Beauchamps Career, v3
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George Meredith >> Beauchamps Career, v3
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He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still
uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no
uncertainty.
Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long
unseen. It was Renee whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years
on her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing her,
he could not see.
Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice. 'You
have come. That storm! You are safe!'
So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him. 'I lost no time. But
you?'
'I am well.'
'Nothing hangs over you?'
'Nothing.'
'Why give me just three days?'
'Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?'
Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.
'You knew it was I?' said he.
'Who else could it be? I heard Venice,' she replied.
Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it appeared,
searching for something that eluded him under the road-side bank. He
sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked, as he drew
up beside Renee: 'What one picks from the earth one may wear, I presume,
especially when we can protest it is our property.'
Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the breast
buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some drooping
exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.
Renee pronounced his name: 'M. le Comte Henri d'Henriel.'
He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.
'Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God,
beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the
storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won.'
'You wear your trophy,' said Renee, and her horse reared and darted
ahead.
The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot. Beauchamp glanced
at M. d'Henriel's breast-decoration. Renee pressed the pace, and
threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley,
where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now in
shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a line
of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale and
shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.
The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face,
marvelling at her voice--that was like and unlike the Renee of old, full
of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer--made the ride magical
to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a perceptible ghost.
Renee slackened speed, saying: 'Tourdestelle spans a branch of our little
river. This is our gate. Had it been daylight I would have taken you by
another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in the
Revolution; an imposing monument, I am assured. However, you will think
it pretty beside the stream. Do you come with us, M. le Comte?'
His answer was inaudible to Beauchamp; he did not quit them.
The lamp at the lodge-gates presented the young man's face in full view,
and Beauchamp thought him supremely handsome. He perceived it to be a
lady's glove that M. d'Henriel wore at his breast.
Renee walked her horse up the park-drive, alongside the bright running
water. It seemed that she was aware of the method of provoking or
reproving M. d'Henriel. He endured some minutes of total speechlessness
at this pace, and abruptly said adieu and turned back.
Renee bounded like a vessel free of her load. 'But why should we hurry?'
said she, and checked her course to the walk again. 'I hope you like our
Normandy, and my valley. You used to love France, Nevil; and Normandy,
they tell me, is cousin to the opposite coast of England, in climate,
soil, people, it may be in manners too. A Beauchamp never can feel that
he is a foreigner in Normandy. We claim you half French. You have
grander parks, they say. We can give you sunlight.'
'And it was really only the wish to see me?' said Beauchamp.
'Only, and really. One does not live for ever--on earth; and it becomes
a question whether friends should be shadows to one another before death.
I wrote to you because I wished to see you: I was impatient because I am
Renee.'
'You relieve me!'
'Evidently you have forgotten my character, Nevil.'
'Not a feature of it.'
'Ah!' she breathed involuntarily.
'Would you have me forget it?'
'When I think by myself, quite alone, yes, I would. Otherwise how can
one hope that one's friend is friendship, supposing him to read us as we
are--minutely, accurately? And it is in absence that we desire our
friends to be friendship itself. And . . . and I am utterly astray!
I have not dealt in this language since I last thought of writing a
diary, and stared at the first line. If I mistake not, you are fond of
the picturesque. If moonlight and water will satisfy you, look yonder.'
The moon launched her fairy silver fleets on a double sweep of the little
river round an island of reeds and two tall poplars.
'I have wondered whether I should ever see you looking at that scene,'
said Renee.
He looked from it to her, and asked if Roland was well, and her father;
then alluded to her husband; but the unlettering elusive moon, bright
only in the extension of her beams, would not tell him what story this
face, once heaven to him, wore imprinted on it. Her smile upon a parted
mouth struck him as two-edged in replying: 'I have good news to give you
of them all: Roland is in garrison at Rouen, and will come when I
telegraph. My father is in Touraine, and greets you affectionately; he
hopes to come. They are both perfectly happy. My husband is
travelling.'
Beauchamp was conscious of some bitter taste; unaware of what it was,
though it led him to say, undesigningly: 'How very handsome that M.
d'Henriel is!--if I have his name correctly.'
