Beauchamps Career, v3
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George Meredith >> Beauchamps Career, v3
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M. d'Orbec remained outside the chateau inspecting the fish-ponds. When
they rejoined him he complimented Beauchamp semi-ironically on his choice
of the river's quiet charms in preference to the dusty roads. Madame de
Rouaillout said, 'Come, M. d'Orbec; what if you surrender your horse to
M. Beauchamp, and row me back?' He changed colour, hesitated, and
declined he had an engagement to call on M. d'Henriel.
'When did you see him?' said she.
He was confused. 'It is not long since, madame.'
'On the road?'
'Coming along-the road.'
'And our glove?'
'Madame la Marquise, if I may trust my memory, M. d'Henriel was not in
official costume.'
Renee allowed herself to be reassured.
A ceremonious visit that M. Livret insisted on was paid to the chapel of
Diane, where she had worshipped and laid her widowed ashes, which, said
M. Livret, the fiends of the Revolution would not let rest.
He raised his voice to denounce them.
It was Roland de Croisnel that answered: 'The Revolution was our
grandmother, monsieur, and I cannot hear her abused.'
Renee caught her brother by the hand. He stepped out of the chapel with
Beauchamp to embrace him; then kissed Renee, and, remarking that she was
pale, fetched flooding colour to her cheeks. He was hearty air to them
after the sentimentalism they had been hearing. Beauchamp and he walked
like loving comrades at school, questioning, answering, chattering,
laughing,--a beautiful sight to Renee, and she looked at Agrnes d'Auffray
to ask her whether 'this Englishman' was not one of them in his frankness
and freshness.
Roland stopped to turn to Renee. 'I met d'Henriel on my ride here,' he
said with a sharp inquisitive expression of eye that passed immediately.
'You rode here from Tourdestelle, then,' said Renee.
'Has he been one of the company, marquise?'
'Did he ride by you without speaking, Roland?'
'Thus.' Roland described a Spanish caballero's formallest salutation,
saying to Beauchamp, 'Not the best sample of our young Frenchman;--woman-
spoiled! Not that the better kind of article need be spoiled by them--
heaven forbid that! Friend Nevil,' he spoke lower, 'do you know, you
have something of the prophet in you? I remember: much has come true.
An old spoiler of women is worse than one spoiled by them! Ah, well: and
Madame Culling? and your seven-feet high uncle? And have you a fleet to
satisfy Nevil Beauchamp yet? You shall see a trial of our new field-guns
at Rouen.'
They were separated with difficulty.
Renee wished her brother to come in the boat; and he would have done so,
but for his objection to have his Arab bestridden by a man unknown to
him.
'My love is a four-foot, and here's my love,' Roland said, going outside
the gilt gate-rails to the graceful little beast, that acknowledged his
ownership with an arch and swing of the neck round to him.
He mounted and called, 'Au revoir, M. le Capitaine.'
'Au revoir, M. le Commandant,' cried Beauchamp.
'Admiral and marshal, each of us in good season,' said Roland. 'Thanks
to your promotion, I had a letter from my sister. Advance a grade, and I
may get another.'
Beauchamp thought of the strange gulf now between him and the time when
he pined to be a commodore, and an admiral. The gulf was bridged as he
looked at Renee petting Roland's horse.
'Is there in the world so lovely a creature?' she said, and appealed
fondlingly to the beauty that brings out beauty, and, bidding it disdain
rivalry, rivalled it insomuch that in a moment of trance Beauchamp with
his bodily vision beheld her, not there, but on the Lido of Venice,
shining out of the years gone.
Old love reviving may be love of a phantom after all. We can, if it must
revive, keep it to the limits of a ghostly love. The ship in the Arabian
tale coming within the zone of the magnetic mountain, flies all its bolts
and bars, and becomes sheer timbers, but that is the carelessness of the
ship's captain; and hitherto Beauchamp could applaud himself for steering
with prudence, while Renee's attractions warned more than they beckoned.
She was magnetic to him as no other woman was. Then whither his course
but homeward?
After they had taken leave of their host and hostess of Chateau Dianet,
walking across a meadow to a line of charmilles that led to the river-
side, he said, 'Now I have seen Roland I shall have to decide upon
going.'
'Wantonly won is deservedly lost,' said Renee. 'But do not disappoint my
Roland much because of his foolish sister. Is he not looking handsome?
