-by
to pleasure, battle to-day. From his point of observation, and with the
store of ideas and images his fiery yet reflective youth had gathered, he
presented himself as it were saddled to that hard-riding force known as
the logical impetus, which spying its quarry over precipices, across
oceans and deserts, and through systems and webs, and into shops and
cabinets of costliest china, will come at it, will not be refused, let
the distances and the breakages be what they may. He went like the
meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, too quick for a cry of
protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes,
and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is
shot forth from the clash of a syllogism.
CHAPTER XVI
A PARTIAL DISPLAY OF BEAUCHAMP IN HIS COLOURS
Beauchamp presented himself at Mount Laurels next day, and formally asked
Colonel Halkett for his vote, in the presence of Cecilia.
She took it for a playful glance at his new profession of politician: he
spoke half-playfully. Was it possible to speak in earnest?
'I 'm of the opposite party,' said the colonel; as conclusive a reply
as could be: but he at once fell upon the rotten navy of a Liberal
Government. How could a true sailor think of joining those Liberals!
The question referred to the country, not to a section of it, Beauchamp
protested with impending emphasis: Tories and Liberals were much the same
in regard to the care of the navy. 'Nevil!' exclaimed Cecilia. He cited
beneficial Liberal bills recently passed, which she accepted for a
concession of the navy to the Tories, and she smiled. In spite of her
dislike of politics, she had only to listen a few minutes to be drawn
into the contest: and thus it is that one hot politician makes many among
women and men of a people that have the genius of strife, or else in this
case the young lady did unconsciously feel a deep interest in refuting
and overcoming Nevil Beauchamp. Colonel Halkett denied the benefits of
those bills. 'Look,' said he, 'at the scarecrow plight of the army under
a Liberal Government!' This laid him open to the charge that he was for
backing Administrations instead of principles.
'I do,' said the colonel. 'I would rather have a good Administration
than all your talk of principles: one's a fact, but principles?
principles?' He languished for a phrase to describe the hazy things.
'I have mine, and you have yours. It's like a dispute between religions.
There's no settling it except by main force. That's what principles lead
you to.'
Principles may be hazy, but heavy artillery is disposable in defence of
them, and Beauchamp fired some reverberating guns for the eternal against
the transitory; with less of the gentlemanly fine taste, the light and
easy social semi-irony, than Cecilia liked and would have expected from
him. However, as to principles, no doubt Nevil was right, and Cecilia
drew her father to another position. 'Are not we Tories to have
principles as well as the Liberals, Nevil?'
'They may have what they call principles,' he admitted, intent on
pursuing his advantage over the colonel, who said, to shorten the
controversy: 'It's a question of my vote, and my liking. I like a Tory
Government, and I don't like the Liberals. I like gentlemen; I don't
like a party that attacks everything, and beats up the mob for power, and
repays it with sops, and is dragging us down from all we were proud of.'
'But the country is growing, the country wants expansion,' said
Beauchamp; 'and if your gentlemen by birth are not up to the mark, you
must have leaders that are.'
'Leaders who cut down expenditure, to create a panic that doubles the
outlay! I know them.'
'A panic, Nevil.' Cecilia threw stress on the memorable word.
He would hear no reminder in it. The internal condition of the country
was now the point for seriously-minded Englishmen.
'My dear boy, what have you seen of the country?' Colonel Halkett
inquired.
'Every time I have landed, colonel, I have gone to the mining and the
manufacturing districts, the centres of industry; wherever there was
dissatisfaction. I have attended meetings, to see and hear for myself.
I have read the papers . . . .'
'The papers!'
'Well, they're the mirror of the country.'
'Does one see everything in a mirror, Nevil?' said Cecilia: 'even in the
smoothest?'
He retorted softly: 'I should be glad to see what you see,' and felled
her with a blush.
For an example of the mirror offered by the Press, Colonel Halkett
touched on Mr. Timothy Turbot's article in eulogy of the great Commander
Beauchamp. 'Did you like it?' he asked. 'Ah, but if you meddle with
politics, you must submit to be held up on the prongs of a fork, my boy;
soaped by your backers and shaved by the foe; and there's a figure for a
gentleman! as your uncle Romfrey says.'