Renee answered: 'He has the misfortune to be considered the handsomest
young man in France.'
'He has an Italian look.'
'His mother was Provencale.'
She put her horse in motion, saying: 'I agree with you that handsome men
are rarities. And, by the way, they do not set our world on fire quite
as much as beautiful women do yours, my friend. Acknowledge so much in
our favour.'
He assented indefinitely. He could have wished himself away canvassing
in Bevisham. He had only to imagine himself away from her, to feel the
flood of joy in being with her.
'Your husband is travelling?'
'It is his pleasure.'
Could she have intended to say that this was good news to give of him as
well as of the happiness of her father and brother?
'Now look on Tourdestelle,' said Renee. 'You will avow that for an
active man to be condemned to seek repose in so dull a place, after the
fatigues of the season in Paris, it is considerably worse than for women,
so I am here to dispense the hospitalities. The right wing of the
chateau, on your left, is new. The side abutting the river is inhabited
by Dame Philiberte, whom her husband imprisoned for attempting to take
her pleasure in travel. I hear upon authority that she dresses in white,
and wears a black crucifix. She is many centuries old, and still she
lives to remind people that she married a Rouaillout. Do you not think
she should have come to me to welcome me? She never has; and possibly of
ladies who are disembodied we may say that they know best. For me, I
desire the interview--and I am a coward: I need not state it.' She
ceased; presently continuing: 'The other inhabitants are my sister, Agnes
d'Auffray, wife of a general officer serving in Afric--my sister by
marriage, and my friend; the baronne d'Orbec, a relation by marriage; M.
d'Orbec, her son, a guest, and a sportsman; M. Livret, an erudite. No
young ladies: I can bear much, but not their presence; girls are odious
to me. I knew one in Venice.'
They came within the rays of the lamp hanging above the unpretending
entrance to the chateau. Renee's broad grey Longueville hat curved low
with its black plume on the side farthest from him. He was favoured by
the gallant lift of the brim on the near side, but she had overshadowed
her eyes.
'He wears a glove at his breast,' said Beauchamp.
'You speak of M. d'Henriel. He wears a glove at his breast; yes, it is
mine,' said Renee.
She slipped from her horse and stood against his shoulder, as if waiting
to be questioned before she rang the bell of the chateau.
Beauchamp alighted, burning with his unutterable questions concerning
that glove.
'Lift your hat, let me beg you; let me see you,' he said.
This was not what she had expected. With one heave of her bosom, and
murmuring: 'I made a vow I would obey you absolutely if you came,' she
raised the hat above her brows, and lightning would not have surprised
him more; for there had not been a single vibration of her voice to tell
him of tears running: nay, the absence of the usual French formalities in
her manner of addressing him, had seemed to him to indicate her intention
to put him at once on an easy friendly footing, such as would be natural
to her, and not painful to him. Now she said:
'You perceive, monsieur, that I have my sentimental fits like others; but
in truth I am not insensible to the picturesque or to gratitude, and I
thank you sincerely for coming, considering that I wrote like a Sphinx--
to evade writing comme une folle!'
She swept to the bell.
Standing in the arch of the entrance, she stretched her whip out to a
black mass of prostrate timber, saying:
'It fell in the storm at two o'clock after midnight, and you on the sea!'
CHAPTER XXIV
HIS HOLIDAY
A single day was to be the term of his holiday at Tourdestelle; but it
stood forth as one of those perfect days which are rounded by an evening
before and a morning after, giving him two nights under the same roof
with Renee, something of a resemblance to three days of her; anticipation
and wonder filling the first, she the next, the adieu the last: every
hour filled. And the first day was not over yet. He forced himself to
calmness, that he might not fritter it, and walked up and down the room
he was dressing in, examining its foreign decorations, and peering
through the window, to quiet his nerves. He was in her own France with
her! The country borrowed hues from Renee, and lent some. This
chivalrous France framed and interlaced her image, aided in idealizing
her, and was in turn transfigured. Not half so well would his native
land have pleaded for the forgiveness of a British damsel who had wrecked
a young man's immoderate first love. That glorified self-love requires
the touch upon imagination of strangeness and an unaccustomed grace, to
subdue it and make it pardon an outrage to its temples and altars, and
its happy reading of the heavens, the earth too: earth foremost, we ought
perhaps to say. It is an exacting heathen, best understood by a glance
at what will appease it: beautiful, however, as everybody has proved; and
shall it be decried in a world where beauty is not overcommon, though it
would slaughter us for its angry satisfaction, yet can be soothed by a
tone of colour, as it were by a novel inscription on a sweetmeat?
