Beauchamps Career, complete by George Meredith (page 7)

that a lady’s name was introduced, which, as your representative in relation to her, I was bound to defend from a gratuitous and scoundrelly aspersion. Shrapnel’s epistle to “brave Beauchamp” is Church hymnification in comparison with his conversation. He is indubitably one of the greatest ruffians of his time.

‘I took the step with the best of intentions, and all I can plead is that I am not a diplomatist of sixty. His last word was that he is for war with us. As far as we men are concerned it is of small importance. I should think that the sort of society he would scandalize a lady in is not much to be feared. I have given him his warning. He tops me by about a head, and loses his temper every two minutes. I could have drawn him out deliciously if he had not rather disturbed mine. By this time my equanimity is restored. The only thing I apprehend is your displeasure with me for having gone to the man. I have done no good, and it prevents me from running over to Holdesbury to see Nevil, for if “shindy letters,” as you call them, are bad, shindy meetings are worse. I should be telling him my opinion of Shrapnel, he would be firing out, I should retort, he would yell, I should snap my fingers, and he would go into convulsions. I am convinced that a cattle-breeder ought to keep himself particularly calm. So unless I have further orders from you I refrain from going.

‘The dinner was enthusiastic. I sat three hours among my Commons, they on me for that length of time–fatiguing, but a duty.’

Cecil subscribed his name with the warmest affection toward his uncle.

The brevity of the second letter had not brought him nearer to the truth in rescinding the picturesque accessories of his altercation with Dr. Shrapnel, but it veraciously expressed the sentiments he felt, and that was the palpable truth for him.

He posted the letter next morning.

CHAPTER XXXI

SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION

About noon the day following, on board the steam-yacht of the Countess of Menai, Cecil was very much astonished to see Mr. Romfrey descending into a boat hard by, from Grancey Lespel’s hired cutter. Steam was up, and the countess was off for a cruise in the Channel, as it was not a race- day, but seeing Mr. Romfrey’s hand raised, she spoke to Cecil, and immediately gave orders to wait for the boat. This lady was a fervent admirer of the knightly gentleman, and had reason to like him, for he had once been her champion. Mr. Romfrey mounted the steps, received her greeting, and beckoned to Cecil. He carried a gold-headed horsewhip under his arm. Lady Menai would gladly have persuaded him to be one of her company for the day’s voyage, but he said he had business in Bevisham, and moving aside with Cecil, put the question to him abruptly: ‘What were the words used by Shrapnel?’

‘The identical words?’ Captain Baskelett asked. He could have tripped out the words with the fluency of ancient historians relating what great kings, ambassadors, or Generals may well have uttered on State occasions, but if you want the identical words, who is to remember them the day after they have been delivered? He said:

‘Well, as for the identical words, I really, and I was tolerably excited, sir, and upon my honour, the identical words are rather difficult to….’ He glanced at the horsewhip, and pricked by the sight of it to proceed, thought it good to soften the matter if possible. ‘I don’t quite recollect . . . I wrote off to you rather hastily. I think he said– but Palmet was there.’

‘Shrapnel spoke the words before Lord Palmet?’ said Mr. Romfrey austerely.

Captain Baskelett summoned Palmet to come near, and inquired of him what he had heard Shrapnel say, suggesting: ‘He spoke of a handsome woman for a housekeeper, and all the world knew her character?’

Mr. Romfrey cleared his throat.

‘Or knew she had no character,’ Cecil pursued in a fit of gratified spleen, in scorn of the woman. ‘Don’t you recollect his accent in pronouncing housekeeper?’

The menacing thunder sounded from Mr. Romfrey. He was patient in appearance, and waited for Cecil’s witness to corroborate the evidence.

It happened (and here we are in one of the circles of small things producing great consequences, which have inspired diminutive philosophers with ironical visions of history and the littleness of man), it happened that Lord Palmet, the humanest of young aristocrats, well-disposed toward the entire world, especially to women, also to men in any way related to pretty women, had just lit a cigar, and it was a cigar that he had been recommended to try the flavour of; and though he, having his wits about him, was fully aware that shipboard is no good place for a trial of the delicacy of tobacco in the leaf, he had begun puffing and sniffing in a critical spirit, and scarcely knew for the moment what to decide as to this particular cigar. He remembered, however, Mr. Romfrey’s objection to tobacco. Imagining that he saw the expression of a profound distaste in that gentleman’s more than usually serious face, he hesitated between casting the cigar into the water and retaining it. He decided upon the latter course, and held the cigar behind his back, bowing to Mr. Romfrey at about a couple of yards distance, and saying to Cecil, ‘Housekeeper; yes, I remember hearing housekeeper. I think so. Housekeeper? yes, oh yes.’

‘And handsome housekeepers were doubtful characters,’ Captain Baskelett prompted him.

Palmet laughed out a single ‘Ha!’ that seemed to excuse him for lounging away to the forepart of the vessel, where he tugged at his fine specimen of a cigar to rekindle it, and discharged it with a wry grimace, so delicate is the flavour of that weed, and so adversely ever is it affected by a breeze and a moist atmosphere. He could then return undivided in his mind to Mr. Romfrey and Cecil, but the subject was not resumed in his presence.

The Countess of Menai steamed into Bevisham to land Mr. Romfrey there. ‘I can be out in the Channel any day; it is not every day that I see you,’ she said, in support of her proposal to take him over.

They sat together conversing, apart from the rest of the company, until they sighted Bevisham, when Mr. Romfrey stood up, and a little crowd of men came round him to enjoy his famous racy talk. Captain Baskelett offered to land with him. He declined companionship. Dropping her hand in his, the countess asked him what he had to do in that town, and he replied, ‘I have to demand an apology.’

Answering the direct look of his eyes, she said, ‘Oh, I shall not speak of it.’

In his younger days, if the rumour was correct, he had done the same on her account.

He stepped into the boat, and presently they saw him mount the pier- steps, with the riding-whip under his arm, his head more than commonly bent, a noticeable point in a man of his tall erect figure. The ladies and some of the gentlemen thought he was looking particularly grave, even sorrowful.

Lady Menai inquired of Captain Baskelett whether he knew the nature of his uncle’s business in Bevisham, the town he despised.

What could Cecil say but no? His uncle had not imparted it to him.

She was flattered in being the sole confidante, and said no more.

The sprightly ingenuity of Captain Baskelett’s mind would have informed him of the nature of his uncle’s expedition, we may be sure, had he put it to the trial; for Mr. Romfrey was as plain to read as a rudimentary sum in arithmetic, and like the tracings of a pedigree-map his preliminary steps to deeds were seen pointing on their issue in lines of straight descent. But Cecil could protest that he was not bound to know, and considering that he was neither bound to know nor to speculate, he determined to stand on his right. So effectually did he accomplish the task, that he was frequently surprised during the evening and the night by the effervescence of a secret exultation rising imp-like within him, that was, he assured himself, perfectly unaccountable.

CHAPTER XXXII

AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP’S FASHION

The day after Mr. Romfrey’s landing in Bevisham a full South-wester stretched the canvas of yachts of all classes, schooner, cutter and yawl, on the lively green water between the island and the forest shore. Cecilia’s noble schooner was sure to be out in such a ringing breeze, for the pride of it as well as the pleasure. She landed her father at the Club steps, and then bore away Eastward to sight a cutter race, the breeze beginning to stiffen. Looking back against sun and wind, she saw herself pursued by a saucy little 15-ton craft that had been in her track since she left the Otley river before noon, dipping and straining, with every inch of sail set; as mad a stern chase as ever was witnessed: and who could the man at the tiller, clad cap-A-pie in tarpaulin, be? She led him dancing away, to prove his resoluteness and laugh at him. She had the powerful wings, and a glory in them coming of this pursuit: her triumph was delicious, until the occasional sparkle of the tarpaulin was lost, the small boat appeared a motionless object far behind, and all ahead of her exceedingly dull, though the race hung there and the crowd of sail.

