Beauchamps Career, v7
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George Meredith >> Beauchamps Career, v7
These were poetic flights, but he knew them not by name, and had not to
be ashamed of them.
Rosamund met him in the hall of the castle. 'You have not deceived me,
my dear lord,' she said, embracing him. 'You have done what you could
for me. The rest is for me to do.'
He reciprocated her embrace warmly, in commendation of her fresher good
looks.
She asked him, 'You have spoken to Dr. Shrapnel?'
He answered her, 'Twice.'
The word seemed quaint. She recollected that he was quaint.
He repeated, 'I spoke to him the first day I saw him, and the second.'
'We are so much indebted to him,' said Rosamund. 'His love of Nevil
surpasses ours. Poor man! poor man! At least we may now hope the blow
will be spared him which would have carried off his life with Nevil's.
I have later news of Nevil than you.'
'Good, of course?'
'Ah me! the pleasure of the absence of pain. He is not gone.'
Lord Romfrey liked her calm resignation.
'There's a Mr. Lydiard,' he said, 'a friend of Nevil's, and a friend of
Louise Devereux's.'
'Yes; we hear from him every four hours,' Rosamund rejoined. 'Mention
him to her before me.'
'That's exactly what I was going to tell you to do before me,' said her
husband, smiling.
'Because, Everard, is it not so?--widows . . . and she loves this
gentleman!'
'Certainly, my dear; I think with you about widows. The world asks them
to practise its own hypocrisy. Louise Devereux was married to a pipe;
she's the widow of tobacco ash. We'll make daylight round her.'
'How good, how kind you are, my lord! I did not think so shrewd! But
benevolence is almost all-seeing: You said you spoke to Dr. Shrapnel
twice. Was he . . . polite?'
'Thoroughly upset, you know.'
'What did he say?'
'What was it? "Beauchamp! Beauchamp!" the first time; and the second
time he said he thought it had left off raining.'
'Ah!' Rosamund drooped her head.
She looked up. 'Here is Louise. My lord has had a long conversation
with Mr. Lydiard.'
'I trust he will come here before you leave us,' added the earl.
Rosamund took her hand. 'My lord has been more acute than I, or else
your friend is less guarded than you.'
'What have you seen?' said the blushing lady.
'Stay. I have an idea you are one of the women I promised to Cecil
Baskelett,' said the earl. 'Now may I tell him there's no chance?'
'Oh! do.'
They spent so very pleasant an evening that the earl settled down into a
comfortable expectation of the renewal of his old habits in the September
and October season. Nevil's frightful cry played on his ear-drum at
whiles, but not too affectingly. He conducted Rosamund to her room,
kissed her, hoped she would sleep well, and retired to his good hard
bachelor's bed, where he confidently supposed he would sleep. The sleep
of a dyspeptic, with a wilder than the monstrous Bevisham dream, befell
him, causing him to rise at three in the morning and proceed to his
lady's chamber, to assure himself that at least she slept well. She was
awake.
'I thought you might come,' she said.
He reproached her gently for indulging foolish nervous fears.
She replied, 'No, I do not; I am easier about Nevil. I begin to think he
will live. I have something at my heart that prevents me from sleeping.
It concerns me. Whether he is to live or die, I should like him to know
he has not striven in vain--not in everything: not where my conscience
tells me he was right, and we, I, wrong--utterly wrong, wickedly wrong.'
'My dear girl, you are exciting yourself.'
'No; feel my pulse. The dead of night brings out Nevil to me like the
Writing on the Wall. It shall not be said he failed in everything.
Shame to us if it could be said! He tried to make me see what my duty
was, and my honour.'
'He was at every man Jack of us.'
'I speak of one thing. I thought I might not have to go. Now I feel I
must. I remember him at Steynham, when Colonel Halkett and Cecilia were
there. But for me, Cecilia would now be his wife. Of that there is no
doubt; that is not the point; regrets are fruitless. I see how the
struggle it cost him to break with his old love--that endearing Madame de
Rouaillout, his Renee--broke his heart; and then his loss of Cecilia
Halkett. But I do believe, true as that I am lying here, and you hold my
hand, my dear husband, those losses were not so fatal to him as his
sufferings he went through on account of his friend Dr. Shrapnel. I will
not keep you here.
Go and have some rest. What I shall beg of you tomorrow will not injure
my health in the slightest: the reverse: it will raise me from a bitter
depression. It shall not be said that those who loved him were unmoved
by him. Before he comes back to life, or is carried to his grave, he
shall know that I was not false to my love of him.'