The peculiarity of Beauchamp was that he knew the slenderness of the
thread which was leading him, and foresaw it twisting to a coil unless he
should hold firm. His work in life was much above the love of a woman in
his estimation, so he was not deluded by passion when he entered the
chateau; it is doubtful whether he would not hesitatingly have sacrificed
one of the precious votes in Bevisham for the pleasure of kissing her
hand when they were on the steps. She was his first love and only love,
married, and long ago forgiven:--married; that is to say, she especially
among women was interdicted to him by the lingering shadow of the
reverential love gone by; and if the anguish of the lover's worse than
death survived in a shudder of memory at the thought of her not solely
lost to him but possessed by another, it did but quicken a hunger that
was three parts curiosity to see how she who had suffered this bore the
change; how like or unlike she might be to the extinct Renee; what traces
she kept of the face he had known. Her tears were startling, but tears
tell of a mood, they do not tell the story of the years; and it was that
story he had such eagerness to read in one brief revelation: an eagerness
born only of the last few hours, and broken by fears of a tarnished
aspect; these again being partly hopes of a coming disillusion that would
restore him his independence and ask him only for pity. The slavery of
the love of a woman chained like Renee was the most revolting of
prospects to a man who cherished his freedom that he might work to the
end of his time. Moreover, it swung a thunder-cloud across his holiday.
He recurred to the idea of the holiday repeatedly, and the more he did so
the thinner it waned. He was exhausting the very air and spirit of it
with a mind that ran incessantly forward and back; and when he and the
lady of so much speculation were again together, an incapacity of
observation seemed to have come over him. In reality it was the
inability to reflect on his observations. Her presence resembled those
dark sunsets throwing the spell of colour across the world; when there is
no question with us of morning or of night, but of that sole splendour
only.
Owing to their arrival late at the chateau, covers were laid for them in
the boudoir of Madame la Marquise, where he had his hostess to himself,
and certainly the opportunity of studying her. An English Navy List,
solitary on a shelf, and laid within it an extract of a paper announcing
the return of the Ariadne to port, explained the mystery of her knowing
that he was in England, as well as the correctness of the superscription
of her letter to him. 'You see, I follow you,' she said.
Beauchamp asked if she read English now.
'A little; but the paper was dispatched to me by M. Vivian Ducie, of your
embassy in Paris. He is in the valley.'
The name of Ducie recalled Lord Palmet's description of the dark beauty
of the fluttering pale gold ornaments. She was now dressed without one
decoration of gold or jewel, with scarcely a wave in the silk, a modesty
of style eloquent of the pride of her form.
Could those eyes fronting him under the lamp have recently shed tears?
They were the living eyes of a brilliant unembarrassed lady; shields
flinging light rather than well-depths inviting it.
Beauchamp tried to compare her with the Renee of Venice, and found
himself thinking of the glove she had surrendered to the handsomest young
man in France. The effort to recover the younger face gave him a dead
creature, with the eyelashes of Renee, the cast of her mouth and throat,
misty as a shape in a dream.
He could compare her with Cecilia, who never would have risked a glove,
never have betrayed a tear, and was the statelier lady, not without
language: but how much less vivid in feature and the gift of speech!
Renee's gift of speech counted unnumbered strings which she played on
with a grace that clothed the skill, and was her natural endowment--an
art perfected by the education of the world. Who cannot talk!--but who
can? Discover the writers in a day when all are writing! It is as rare
an art as poetry, and in the mouths of women as enrapturing, richer than
their voices in music.