Cecilia’s transient flutter of coquettry created by the animating air and her queenly flight was over. She fled splendidly and she came back graciously. But he refused her open hand, as it were. He made as if to stand across her tack, and, reconsidering it, evidently scorned his advantage and challenged the stately vessel for a beat up against the wind. It was as pretty as a Court minuet. But presently Cecilia stood too far on one tack, and returning to the centre of the channel, found herself headed by seamanship. He waved an ironical salute with his sou’wester. Her retort consisted in bringing her vessel to the wind, and sending a boat for him.

She did it on the impulse; had she consulted her wishes she would rather have seen him at his post, where he seemed in his element, facing the spray and cunningly calculating to get wind and tide in his favour. Partly with regret she saw him, stripped of his tarpaulin, jump into her boat, as though she had once more to say farewell to sailor Nevil Beauchamp; farewell the bright youth, the hero, the true servant of his country!

That feeling of hers changed when he was on board. The stirring cordial day had put new breath in him.

‘Should not the flag be dipped?’ he said, looking up at the peak, where the white flag streamed.

‘Can you really mistake compassion for defeat?’ said she, with a smile.

‘Oh! before the wind of course I hadn’t a chance.’

‘How could you be so presumptuous as to give chase? And who has lent you that little cutter?’

Beauchamp had hired her for a month, and he praised her sailing, and pretended to say that the race was not always to the strong in a stiff breeze.

‘But in point’ of fact I was bent on trying how my boat swims, and had no idea of overhauling you. To-day our salt-water lake is as fine as the Mediterranean.’

‘Omitting the islands and the Mediterranean colour, it is. I have often told you how I love it. I have landed papa at the Club. Are you aware that we meet you at Steynham the day after to-morrow?’

‘Well, we can ride on the downs. The downs between three and four of a summer’s morning are as lovely as anything in the world. They have the softest outlines imaginable . . . and remind me of a friend’s upper lip when she deigns to smile.’

‘Is one to rise at that hour to behold the effect? And let me remind you further, Nevil, that the comparison of nature’s minor work beside her mighty is an error, if you will be poetical.’

She cited a well-known instance of degradation in verse.

But a young man who happens to be intimately acquainted with a certain ‘dark eye in woman’ will not so lightly be brought to consider that the comparison of tempestuous night to the flashing of those eyes of hers topples the scene headlong from grandeur. And if Beauchamp remembered rightly, the scene was the Alps at night.

He was prepared to contest Cecilia’s judgement. At that moment the breeze freshened and the canvas lifted from due South the yacht swung her sails to drive toward the West, and Cecilia’s face and hair came out golden in the sunlight. Speech was difficult, admiration natural, so he sat beside her, admiring in silence.

She said a good word for the smartness of his little yacht.

‘This is my first trial of her,’ said Beauchamp. ‘I hired her chiefly to give Dr. Shrapnel a taste of salt air. I ‘ve no real right to be idling about. His ward Miss Denham is travelling in Switzerland; the dear old man is alone, and not quite so well as I should wish. Change of scene will do him good. I shall land him on the French coast for a couple of days, or take him down Channel.’

Cecilia gazed abstractedly at a passing schooner.

‘He works too hard,’ said Beauchamp.

‘Who does?’

‘Dr. Shrapnel.’

Some one else whom we have heard of works too hard, and it would be happy for mankind if he did not.

Cecilia named the schooner; an American that had beaten our crack yachts. Beauchamp sprang up to spy at the American.

‘That’s the Corinne, is she!’

Yankee craftiness on salt water always excited his respectful attention as a spectator.

‘And what is the name of your boat, Nevil?’

‘The fool of an owner calls her the Petrel. It’s not that I’m superstitious, but to give a boat a name of bad augury to sailors appears to me . . . however, I ‘ve argued it with him and I will have her called the Curlew. Carrying Dr. Shrapnel and me, Petrel would be thought the proper title for her isn’t that your idea?’

He laughed and she smiled, and then he became overcast with his political face, and said, ‘I hope–I believe–you will alter your opinion of him. Can it be an opinion when it’s founded on nothing? You know really nothing of him. I have in my pocket what I believe would alter your mind about him entirely. I do think so; and I think so because I feel you would appreciate his deep sincerity and real nobleness.’

‘Is it a talisman that you have, Nevil?’

‘No, it’s a letter.’

Cecilia’s cheeks took fire.

‘I should so much like to read it to you,’ said he.

‘Do not, please,’ she replied with a dash of supplication in her voice.

‘Not the whole of it–an extract here and there? I want you so much to understand him.’

‘I am sure I should not.’

‘Let me try you!’

‘Pray do not.’

‘Merely to show you…’

‘But, Nevil, I do not wish to understand him.’

‘But you have only to listen for a few minutes, and I want you to know what good reason I have to reverence him as a teacher and a friend.’

Cecilia looked at Beauchamp with wonder. A confused recollection of the contents of the letter declaimed at Mount Laurels in Captain Baskelett’s absurd sing-song, surged up in her mind revoltingly. She signified a decided negative. Something of a shudder accompanied the expression of it.

But he as little as any member of the Romfrey blood was framed to let the word no stand quietly opposed to him. And the no that a woman utters! It calls for wholesome tyranny. Those old, those hoar-old duellists, Yes and No, have rarely been better matched than in Beauchamp and Cecilia. For if he was obstinate in attack she had great resisting power. Twice to listen to that letter was beyond her endurance. Indeed it cast a shadow on him and disfigured him; and when, affecting to plead, he said: ‘You must listen to it to please me, for my sake, Cecilia,’ she answered: ‘It is for your sake, Nevil, I decline to.’

‘Why, what do you know of it?’ he exclaimed.

‘I know the kind of writing it would be.’

‘How do you know it?’

‘I have heard of some of Dr. Shrapnel’s opinions.’

‘You imagine him to be subversive, intolerant, immoral, and the rest! all that comes under your word revolutionary.’

‘Possibly; but I must defend myself from hearing what I know will be certain to annoy me.’

‘But he is the reverse of immoral: and I intend to read you parts of the letter to prove to you that he is not the man you would blame, but I, and that if ever I am worthier . . . worthier of you, as I hope to become, it will be owing to this admirable and good old man.’

Cecilia trembled: she was touched to the quick. Yet it was not pleasant to her to be wooed obliquely, through Dr. Shrapnel.

She recognized the very letter, crowned with many stamps, thick with many pages, in Beauchamp’s hands.

‘When you are at Steynham you will probably hear my uncle Everard’s version of this letter,’ he said. ‘The baron chooses to think everything fair in war, and the letter came accidentally into his hands with the seal broken; well, he read it. And, Cecilia, you can fancy the sort of stuff he would make of it. Apart from that, I want you particularly to know how much I am indebted to Dr. Shrapnel. Won’t you learn to like him a little? Won’t you tolerate him?–I could almost say, for my sake! He and I are at variance on certain points, but taking him altogether, I am under deeper obligations to him than to any man on earth. He has found where I bend and waver.’

