Beauchamps Career, v6
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George Meredith >> Beauchamps Career, v6
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'Nevil, I have said it finally. I have no longer the right to conceive
it unsaid.'
'So we speak! It's the language of indolence, temper, faint hearts.
"Too late" has no meaning. Turn back with me to the park. I offer you
my whole heart; I love you. There's no woman living who could be to me
the wife you would be. I'm like your male nightingale that you told me
of: I must have my mate to sing to--that is, work for and live for; and
she must not delay too long. Did I? Pardon me if you think I did. You
have known I love you. I have been distracted by things that kept me
from thinking of myself and my wishes: and love's a selfish business
while . . . while one has work in hand. It's clear I can't do two
things at a time--make love and carry on my taskwork. I have been idle
for weeks. I believed you were mine and wanted no lovemaking. There's
no folly in that, if you understand me at all. As for vanity about
women, I 've outlived it. In comparison with you I'm poor, I know:--you
look distressed, but one has to allude to it:--I admit that wealth would
help me. To see wealth supporting the cause of the people for once
would--but you say, too late! Well, I don't renounce you till I see you
giving your hand to a man who's not myself. You have been offended:
groundlessly, on my honour! You are the woman of all women in the world
to hold me fast in faith and pride in you. It's useless to look icy: you
feel what I say.'
'Nevil, I feel grief, and beg you to cease. I am----It is-----'
"'Too late' has not a rag of meaning, Cecilia! I love your name. I love
this too: this is mine, and no one can rob me of it.'
He drew forth a golden locket and showed her a curl of her hair.
Crimsoning, she said instantly: 'Language of the kind I used is open to
misconstruction, I fear. I have not even the right to listen to you. I
am . . . You ask me for what I have it no longer in my power to give.
I am engaged.'
The shot rang through him and partly stunned him; but incredulity made a
mocking effort to sustain him. The greater wounds do not immediately
convince us of our fate, though we may be conscious that we have been
hit.
'Engaged in earnest?' said he.
'Yes.'
'Of your free will?'
'Yes.'
Her father stepped out on the terrace, from one of the open windows,
trailing a newspaper like a pocket-handkerchief. Cecilia threaded the
flower-beds to meet him.
'Here's an accident to one of our ironclads,' he called to Beauchamp.
'Lives lost, sir?'
'No, thank heaven! but, upon my word, it's a warning. Read the
telegram; it's the Hastings. If these are our defences, at a cost of
half a million of money, each of them, the sooner we look to our land
forces the better.'
'The Shop will not be considered safe!' said Beauchamp, taking in the
telegram at a glance. 'Peppel's a first-rate officer too: she couldn't
have had a better captain. Ship seriously damaged!'
He handed back the paper to the colonel.
Cecilia expected him to say that he had foreseen such an event.
He said nothing; and with a singular contraction of the heart she
recollected how he had denounced our system of preparing mainly for the
defensive in war, on a day when they stood together in the park, watching
the slow passage of that very ship, the Hastings, along the broad water,
distant below them. The 'swarms of swift vessels of attack,' she
recollected particularly, and 'small wasps and rams under mighty steam-
power,' that he used to harp on when declaring that England must be known
for the assailant in war: she was to 'ray out' her worrying fleets. 'The
defensive is perilous policy in war': he had said it. She recollected
also her childish ridicule of his excess of emphasis: he certainly had
foresight.'
Mr. Austin and Mr. Tuckham came strolling in conversation round the house
to the terrace. Beauchamp bowed to the former, nodded to the latter,
scrutinizing him after he had done so, as if the flash of a thought were
in his mind. Tuckham's radiant aspect possibly excited it: 'Congratulate
me!' was the honest outcry of his face and frame. He was as over-
flowingly rosy as a victorious candidate at the hustings commencing a
speech. Cecilia laid her hand on an urn, in dread of the next words from
either of the persons present. Her father put an arm in hers, and leaned
on her. She gazed at her chamber window above, wishing to be wafted
thither to her seclusion within. The trembling limbs of physical
irresoluteness was a new experience to her.
'Anything else in the paper, colonel? I've not seen it to-day,' said
Beauchamp, for the sake of speaking.
'No, I don't think there's anything,' Colonel Halkett replied. 'Our
diplomatists haven't been shining much: that 's not our forte.'
'No: it's our field for younger sons.'
'Is it? Ah! There's an expedition against the hilltribes in India, and
we're such a peaceful nation, eh? We look as if we were in for a
complication with China.'
'Well, sir, we must sell our opium.'
'Of course we must. There's a man writing about surrendering Gibraltar!'
'I'm afraid we can't do that.'
'But where do you draw the line?' quoth Tuckham, very susceptible to a
sneer at the colonel, and entirely ignorant of the circumstances
attending Beauchamp's position before him. 'You defend the Chinaman; and
it's questionable if his case is as good as the Spaniard's.'
