Beauchamps Career, v6

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'Hear: none: but: accused: false.'

Treble dots were under the word 'to-morrow.' He had scored the margin of
the sentences containing his dotted words, as if in admiration of their
peculiar wisdom.

She thought it piteous that he should be reduced to such means of
communication. The next instant Cecilia was shrinking from the adept
intriguer--French-taught!

In the course of the evening her cousin remarked:

'Captain Beauchamp must see merit in things undiscoverable by my poor
faculties. I will show you a book he has marked.'

'Did you see it? I was curious to examine it,' interposed Cecilia; 'and
I am as much at a loss as you to understand what could have attracted
him. One sentence . . .'

'About the sheikh in the stables, where he accused the pretended
physician? Yes, what was there in that?'

'Where is the book?' said Mrs. Grancey.

'Not here, I think.' Cecilia glanced at the drawing-room book-table, and
then at Mr. Austin, the victim of an unhappy love in his youth, and
unhappy about her, as her father had said. Seymour Austin was not one to
spread the contagion of intrigue! She felt herself caught by it, even
melting to feel enamoured of herself in consequence, though not loving
Beauchamp the more.

'This newspaper, if it's not merely an airy project, will be ruination,'
said Tuckham. 'The fact is, Beauchamp has no bend in him. He can't meet
a man without trying a wrestle, and as long as he keeps his stiffness, he
believes he has won. I've heard an oculist say that the eye that doesn't
blink ends in blindness, and he who won't bend breaks. It's a pity, for
he's a fine fellow. A Radical daily Journal of Shrapnel's colour, to
educate the people by giving them an interest in the country! Goodness,
what a delusion! and what a waste of money! He'll not be able to carry
it on a couple of years. And there goes his eighty thousand!'

Cecilia's heart beat fast. She had no defined cause for its excitement.

Colonel Halkett returned to Mount Laurels close upon midnight, very
tired, coughing and complaining of the bitter blowing East. His guests
shook hands with him, and went to bed.

'I think I'll follow their example,' he said to Cecilia, after drinking a
tumbler of mulled wine.

'Have you nothing to tell me, dear papa?' said she, caressing him
timidly.

'A confirmation of the whole story from Lord Romfrey in person--that's
all. He says Beauchamp's mad. I begin to believe it. You must use your
judgement. I suppose I must not expect you to consider me. You might
open your heart to Austin. As to my consent, knowing what I do, you will
have to tear it out of me. Here's a country perfectly contented, and
that fellow at work digging up grievances to persuade the people they're
oppressed by us. Why should I talk of it? He can't do much harm; unless
he has money--money! Romfrey says he means to start a furious paper.
He'll make a bonfire of himself. I can't stand by and see you in it too.
I may die; I may be spared the sight.'

Cecilia flung her arms round his neck. 'Oh! papa.'

'I don't want to make him out worse than he is, my dear. I own to his
gallantry--in the French sense as well as the English, it seems! It's
natural that Romfrey should excuse his wife. She's another of the women
who are crazy about Nevil Beauchamp. She spoke to me of the "pleasant
visit of her French friends," and would have enlarged on it, but Romfrey
stopped her. By the way, he proposes Captain Baskelett for you, and
we're to look for Baskelett's coming here, backed by his uncle. There's
no end to it; there never will be till you're married: and no peace for
me! I hope I shan't find myself with a cold to-morrow.'

The colonel coughed, and perhaps exaggerated the premonitory symptoms of
a cold.

'Italy, papa, would do you good,' said Cecilia.

'It might,' said he.

'If we go immediately, papa; to-morrow, early in the morning, before
there is a chance of any visitors coming to the house.'

'From Bevisham?'

'From Steynham. I cannot endure a second persecution.'

'But you have a world of packing, my dear.'

'An hour before breakfast will be sufficient for me.'

'In that case, we might be off early, as you say, and have part of the
Easter week in Rome.'

'Mr. Austin wishes it greatly, papa, though he has not mentioned it.'