‘I recognize your chivalry, Nevil.’

‘He has done his best to train me to be of some service. Where’s the chivalry in owning a debt? He is one of our true warriors; fearless and blameless. I have had my heroes before. You know how I loved Robert Hall: his death is a gap in my life. He is a light for fighting Englishmen–who fight with the sword. But the scale of the war, the cause, and the end in view, raise Dr. Shrapnel above the bravest I have ever had the luck to meet. Soldiers and sailors have their excitement to keep them up to the mark; praise and rewards. He is in his eight-and- sixtieth year, and he has never received anything but obloquy for his pains. Half of the small fortune he has goes in charities and subscriptions. Will that touch you? But I think little of that, and so does he. Charity is a common duty. The dedication of a man’s life and whole mind to a cause, there’s heroism. I wish I were eloquent; I wish I could move you.’

Cecilia turned her face to him. ‘I listen to you with pleasure, Nevil; but please do not read the letter.’

‘Yes; a paragraph or two I must read.’

She rose.

He was promptly by her side. ‘If I say I ask you for one sign that you care for me in some degree?’

‘I have not for a moment ceased to be your friend, Nevil, since I was a child.’

‘But if you allow yourself to be so prejudiced against my best friend that you will not hear a word of his writing, are you friendly?’

‘Feminine, and obstinate,’ said Cecilia.

‘Give me your eyes an instant. I know you think me reckless and lawless: now is not that true? You doubt whether, if a lady gave me her hand I should hold to it in perfect faith. Or, perhaps not that: but you do suspect I should be capable of every sophism under the sun to persuade a woman to break her faith, if it suited me: supposing some passion to be at work. Men who are open to passion have to be taught reflection before they distinguish between the woman they should sue for love because she would be their best mate, and the woman who has thrown a spell on them. Now, what I beg you to let me read you in this letter is a truth nobly stated that has gone into my blood, and changed me. It cannot fail, too, in changeing your opinion of Dr. Shrapnel. It makes me wretched that you should be divided from me in your ideas of him. I, you see–and I confess I think it my chief title to honour–reverence him.’

‘I regret that I am unable to utter the words of Ruth,’ said Cecilia, in a low voice. She felt rather tremulously; opposed only to the letter and the writer of it, not at all to Beauchamp, except on account of his idolatry of the wicked revolutionist. Far from having a sense of opposition to Beauchamp; she pitied him for his infatuation, and in her lofty mental serenity she warmed to him for the seeming boyishness of his constant and extravagant worship of the man, though such an enthusiasm cast shadows on his intellect.

He was reading a sentence of the letter.

‘I hear nothing but the breeze, Nevil,’ she said.

The breeze fluttered the letter-sheets: they threatened to fly. Cecilia stepped two paces away.

‘Hark; there is a military band playing on the pier,’ said she. ‘I am so fond of hearing music a little off shore.’

Beauchamp consigned the letter to his pocket.

‘You are not offended, Nevil?’

‘Dear me, no. You haven’t a mind for tonics, that’s all.’

‘Healthy persons rarely have,’ she remarked, and asked him, smiling softly, whether he had a mind for music.

His insensibility to music was curious, considering how impressionable he was to verse, and to songs of birds. He listened with an oppressed look, as to something the particular secret of which had to be reached by a determined effort of sympathy for those whom it affected. He liked it if she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he liked it, clearly trying hard to comprehend it, as unmoved by the swell and sigh of the resonant brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit thrilled to it, and was bountiful in glowing visions and in tenderness.

There hung her hand. She would not have refused to yield it. The hero of her childhood, the friend of her womanhood, and her hero still, might have taken her with half a word.

Beauchamp was thinking: She can listen to that brass band, and she shuts her ears to this letter:

The reading of it would have been a prelude to the opening of his heart to her, at the same time that it vindicated his dear and honoured master, as he called Dr. Shrapnel. To speak, without the explanation of his previous reticence which this letter would afford, seemed useless: even the desire to speak was absent, passion being absent.

‘I see papa; he is getting into a boat with some one,’ said Cecilia, and gave orders for the yacht to stand in toward the Club steps. ‘Do you know, Nevil, the Italian common people are not so subject to the charm of music as other races? They have more of the gift, and I think less of the feeling. You do not hear much music in Italy. I remember in the year of Revolution there was danger of a rising in some Austrian city, and a colonel of a regiment commanded his band to play. The mob was put in good humour immediately.’

‘It’s a soporific,’ said Beauchamp.

‘You would not rather have had them rise to be slaughtered?’

‘Would you have them waltzed into perpetual servility?’

Cecilia hummed, and suggested: ‘If one can have them happy in any way?’

‘Then the day of destruction may almost be dated.’

‘Nevil, your terrible view of life must be false.’

‘I make it out worse to you than to any one else, because I want our minds to be united.’

‘Give me a respite now and then.’

‘With all my heart. And forgive me for beating my drum. I see what others don’t see, or else I feel it more; I don’t know; but it appears to me our country needs rousing if it’s to live. There ‘s a division between poor and rich that you have no conception of, and it can’t safely be left unnoticed. I’ve done.’

He looked at her and saw tears on her under-lids.

‘My dearest Cecilia!’

‘Music makes me childish,’ said she.

Her father was approaching in the boat. Beside him sat the Earl of Lockrace, latterly classed among the suitors of the lady of Mount Laurels.

A few minutes remained to Beauchamp of his lost opportunity. Instead of seizing them with his usual promptitude, he let them slip, painfully mindful of his treatment of her last year after the drive into Bevisham, when she was England, and Renee holiday France.

This feeling he fervently translated into the reflection that the bride who would bring him beauty and wealth, and her especial gift of tender womanliness, was not yet so thoroughly mastered as to grant her husband his just prevalence with her, or even indeed his complete independence of action, without which life itself was not desireable.

Colonel Halkett stared at Beauchamp as if he had risen from the deep.

‘Have you been in that town this morning?’ was one of his first questions to him when he stood on board.

‘I came through it,’ said Beauchamp, and pointed to his little cutter labouring in the distance. ‘She’s mine for a month; I came from Holdesbury to try her; and then he stated how he had danced attendance on the schooner for a couple of hours before any notice was taken of him, and Cecilia with her graceful humour held up his presumption to scorn.

Her father was eyeing Beauchamp narrowly, and appeared troubled.

‘Did you see Mr. Romfrey yesterday, or this morning?’ the colonel asked him, mentioning that Mr. Romfrey had been somewhere about the island yesterday, at which Beauchamp expressed astonishment, for his uncle Everard seldom visited a yachting station.

Colonel Halkett exchanged looks with Cecilia. Hers were inquiring, and he confirmed her side-glance at Beauchamp. She raised her brows; he nodded, to signify that there was gravity in the case. Here the signalling stopped short; she had to carry on a conversation with Lord Lockrace, one of those men who betray the latent despot in an exhibition of discontentment unless they have all a lady’s hundred eyes attentive to their discourse.

At last Beauchamp quitted the vessel.

When he was out of hearing, Colonel Halkett said to Cecilia: ‘Grancey Lespel tells me that Mr. Romfrey called on the man Shrapnel yesterday evening at six o’clock.’

‘Yes, Papa?’

‘Now come and see the fittings below,’ the colonel addressed Lord Lockrace, and murmured to his daughter:

‘And soundly horsewhipped him!’