'The Chinaman has a case against our traders. Gibraltar concerns our
imperial policy.'
'As to the case against the English merchants, the Chinaman is for
shutting up his millions of acres of productive land, and the action of
commerce is merely a declaration of a universal public right, to which
all States must submit.'
'Immorality brings its punishment, be sure of that. Some day we shall
have enough of China. As to the Rock, I know the argument; I may be
wrong. I've had the habit of regarding it as necessary to our naval
supremacy.'
'Come! there we agree.'
'I'm not so certain.'
'The counter-argument, I call treason.'
'Well,' said Beauchamp, 'there's a broad policy, and a narrow. There's
the Spanish view of the matter--if you are for peace and harmony and
disarmament.'
'I'm not.'
'Then strengthen your forces.'
'Not a bit of it!'
'Then bully the feeble and truckle to the strong; consent to be hated
till you have to stand your ground.'
'Talk!'
'It seems to me logical.'
'That's the French notion--c'est lodgique!'
Tuckham's pronunciation caused Cecilia to level her eyes at him
passingly.
'By the way,' said Colonel Halkett, 'there are lots of horrors in the
paper to-day; wife kickings, and starvations--oh, dear me! and the
murder of a woman: two columns to that.'
'That, the Tory reaction is responsible for!' said Tuckham, rather by
way of a joke than a challenge.
Beauchamp accepted it as a challenge. Much to the benevolent amusement
of Mr. Austin and Colonel Halkett, he charged the responsibility of every
crime committed in the country, and every condition of misery, upon the
party which declined to move in advance, and which therefore apologized
for the perpetuation of knavery, villany, brutality, injustice, and foul
dealing.
'Stick to your laws and systems and institutions, and so long as you
won't stir to amend them, I hold you accountable for that long newspaper
list daily.'
He said this with a visible fire of conviction.
Tuckham stood bursting at the monstrousness of such a statement.
He condensed his indignant rejoinder to: 'Madness can't go farther!'
'There's an idea in it,' said Mr. Austin.
'It's an idea foaming at the mouth, then.'
'Perhaps it has no worse fault than that of not marching parallel with
the truth,' said Mr. Austin, smiling. 'The party accusing in those terms
. . . what do you say, Captain Beauchamp?--supposing us to be pleading
before a tribunal?'
Beauchamp admitted as much as that he had made the case gigantic, though
he stuck to his charge against the Tory party. And moreover: the Tories-
and the old Whigs, now Liberals, ranked under the heading of Tories--
those Tories possessing and representing the wealth of the country, yet
had not started one respectable journal that a lady could read through
without offence to her, or a gentleman without disgust! If there was not
one English newspaper in existence independent of circulation and
advertisements, and of the tricks to win them, the Tories were answerable
for the vacancy. They, being the rich who, if they chose, could set an
example to our Press by subscribing to maintain a Journal superior to the
flattering of vile appetites--'all that nauseous matter,' Beauchamp
stretched his fingers at the sheets Colonel Halkett was holding, and
which he had not read--'those Tories,' he bowed to the colonel, 'I'm
afraid I must say you, sir, are answerable for it.'
'I am very well satisfied with my paper,' said the colonel.
Beauchamp sighed to himself. 'We choose to be satisfied,' he said.
His pure and mighty DAWN was in his thoughts: the unborn light of a day
denied to earth!
One of the doctors of Bevisham, visiting a sick maid of the house,
trotted up the terrace to make his report to her master of the state of
her health. He hoped to pull her through with the aid of high feeding.
He alluded cursorily to a young girl living on the outskirts of the town,
whom he had been called in to see at the eleventh hour, and had lost,
owing to the lowering of his patient from a prescription of a vegetable
diet by a certain Dr. Shrapnel.
That ever-explosive name precipitated Beauchamp to the front rank of the
defence.
'I happen to be staying with Dr. Shrapnel,' he observed. 'I don't eat
meat there because he doesn't, and I am certain I take no harm by
avoiding it. I think vegetarianism a humaner system, and hope it may be
wise. I should like to set the poor practising it, for their own sakes;
and I have half an opinion that it would be good for the rich--if we are
to condemn gluttony.'
'Ah? Captain Beauchamp!' the doctor bowed to him. 'But my case was one
of poor blood requiring to be strengthened. The girl was allowed to sink
so low that stimulants were ineffective when I stepped in. There's the
point. It 's all very well while you are in health. You may do without
meat till your system demands the stimulant, or else--as with this poor
girl! And, indeed, Captain Beauchamp, if I may venture the remark--I had
the pleasure of seeing you during the last Election in our town--and if I
may be so bold, I should venture to hint that the avoidance of animal
food--to judge by appearances--has not been quite wholesome for you.'
Eyes were turned on Beauchamp.