'My dear, your pulse is at ninety,' said the earl.
'Look lenient, be kind, be just, my husband. Oh! let us cleanse our
hearts. This great wrong was my doing. I am not only quite strong
enough to travel to Bevisham, I shall be happy in going: and when I have
done it--said: "The wrong was all mine," I shall rejoice like the pure in
spirit. Forgiveness does not matter, though I now believe that poor
loving old man who waits outside his door weeping, is wrong-headed only
in his political views. We women can read men by their power to love.
Where love exists there is goodness. But it is not for the sake of the
poor old man himself that I would go: it is for Nevil's; it is for ours,
chiefly for me, for my child's, if ever . . . !' Rosamund turned her
head on her pillow.
The earl patted her cheek. 'We 'll talk it over in the morning,' he
said. 'Now go to sleep.'
He could not say more, for he did not dare to attempt cajolery with her.
Shading his lamp he stepped softly away to wrestle with a worse nightmare
than sleep's. Her meaning was clear: and she was a woman to insist on
doing it. She was nevertheless a woman not impervious to reason, if only
he could shape her understanding to perceive that the state of her
nerves, incident to her delicate situation and the shock of that fellow
Nevil's illness--poor lad!--was acting on her mind, rendering her a
victim of exaggerated ideas of duty, and so forth.
Naturally, apart from allowing her to undertake the journey by rail, he
could not sanction his lady's humbling of herself so egregiously and
unnecessarily. Shrapnel had behaved unbecomingly, and had been punished
for it. He had spoken to Shrapnel, and the affair was virtually at an
end. With his assistance she would see that, when less excited. Her
eternal brooding over Nevil was the cause of these mental vagaries.
Lord Romfrey was for postponing the appointed discussion in the morning
after breakfast. He pleaded business engagements.
'None so urgent as this of mine,' said Rosamund.
'But we have excellent news of Nevil: you have Gannet's word for it,' he
argued. 'There's really nothing to distress you.'
'My heart: I must be worthy of good news, to know happiness,' she
answered. 'I will say, let me go to Bevisham two, three, four days
hence, if you like, but there is peace for me, and nowhere else.'
'My precious Rosamund! have you set your two eyes on it? What you are
asking, is for permission to make an apology to Shrapnel!'
'That is the word.'
'That's Nevil's word.'
'It is a prescription to me.'
'An apology?'
The earl's gorge rose. Why, such an act was comparable to the circular
mission of the dog!
'If I do not make the apology, the mother of your child is a coward,'
said Rosamund.
'She's not.'
'I trust not.'
'You are a reasonable woman, my dear. Now listen the man insulted you.
It's past: done with. He insulted you . . .'
'He did not.'
'What?'
'He was courteous to me, hospitable to me, kind to me. He did not insult
me. I belied him.'
'My dear saint, you're dreaming. He spoke insultingly of you to Cecil.'
'Is my lord that man's dupe? I would stand against him before the throne
of God, with what little I know of his interview with Dr. Shrapnel, to
confront him and expose his lie. Do not speak of him. He stirs my evil
passions, and makes me feel myself the creature I was when I returned to
Steynham from my first visit to Bevisham, enraged with jealousy of Dr.
Shrapnel's influence over Nevil, spiteful, malicious: Oh! such a nest of
vileness as I pray to heaven I am not now, if it is granted me to give
life to another. Nevil's misfortunes date from that,' she continued, in
reply to the earl's efforts to soothe her. 'Not the loss of the
Election: that was no misfortune, but a lesson. He would not have shone
in Parliament: he runs too much from first principles to extremes. You
see I am perfectly reasonable, Everard: 'I can form an exact estimate of
character and things.' She smiled in his face. 'And I know my husband
too: what he will grant; what he would not, and justly would not. I know
to a certainty that vexatious as I must be to you now, you are conscious
of my having reason for being so.'
'You carry it so far--fifty miles beyond the mark,' said he. 'The man
roughed you, and I taught him manners.'
'No!' she half screamed her interposition. 'I repeat, he was in no way
discourteous or disobliging to me. He offered me a seat at his table,
and, heaven forgive me! I believe a bed in his house, that I might wait
and be sure of seeing Nevil, because I was very anxious to see him.'
'All the same, you can't go to the man.'
'I should have said so too, before my destiny touched me.'
'A certain dignity of position, my dear, demands a corresponding dignity
of conduct: you can't go.'
'If I am walking in the very eye of heaven, and feeling it shining on me
where I go, there is no question for me of human dignity.'