Cecilia turned on the instant to gaze after Nevil Beauchamp. She could have wept for pity. Her father’s emphasis on ‘soundly’ declared an approval of the deed, and she was chilled by a sickening abhorrence and dread of the cruel brute in men, such as, awakened by she knew not what, had haunted her for a year of her girlhood.

‘And he deserved it!’ the colonel pursued, on emerging from the cabin at Lord Lockrace’s heels. ‘I’ve no doubt he richly deserved it. The writer of that letter we heard Captain Baskelett read the other day deserves the very worst he gets.’

‘Baskelett bored the Club the other night with a letter of a Radical fellow,’ said Lord Lockrace. ‘Men who write that stuff should be strung up and whipped by the common hangman.’

‘It was a private letter,’ said Cecilia.

‘Public or private, Miss Halkett.’

Her mind flew back to Seymour Austin for the sense of stedfastness when she heard such language as this, which, taken in conjunction with Dr. Shrapnel’s, seemed to uncloak our Constitutional realm and show it boiling up with the frightful elements of primitive societies.

‘I suppose we are but half civilized,’ she said.

‘If that,’ said the earl.

Colonel Halkett protested that he never could quite make out what Radicals were driving at.

‘The rents,’ Lord Lockrace observed in the conclusive tone of brevity. He did not stay very long.

The schooner was boarded subsequently by another nobleman, an Admiral of the Fleet and ex-minister of the Whig Government, Lord Croyston, who was a friend of Mr. Romfrey’s, and thought well of Nevil Beauchamp as a seaman and naval officer, but shook an old head over him as a politician. He came to beg a passage across the water to his marine Lodge, an accident having happened early in the morning to his yacht, the Lady Violet. He was able to communicate the latest version of the horsewhipping of Dr. Shrapnel, from which it appeared that after Mr. Romfrey had handsomely flogged the man he flung his card on the prostrate body, to let men know who was responsible for the act. He expected that Mr. Romfrey would be subjected to legal proceedings. ‘But if there’s a pleasure worth paying for it’s the trouncing of a villain,’ said he; and he had been informed that Dr. Shrapnel was a big one. Lord Croyston’s favourite country residence was in the neighbourhood of old Mrs. Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames. Speaking of Nevil Beauchamp a second time, he alluded to his relations with his great-aunt, said his prospects were bad, that she had interdicted her house to him, and was devoted to her other great-nephew.

‘And so she should be,’ said Colonel Halkett. ‘That’s a young man who’s an Englishman without French gunpowder notions in his head. He works for us down at the mine in Wales a good part of the year, and has tided us over a threatening strike there: gratuitously: I can’t get him to accept anything. I can’t think why he does it.’

‘He’ll have plenty,’ said Lord Croyston, levelling his telescope to sight the racing cutters.

Cecilia fancied she descried Nevil’s Petrel, dubbed Curlew, to Eastward, and had a faint gladness in the thought that his knowledge of his uncle Everard’s deed of violence would be deferred for another two or three hours.

She tried to persuade her father to wait for Nevil, and invite him to dine at Mount Laurels, and break the news to him gently. Colonel Halkett argued that in speaking of the affair he should certainly not commiserate the man who had got his deserts, and saying this he burst into a petty fury against the epistle of Dr. Shrapnel, which appeared to be growing more monstrous in proportion to his forgetfulness of the details, as mountains gather vastness to the eye at a certain remove. Though he could not guess the reason for Mr. Romfrey’s visit to Bevisham, he was, he said, quite prepared to maintain that Mr. Romfrey had a perfect justification for his conduct.

Cecilia hinted at barbarism. The colonel hinted at high police duties that gentlemen were sometimes called on to perform for the protection of society. ‘In defiance of its laws?’ she asked; and he answered: ‘Women must not be judging things out of their sphere,’ with the familiar accent on ‘women’ which proves their inferiority. He was rarely guilty of it toward his daughter. Evidently he had resolved to back Mr. Romfrey blindly. That epistle of Dr. Shrapnel’s merited condign punishment and had met with it, he seemed to rejoice in saying: and this was his abstract of the same: ‘An old charlatan who tells his dupe to pray every night of his life for the beheading of kings and princes, and scattering of the clergy, and disbanding the army, that he and his rabble may fall upon the wealthy, and show us numbers win; and he’ll undertake to make them moral!’

‘I wish we were not going to Steynham,’ said Cecilia.

‘So do I. Well, no, I don’t,’ the colonel corrected himself, ‘no; it ‘s an engagement. I gave my consent so far. We shall see whether Nevil Beauchamp’s a man of any sense.’

Her heart sank. This was as much as to let her know that if Nevil broke with his uncle, the treaty of union between the two families, which her father submitted to entertain out of consideration for Mr. Romfrey, would be at an end.

The wind had fallen. Entering her river, Cecilia gazed back at the smooth broad water, and the band of golden beams flung across it from the evening sun over the forest. No little cutter was visible. She could not write to Nevil to bid him come and concert with her in what spirit to encounter his uncle Everard at Steynham. And guests would be at Mount Laurels next day; Lord Lockrace, Lord Croyston, and the Lespels; she could not drive down to Bevisham on the chance of seeing him. Nor was it to be acknowledged even to herself that she so greatly desired to see him and advise him. Why not? Because she was one of the artificial creatures called women (with the accent) who dare not be spontaneous, and cannot act independently if they would continue to be admirable in the world’s eye, and who for that object must remain fixed on shelves, like other marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shattering or tarnishing. This is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves to the dealers. Their artificiality is at once their bane and their source of superior pride.

Seymour Austin might have reason for seeking to emancipate them, she thought, and blushed in thought that she could never be learning anything but from her own immediate sensations.

Of course it was in her power to write to Beauchamp, just as it had been in his to speak to her, but the fire was wanting in her blood and absent from his mood, so they were kept apart.

Her father knew as little as she what was the positive cause of Mr. Romfrey’s chastisement of Dr. Shrapnel. ‘Cause enough, I don’t doubt,’ he said, and cited the mephitic letter.

Cecilia was not given to suspicions, or she would have had them kindled by a certain wilfulness in his incessant reference to the letter, and exoneration, if not approval, of Mr. Romfrey’s conduct.

How did that chivalrous gentleman justify himself for condescending to such an extreme as the use of personal violence? Was there a possibility of his justifying it to Nevil? She was most wretched in her reiteration of these inquiries, for, with a heart subdued, she had still a mind whose habit of independent judgement was not to be constrained, and while she felt that it was only by siding with Nevil submissively and blindly in this lamentable case that she could hope for happiness, she foresaw the likelihood of her not being able to do so as much as he would desire and demand. This she took for the protest of her pure reason. In reality, grieved though she was on account of that Dr. Shrapnel, her captive heart resented the anticipated challenge to her to espouse his cause or languish.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM

The judge pronouncing sentence of condemnation on the criminal is proverbially a sorrowfully-minded man; and still more would he be so had he to undertake the part of executioner as well. This is equivalent to saying that the simple pleasures are no longer with us; it must be a personal enemy now to give us any satisfaction in chastising and slaying. Perhaps by-and-by that will be savourless: we degenerate. There is, nevertheless, ever (and let nature be praised for it) a strong sustainment in the dutiful exertion of our physical energies, and Mr. Everard Romfrey experienced it after he had fulfilled his double office on the person of Dr. Shrapnel by carrying out his own decree. His conscience approved him cheerlessly, as it is the habit of that secret monitor to do when we have no particular advantage coming of the act we have performed; but the righteous labour of his arm gave him high breathing and an appetite.