This was the fascination Beauchamp felt weaving round him. Would you,
that are separable from boys and mobs, and the object malignly called the
Briton, prefer the celestial singing of a woman to her excellently
talking? But not if it were given you to run in unison with her genius
of the tongue, following her verbal ingenuities and feminine silk-flashes
of meaning; not if she led you to match her fine quick perceptions with
more or less of the discreet concordance of the violoncello accompanying
the viol. It is not high flying, which usually ends in heavy falling.
You quit the level of earth no more than two birds that chase from bush
to bush to bill in air, for mutual delight to make the concert heavenly.
Language flowed from Renee in affinity with the pleasure-giving laws that
make the curves we recognize as beauty in sublimer arts. Accept
companionship for the dearest of the good things we pray to have, and
what equalled her! Who could be her rival!
Her girl's crown of irradiated Alps began to tremble over her dimly, as
from moment to moment their intimacy warmed, and Beauchamp saw the young
face vanishing out of this flower of womanhood. He did not see it
appearing or present, but vanishing like the faint ray in the rosier.
Nay, the blot of her faithlessness underwent a transformation: it
affected him somewhat as the patch cunningly laid on near a liquid dimple
in fair cheeks at once allures and evades a susceptible attention.
Unused in his French of late, he stumbled at times, and she supplied the
needed phrase, taking no note of a blunder. Now men of sweet blood
cannot be secretly accusing or criticizing a gracious lady. Domestic men
are charged with thinking instantly of dark death when an ordinary
illness befalls them; and it may be so or not: but it is positive that
the gallant man of the world, if he is in the sensitive condition, and
not yet established as the lord of her, feels paralyzed in his masculine
sense of leadership the moment his lady assumes the initiative and
directs him: he gives up at once; and thus have many nimble-witted dames
from one clear start retained their advantage.
Concerning that glove: well! the handsomest young man in France wore the
glove of the loveliest woman. The loveliest? The very loveliest in the
purity of her French style--the woman to challenge England for a type of
beauty to eclipse her. It was possible to conceive her country wagering
her against all women.
If Renee had faults, Beauchamp thought of her as at sea breasting
tempests, while Cecilia was a vessel lying safe in harbour, untried,
however promising: and if Cecilia raised a steady light for him, it was
over the shores he had left behind, while Renee had really nothing to do
with warning or rescuing, or with imperilling; she welcomed him simply to
a holiday in her society. He associated Cecilia strangely with the
political labours she would have had him relinquish; and Renee with a
pleasant state of indolence, that her lightest smile disturbed. Shun
comparisons.
It is the tricksy heart which sets up that balance, to jump into it on
one side or the other. Comparisons come of a secret leaning that is sure
to play rogue under its mien of honest dealer: so Beauchamp suffered
himself to be unjust to graver England, and lost the strength she would
have given him to resist a bewitchment. The case with him was, that his
apprenticeship was new; he had been trotting in harness as a veritable
cab-horse of politics--he by blood a racer; and his nature craved for
diversions, against his will, against his moral sense and born tenacity
of spirit.
Not a word further of the glove. But at night, in his bed, the glove was
a principal actor in events of extraordinary magnitude and inconsequence.
He was out in the grounds with the early morning light. Coffee and sweet
French bread were brought out to him, and he was informed of the hours of
reunion at the chateau, whose mistress continued invisible. She might be
sleeping. He strolled about, within view of the windows, wondering at
her subservience to sleep. Tourdestelle lay in one of those Norman
valleys where the river is the mother of rich pasture, and runs hidden
between double ranks of sallows, aspens and poplars, that mark its
winding line in the arms of trenched meadows. The high land on either
side is an unwatered flat up to the horizon, little varied by dusty
apple-trees planted in the stubble here and there, and brown mud walls of
hamlets; a church-top, a copse, an avenue of dwarf limes leading to the
three-parts farm, quarter residence of an enriched peasant striking new
roots, or decayed proprietor pinching not to be severed from ancient.
Descending on the deep green valley in Summer is like a change of climes.
The chateau stood square at a branch of the river, tossing three light
bridges of pretty woodwork to park and garden. Great bouquets of
swelling blue and pink hydrangia nestled at his feet on shaven grass. An
open window showed a cloth of colour, as in a reminiscence of Italy.
