Beauchamps Career, v6

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'He didn't talk like a tradesman,' Beauchamp mused.

'He may be one, for all that. It's better to class him as an
enthusiast.'

'An enthusiast!' Beauchamp stamped: 'for what?'

'For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles
he is accustomed to read in the papers. You don't study your
countrymen.'

'I'd study that fellow, if I had the chance.'

'You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse
temper than most of them.'

Beauchamp shook Lydiard's hand, saying, 'The widow?'

'There's no woman like her!'

'Well, now you're free--why not? I think I put one man out of the
field.'

'Too early! Besides--'

'Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.'

'When shall you go down to Bevisham?'

'When? I can't tell: when I've gone through fire. There never was a
home for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good girl--
the best of girls! if you hadn't a little spoilt her with your
philosophy of the two sides of the case.'

'I've not given her the brains.'

'She's always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action: she has no will. So
she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her submitting, as
if she must submit to me, because I'm overbearing, instead of accepting
the fact.'

'She feels your influence.'

'She's against the publication of THE DAWN--for the present. It's an
"unseasonable time." I argue with her: I don't get hold of her mind a
bit; but at last she says, "very well." She has your head.'

And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.

They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other's task of
endurance.

As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore
walking past.

'Jack!' he called.

Wilmore glanced round. 'How do you do, Beauchamp?'

'Where are you off to, Jack?'

'Down to the Admiralty. I'm rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.'

'Can't you stop just a minute?'

'I'm afraid I can't. Good morning.'

It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive,
retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.

'That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,' Beauchamp
said to Lydiard, who answered:

'The article did not put the idea of you into men's minds, but gave
tongue to it: you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the
Press.'

'You wouldn't take that man and me to have been messmates for years!
Old Jack Wilmore! Don't go, Lydiard.'

Lydiard declared that he was bound to go: he was engaged to read Italian
for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

'Then go, by all means,' Beauchamp dismissed him.

He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the
door-step, and found them of one colour. If it was an accident befalling
him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an hour, what of
the sentiments of universal England? Lady Barbara's elopement with Lord
Alfred last year did not rouse much execration; hardly worse than gossip
and compassion. Beauchamp drank a great deal of bitterness from his
reflections.

They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over
themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts
from their mischances and from most occurrences. So does the world they
combat win on them.

'For,' says Dr. Shrapnel, 'the world and nature, which are opposed in
relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect
victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the
victory over the world, as over nature, is over self: and this victory
lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature: for
the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.'

The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp. He
had never before said to himself, 'I have done my best, and I am beaten!'
Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but here, within
the walls where Renee lay silently breathing, barely breathing, it might
be dying, he was overcome, and left it to circumstance to carry him to a
conclusion. He went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he beheld
Madame d'Auffray in conversation with Rosamund.

'I was assured by Madame la Comtesse that I should see you to-day,' the
French lady said as she swam to meet him; 'it is a real pleasure': and
pressing his hand she continued, 'but I fear you will be disappointed of
seeing my sister. She would rashly try your climate at its worst period.
Believe me, I do not join in decrying it, except on her account: I could
have forewarned her of an English Winter and early Spring. You know her
impetuosity; suddenly she decided on accepting the invitation of Madame
la Comtesse; and though I have no fears of her health, she is at present
a victim of the inclement weather.'

'You have seen her, madame?' said Beauchamp. So well had the clever
lady played the dupe that he forgot there was a part for him to play.
Even the acquiescence of Rosamund in the title of countess bewildered
him.

'Madame d'Auffray has been sitting for an hour with Madame de
Rouaillout,' said Rosamund.

He spoke of Roland's coming.

'Ah?' said Madame d'Auffray, and turned to Rosamund: 'you have
determined to surprise us: then you will have a gathering of the whole
family in your hospitable house, Madame la Comtesse!

'If M. la Marquis will do it that honour, madame!

'My brother is in London,' Madame d'Auffray said to Beauchamp.

The shattering blow was merited by one who could not rejoice that he had
acted rightly.