'Austin, my darling girl, is not one of your impatient men who burst with
everything they have in their heads or their hearts.'

'Oh! but I know him so well,' said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent
enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp suffering.
The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an enigma
concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had not
hitherto known at all. Her curiosity to pierce it faded. She and her
maid were packing through the night. At dawn she requested her maid to
lift the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather. 'Grey,
Miss,' the maid reported. It signified to Cecilia: no one roaming
outside.

The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she
commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil's
disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and
motives.--'I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my
weakness.'--Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be
jealous, nor any right to reproach him. Her task was to climb back to
those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her
down.

Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.

CHAPTER XLVI

AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN

It was in Italy that Cecilia's maiden dreams of life had opened. She
hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind
untainted. Italy was to be her reviving air.

While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at
speed to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France--she simply
remembered Nevil: he was distant; he had no place in the storied
landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men who
bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth's for those adoring
them. If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted her
through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her
flight released her. France, too, her rival!--the land of France,
personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative
gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.--'She knew him first: she
was his first love.' The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them,
renewed Cecilia's lofty-perching youth. Then--I am in Italy! she sighed
with rapture. The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.

But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on
over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to
the soul. In Rome Cecilia's vision of her track to Rome was of a run of
fire over a heath. She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome. It
seemed burnt out.

Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment
she had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it
like nothing she had yet experienced. Previous pains were but Summer
lightnings, passing shadows. She could have believed in sorcery:
the man had eaten her heart!

A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the
notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird. It served
to veil her dulness. An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking
to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a
young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to
be followed by their footman in the melancholy pomp of state livery.
Wherever she encountered them Cecilia talked Nevil Beauchamp. Even Mr.
Tuckham perceived it. She was extremely uncharitable: she extended her
ungenerous criticism to the institution of the footman: England, and the
English, were lashed.

'These people are caricatures,' Tuckham said, in apology for poor England
burlesqued abroad. 'You must not generalize on them. Footmen are
footmen all the world over. The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.'

'They are at home. Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe.
We cannot but be despised. One comes abroad foredoomed to share the
sentiment. This is your middle-class! What society can they move in,
that sanctions a vulgarity so perplexing? They have the air of ornaments
on a cottager's parlour mantelpiece.'

Tuckham laughed. 'Something of that,' he said.

'Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,' she
continued. 'It is not wonderful that we have so much satirical writing
in England, with such objects of satire. It may be as little wonderful
that the satire has no effect. Immense wealth and native obtuseness
combine to disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say
monstrosity. I fall in love with the poor, and think they have a cause
to be pleaded, when I look at those people. We scoff at the vanity of
the French, but it is a graceful vanity; pardonable compared with ours.'

'I've read all that a hundred times,' quoth Tuckham bluntly.

'So have I. I speak of it because I see it. We scoff at the simplicity
of the Germans.'

'The Germans live in simple fashion, because they're poor. French
vanity's pretty and amusing. I don't know whether it's deep in them, for
I doubt their depth; but I know it's in their joints. The first spring
of a Frenchman comes of vanity. That you can't say of the English.
Peace to all! but I abhor cosmopolitanism. No man has a firm foothold
who pretends to it. None despises the English in reality. Don't be
misled, Miss Halkett. We're solid: that is the main point. The world
feels our power, and has confidence in our good faith. I ask for no
more.'

'With Germans we are supercilious Celts; with Frenchmen we are sneering
Teutons:--Can we be loved, Mr. Tuckham?'

'That's a quotation from my friend Lydiard. Loved? No nation ever was
loved while it lived. As Lydiard says, it may be a good beast or a bad,
but a beast it is. A nation's much too big for refined feelings and
affections. It must be powerful or out of the way, or down it goes.
When a nation's dead you may love it; but I don't see the use of dying to
be loved. My aim for my country is to have the land respected. For that
purpose we must have power; for power wealth; for wealth industry; for
industry internal peace: therefore no agitation, no artificial divisions.
All's plain in history and fact, so long as we do not obtrude
sentimentalism. Nothing mixes well with that stuff--except poetical
ideas!'