He foresaw that he and Nevil would soon be having a wrestle over the matter, hand and thigh; but a gentleman in the right engaged with a fellow in the wrong has nothing to apprehend; is, in fact, in the position of a game-preserver with a poacher. The nearest approach to gratification in that day’s work which Mr. Romfrey knew was offered by the picture of Nevil’s lamentable attitude above his dirty idol. He conceived it in the mock-mediaeval style of our caricaturists:–Shrapnel stretched at his length, half a league, in slashed yellows and blacks, with his bauble beside him, and prodigious pointed toes; Nevil in parti- coloured tights, on one leg, raising his fists in imprecation to a nose in the firmament.

Gentlemen of an unpractised imaginative capacity cannot vision for themselves exactly what they would, being unable to exercise authority over the proportions and the hues of the objects they conceive, which are very much at the mercy of their sportive caprices; and the state of mind of Mr. Romfrey is not to be judged by his ridiculous view of the pair. In the abstract he could be sorry for Shrapnel. As he knew himself magnanimous, he promised himself to be forbearing with Nevil.

Moreover, the month of September was drawing nigh; he had plenty to think of. The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy the situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling the same thought in connection with September. Our England holds possession of a considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps the world in awe to see her bestowing so considerable a portion of her intelligence upon her recreations. To prosecute them with her whole heart is an ingenious exhibition of her power. Mr. Romfrey was of those who said to his countrymen, ‘Go yachting; go cricketing; go boat-racing; go shooting; go horseracing, nine months of the year, while the other Europeans go marching and drilling.’ Those occupations he considered good for us; and our much talking, writing, and thinking about them characteristic, and therefore good. And he was not one of those who do penance for that sweating indolence in the fits of desperate panic. Beauchamp’s argument that the rich idler begets the idling vagabond, the rich wagerer the brutal swindler, the general thirst for a mad round of recreation a generally-increasing disposition to avoid serious work, and the unbraced moral tone of the country an indifference to national responsibility (an argument doubtless extracted from Shrapnel, talk tall as the very demagogue when he stood upright), Mr. Romfrey laughed at scornfully, affirming that our manufactures could take care of themselves. As for invasion, we are circled by the sea. Providence has done that for us, and may be relied on to do more in an emergency.–The children of wealth and the children of the sun alike believe that Providence is for them, and it would seem that the former can do without it less than the latter, though the former are less inclined to give it personification.

This year, however, the array of armaments on the Continent made Mr. Romfrey anxious about our navy. Almost his first topic in welcoming Colonel Halkett and Cecilia to Steynham was the rottenness of navy administration; for if Providence is to do anything for us it must have a sea-worthy fleet for the operation. How loudly would his contemptuous laughter have repudiated the charge that he trusted to supernatural agency for assistance in case of need! But so it was: and he owned to believing in English luck. Partly of course he meant that steady fire of combat which his countrymen have got heated to of old till fortune blessed them.

‘Nevil is not here?’ the colonel asked.

‘No, I suspect he’s gruelling and plastering a doctor of his acquaintance,’ Mr. Romfrey said, with his nasal laugh composed of scorn and resignation.

‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard,’ said Colonel Halkett hastily.

He would have liked to be informed of Dr. Shrapnel’s particular offence: he mentioned the execrable letter.

Mr. Romfrey complacently interjected: ‘Drug-vomit!’ and after an interval: ‘Gallows!’

‘That man has done Nevil Beauchamp a world of mischief, Romfrey.’

‘We’ll hope for a cure, colonel.’

‘Did the man come across you?’

‘He did.’

Mr. Romfrey was mute on the subject. Colonel Halkett abstained from pushing his inquiries.

Cecilia could only tell her father when they were alone in the drawing- room a few minutes before dinner that Mrs. Culling was entirely ignorant of any cause to which Nevil’s absence might be attributed.

‘Mr. Romfrey had good cause,’ the colonel said, emphatically.

He repeated it next day, without being a bit wiser of the cause.

Cecilia’s happiness or hope was too sensitive to allow of a beloved father’s deceiving her in his opposition to it.

She saw clearly now that he had fastened on this miserable incident, expecting an imbroglio that would divide Nevil and his uncle, and be an excuse for dividing her and Nevil. O for the passionate will to make head against what appeared as a fate in this matter! She had it not.

Mr. and Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, Sir John and Lady Baskelett, and the Countess of Welshpool, another sister of Mr. Romfrey’s, arrived at Steynham for a day and a night. Lady Baskelett and Lady Welshpool came to see their brother, not to countenance his household; and Mr. Wardour- Devereux could not stay longer than a certain number of hours under a roof where tobacco was in evil odour. From her friend Louise, his wife, Cecilia learnt that Mr. Lydiard had been summoned to Dr. Shrapnel’s bedside, as Mrs. Devereux knew by a letter she had received from Mr. Lydiard, who was no political devotee of that man, she assured Cecilia, but had an extraordinary admiration for the Miss Denham living with him. This was kindly intended to imply that Beauchamp was released from his attendance on Dr. Shrapnel, and also that it was not he whom the Miss Denham attracted.

‘She is in Switzerland,’ said Cecilia.

‘She is better there,’ said Mrs. Devereux.

Mr. Stukely Culbrett succeeded to these visitors. He heard of the case of Dr. Shrapnel from Colonel Halkett, and of Beauchamp’s missing of his chance with the heiress from Mr. Romfrey.

Rosamund Culling was in great perplexity about Beauchamp’s prolonged absence; for he had engaged to come, he had written to her to say he would be sure to come; and she feared he was ill. She would have persuaded Mr. Culbrett to go down to Bevisham to see him: she declared that she could even persuade herself to call on Dr. Shrapnel a second time, in spite of her horror of the man. Her anger at the thought of his keeping Nevil away from good fortune and happiness caused her to speak in resentment and loathing of the man.

‘He behaved badly when you saw him, did he?’ said Stukely.

‘Badly, is no word. He is detestable,’ Rosamund replied.

‘You think he ought to be whipped?’

She feigned an extremity of vindictiveness, and twisted her brows in comic apology for the unfeminine sentiment, as she said: ‘I really do.’

The feminine gentleness of her character was known to Stukely, so she could afford to exaggerate the expression of her anger, and she did not modify it, forgetful that a woman is the representative of the sex with cynical men, and escapes from contempt at the cost of her sisterhood.

Looking out of an upper window in the afternoon she beheld Nevil Beauchamp in a group with his uncle Everard, the colonel and Cecilia, and Mr. Culbrett. Nevil was on his feet; the others were seated under the great tulip-tree on the lawn.

A little observation of them warned her that something was wrong. There was a vacant chair; Nevil took it in his hand at times, stamped it to the ground, walked away and sharply back fronting his uncle, speaking vehemently, she perceived, and vainly, as she judged by the cast of his uncle’s figure. Mr. Romfrey’s head was bent, and wagged slightly, as he screwed his brows up and shot his eyes, queerly at the agitated young man. Colonel Halkett’s arms crossed his chest. Cecilia’s eyelids drooped their, lashes. Mr. Culbrett was balancing on the hind-legs of his chair. No one appeared to be speaking but Nevil.

It became evident that Nevil was putting a series of questions to his uncle. Mechanical nods were given him in reply.

Presently Mr. Romfrey rose, thundering out a word or two, without a gesture.