And he is young to be a commandant, for we have no interest at this
Court. They kept him out of the last war! My father expects to find you
at Tourdestelle, and how account to him for your hurried flight? save
with the story of that which brought you to us!'
'The glove? I shall beg for the fellow to it before I depart, marquise.'
'You perceived my disposition to light-headedness, monsieur, when I was a
girl.'
'I said that I--But the past is dust. Shall I ever see you in
England?'
'That country seems to frown on me. But if I do not go there, nor you
come here, except to imperious mysterious invitations, which will not be
repeated, the future is dust as well as the past: for me, at least. Dust
here, dust there!--if one could be like a silk-worm, and live lying on
the leaf one feeds on, it would be a sort of answer to the riddle--living
out of the dust, and in the present. I find none in my religion. No
doubt, Madame de Breze did: why did you call Diane so to M. Livret?'
She looked at him smiling as they came out of the shadow of the clipped
trees. He was glancing about for the boat.
'The boat is across the river,' Renee said, in a voice that made him seek
her eyes for an explanation of the dead sound. She was very pale. 'You
have perfect command of yourself? For my sake!' she said.
He looked round.
Standing up in the boat, against the opposite bank, and leaning with
crossed legs on one of the sculls planted in the gravel of the river,
Count Henri d'Henriel's handsome figure presented itself to Beauchamp's
gaze.
With a dryness that smacked of his uncle Everard Romfrey, Beauchamp said
of the fantastical posture of the young man, 'One can do that on fresh
water.'
Renee did not comprehend the sailor-sarcasm of the remark; but she also
commented on the statuesque appearance of Count Henri: 'Is the pose for
photography or for sculpture?'
Neither of them showed a sign of surprise or of impatience.
M. d'Henriel could not maintain the attitude. He uncrossed his legs
deliberately, drooped hat in hand, and came paddling over; apologized
indolently, and said, 'I am not, I believe, trespassing on the grounds
of Tourdestelle, Madame la Marquise!'
'You happen to be in my boat, M. le Comte,' said Renee.
'Permit me, madame.' He had set one foot on shore, with his back to
Beauchamp, and reached a hand to assist her step into the boat.
Beauchamp caught fast hold of the bows while Renee laid a finger on Count
Henri's shoulder to steady herself.
The instant she had taken her seat, Count Henri dashed the scull's blade
at the bank to push off with her, but the boat was fast. His manoeuvre
had been foreseen. Beauchamp swung on board like the last seaman of a
launch, and crouched as the boat rocked away to the stream; and still
Count Henri leaned on the scull, not in a chosen attitude, but for
positive support. He had thrown his force into the blow, to push off
triumphantly, and leave his rival standing. It occurred that the boat's
brief resistance and rocking away agitated his artificial equipoise, and,
by the operation of inexorable laws, the longer he leaned across an
extending surface the more was he dependent; so that when the measure of
the water exceeded the length of his failing support on land, there was
no help for it: he pitched in. His grimace of chagrin at the sight of
Beauchamp securely established, had scarcely yielded to the grimness of
feature of the man who feels he must go, as he took the plunge; and these
two emotions combined to make an extraordinary countenance.
He went like a gallant gentleman; he threw up his heels to clear the
boat, dropping into about four feet of water, and his first remark on
rising was, 'I trust, madame, I have not had the misfortune to splash
you.'
Then he waded to the bank, scrambled to his feet, and drew out his
moustachios to their curving ends. Renee nodded sharply to Beauchamp to
bid him row. He, with less of wisdom, having seized the floating scull
abandoned by Count Henri, and got it ready for the stroke, said a word of
condolence to the dripping man.
Count Henri's shoulders and neck expressed a kind of negative that, like
a wet dog's shake of the head, ended in an involuntary whole length
shudder, dog-like and deplorable to behold. He must have been conscious
of this miserable exhibition of himself; he turned to Beauchamp: 'You
are, I am informed, a sailor, monsieur. I compliment you on your naval
tactics: our next meeting will be on land. Au revoir, monsieur. Madame
la Marquise, I have the honour to salute you.'
With these words he retreated.