Contrary to her anticipation, Cecilia was thrown more into companionship
with Mr. Tuckham than with Mr. Austin; and though it often vexed her, she
acknowledged that she derived a benefit from his robust antagonism of
opinion. And Italy had grown tasteless to her. She could hardly
simulate sufficient curiosity to serve for a vacant echo to Mr. Austin's
historic ardour. Pliny the Younger might indeed be the model of a
gentleman of old Rome; there might be a scholarly pleasure in
calculating, as Mr. Austin did, the length of time it took Pliny to
journey from the city to his paternal farm, or villa overlooking the
lake, or villa overlooking the bay, and some abstruse fun in the tender
ridicule of his readings of his poems to friends; for Mr. Austin smiled
effusively in alluding to the illustrious Roman pleader's foible of
verse: but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil
Beauchamp: she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer,
student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern
English gentleman, though he was. 'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly
to Seymour Austin's fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!'
conclusively: like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables.
She was unworthy of the society of a scholar. Nor could she kneel at the
feet of her especial heroes: Dante, Raphael, Buonarotti: she was unworthy
of them. She longed to be at Mount Laurels. Mr. Tuckham's conversation
was the nearest approach to it--as it were round by Greenland; but it was
homeward.

She was really grieved to lose him. Business called him to England.

'What business can it be, papa?' she inquired: and the colonel replied
briefly: 'Ours.'

Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in the
ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy,
Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning
the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no
jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle
cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and
laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome: she pulled
for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome
of the wise and clement emperors. To Cecilia's mind Rome rocked at a
period so closely neighbouring her decay: to him, with an imagination
brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the
sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished
supreme, and men eminent for culture: the finest flowers of our race, he
thought them: and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.

Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not have
framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and
elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism
of the Roman pattern:--he rejected the French. She mused on dim old
thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman's life under high
governorship. Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step. The
trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for
women aspiring to moral beauty and distinction. Beside such they should
be planted, if they would climb! Her walks and conversations with
Seymour Austin charmed her as the haze of a summer evening charms the
sight.

Upon the conclusion of her term of exile Cecilia would gladly have
remained in Italy another month. An appointment of her father's with Mr.
Tuckham at Mount Laurels on a particular day she considered as of no
consequence whatever, and she said so, in response to a meaningless nod.
But Mr. Austin was obliged to return to work. She set her face homeward
with his immediately, and he looked pleased: he did not try to dissuade
her from accompanying him by affecting to think it a sacrifice: clearly
he knew that to be near him was her greatest delight.

Thus do we round the perilous headland called love by wooing a good man
for his friendship, and requiting him with faithful esteem for the grief
of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth!

Cecilia would not suffer her fancy to go very far in pursuit of the
secret of Mr. Austin's present feelings. Until she reached Mount Laurels
she barely examined her own. The sight of the house warned her instantly
that she must have a defence: and then, in desperation but with perfect
distinctness, she entertained the hope of hearing him speak the
protecting words which could not be broken through when wedded to her
consent.

If Mr. Austin had no intentions, it was at least strange that he did not
part from her in London.

He whose coming she dreaded had been made aware of the hour of her
return, as his card, with the pencilled line, 'Will call on the 17th,'
informed her. The 17th was the morrow.

After breakfast on the morning of the 17th Seymour Austin looked her in
the eyes longer than it is customary for ladies to have to submit to keen
inspection.

'Will you come into the library?' he said.

She went with him into the library.

Was it to speak of his anxiousness as to the state of her father's health
that he had led her there, and that he held her hand? He alarmed her,
and he pacified her alarm, yet bade her reflect on the matter, saying
that her father, like other fathers, would be more at peace upon the
establishment of his daughter. Mr. Austin remarked that the colonel was
troubled.

'Does he wish for my pledge never to marry without his approval? I will
give it,' said Cecilia.