Colonel Halkett rose.

Nevil flung his hand out straight to the house.

Mr. Romfrey seemed to consent; the colonel shook his head: Nevil insisted.

A footman carrying a tea-tray to Miss Halkett received some commission and swiftly disappeared, making Rosamund wonder whether sugar, milk or cream had been omitted.

She met him on the first landing, and heard that Mr. Romfrey requested her to step out on the lawn.

Expecting to hear of a piece of misconduct on the part of the household servants, she hurried forth, and found that she had to traverse the whole space of the lawn up to the tuliptree. Colonel Halkett and Mr. Romfrey had resumed their seats. The colonel stood up and bowed to her.

Mr. Romfrey said: ‘One question to you, ma’am, and you shall not be detained. Did not that man Shrapnel grossly insult you on the day you called on him to see Captain Beauchamp about a couple of months before the Election?’

‘Look at me when you speak, ma’am,’ said Beauchamp.

Rosamund looked at him.

The whiteness of his face paralyzed her tongue. A dreadful levelling of his eyes penetrated and chilled her. Instead of thinking of her answer she thought of what could possibly have happened.

‘Did he insult you at all, ma’am?’ said Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey reminded him that he was not a cross-examining criminal barrister.

They waited for her to speak.

She hesitated, coloured, betrayed confusion; her senses telling her of a catastrophe, her conscience accusing her as the origin of it.

‘Did Dr. Shrapnel, to your belief, intentionally hurt your feelings or your dignity?’ said Beauchamp, and made the answer easier:

‘Not intentionally, surely: not . . . I certainly do not accuse him.’

‘Can you tell me you feel that he wounded you in the smallest degree? And if so, how? I ask you this, because he is anxious, if he lives, to apologize to you for any offence that he may have been guilty of: he was ignorant of it. I have his word for that, and his commands to me to bear it to you. I may tell you I have never known him injure the most feeble thing–anything alive, or wish to.’

Beauchamp’s voice choked. Rosamund saw tears leap out of the stern face of her dearest now in wrath with her.

‘Is he ill?’ she faltered.

‘He is. You own to a strong dislike of him, do you not?’

‘But not to desire any harm to him.’

‘Not a whipping,’ Mr. Culbrett murmured.

Everard Romfrey overheard it.

He had allowed Mrs. Culling to be sent for, that she might with a bare affirmative silence Nevil, when his conduct was becoming intolerable before the guests of the house.

‘That will do, ma’am,’ he dismissed her.

Beauchamp would not let her depart.

‘I must have your distinct reply, and in Mr. Romfrey’s presence:–say, that if you accused him you were mistaken, or that they were mistaken who supposed you had accused him. I must have the answer before you go.’

‘Sir, will you learn manners!’ Mr. Romfrey said to him, with a rattle of the throat.

Beauchamp turned his face from-her.

Colonel Halkett offered her his arm to lead her away.

‘What is it? Oh, what is it?’ she whispered, scarcely able to walk, but declining the colonel’s arm.

‘You ought not to have been dragged out here,’ said he. ‘Any one might have known there would be no convincing of Captain Beauchamp. That old rascal in Bevisham has been having a beating; that’s all. And a very beautiful day it is!–a little too hot, though. Before we leave, you must give me a lesson or two in gardening.’

‘Dr. Shrapnel–Mr. Romfrey!’ said Rosamund half audibly under the oppression of the more she saw than what she said.

The colonel talked of her renown in landscape-gardening. He added casually: ‘They met the other day.’

‘By accident?’

‘By chance, I suppose. Shrapnel defends one of your Steynham poaching vermin.’

‘Mr. Romfrey struck him?–for that? Oh, never!’ Rosamund exclaimed.

‘I suppose he had a long account to settle.’

She fetched her breath painfully. ‘I shall never be forgiven.’

‘And I say that a gentleman has no business with idols,’ the colonel fumed as he spoke. ‘Those letters of Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp are a scandal on the name of Englishman.’

‘You have read that shocking one, Colonel Halkett?’

‘Captain Baskelett read it out to us.’

‘He? Oh! then . . .’ She stopped:–Then the author of this mischief is clear to me! her divining hatred of Cecil would have said, but her humble position did not warrant such speech. A consideration of the lowliness necessitating this restraint at a moment when loudly to denounce another’s infamy with triumphant insight would have solaced and supported her, kept Rosamund dumb.

She could not bear to think of her part in the mischief.

She was not bound to think of it, knowing actually nothing of the occurrence.

Still she felt that she was on her trial. She detected herself running in and out of her nature to fortify it against accusations rather than cleanse it for inspection. It was narrowing in her own sight. The prospect of her having to submit to a further interrogatory, shut it up entrenched in the declaration that Dr. Shrapnel had so far outraged her sentiments as to be said to have offended her: not insulted, perhaps, but certainly offended.

And this was a generous distinction. It was generous; and, having recognized the generosity, she was unable to go beyond it.

She was presently making the distinction to Miss Halkett. The colonel had left her at the door of the house: Miss Halkett sought admission to her private room on an errand of condolence, for she had sympathized with her very much in the semi-indignity Nevil had forced her to undergo: and very little indeed had she been able to sympathize with Nevil, who had been guilty of the serious fault of allowing himself to appear moved by his own commonplace utterances; or, in other words, the theme being hostile to his audience, he had betrayed emotion over it without first evoking the spirit of pathos.

‘As for me,’ Rosamund replied, to some comforting remarks of Miss Halkett’s, ‘I do not understand why I should be mixed up in Dr. Shrapnel’s misfortunes: I really am quite unable to recollect his words to me or his behaviour: I have only a positive impression that I left his house, where I had gone to see Captain Beauchamp, in utter disgust, so repelled by his language that I could hardly trust myself to speak of the man to Mr. Romfrey when he questioned me. I did not volunteer it. I am ready to say that I believe Dr. Shrapnel did not intend to be insulting. I cannot say that he was not offensive.

You know, Miss Halkett, I would willingly, gladly have saved him from anything like punishment.’

‘You are too gentle to have thought of it,’ said Cecilia.

‘But I shall never be forgiven by Captain Beauchamp. I see in his eyes that he accuses me and despises me.’

‘He will not be so unjust, Mrs. Culling.’

Rosamund begged that she might hear what Nevil had first said on his arrival.

Cecilia related that they had seen him walking swiftly across the park, and that Mr. Romfrey had hailed him, and held his hand out; and that Captain Beauchamp had overlooked it, saying he feared Mr. Romfrey’s work was complete. He had taken her father’s hand and hers and his touch was like ice.

‘His worship of that Dr. Shrapnel is extraordinary,’ quoth Rosamund. ‘And how did Mr. Romfrey behave to him?’

‘My father thinks, very forbearingly.’

Rosamund sighed and made a semblance of wringing her hands. ‘It seems to me that I anticipated ever since I heard of the man . . . or at least ever since I saw him and heard him, he would be the evil genius of us all: if I dare include myself. But I am not permitted to escape! And, Miss Halkett, can you tell me how it was that my name–that I became involved? I cannot imagine the circumstances which would bring me forward in this unhappy affair.’

Cecilia replied: ‘The occasion was, that Captain Beauchamp so scornfully contrasted the sort of injury done by Dr. Shrapnel’s defence of a poacher on his uncle’s estate, with the severe chastisement inflicted by Mr. Romfrey in revenge for it. He would not leave the subject.’