Cecilia did not join this discussion, though she had heard from her
father that something grotesque had been written of Nevil. Her
foolishness in blushing vexed body and mind. She was incensed by a silly
compliment that struck at her feminine nature when her intellect stood in
arms. Yet more hurt was she by the reflection that a too lively
sensibility might have conjured up the idea of the compliment. And
again, she wondered at herself for not resenting so rare a presumption
as it implied, and not disdaining so outworn a form of flattery. She
wondered at herself too for thinking of resentment and disdain in
relation to the familiar commonplaces of licenced impertinence. Over all
which hung a darkened image of her spirit of independence, like a moon in
eclipse.
Where lay his weakness? Evidently in the belief that he had thought
profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was
discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes
and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight
of faery in a forest bewitched.
'Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,' she said, after
listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and
indifference to the union of classes.
'I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,' he turned to her.
'The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?'
'Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets.'
'It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have
only one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas,
can there be?'
'So you call me quack?'
'No, Nevil, no,' she breathed a rich contralto note of denial: 'but if
the country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your
prescription . . .'
'There's nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,' said Nevil, blinking
over it.
She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so
tedious that her father struck through it with the remark:
'Concerning that quack--that's one in the background, though!'
'I know of none,' said Beauchamp, well-advised enough to forbear mention
of the name of Shrapnel.
Cecilia petitioned that her stumbling ignorance, which sought the road of
wisdom, might be heard out. She had a reserve entanglement for her
argumentative friend. 'You were saying, Nevil, that you were for
principles rather than for individuals, and you instanced Mr. Cougham,
the senior Liberal candidate of Bevisham, as one whom you would prefer to
see in Parliament instead of Seymour Austin, though you confess to Mr.
Austin's far superior merits as a politician and servant of his country:
but Mr. Cougham supports Liberalism while Mr. Austin is a Tory. You are
for the principle.'
'I am,' said he, bowing.
She asked: 'Is not that equivalent to the doctrine of election by Grace?'
Beauchamp interjected: 'Grace! election?'
Cecilia was tender to his inability to follow her allusion.
'Thou art a Liberal--then rise to membership,' she said. 'Accept my
creed, and thou art of the chosen. Yes, Nevil, you cannot escape from
it. Papa, he preaches Calvinism in politics.'
'We stick to men, and good men,' the colonel flourished. 'Old English
for me!'
'You might as well say, old timber vessels, when Iron's afloat, colonel.'
'I suspect you have the worst of it there, papa,' said Cecilia, taken by
the unexpectedness and smartness of the comparison coming from wits that
she had been undervaluing.
'I shall not own I'm worsted until I surrender my vote,' the colonel
rejoined.
'I won't despair of it,' said Beauchamp.
Colonel Halkett bade him come for it as often as he liked. You'll be
beaten in Bevisham, I warn you. Tory reckonings are safest: it's an
admitted fact: and we know you can't win. According to my judgement a
man owes a duty to his class.'
'A man owes a duty to his class as long as he sees his class doing its
duty to the country,' said Beauchamp; and he added, rather prettily in
contrast with the sententious commencement, Cecilia thought, that the
apathy of his class was proved when such as he deemed it an obligation on
them to come forward and do what little they could. The deduction of the
proof was not clearly consequent, but a meaning was expressed; and in
that form it brought him nearer to her abstract idea of Nevil Beauchamp
than when he raged and was precise.
After his departure she talked of him with her father, to be charitably
satirical over him, it seemed.
The critic in her ear had pounced on his repetition of certain words that
betrayed a dialectical stiffness and hinted a narrow vocabulary: his use
of emphasis, rather reminding her of his uncle Everard, was, in a young
man, a little distressing. 'The apathy of the country, papa; the apathy
of the rich; a state of universal apathy. Will you inform me, papa, what
the Tories are doing? Do we really give our consciences to the keeping
of the parsons once a week, and let them dogmatize for us to save us from
exertion? We must attach ourselves to principles; nothing is permanent
but principles. Poor Nevil! And still I am sure you have, as I have,
the feeling that one must respect him. I am quite convinced that he
supposes he is doing his best to serve his country by trying for
Parliament, fancying himself a Radical. I forgot to ask him whether he
had visited his great-aunt, Mrs. Beauchamp. They say the dear old lady
has influence with him.'