'He would like you to undertake to marry the man of his choice.'
Cecilia's features hung on an expression equivalent to:--I could almost
do that.'

At the same time she felt it was not Seymour Austin's manner of speaking.
He seemed to be praising an unknown person--some gentleman who was rough,
but of solid promise and singular strength of character.

The house-bell rang. Believing that Beauchamp had now come, she showed a
painful ridging of the brows, and Mr. Austin considerately mentioned the
name of the person he had in his mind.

She readily agreed with him regarding Mr. Tuckham's excellent qualities
--if that was indeed the name; and she hastened to recollect how little
she had forgotten Mr. Tuckham's generosity to Beauchamp, and confessed to
herself it might as well have been forgotten utterly for the thanks he
had received. While revolving these ideas she was listening to Mr.
Austin; gradually she was beginning to understand that she was parting
company with her original conjectures, but going at so swift a pace in so
supple and sure a grasp, that, like the speeding train slipped on new
lines of rails by the pointsman, her hurrying sensibility was not
shocked, or the shock was imperceptible, when she heard him proposing Mr.
Tuckham to her for a husband, by her father's authority, and with his own
warm seconding. He had not dropped her hand: he was very eloquent, a
masterly advocate: he pleaded her father's cause; it was not put to her
as Mr. Tuckham's: her father had set his heart on this union he was
awaiting her decision.

'Is it so urgent?' she asked.

'It is urgent. It saves him from an annoyance. He requires a son-in-law
whom he can confidently rely on to manage the estates, which you are
woman of the world enough to know should be in strong hands. He gives
you to a man of settled principles. It is urgent, because he may wish to
be armed with your answer at any instant.'

Her father entered the library. He embraced her, and 'Well?' he said.

'I must think, papa, I must think.'

She pressed her hand across her eyes. Disillusioned by Seymour Austin,
she was utterly defenceless before Beauchamp: and possibly Beauchamp was
in the house. She fancied he was, by the impatient brevity of her
father's voice.

Seymour Austin and Colonel Halkett left the room, and Blackburn Tuckham
walked in, not the most entirely self-possessed of suitors, puffing
softly under his breath, and blinking eyes as rapidly as a skylark claps
wings on the ascent.

Half an hour later Beauchamp appeared. He asked to see the colonel,
delivered himself of his pretensions and wishes to the colonel, and was
referred to Cecilia; but Colonel Halkett declined to send for her.
Beauchamp declined to postpone his proposal until the following day.
He went outside the house and walked up and down the grass-plot.

Cecilia came to him at last.

'I hear, Nevil, that you are waiting to speak to me.'

'I've been waiting some weeks. Shall I speak here?'

'Yes, here, quickly.'

'Before the house? I have come to ask you for your hand.'

'Mine? I cannot . . .'

'Step into the park with me. I ask you to marry me.'

'It is too late.'

CHAPTER XLVII

THE REFUSAL OF HIM

Passing from one scene of excitement to another, Cecilia was perfectly
steeled for her bitter task; and having done that which separated her a
sphere's distance from Beauchamp, she was cold, inaccessible to the face
of him who had swayed her on flood and ebb so long, incapable of tender
pity, even for herself. All she could feel was a harsh joy to have
struck off her tyrant's fetters, with a determination to cherish it
passionately lest she should presently be hating herself: for the shadow
of such a possibility fell within the narrow circle of her strung
sensations. But for the moment her delusion reached to the idea that she
had escaped from him into freedom, when she said, 'It is too late.'
Those words were the sum and voice of her long term of endurance. She
said them hurriedly, almost in a whisper, in the manner of one changeing
a theme of conversation for subjects happier and livelier, though none
followed.

The silence bore back on her a suspicion of a faint reproachfulness in
the words; and perhaps they carried a poetical tone, still more
distasteful.

'You have been listening to tales of me,' said Beauchamp.

'Nevil, we can always be friends, the best of friends.'