Beauchamp heard himself addressed:--'You are looking for my sister-in-
law, M. Beauchamp?'
The speaker was Madame d'Auffray, to whom he had been introduced
overnight--a lady of the aquiline French outline, not ungentle.
Renee had spoken affectionately of her, he remembered. There was nothing
to make him be on his guard, and he stated that he was looking for Madame
de Rouaillout, and did not conceal surprise at the information that she
was out on horseback.
'She is a tireless person,' Madame d'Auffray remarked. 'You will not
miss her long. We all meet at twelve, as you know.'
'I grudge an hour, for I go to-morrow,' said Beauchamp.
The notification of so early a departure, or else his bluntness,
astonished her. She fell to praising Renee's goodness. He kept her to
it with lively interrogations, in the manner of a, guileless boy urging
for eulogies of his dear absent friend. Was it duplicity in him or
artlessness?
'Has she, do you think, increased in beauty?' Madame d'Auffray inquired:
an insidious question, to which he replied:
'Once I thought it would be impossible.'
Not so bad an answer for an Englishman, in a country where speaking is
fencing; the race being little famous for dialectical alertness: but was
it artful or simple?
They skirted the chateau, and Beauchamp had the history of Dame
Philiberte recounted to him, with a mixture of Gallic irony, innuendo,
openness, touchingness, ridicule, and charity novel to his ears. Madame
d'Auffray struck the note of intimacy earlier than is habitual. She
sounded him in this way once or twice, carelessly perusing him, and
waiting for the interesting edition of the Book of Man to summarize its
character by showing its pages or remaining shut. It was done
delicately, like the tap of a finger-nail on a vase. He rang clear; he
had nothing to conceal; and where he was reserved, that is, in speaking
of the developed beauty and grace of Renee, he was transparent. She read
the sort of man he was; she could also hazard a guess as to the man's
present state. She ventured to think him comparatively harmless--for the
hour: for she was not the woman to be hoodwinked by man's dark nature
because she inclined to think well of a particular man; nor was she one
to trust to any man subject to temptation. The wisdom of the
Frenchwoman's fortieth year forbade it. A land where the war between
the sexes is honestly acknowledged, and is full of instruction, abounds
in precepts; but it ill becomes the veteran to practise rigorously what
she would prescribe to young women. She may discriminate; as thus:--
Trust no man. Still, this man may be better than that man; and it is bad
policy to distrust a reasonably guileless member of the preying sex
entirely, and so to lose his good services. Hawks have their uses in
destroying vermin; and though we cannot rely upon the taming of hawks,
one tied by the leg in a garden preserves the fruit.
'There is a necessity for your leaving us to-morrow; M. Beauchamp?'
'I regret to say, it is imperative, madame.'
'My husband will congratulate me on the pleasure I have, and have long
desired, of making your acquaintance, and he will grieve that he has not
been so fortunate; he is on service in Africa. My brother, I need not
say, will deplore the mischance which has prevented him from welcoming
you. I have telegraphed to him; he is at one of the Baths in Germany,
and will come assuredly, if there is a prospect of finding you here.
None? Supposing my telegram not to fall short of him, I may count on his
being here within four days.'
Beauchamp begged her to convey the proper expressions of his regret to M.
le Marquis.
'And M. de Croisnel? And Roland, your old comrade and brother-in-arms?
What will be their disappointment!' she said.
'I intend to stop for an hour at Rouen on my way back,' said Beauchamp.
She asked if her belle-soeur was aware of the short limitation of his
visit.
He had not mentioned it to Madame la Marquise.
'Perhaps you may be moved by the grief of a friend: Renee may persuade
you to stay.'
'I came imagining I could be of some use to Madame la Marquise. She
writes as if she were telegraphing.'
'Perfectly true of her! For that matter, I saw the letter. Your looks
betray a very natural jealousy; but seeing it or not it would have been
the same: she and I have no secrets. She was, I may tell you, strictly
unable to write more words in the letter. Which brings me to inquire
what impression M. d'Henriel made on you yesterday evening.'
'He is particularly handsome.'
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