CHAPTER XLIII

THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS

An extraordinary telegraphic message, followed by a still more
extraordinary letter the next morning, from Rosamund Culling, all but
interdicted the immediate occupation of his house in town to Everard, now
Earl of Romfrey. She begged him briefly not to come until after the
funeral, and proposed to give him good reasons for her request at their
meeting. 'I repeat, I pledge myself to satisfy you on this point,' she
wrote. Her tone was that of one of your heroic women of history refusing
to surrender a fortress.

Everard's wrath was ever of a complexion that could suffer postponements
without his having to fear an abatement of it. He had no business to
transact in London, and he had much at the Castle, so he yielded himself
up to his new sensations, which are not commonly the portion of gentlemen
of his years. He anticipated that Nevil would at least come down to the
funeral, but there was no appearance of him, nor a word to excuse his
absence. Cecil was his only supporter. They walked together between the
double ranks of bare polls of the tenantry and peasantry, resembling in a
fashion old Froissart engravings the earl used to dote on in his boyhood,
representing bodies of manacled citizens, whose humbled heads looked like
nuts to be cracked, outside the gates of captured French towns, awaiting
the disposition of their conqueror, with his banner above him and
prancing knights around. That was a glory of the past. He had no
successor. The thought was chilling; the solitariness of childlessness
to an aged man, chief of a most ancient and martial House, and proud of
his blood, gave him the statue's outlook on a desert, and made him feel
that he was no more than a whirl of the dust, settling to the dust.

He listened to the parson curiously and consentingly. We are ashes. Ten
centuries had come to an end in him to prove the formula correct. The
chronicle of the House would state that the last Earl of Romfrey left no
heir.

Cecil was a fine figure walking beside him. Measured by feet, he might
be a worthy holder of great lands. But so heartily did the earl despise
this nephew that he never thought of trying strength with the fellow, and
hardly cared to know what his value was, beyond his immediate uses as an
instrument to strike with. Beauchamp of Romfrey had been his dream, not
Baskelett: and it increased his disgust of Beauchamp that Baskelett
should step forward as the man. No doubt Cecil would hunt the county
famously: he would preserve game with the sleepless eye of a General of
the Jesuits. These things were to be considered.

Two days after the funeral Lord Romfrey proceeded to London. He was met
at the station by Rosamund, and informed that his house was not yet
vacated by the French family.

'And where have you arranged for me to go, ma'am?' he asked her
complacently.

She named an hotel where she had taken rooms for him.

He nodded, and was driven to the hotel, saying little on the road.

As she expected, he was heavily armed against her and Nevil.

'You're the slave of the fellow, ma'am. You are so infatuated that you
second his amours, in my house. I must wait for a clearance, it seems.'

He cast a comical glance of disapprobation on the fittings of the hotel
apartment, abhorring gilt.

'They leave us the day after to-morrow,' said Rosamund, out of breath
with nervousness at the commencement of the fray, and skipping over the
opening ground of a bold statement of facts. 'Madame de Rouaillout has
been unwell. She is not yet recovered; she has just risen. Her sister-
in-law has nursed her. Her husband seems much broken in health; he is
perfect on the points of courtesy.'

'That is lucky, ma'am.'

'Her brother, Nevil's comrade in the war, was there also.'

'Who came first?'

'My lord, you have only heard Captain Baskelett's version of the story.
She has been my guest since the first day of her landing in England.
There cannot possibly be an imputation on her.'

'Ma'am, if her husband manages to be satisfied, what on earth have I to
do with it?'

'I am thinking of Nevil, my lord.'

'You're never thinking of any one else, ma'am.'

'He sleeps here, at this hotel. He left the house to Madame de
Rouaillout. I bear witness to that.'

'You two seem to have made your preparations to stand a criminal trial.'

'It is pure truth, my lord.'

'Do you take me to be anxious about the fellow's virtue?'

'She is a lady who would please you.'

'A scandal in my house does not please me.'

'The only approach to a scandal was made by Captain Baskelett.'

'A poor devil locked out of his bed on a Winter's night hullabaloos with
pretty good reason. I suppose he felt the contrast.'

'My lord, this lady did me the honour to come to me on a visit. I have
not previously presumed to entertain a friend. She probably formed no
estimate of my exact position.'

The earl with a gesture implied Rosamund's privilege to act the hostess
to friends.