Such flighty talk offended Lord Romfrey.
'It comes to this: you're in want of a parson.'
Rosamund was too careful to hint that she would have expected succour and
seconding from one or other of the better order of clergymen.
She shook her head. 'To this, my dear lord: I have a troubled mind; and
it is not to listen nor to talk, that I am in need of, but to act.'
'Yes, my dear girl, but not to act insanely. I do love soundness of
head. You have it, only just now you're a little astray. We'll leave
this matter for another time.'
Rosamund held him by the arm. 'Not too long!'
Both of them applied privately to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux for her opinion
and counsel on the subject of the proposal to apologize to Dr. Shrapnel.
She was against it with the earl, and became Rosamund's echo when with
her. When alone, she was divided into two almost equal halves: deeming
that the countess should not insist, and the earl should not refuse: him
she condemned for lack of sufficient spiritual insight to perceive the
merits of his wife's request: her she accused of some vestige of
something underbred in her nature, for putting such fervid stress upon
the supplication: i.e. making too much of it--a trick of the vulgar: and
not known to the languid.
She wrote to Lydiard for advice.
He condensed a paragraph into a line:
'It should be the earl. She is driving him to it, intentionally or not.'
Mrs. Devereux doubted that the countess could have so false an idea of
her husband's character as to think it possible he would ever be bent to
humble himself to the man he had castigated. She was right. It was by
honestly presenting to his mind something more loathsome still, the
humbling of herself, that Rosamund succeeded in awakening some remote
thoughts of a compromise, in case of necessity. Better I than she!
But the necessity was inconceivable.
He had really done everything required of him, if anything was really
required, by speaking to Shrapnel civilly. He had spoken to Shrapnel
twice.
Besides, the castle was being gladdened by happier tidings of Beauchamp.
Gannet now pledged his word to the poor fellow's recovery, and the earl's
particular friends arrived, and the countess entertained them. October
passed smoothly.
She said once: 'Ancestresses of yours, my lord, have undertaken
pilgrimages as acts of penance for sin, to obtain heaven's intercession
in their extremity.'
'I dare say they did,' he replied. 'The monks got round them.'
'It is not to be laughed at, if it eased their hearts.'
Timidly she renewed her request for permission to perform the pilgrimage
to Bevisham.
'Wait,' said he, 'till Nevil is on his legs.'
'Have you considered where I may then be, Everard?'
'My love, you sleep well, don't you?'
'You see me every night.'
'I see you sound asleep.'
'I see you watching me.'
'Let's reason,' said the earl; and again they went through the argument
upon the apology to Dr. Shrapnel.
He was willing to indulge her in any amount of it: and she perceived why.
Fox! she thought. Grand fox, but fox downright. For her time was
shortening to days that would leave her no free-will.
On the other hand, the exercise of her free-will in a fast resolve, was
growing all the more a privilege that he was bound to respect. As she
became sacreder and doubly precious to him, the less would he venture to
thwart her, though he should think her mad. There would be an analogy
between his manner of regarding her and the way that superstitious
villagers look on their crazy innocents, she thought sadly. And she bled
for him too: she grieved to hurt his pride. But she had come to imagine
that there was no avoidance of this deed of personal humiliation.
Nevil had scrawled a note to her. She had it in her hand one forenoon in
mid November, when she said to her husband: 'I have ordered the carriage
for two o'clock to meet the quarter to three train to London, and I have
sent Stanton on to get the house ready for us tonight.'
Lord Romfrey levelled a marksman's eye at her.
'Why London? You know my wish that it should be here at the castle.'
'I have decided to go to Bevisham. I have little time left.'
'None, to my thinking.'
'Oh I yes; my heart will be light. I shall gain. You come with me to
London?'
'You can't go.'
'Don't attempt to reason with me, please, please!'
'I command, madam.'
'My lord, it is past the hour of commanding.'
He nodded his head, with the eyes up amid the puckered brows, and blowing
one of his long nasal expirations, cried, 'Here we are, in for another
bout of argument.'
'No; I can bear the journey, rejoice in confessing my fault, but more
argument I cannot bear. I will reason with you when I can: submit to me
in this.'
'Feminine reasoning!' he interjected.
'I have nothing better to offer. It will be prudent to attend to me.
Take my conduct for the portion I bring you. Before I put myself in
God's care I must be clean. I am unclean. Language like that offends
you. I have no better. My reasoning has not touched you; I am helpless,
except in this determination that my contrition shall be expressed to Dr.