'Row quickly, I beg of you,' Renee said to Beauchamp. Her desire was to
see Roland, and open her heart to her brother; for now it had to be
opened. Not a minute must be lost to prevent further mischief. And who
was guilty? she. Her heart clamoured of her guilt to waken a cry of
innocence. A disdainful pity for the superb young savage just made
ludicrous, relieved him of blame, implacable though he was. He was
nothing; an accident--a fool. But he might become a terrible instrument
of punishment. The thought of that possibility gave it an aspect of
retribution, under which her cry of innocence was insufferable in its
feebleness. It would have been different with her if Beauchamp had taken
advantage of her fever of anxiety, suddenly appeased by the sight of him
on the evening of his arrival at Tourdestelle after the storm, to attempt
a renewal of their old broken love-bonds. Then she would have seen only
a conflict between two men, neither of whom could claim a more secret
right than the other to be called her lover, and of whom both were on a
common footing, and partly despicable. But Nevil Beauchamp had behaved
as her perfect true friend, in the character she had hoped for when she
summoned him. The sense of her guilt lay in the recognition that he had
saved her. From what? From the consequences of delirium rather than
from love--surely delirium, founded on delusion; love had not existed.
She had said to Count Henri, 'You speak to me of love. I was beloved
when I was a girl, before my marriage, and for years I have not seen or
corresponded with the man who loved me, and I have only to lift my finger
now and he will come to me, and not once will he speak to me of love.'
Those were the words originating the wager of the glove. But what of
her, if Nevil Beauchamp had not come?
Her heart jumped, and she blushed ungovernably in his face,--as if he
were seeing her withdraw her foot from the rock's edge, and had that
instant rescued her. But how came it she had been so helpless? She
could ask; she could not answer.
Thinking, talking to her heart, was useless. The deceiver simply feigned
utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable. She burned to do
some act of extreme self-abasement that should bring an unwonted degree
of wrath on her externally, and so re-entitle her to consideration in her
own eyes. She burned to be interrogated, to have to weep, to be scorned,
abused, and forgiven, that she might say she did not deserve pardon.
Beauchamp was too English, evidently too blind, for the description of
judge-accuser she required; one who would worry her without mercy, until-
disgraced by the excess of torture inflicted--he should reinstate her by
as much as he had overcharged his accusation, and a little more.
Reasonably enough, instinctively in fact, she shunned the hollow of an
English ear. A surprise was in reserve for her.
Beauchamp gave up rowing. As he rested on the sculls, his head was bent
and turned toward the bank. Renee perceived an over-swollen monster
gourd that had strayed from a garden adjoining the river, and hung
sliding heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in prolonged
contemplation of its image in the mirror below. Apparently this obese
Narcissus enchained his attention.
She tapped her foot. 'Are you tired of rowing, monsieur?'
'It was exactly here,' said he, 'that you told me you expected your
husband's return.'
She glanced at the gourd, bit her lip, and, colouring, said, 'At what
point of the river did I request you to congratulate me on it?'
She would not have said that, if she had known the thoughts at work
within him.
He set the boat swaying from side to side, and at once the hugeous
reflection of that conceivably self-enamoured bulk quavered and
distended, and was shattered in a thousand dancing fragments, to re-unite
and recompose its maudlin air of imaged satisfaction.
She began to have a vague idea that he was indulging grotesque fancies.
Very strangely, the ridiculous thing, in the shape of an over-stretched
likeness, that she never would have seen had he indicated it directly,
became transfused from his mind to hers by his abstract, half-amused
observation of the great dancing gourd--that capering antiquity,
lumbering volatility, wandering, self-adored, gross bald Cupid, elatest
of nondescripts! Her senses imagined the impressions agitating
Beauchamp's, and exaggerated them beyond limit; and when he amazed her
with a straight look into her eyes, and the words, 'Better let it be a
youth--and live, than fall back to that!' she understood him immediately;
and, together with her old fear of his impetuosity and downrightness,
came the vivid recollection, like a bright finger pointing upon darkness,
of what foul destiny, magnified by her present abhorrence of it, he would
have saved her from in the days of Venice and Touraine, and unto what
loathly example of the hideous grotesque she, in spite of her lover's
foresight on her behalf, had become allied.
Face to face as they sat, she had no defence for her scarlet cheeks; her
eyes wavered.
'We will land here; the cottagers shall row the boat up,' she said.