'You invited her?' he said.

'That is, I had told her I hoped she would come to England.'

'She expected you to be at the house in town on her arrival?'

'It was her impulse to come.'

'She came alone?'

'She may have desired to be away from her own people for a time: there
may have been domestic differences. These cases are delicate.'

'This case appears to have been so delicate that you had to lock out a
fourth party.'

'It is indelicate and base of Captain Baskelett to complain and to hint.
Nevil had to submit to the same; and Captain Baskelett took his revenge
on the housedoor and the bells. The house was visited by the police next
morning.'

'Do you suspect him to have known you were inside the house that night?'

She could not say so: but hatred of Cecil urged her past the bounds of
habitual reticence to put it to her lord whether he, imagining the worst,
would have behaved like Cecil.

To this he did not reply, but remarked, 'I am sorry he annoyed you,
ma'am.'

'It is not the annoyance to me; it is the shocking, the unmanly insolence
to a lady, and a foreign lady.'

'That's a matter between him and Nevil. I uphold him.'

'Then, my lord, I am silent.'

Silent she remained; but Lord Romfrey was also silent: and silence being
a weapon of offence only when it is practised by one out of two, she had
to reflect whether in speaking no further she had finished her business.

'Captain Baskelett stays at the Castle?' she asked.

'He likes his quarters there.'

'Nevil could not go down to Romfrey, my lord. He was obliged to wait,
and see, and help me to entertain, her brother and her husband.'

'Why, ma'am? But I have no objection to his making the marquis a happy
husband.'

'He has done what few men would have done, that she may be a self-
respecting wife.'

'The parson's in that fellow!' Lord Romfrey exclaimed. 'Now I have the
story. She came to him, he declined the gift, and you were turned into
the curtain for them. If he had only been off with her, he would have
done the country good service. Here he's a failure and a nuisance; he's
a common cock-shy for the journals. I'm tired of hearing of him; he's a
stench in our nostrils. He's tired of the woman.'

'He loves her.'

'Ma'am, you're hoodwinked. If he refused to have her, there 's a
something he loves better. I don't believe we've bred a downright
lackadaisical donkey in our family: I know him. He's not a fellow for
abstract morality: I know him. It's bargain against bargain with him;
I'll do him that justice. I hear he has ordered the removal of the
Jersey bull from Holdesbury, and the beast is mine,' Lord Romfrey
concluded in a lower key.

'Nevil has taken him.'

'Ha! pull and pull, then!'

'He contends that he is bound by a promise to give an American gentleman
the refusal of the bull, and you must sign an engagement to keep the
animal no longer than two years.'

'I sign no engagement. I stick to the bull.'

'Consent to see Nevil to-night, my lord.'

'When he has apologized to you, I may, ma'am.'

'Surely he did more, in requesting me to render him a service.'

'There's not a creature living that fellow wouldn't get to serve him,
if he knew the trick. We should all of us be marching on London at
Shrapnel's heels. The political mania is just as incurable as
hydrophobia, and he's bitten. That's clear.'

'Bitten perhaps: but not mad. As you have always contended, the true
case is incurable, but it is very rare: and is this one?'

'It's uncommonly like a true case, though I haven't seen him foam at the
mouth, and shun water-as his mob does.'

Rosamund restrained some tears, betraying the effort to hide the
moisture. 'I am no match for you, my lord. I try to plead on his
behalf;--I do worse than if I were dumb. This I most earnestly say: he
is the Nevil Beauchamp who fought for his country, and did not abandon
her cause, though he stood there--we had it from Colonel Halkett--a
skeleton: and he is the Nevil who--I am poorly paying my debt to him!
--defended me from the aspersions of his cousin.'

'Boys!' Lord Romfrey ejaculated.

'It is the same dispute between them as men.'

'Have you forgotten my proposal to shield you from liars and
scandalmongers?'