Shrapnel. If I am to have life, to be worthy of living and being a
mother, it must be done. Now, my dear lord, see that, and submit.
You're but one voice: I am two.'
He jumped off his chair, frowning up his forehead, and staring awfully at
the insulting prospect. 'An apology to the man? By you? Away with it.'
'Make allowances for me if you can, my dear lord that is what I am going
to do.'
'My wife going there?' He strode along furiously. 'No!'
'You will not stop her.'
'There's a palsy in my arm if I don't.'
She plucked at her watch.
'Why, ma'am, I don't know you,' he said, coming close to her. 'Let 's
reason. Perhaps you overshot it; you were disgusted with Shrapnel.
Perhaps I was hasty; I get fired by an insult to a woman. There was a
rascal kissed a girl once against her will, and I heard her cry out; I
laid him on his back for six months; just to tell you; I'd do the same to
lord or beggar. Very well, my dear heart, we'll own I might have looked
into the case when that dog Cecil . . . what's the matter?'
'Speak on, my dear husband,' said Rosamund, panting.
'But your making the journey to Bevisham is a foolish notion.'
'Yes? well?'
'Well, we'll wait.'
'Oh! have we to travel over it all again?' she exclaimed in despair at
the dashing out of a light she had fancied. 'You see the wrong. You
know the fever it is in my blood, and you bid me wait.'
'Drop a line to Nevil.'
'To trick my conscience! I might have done that, and done well, once.
Do you think I dislike the task I propose to myself? It is for your sake
that I would shun it. As for me, the thought of going there is an
ecstasy. I shall be with Nevil, and be able to look in his face. And
how can I be actually abasing you when I am so certain that I am worthier
of you in what I do?'
Her exaltation swept her on. 'Hurry there, my lord, if you will. If you
think it prudent that you should go in my place, go: you deprive me of a
great joy, but I will not put myself in your way, and I consent. The
chief sin was mine; remember that. I rank it viler than Cecil
Baskelett's. And listen: when--can you reckon?--when will he confess his
wickedness? We separate ourselves from a wretch like that.'
'Pooh,' quoth the earl.
'But you will go?' She fastened her arms round the arm nearest: 'You or
I! Does it matter which? We are one. You speak for me; I should have
been forced to speak for you. You spare me the journey. I do not in
truth suppose it would have injured me; but I would not run one
unnecessary risk.'
Lord Romfrey sighed profoundly. He could not shake her off. How could
he refuse her?
How on earth had it come about that suddenly he was expected to be the
person to go?
She would not let him elude her; and her stained cheeks and her trembling
on his arm pleaded most pressingly and masteringly. It might be that she
spoke with a knowledge of her case. Positive it undoubtedly was that she
meant to go if he did not. Perhaps the hopes of his House hung on it.
Having admitted that a wrong had been done, he was not the man to leave
it unamended; only he would have chosen his time, and the manner. Since
Nevil's illness, too, he had once or twice been clouded with a little bit
of regret at the recollection of poor innocent old Shrapnel posted like a
figure of total inebriation beside the doorway of the dreadful sickroom.
There had been women of the earl's illustrious House who would have given
their hands to the axe rather than conceal a stain and have to dread a
scandal. His Rosamund, after all, was of their pattern; even though she
blew that conscience she prattled of into trifles, and swelled them, as
women of high birth in this country, out of the clutches of the priests,
do not do.
She clung to him for his promise to go.
He said: 'Well, well.'
'That means, you will,' said she.
His not denying it passed for the affirmative.
Then indeed she bloomed with love of him.
'Yet do say yes,' she begged.
'I'll go, ma'am,' shouted the earl. 'I'll go, my love,' he said softly.
CHAPTER LIII
THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
'You and Nevil are so alike,' Lady Romfrey said to her lord, at some
secret resemblance she detected and dwelt on fondly, when the earl was on
the point of starting a second time for Bevisham to perform what she had
prompted him to conceive his honourable duty, without a single intimation
that he loathed the task, neither shrug nor grimace.
'Two ends of a stick are pretty much alike: they're all that length
apart,' said he, very little in the humour for compliments, however well
braced for his work.
His wife's admiring love was pleasant enough. He preferred to have it
unspoken. Few of us care to be eulogized in the act of taking a nauseous
medical mixture.
For him the thing was as good as done, on his deciding to think it both
adviseable and right: so he shouldered his load and marched off with it.