'I don't think he's been anywhere,' Colonel Halkett half laughed at the
quaint fellow. 'I wish the other great-nephew of hers were in England,
for us to run him against Nevil Beauchamp. He's touring the world. I'm
told he's orthodox, and a tough debater. We have to take what we can
get.'
'My best wishes for your success, and you and I will not talk of politics
any more, papa. I hope Nevil will come often, for his own good; he will
meet his own set of people here. And if he should dogmatize so much as
to rouse our apathy to denounce his principles, we will remember that we
are British, and can be sweet-blooded in opposition. Perhaps he may
change, even tra le tre ore a le quattro: electioneering should be a
lesson. From my recollection of Blackburn Tuckham, he was a boisterous
boy.'
'He writes uncommonly clever letters home to his aunt Beauchamp. She has
handed them to me to read,' said the colonel. 'I do like to see
tolerably solid young fellows: they give one some hope of the stability
of the country.'
'They are not so interesting to study, and not half so amusing,' said
Cecilia.
Colonel Halkett muttered his objections to the sort of amusement
furnished by firebrands.
'Firebrand is too strong a word for poor Nevil,' she remonstrated.
In that estimate of the character of Nevil Beauchamp, Cecilia soon had to
confess that she had been deceived, though not by him.
CHAPTER XVII
HIS FRIEND AND FOE
Looking from her window very early on a Sunday morning, Miss Halkett saw
Beauchamp strolling across the grass of the park. She dressed hurriedly
and went out to greet him, smiling and thanking him for his friendliness
in coming.
He said he was delighted, and appeared so, but dashed the sweetness.
'You know I can't canvass on Sundays!
'I suppose not,' she replied. 'Have you walked up from Bevisham? You
must be tired.'
'Nothing tires me,' said he.
With that they stepped on together.
Mount Laurels, a fair broad house backed by a wood of beeches and firs,
lay open to view on the higher grassed knoll of a series of descending
turfy mounds dotted with gorseclumps, and faced South-westerly along the
run of the Otley river to the gleaming broad water and its opposite
border of forest, beyond which the downs of the island threw long
interlapping curves. Great ships passed on the line of the water to and
fro; and a little mist of masts of the fishing and coasting craft by
Otley village, near the river's mouth, was like a web in air. Cecilia
led him to her dusky wood of firs, where she had raised a bower for a
place of poetical contemplation and reading when the clear lapping salt
river beneath her was at high tide. She could hail the Esperanza from
that cover; she could step from her drawing-room window, over the flower-
beds, down the gravel walk to the hard, and be on board her yacht within
seven minutes, out on her salt-water lake within twenty, closing her
wings in a French harbour by nightfall of a summer's day, whenever she
had the whim to fly abroad. Of these enviable privileges she boasted
with some happy pride.
'It's the finest yachting-station in England,' said Beauchamp.
She expressed herself very glad that he should like it so much.
Unfortunately she added, 'I hope you will find it pleasanter to be here
than canvassing.'
'I have no pleasure in canvassing,' said he. 'I canvass poor men
accustomed to be paid for their votes, and who get nothing from me but
what the baron would call a parsonical exhortation. I'm in the thick of
the most spiritless crew in the kingdom. Our southern men will not
compare with the men of the north. But still, even among these fellows,
I see danger for the country if our commerce were to fail, if distress
came on them. There's always danger in disunion. That's what the rich
won't see. They see simply nothing out of their own circle; and they
won't take a thought of the overpowering contrast between their luxury
and the way of living, that's half-starving, of the poor. They
understand it when fever comes up from back alleys and cottages, and then
they join their efforts to sweep the poor out of the district. The poor
are to get to their work anyhow, after a long morning's walk over the
proscribed space; for we must have poor, you know. The wife of a parson
I canvassed yesterday, said to me, "Who is to work for us, if you do away
with the poor, Captain Beauchamp?"'
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