'Could I ever forget it?' Rosamund appeared to come shining out of a
cloud. 'Princeliest and truest gentleman, I thought you then, and I know
you to be, my dear lord. I fancied I had lived the scandal down. I was
under the delusion that I had grown to be past backbiting: and that no
man could stand before me to insult and vilify me. But, for a woman in
any so-called doubtful position, it seems that the coward will not be
wanting to strike her. In quitting your service, I am able to affirm
that only once during the whole term of it have I consciously overstepped
the line of my duties: it was for Nevil: and Captain Baskelett undertook
to defend your reputation, in consequence.'

'Has the rascal been questioning your conduct?' The earl frowned.

'Oh, no! not questioning: he does not question, he accuses: he never
doubted: and what he went shouting as a boy, is plain matter of fact to
him now. He is devoted to you. It was for your sake that he desired me
to keep my name from being mixed up in a scandal he foresaw the
occurrence of in your house.'

'He permitted himself to sneer at you?'

'He has the art of sneering. On this occasion he wished to be direct and
personal.'

'What sort of hints were they?'

Lord Romfrey strode away from her chair that the answer might be easy to
her, for she was red, and evidently suffering from shame as well as
indignation.

'The hints we call distinct.' said Rosamund.

'In words?'

'In hard words.'

'Then you won't meet Cecil?'

Such a question, and the tone of indifference in which it came, surprised
and revolted her so that the unreflecting reply leapt out:

'I would rather meet a devil.'

Of how tremblingly, vehemently, and hastily she had said it, she was
unaware. To her lord it was an outcry of nature, astutely touched by him
to put her to proof.

He continued his long leisurely strides, nodding over his feet.

Rosamund stood up. She looked a very noble figure in her broad black-
furred robe. 'I have one serious confession to make, sir.'

'What's that?' said he.

'I would avoid it, for it cannot lead to particular harm; but I have an
enemy who may poison your ear in my absence. And first I resign my
position. I have forfeited it.'

'Time goes forward, ma'am, and you go round. Speak to the point. Do you
mean that you toss up the reins of my household?'

'I do. You trace it to Nevil immediately?'

'I do. The fellow wants to upset the country, and he begins with me.'

'You are wrong, my lord. What I have done places me at Captain
Baskelett's mercy. It is too loathsome to think of: worse than the whip;
worse than your displeasure. It might never be known; but the thought
that it might gives me courage. You have said that to protect a woman
everything is permissible. It is your creed, my lord, and because the
world, I have heard you say, is unjust and implacable to women. In some
cases, I think so too. In reality I followed your instructions; I mean,
your example. Cheap chivalry on my part! But it pained me not a little.
I beg to urge that in my defence.'

'Well, ma'am, you have tied the knot tight enough; perhaps now you'll cut
it,' said the earl.

Rosamund gasped softly. 'M. le Marquis is a gentleman who, after a life
of dissipation, has been reminded by bad health that he has a young and
beautiful wife.'

'He dug his pit to fall into it:--he's jealous?'

She shook her head to indicate the immeasurable.

'Senile jealousy is anxious to be deceived. He could hardly be deceived
so far as to imagine that Madame la Marquise would visit me, such as I
am, as my guest. Knowingly or not, his very clever sister, a good woman,
and a friend to husband and wife--a Frenchwoman of the purest type--gave
me the title. She insisted on it, and I presumed to guess that she
deemed it necessary for the sake of peace in that home.'

Lord Romfrey appeared merely inquisitive; his eyebrows were lifted in
permanence; his eyes were mild.

She continued: 'They leave England in a few hours. They are not likely
to return. I permitted him to address me with the title of countess.'

'Of Romfrey?' said the earl.

Rosamund bowed.

His mouth contracted. She did not expect thunder to issue from it, but
she did fear to hear a sarcasm, or that she would have to endure a deadly
silence: and she was gathering her own lips in imitation of his, to nerve
herself for some stroke to come, when he laughed in his peculiar close-
mouthed manner.

'I'm afraid you've dished yourself.'

'You cannot forgive me, my lord?'

He indulged in more of his laughter, and abruptly summoning gravity, bade
her talk to him of affairs. He himself talked of the condition of the
Castle, and with a certain off-hand contempt of the ladies of the family,
and Cecil's father, Sir John. 'What are they to me?' said he, and he
complained of having been called Last Earl of Romfrey.

'The line ends undegenerate,' said Rosamund fervidly, though she knew not
where she stood.