'Were you astonished at my asking you for your hand? You said "mine?"
as if you wondered. You have known my feelings for you. Can you deny
that? I have reckoned on yours--too long?--But not falsely? No, hear me
out. The truth is, I cannot lose you. And don't look so resolute.
Overlook little wounds: I was never indifferent to you. How could I be--
with eyes in my head? The colonel is opposed to me of course: he will
learn to understand me better: but you and I! we cannot be mere friends.
It's like daylight blotted out--or the eyes gone blind:--Too late? Can
you repeat it? I tried to warn you before you left England: I should
have written a letter to put you on your guard against my enemies:--
I find I have some: but a letter is sure to stumble; I should have been
obliged to tell you that I do not stand on my defence; and I thought I
should see you the next day. You went: and not a word for me! You gave
me no chance. If you have no confidence in me I must bear it. I may say
the story is false. With your hand in mine I would swear it.'

'Let it be forgotten,' said Cecilia, surprised and shaken to think that
her situation required further explanations; fascinated and unnerved by
simply hearing him. 'We are now--we are walking away from the house.'

'Do you object to a walk with me?'

They had crossed the garden plot and were at the gate of the park leading
to the Western wood. Beauchamp swung the gate open. He cast a look at
the clouds coming up from the South-west in folds of grey and silver.

'Like the day of our drive into Bevisham!--without the storm behind,' he
said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of her hair
in sunless light. 'There are flowers that grow only in certain valleys,
and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for Italy.
You colour the whole region for me. When you were absent, you were here.
I called here six times, and walked and talked with you.'

Cecilia set her face to the garden. Her heart had entered on a course of
heavy thumping, like a sapper in the mine.

Pain was not unwelcome to her, but this threatened weakness.

What plain words could she use? If Mr. Tuckham had been away from the
house, she would have found it easier to speak of her engagement; she
knew not why. Or if the imperative communication could have been
delivered in Italian or French, she was as little able to say why it
should have slipped from her tongue without a critic shudder to arrest
it. She was cold enough to revolve the words: betrothed, affianced,
plighted: and reject them, pretty words as they are. Between the
vulgarity of romantic language, and the baldness of commonplace, it
seemed to her that our English gives us no choice; that we cannot be
dignified in simplicity. And for some reason, feminine and remote, she
now detested her 'hand' so much as to be unable to bring herself to the
metonymic mention of it. The lady's difficulty was peculiar to sweet
natures that have no great warmth of passion; it can only be indicated.
Like others of the kind, it is traceable to the most delicate of
sentiments, and to the flattest:--for Mr. Blackburn's Tuckham's figure
was (she thought of it with no personal objection) not of the graceful
order, neither cavalierly nor kingly: and imagining himself to say, 'I am
engaged,' and he suddenly appearing on the field, Cecilia's whole mind
was shocked in so marked a way did he contrast with Beauchamp.

This was the effect of Beauchamp's latest words on her. He had disarmed
her anger.

'We must have a walk to-day,' he said commandingly, but it had stolen
into him that he and she were not walking on the same bank of the river,
though they were side by side: a chill water ran between them. As in
other days, there hung her hand: but not to be taken. Incredible as it
was, the icy sense of his having lost her benumbed him. Her beautiful
face and beautiful tall figure, so familiar to him that they were like a
possession, protested in his favour while they snatched her from him all
the distance of the words 'too late.'

'Will you not give me one half-hour?'

'I am engaged,' Cecilia plunged and extricated herself, 'I am engaged to
walk with Mr. Austin and papa.'

Beauchamp tossed his head. Something induced him to speak of Mr.
Tuckham. 'The colonel has discovered his Tory young man! It's an object
as incomprehensible to me as a Tory working-man. I suppose I must take
it that they exist. As for Blackburn Tuckham, I have nothing against
him. He's an honourable fellow enough, and would govern Great Britain as
men of that rich middle-class rule their wives--with a strict regard for
ostensible humanity and what the law allows them. His manners have
improved. Your cousin Mary seems to like him: it struck me when I saw
them together. Cecilia! one half-hour! You refuse me: you have not
heard me. You will not say too late.'

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