'Somewhere--anywhere,' said Beauchamp. 'But I must speak. I will tell
you now. I do not think you to blame--barely; not in my sight; though no
man living would have suffered as I should. Probably some days more and
you would have been lost. You looked for me! Trust your instinct now
I'm with you as well as when I'm absent. Have you courage? that 's the
question. You have years to live. Can you live them in this place--with
honour? and alive really?'
Renee's eyes grew wide; she tried to frown, and her brows merely
twitched; to speak, and she was inarticulate. His madness, miraculous
penetration, and the super-masculine charity in him, unknown to the world
of young men in their treatment of women, excited, awed, and melted her.
He had seen the whole truth of her relations with M. d'Henriel!--the
wickedness of them in one light, the innocence in another; and without
prompting a confession he forgave her. Could she believe it? This was
love, and manly love.
She yearned to be on her feet, to feel the possibility of an escape from
him.
She pointed to a landing. He sprang to the bank. 'It could end in
nothing else,' he said, 'unless you beat cold to me. And now I have your
hand, Renee! It's the hand of a living woman, you have no need to tell
me that; but faithful to her comrade! I can swear it for her--faithful
to a true alliance! You are not married, you are simply chained: and you
are terrorized. What a perversion of you it is! It wrecks you. But
with me? Am I not your lover? You and I are one life. What have we
suffered for but to find this out and act on it? Do I not know that a
woman lives, and is not the rooted piece of vegetation hypocrites and
tyrants expect her to be? Act on it, I say; own me, break the chains,
come to me; say, Nevil Beauchamp or death! And death for you? But you
are poisoned and thwart-eddying, as you live now: worse, shaming the
Renee I knew. Ah-Venice! But now we are both of us wiser and stronger:
we have gone through fire. Who foretold it? This day, and this misery
and perversion that we can turn to joy, if we will--if you will! No
heart to dare is no heart to love!--answer that! Shall I see you cower
away from me again? Not this time!'
He swept on in a flood, uttered mad things, foolish things, and things of
an insight electrifying to her. Through the cottager's garden, across a
field, and within the park gates of Tourdestelle it continued
unceasingly; and deeply was she won by the rebellious note in all that
he said, deeply too by his disregard of the vulgar arts of wooers: she
detected none. He did not speak so much to win as to help her to see
with her own orbs. Nor was it roughly or chidingly, though it was
absolutely, that he stripped her of the veil a wavering woman will keep
to herself from her heart's lord if she can.
They arrived long after the boat at Tourdestelle, and Beauchamp might
believe he had prevailed with her, but for her forlorn repetition of
the question he had put to her idly and as a new idea, instead of
significantly, with a recollection and a doubt 'Have I courage, Nevil?'
The grain of common sense in cowardice caused her to repeat it when her
reason was bedimmed, and passion assumed the right to show the way of
right and wrong.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A cloud of millinery shoots me off a mile from a woman
A string of pearls: a woman who goes beyond that's in danger
Admires a girl when there's no married woman or widow in sight
After forty, men have married their habits
An old spoiler of women is worse than one spoiled by them!
And never did a stroke of work in my life
Are we practical?' penetrates the bosom of an English audience
As to wit, the sneer is the cloak of clumsiness
Contemptuous exclusiveness could not go farther
Discover the writers in a day when all are writing!
Feigned utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable
Frozen vanity called pride, which does not seek to be revenged
Half-truth that we may put on the mask of the whole
Hopes of a coming disillusion that would restore him
How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!
I can confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so?
If there's no doubt about it, how is it I have a doubt about it?
It is not high flying, which usually ends in heavy falling
Let none of us be so exalted above the wit of daily life
No heart to dare is no heart to love!
Oggler's genial piety made him shrink with nausea
Past fairness, vaguely like a snow landscape in the thaw
Planting the past in the present like a perceptible ghost
Pleasure-giving laws that make the curves we recognize as beauty
Practical or not, the good people affectingly wish to be
Shun comparisons
So the frog telleth tadpoles
Socially and politically mean one thing in the end
Story that she believed indeed, but had not quite sensibly felt
The critic that sneers
The language of party is eloquent
The slavery of the love of a woman chained
There may be women who think as well as feel; I don't know them
Trust no man Still, this man may be better than that man
Use your religion like a drug
Who cannot talk!--but who can?
Wives are only an item in the list, and not the most important
Women don't care uncommonly for the men who love them
You are not married, you are simply chained
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