CHAPTER XLVIII
OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY
Cecilia softly dropped her father's arm, and went into the house. The
exceeding pallor of Beauchamp's face haunted her in her room. She heard
the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn
Tuckham's: 'Immorality of meat-eating? What nonsense are they up to
now?'
Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two. As usual, he was the
solitary minority.
But how mournfully changed he was! She had not noticed it, agitated
by her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen.
He was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of the
Esperanza out of Lieutenant Wilmore's boat, that sunny breezy day which
was the bright first chapter of her new life--of her late life, as it
seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the
coldest of the women of earth. She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth,
flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden
and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had
ceased to speak.
How much he must have suffered of late! The room she had looked to as a
refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had
incredibly accepted. She remained there, the victim of a heart malady,
under the term of headache. Feeling entrapped, she considered that she
must have been encircled and betrayed. She looked back on herself as a
giddy figure falling into a pit: and in the pit she lay.
And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the
generous and stedfast man of earth! He never abandoned a common
friendship. His love of his country was love still, whatever the form it
had taken. His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for which
men laughed at him, was beautiful.
Where am I? she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by
his wan features. She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave. Even Mr.
Austin had conspired against him: for only she read Nevil justly. His
defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned
the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to
creep into sunshine.
The only worthy thing she could think of doing was (it must be mentioned
for a revelation of her fallen state, and, moreover, she was not lusty of
health at the moment) to abjure meat. The body loathed it, and
consequently the mind of the invalided lady shrank away in horror of the
bleeding joints, and the increasingly fierce scramble of Christian souls
for the dismembered animals: she saw the innocent pasturing beasts, she
saw the act of slaughter. She had actually sweeping before her sight a
spectacle of the ludicrous-terrific, in the shape of an entire community
pursuing countless herds of poor scampering animal life for blood: she,
meanwhile, with Nevil and Dr. Shrapnel, stood apart contemning. For
whoso would not partake of flesh in this kingdom of roast beef must be of
the sparse number of Nevil's execrated minority in politics.
The example will show that she touched the borders of delirium.
Physically, the doctor pronounces her bilious. She was in earnest so far
as to send down to the library for medical books, and books upon diet.
These, however, did not plead for the beasts. They treated the subject
without question of man's taking that which he has conquered. Poets and
philosophers did the same. Again she beheld Nevil Beauchamp solitary in
the adverse rank to the world;--to his countrymen especially. But that
it was no material cause which had wasted his cheeks and lined his
forehead, she was sure: and to starve with him, to embark with him in his
little boat on the seas he whipped to frenzy, would have been a dream of
bliss, had she dared to contemplate herself in a dream as his companion.
It was not to be thought of.
No: but this was, and to be thought of seriously: Cecilia had said to
herself for consolation that Beauchamp was no spiritual guide; he had her
heart within her to plead for him, and the reflection came to her, like a
bubble up from the heart, that most of our spiritual guides neglect the
root to trim the flower: and thence, turning sharply on herself, she
obtained a sudden view of her allurement and her sin in worshipping
herself, and recognized that the aim at an ideal life closely approaches,
or easily inclines, to self-worship; to which the lady was woman and
artist enough to have had no objection, but that therein visibly she
discerned the retributive vain longings, in the guise of high individual
superiority and distinction, that had thwarted her with Nevil Beauchamp,
never permitting her to love single-mindedly or whole-heartedly, but
always in reclaiming her rights and sighing for the loss of her ideal;
adoring her own image, in fact, when she pretended to cherish, and regret
that she could not sufficiently cherish, the finer elements of nature.
What was this ideal she had complained of losing? It was a broken
mirror: she could think of it in no other form.
Dr. Shrapnel's 'Ego-Ego' yelped and gave chase to her through the pure
beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets. It hunted
all the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their
heads-her favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.
The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a
consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. 'The very family to
require strong nourishment,' said the doctor.
Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world's weight.
Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp's track to experience that.
She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
Homoeopathy, hydropathy,--the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.
Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her
Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of
their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount
Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one deposited
on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her father had
seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her personal
dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal of her
feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her where she
now lay helpless, almost inanimate.
She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a
marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear of
death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than Cecilia's
shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood like a
snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily for
Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few and
short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him to
alarm her.
Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge,
or at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed.
He was never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he
absolutely trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself
that she belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon
Beauchamp. With a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a
collection of treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and
pencil-marked to simplify her study of the question. They sketched in
company; she played music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it
well. He seemed to feel the beauty of it sensitively, as she did
critically. In other days the positions had been reversed. He
invariably talked of Beauchamp with kindness, deploring only that he
should be squandering his money on workmen's halls and other hazy
projects down in Bevisham.
'Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and has
actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten thousand
pounds on a single building outside the town, and he'll have to endow it
to support it--a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he wants to jam
the business of two or three centuries into a life-time. These men of
their so-called progress are like the majority of religious minds: they
can't believe without seeing and touching. That is to say, they don't
believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly by agitating,
and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass they can
believe in. You see it in their way of arguing; it's half done with the
fist. Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible despondency about
progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp's no Radical. He hasn't forgiven the
Countess of Romfrey for marrying above her rank. He may be a bit of a
Republican: but really in this country Republicans are fighting with the
shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse. I beg to state that I have a
reverence for constituted authority: I speak of what those fellows are
contending with.'
'Right,' said Colonel Halkett. 'But "the shadow of an old hat and a
cockhorse": what does that mean?'
'That's what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.'
'Ah! so; yes,' quoth the colonel. 'And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
that what we've grown up well with, powerfully with, it's base
ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.'
He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he affirmed
of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect Beauchamp's
interests.
A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement of
the earl's expectations of a son and heir. The earl wrote to Colonel
Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time
there.
'Now, that's brave news!' the colonel exclaimed.
He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so to
Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord's hand and congratulate him with
all his heart. Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of any
description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in the
peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day to be
fixed. Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at wonderful
colours of a Western sky: an oblivion of earthly dates and obligations.
What mattered it that there were gales in August? She loved the sea,
and the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and plunging gannet,
the sun on the waves, and the torn cloud. The revelling libertine open
sea wedded her to Beauchamp in that veiled cold spiritual manner she
could muse on as a circumstance out of her life.
Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind. The gales of August
mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped at
a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon as
they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw
beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting
sea. Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof. As the
Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself
through her love of it; quite to herself. It was delicious to look round
and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her from
thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was abroad.
The hard dry gale increased. Her father, stretched beside her, drew her
attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib
on the Esperanza's weather bow--a gallant boat carefully handled. She
watched it with some anxiety, but the Esperanza was bound for a Devon
bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the
little cutter to run into haven if she pleased. The passing her was no
event.--In a representation of the common events befalling us in these
times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at
whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect
tense. For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with
Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened to
cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened? Cecilia gathered
it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and pleasure, she
found at Romfrey Castle. Her friend Louise received a letter from Mr.
Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman's log of a cruise of a
fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch of Beauchamp
standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up to nine at
night, munching a biscuit for nourishment. The beautiful widow prepared
the way for what was very soon to be publicly known concerning herself by
reading out this passage of her correspondent's letter in the breakfast
room.
'Yes, the fellow's a sailor!' said Lord Romfrey.
The countess rose from her chair and walked out.
'Now, was that abuse of the fellow?' the old lord asked Colonel Halkett.
'I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else. He is a sailor, and he's
fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends his neck
never 's nearer it.'
He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.
Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window overlooking
the swelling woods of Romfrey. She praised the loveliness of the view.
'It is fire to me,' said Rosamund.
Cecilia looked at her, startled. Rosamund said no more.
She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in
company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did
she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a
shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant
pain.
We will make no mystery about it. I would I could. Those happy tales of
mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of
bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the attentive
mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the familiar
urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise. And oh, the
refreshment there is in dealing with characters either contemptibly
beneath us or supernaturally above! My way is like a Rhone island in the
summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between the two
forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight mankind--
honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none; they are
actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that they are
directed to set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant benches!--
the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to; and
if you are there impervious to them, we are lost: back I go to my
wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit of
listening to my own voice more than is good: The burden of a child in her
bosom had come upon Rosamund with the visage of the Angel of Death
fronting her in her path. She believed that she would die; but like much
that we call belief, there was a kernel of doubt in it, which was lively
when her frame was enlivened, and she then thought of the giving birth to
this unloved child, which was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose
interest solely (so she could presume to think, because it had been her
motive reason) she had married the earl. She had no wish to be a mother;
but that prospect, and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she
could have submitted to for Lord Romfrey's sake. It struck her like a
scoffer's blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have
become the instrument for dispossessing him. The revulsion of her
feelings enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to
fathom him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had
been his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a
woman to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the
trifles daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her
resentment, like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines.
Nevil's loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she
was lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham. Lord Romfrey had
repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental
questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was
more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor. Latterly, with
the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of
hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking the
hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her. Now and
then they occurred perforce. The presence of Cecilia exasperated
Rosamund's peculiar sensitiveness. It required Louise Wardour-Devereux's
apologies and interpretations to account for what appeared to Cecilia
strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady Romfrey's behaviour.
The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady Romfrey had paid Mrs.
Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly one Sunday in the
London season, for the purpose, as it became evident, of meeting Mr.
Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr. Tuckham would be
there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was, Louise assured Cecilia,
purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were present: but the countess
obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr. Tuckham came from it
declaring it to have been more terrible than any he had ever been called
upon to endure. The object of the countess was to persuade him to
renounce his bride.
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