He could have postponed the right proceeding, even after the partial
recognition of his error:--one drops a word or two by hazard, one
expresses an anxiety to afford reparation, one sends a message, and so
forth, for the satisfaction of one's conventionally gentlemanly feeling:
but the adviseable proceeding under stress of peculiar circumstances,
his clearly-awakened recognition of that, impelled him unhesitatingly.
His wife had said it was the portion she brought him. Tears would not
have persuaded him so powerfully, that he might prove to her he was glad
of her whatever the portion she brought. She was a good wife, a brave
woman, likely to be an incomparable mother. At present her very virtues
excited her to fancifulness nevertheless she was in his charge, and he
was bound to break the neck of his will, to give her perfect peace of
wind. The child suffers from the mother's mental agitation. It might be
a question of a nervous or an idiot future Earl of Romfrey. Better death
to the House than such a mockery of his line! These reflections reminded
him of the heartiness of his whipping of that poor old tumbled signpost
Shrapnel, in the name of outraged womankind. If there was no outrage?
Assuredly if there was no outrage, consideration for the state of his
wife would urge him to speak the apology in the most natural manner
possible. She vowed there was none.
He never thought of blaming her for formerly deceiving him, nor of
blaming her for now expediting him.
In the presence of Colonel Halkett, Mr. Tuckham, and Mr. Lydiard, on a
fine November afternoon, standing bareheaded in the fir-bordered garden
of the cottage on the common, Lord Romfrey delivered his apology to Dr.
Shrapnel, and he said:
'I call you to witness, gentlemen, I offer Dr. Shrapnel the fullest
reparation he may think fit to demand of me for an unprovoked assault on
him, that I find was quite unjustified, and for which I am here to ask
his forgiveness.'
Speech of man could not have been more nobly uttered.
Dr. Shrapnel replied:
'To the half of that, sir--'tis over! What remains is done with the
hand.'
He stretched his hand out.
Lord Romfrey closed his own on it.
The antagonists, between whom was no pretence of their being other after
the performance of a creditable ceremony, bowed and exchanged civil
remarks: and then Lord Romfrey was invited to go into the house and see
Beauchamp, who happened to be sitting with Cecilia Halkett and Jenny
Denham. Beauchamp was thin, pale, and quiet; but the sight of him
standing and conversing after that scene of the skinny creature
struggling with bareribbed obstruction on the bed, was an example of
constitutional vigour and a compliment to the family very gratifying to
Lord Romfrey. Excepting by Cecilia, the earl was coldly received. He
had to leave early by special express for London to catch the last train
to Romfrey. Beauchamp declined to fix a day for his visit to the castle
with Lydiard, but proposed that Lydiard should accompany the earl on his
return. Lydiard was called in, and at once accepted the earl's
invitation, and quitted the room to pack his portmanteau.
A faint sign of firm-shutting shadowed the corners of Jenny's lips.
'You have brought my nephew to life,' Lord Romfrey said to her.
'My share in it was very small, my lord.'
'Gannet says that your share in it was very great.'
'And I say so, with the authority of a witness,' added Cecilia.
'And I, from my experience,' came from Beauchamp.
His voice had a hollow sound, unlike his natural voice.
The earl looked at him remembering the bright laughing lad he had once
been, and said: 'Why not try a month of Madeira? You have only to step
on board the boat.'
'I don't want to lose a month of my friend,' said Beauchamp.
'Take your friend with you. After these fevers our Winters are bad.'
'I've been idle too long.'
'But, Captain Beauchamp,' said Jenny, 'you proposed to do nothing but
read for a couple of years.'
'Ay, there's the voyage!' sighed he, with a sailor-invalid's vision of
sunny seas dancing in the far sky.
'You must persuade Dr. Shrapnel to come; and he will not come unless you
come too, and you won't go anywhere but to the Alps!' She bent her eyes
on the floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from the
Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia: granite, as
he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of despair seemed to
tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had made in life, and cry
failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not been created for
failure.
He touched his uncle's hand indifferently: 'My love to the countess: let
me hear of her, sir, if you please.'
'You shall,' said the earl. 'But, off to Madeira, and up Teneriffe: sail
the Azores. I'll hire you a good-sized schooner.'
'There is the Esperanza,' said Cecilia. 'And the vessel is lying idle,
Nevil! Can you allow it?'
He consented to laugh at himself, and fell to coughing.
Jenny Denham saw a real human expression of anxiety cross the features of
the earl at the sound of the cough.
Lord Romfrey said 'Adieu,' to her.
He offered her his hand, which she contrived to avoid taking by dropping
a formal half-reverence.