'Ends!' quoth the earl.

'I must see Stukely,' he added briskly, and stooped to her: 'I beg you to
drive me to my Club, countess.'

'Oh! sir.'

'Once a countess, always a countess!'

'But once an impostor, my lord?'

'Not always, we'll hope.'

He enjoyed this little variation in the language of comedy; letting it
drop, to say: 'Be here to-morrow early. Don't chase that family away
from the house. Do as you will, but not a word of Nevil to me: he's a
bad mess in any man's porringer; it's time for me to claim exemption of
him from mine.'

She dared not let her thoughts flow, for to think was to triumph, and
possibly to be deluded. They came in copious volumes when Lord Romfrey,
alighting at his Club, called to the coachman: 'Drive the countess home.'

They were not thoughts of triumph absolutely. In her cooler mind she
felt that it was a bad finish of a gallant battle. Few women had risen
against a tattling and pelting world so stedfastly; and would it not have
been better to keep her own ground, which she had won with tears and some
natural strength, and therewith her liberty, which she prized? The
hateful Cecil, a reminder of whom set her cheeks burning and turned her
heart to serpent, had forced her to it. So she honestly conceived, owing
to the circumstance of her honestly disliking the pomps of life and not
desiring to occupy any position of brilliancy. She thought assuredly of
her hoard of animosity toward the scandalmongers, and of the quiet glance
she would cast behind on them, and below. That thought came as a fruit,
not as a reflection.

But if ever two offending young gentlemen, nephews of a long-suffering
uncle, were circumvented, undermined, and struck to earth, with one blow,
here was the instance. This was accomplished by Lord Romfrey's
resolution to make the lady he had learnt to esteem his countess: and
more, it fixed to him for life one whom he could not bear to think of
losing: and still more, it might be; but what more was unwritten on his
tablets.

Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step
without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.

CHAPTER XLIV

THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO PASSIONS IN
BEAUCHAMP

It was now the season when London is as a lighted tower to her provinces,
and, among other gentlemen hurried thither by attraction, Captain
Baskelett arrived. Although not a personage in the House of Commons, he
was a vote; and if he never committed himself to the perils of a speech,
he made himself heard. His was the part of chorus, which he performed
with a fairly close imitation of the original cries of periods before
parliaments were instituted, thus representing a stage in the human
development besides the borough of Bevisham. He arrived in the best of
moods for the emission of high-pitched vowel-sounds; otherwise in the
worst of tempers. His uncle had notified an addition of his income to
him at Romfrey, together with commands that he should quit the castle
instantly: and there did that woman, Mistress Culling, do the honours to
Nevil Beauchamp's French party. He assured Lord Palmet of his positive
knowledge of the fact, incredible as the sanction of such immoral
proceedings by the Earl of Romfrey must appear to that young nobleman.
Additions to income are of course acceptable, but in the form of a
palpable stipulation for silence, they neither awaken gratitude nor
effect their purpose. Quite the contrary; they prick the moral mind to
sit in judgement on the donor. It means, she fears me! Cecil
confidently thought and said of the intriguing woman who managed his
patron.

The town-house was open to him. Lord Romfrey was at Steynham. Cecil
could not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it. He
happened to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for
his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English
nobility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people.
She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against
him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go
down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling's orders. The old woman
lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted
the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess. This she knew for
a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who
came second brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the
very words--the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling
for the Countess of Romfrey. What was more, my lord's coachman caught it
up, and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the
footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the
mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the
poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had
seen a ghost. 'She have such power,' Cecil's admirer concluded.

'I wager I match her,' Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands
and letting his lower teeth shine out. The means of matching her were
not so palpable as the resolution. First he took men into his
confidence. Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the
question, 'What ought I to do?' In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey
he ought not to pass it over, he suggested. The ladies of the family
urged him to go to Steynham and boldly confront the woman. He was not
prepared for that. Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and
make it the topic of the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it.
Cecil had the ear of the town for a month. He was in the act of slicing
the air with his right hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady
Elsea's, to protest how vast was the dishonour done to the family by
Mistress Culling, when Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, 'The lady
you speak of is the Countess of Romfrey. I was present at the marriage.'

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