‘I see him–see his eyes!’ cried Rosamund, her bosom heaving and sinking deep, as her conscience quavered within her. ‘At last Mr. Romfrey mentioned me?’

‘He stood up and said you had been personally insulted by Dr. Shrapnel.’

Rosamund meditated in a distressing doubt of her conscientious truthfulness.

‘Captain Beauchamp will be coming to me; and how can I answer him? Heaven knows I would have shielded the poor man, if possible–poor wretch! Wicked though he is, one has only to hear of him suffering! But what can I answer? I do recollect now that Mr. Romfrey compelled me from question to question to confess that the man had vexed me. Insulted, I never said. At the worst, I said vexed. I would not have said insulted, or even offended, because Mr. Romfrey . . . ah! we know him. What I did say, I forget. I have no guide to what I said but my present feelings, and they are pity for the unfortunate man much more than dislike.–Well, I must go through the scene with Nevil!’ Rosamund concluded her outcry of ostensible exculpation.

She asked in a cooler moment how it was that Captain Beauchamp had so far forgotten himself as to burst out on his uncle before the guests of the house. It appeared that he had wished his uncle to withdraw with him, and Mr. Romfrey had bidden him postpone private communications. Rosamund gathered from one or two words of Cecilia’s that Mr. Romfrey, until finally stung by Nevil, had indulged in his best-humoured banter.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

Alike believe that Providence is for them Better for men of extremely opposite opinions not to meet Convict it by instinct without the ceremony of a jury Cowardice is even worse for nations than for individual men Give our courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope Good maxim for the wrathful–speak not at all Impossible for him to think that women thought Leader accustomed to count ahead upon vapourish abstractions Love, that has risen above emotion, quite independent of craving Made of his creed a strait-jacket for humanity Mankind is offended by heterodoxy in mean attire May not one love, not craving to be beloved? People with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship Prayer for an object is the cajolery of an idol Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run counter Small things producing great consequences That a mask is a concealment
The girl could not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly The religion of this vast English middle-class–Comfort The turn will come to us as to others–and go Women must not be judging things out of their sphere

BEAUCHAMP’S CAREER

By GEORGE MEREDITH

1897

BOOK 5.

XXXIV. THE FACE OF RENEE
XXXV. THE RIDE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION XXXVI. PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF MR. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL XXXVII. CECILIA CONQUERED
XXXVIII. LORD AVONLEY
XXXIX. BETWEEN BEAUCHAMP AND CECILIA XL. A TRIAL OF HIM
XLI. A LAME VICTORY

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE FACE OF RENEE

Shortly before the ringing of the dinner-bell Rosamund knocked at Beauchamp’s dressing-room door, the bearer of a telegram from Bevisham. He read it in one swift run of the eyes, and said: ‘Come in, ma’am, I have something for you. Madame de Rouaillout sends you this.’

Rosamund saw her name written in a French hand on the back of the card.

‘You stay with us, Nevil?’

‘To-night and to-morrow, perhaps. The danger seems to be over.’

‘Has Dr. Shrapnel been in danger?’

‘He has. If it’s quite over now!’

‘I declare to you, Nevil . . .’

‘Listen to me, ma’am; I’m in the dark about this murderous business:–an old man, defenceless, harmless as a child!–but I know this, that you are somewhere in it.’

‘Nevil, do you not guess at some one else?’

‘He! yes, he! But Cecil Baskelett led no blind man to Dr. Shrapnel’s gate.’

‘Nevil, as I live, I knew nothing of it!’

‘No, but you set fire to the train. You hated the old man, and you taught Mr. Romfrey to think that you had been insulted. I see it all. Now you must have the courage to tell him of your error. There’s no other course for you. I mean to take Mr. Romfrey to Dr. Shrapnel, to save the honour of our family, as far as it can be saved.’

‘What? Nevil!’ exclaimed Rosamund, gaping.

‘It seems little enough, ma’am. But he must go. I will have the apology spoken, and man to man.’

‘But you would never tell your uncle that?’

He laughed in his uncle’s manner.

‘But, Nevil, my dearest, forgive me, I think of you–why are the Halketts here? It is not entirely with Colonel Halkett’s consent. It is your uncle’s influence with him that gives you your chance. Do you not care to avail yourself of it? Ever since he heard Dr. Shrapnel’s letter to you, Colonel Halkett has, I am sure, been tempted to confound you with him in his mind: ah! Nevil, but recollect that it is only Mr. Romfrey who can help to give you your Cecilia. There is no dispensing with him. Postpone your attempt to humiliate–I mean, that is, Oh! Nevil, whatever you intend to do to overcome your uncle, trust to time, be friends with him; be a little worldly! for her sake! to ensure her happiness!’

Beauchamp obtained the information that his cousin Cecil had read out the letter of Dr. Shrapnel at Mount Laurels.

The bell rang.

‘Do you imagine I should sit at my uncle’s table if I did not intend to force him to repair the wrong he has done to himself and to us?’ he said.

‘Oh! Nevil, do you not see Captain Baskelett at work here?’

‘What amends can Cecil Baskelett make? My uncle is a man of honour: it is in his power. There, I leave you to speak to him; you will do it to-night, after we break up in the drawing-room.’

Rosamund groaned: ‘An apology to Dr. Shrapnel from Mr. Romfrey! It is an impossibility, Nevil! utter!’

‘So you say to sit idle: but do as I tell you.’

He went downstairs.

He had barely reproached her. She wondered at that; and then remembered his alien sad half-smile in quitting the room.

Rosamund would not present herself at her lord’s dinner-table when there were any guests at Steynham. She prepared to receive Miss Halkett in the drawing-room, as the guests of the house this evening chanced to be her friends.

Madame de Rouaillout’s present to her was a photograph of M. de Croisnel, his daughter and son in a group. Rosamund could not bear to look at the face of Renee, and she put it out of sight. But she had looked. She was reduced to look again.

Roland stood beside his father’s chair; Renee sat at his feet, clasping his right hand. M. de Croisnel’s fallen eyelids and unshorn white chin told the story of the family reunion. He was dying: his two children were nursing him to the end.

Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman than Renee: but on which does the eye linger longest–which draws the heart? a radiant landscape, where the tall ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the stately march of Summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark water?

Dark-eyed Renee was not beauty but attraction; she touched the double chords within us which are we know not whether harmony or discord, but a divine discord if an uncertified harmony, memorable beyond plain sweetness or majesty. There are touches of bliss in anguish that superhumanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of the eternal in the variable. These two chords of poignant antiphony she struck throughout the range of the hearts of men, and strangely intervolved them in vibrating unison. Only to look at her face, without hearing her voice, without the charm of her speech, was to feel it. On Cecilia’s entering the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret, Rosamund handed her the card of the photographic artist of Tours, mentioning no names.

‘I should say the portrait is correct. A want of spirituality,’ Rosamund said critically, using one of the insular commonplaces, after that manner of fastening upon what there is not in a piece of Art or nature.

Cecilia’s avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher mark.

She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was. She sat over the portrait blushing burningly: ‘And that is a brother?’ she said.

‘That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,’ said Rosamund.

Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features. Renee enchained her. Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French face came out surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew from the tremulous mouth. The eyes? were they quivering with internal light, or were they set to seem so in the sensitive strange curves of the eyelids whose awakened lashes appeared to tremble on some borderland between lustreful significance and the mists? She caught at the nerves like certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of a stringed instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable. Yet she sat there at her father’s feet gazing out into the world indifferent to spectators, indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness. Her left hand clasped his right, and she supported herself on the floor with the other hand leaning away from him, to the destruction of conventional symmetry in the picture. None but a woman of consummate breeding dared have done as she did. It was not Southern suppleness that saved her from the charge of harsh audacity, but something of the kind of genius in her mood which has hurried the greater poets of sound and speech to impose their naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the laws to have been our meagre limitations.

The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the excellent body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our ranks flapping their leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments in imagery, will best be satisfied, by the statement that she was indescribable: a term that exacts no labour of mind from him or from them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it fills a vacuum.

That posture of Renee displeased Cecilia and fascinated her. In an exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure displeasure: but here was Nevil’s first love, the woman who loved him; and she was French. After a continued study of her Cecilia’s growing jealousy betrayed itself in a conscious rivalry of race, coming to the admission that Englishwomen cannot fling themselves about on the floor without agonizing the graces: possibly, too, they cannot look singularly without risks in the direction of slyness and brazen archness; or talk animatedly without dipping in slang. Conventional situations preserve them and interchange dignity with them; still life befits them; pre-eminently that judicial seat from which in briefest speech they deliver their judgements upon their foreign sisters. Jealousy it was that plucked Cecilia from her majestic place and caused her to envy in Renee things she would otherwise have disapproved.

At last she had seen the French lady’s likeness! The effect of it was a horrid trouble in Cecilia’s cool blood, abasement, a sense of eclipse, hardly any sense of deserving worthiness: ‘What am I but an heiress!’ Nevil had once called her beautiful; his praise had given her beauty. But what is beauty when it is outshone! Ask the owners of gems. You think them rich; they are pining.

Then, too, this Renee, who looked electrical in repose, might really love Nevil with a love that sent her heart out to him in his enterprises, justifying and adoring him, piercing to the hero in his very thoughts. Would she not see that his championship of the unfortunate man Dr. Shrapnel was heroic?

Cecilia surrendered the card to Rosamund, and it was out of sight when Beauchamp stepped in the drawing-room. His cheeks were flushed; he had been one against three for the better part of an hour.

‘Are you going to show me the downs to-morrow morning?’ Cecilia said to him; and he replied, ‘You will have to be up early.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the colonel, at Beauchamp’s heels.

He was volunteering to join the party of two for the early morning’s ride to the downs. Mr. Romfrey pressed his shoulder, saying, ‘There’s no third horse can do it in my stables.’

Colonel Halkett turned to him.

‘I had your promise to come over the kennels with me and see how I treat a cry of mad dog, which is ninety-nine times out of a hundred mad fool man,’ Mr. Romfrey added.

By that the colonel knew he meant to stand by Nevil still and offer him his chance of winning Cecilia.

Having pledged his word not to interfere, Colonel Halkett submitted, and muttered, ‘Ah! the kennels.’ Considering however what he had been witnessing of Nevil’s behaviour to his uncle, the colonel was amazed at Mr. Romfrey’s magnanimity in not cutting him off and disowning him.

‘Why the downs?’ he said.

‘Why the deuce, colonel?’ A question quite as reasonable, and Mr. Romfrey laughed under his breath. To relieve an uncertainty in Cecilia’s face, that might soon have become confusion, he described the downs fronting the paleness of earliest dawn, and then their arch and curve and dip against the pearly grey of the half-glow; and then, among their hollows, lo, the illumination of the East all around, and up and away, and a gallop for miles along the turfy thymy rolling billows, land to left, sea to right, below you. ‘It’s the nearest hit to wings we can make, Cecilia.’ He surprised her with her Christian name, which kindled in her the secret of something he expected from that ride on the downs. Compare you the Alps with them? If you could jump on the back of an eagle, you might. The Alps have height. But the downs have swiftness. Those long stretching lines of the downs are greyhounds in full career. To look at them is to set the blood racing! Speed is on the downs, glorious motion, odorous air of sea and herb, exquisite as in the isles of Greece. And the Continental travelling ninnies leave England for health!–run off and forth from the downs to the steamboat, the railway, the steaming hotel, the tourist’s shivering mountain-top, in search of sensations! There on the downs the finest and liveliest are at their bidding ready to fly through them like hosts of angels.

He spoke somewhat in that strain, either to relieve Cecilia or prepare the road for Nevil, not in his ordinary style; on the contrary, with a swing of enthusiasm that seemed to spring of ancient heartfelt fervours. And indeed soon afterward he was telling her that there on those downs, in full view of Steynham, he and his wife had first joined hands.

Beauchamp sat silent. Mr. Romfrey despatched orders to the stables, and Rosamund to the kitchen. Cecilia was rather dismayed by the formal preparations for the ride. She declined the early cup of coffee. Mr. Romfrey begged her to take it. ‘Who knows the hour when you ‘ll be back?’ he said. Beauchamp said nothing.

The room grew insufferable to Cecilia. She would have liked to be wafted to her chamber in a veil, so shamefully unveiled did she seem to be. But the French lady would have been happy in her place! Her father kissed her as fathers do when they hand the bride into the travelling-carriage. His ‘Good-night, my darling!’ was in the voice of a soldier on duty. For a concluding sign that her dim apprehensions pointed correctly, Mr. Romfrey kissed her on the forehead. She could not understand how it had come to pass that she found herself suddenly on this incline, precipitated whither she would fain be going, only less hurriedly, less openly, and with her secret merely peeping, like a dove in the breast.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE RIDE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

That pure opaque of the line of downs ran luminously edged against the pearly morning sky, with its dark landward face crepusculine yet clear in every combe, every dotting copse and furze-bush, every wavy fall, and the ripple, crease, and rill-like descent of the turf. Beauty of darkness was there, as well as beauty of light above.

Beauchamp and Cecilia rode forth before the sun was over the line, while the West and North-west sides of the rolling downs were stamped with such firmness of dusky feature as you see on the indentations of a shield of tarnished silver. The mounting of the sun behind threw an obscurer gloom, and gradually a black mask overcame them, until the rays shot among their folds and windings, and shadows rich as the black pansy, steady as on a dialplate rounded with the hour.

Mr. Everard Romfrey embraced this view from Steynham windows, and loved it. The lengths of gigantic ‘greyhound backs’ coursing along the South were his vision of delight; no image of repose for him, but of the life in swiftness. He had known them when the great bird of the downs was not a mere tradition, and though he owned conscientiously to never having beheld the bird, a certain mystery of holiness hung about the region where the bird had been in his time. There, too, with a timely word he had gained a wealthy and good wife. He had now sent Nevil to do the same.

This astute gentleman had caught at the idea of a ride of the young couple to the downs with his customary alacrity of perception as being the very best arrangement for hurrying them to the point. At Steynham Nevil was sure to be howling all day over his tumbled joss Shrapnel. Once away in the heart of the downs, and Cecilia beside him, it was a matter of calculation that two or three hours of the sharpening air would screw his human nature to the pitch. In fact, unless each of them was reluctant, they could hardly return unbetrothed. Cecilia’s consent was foreshadowed by her submission in going: Mr. Romfrey had noticed her fright at the suggestive formalities he cast round the expedition, and felt sure of her. Taking Nevil for a man who could smell the perfume of a ripe affirmative on the sweetest of lips, he was pretty well sure of him likewise. And then a truce to all that Radical rageing and hot- pokering of the country! and lie in peace, old Shrapnel! and get on your legs when you can, and offend no more; especially be mindful not to let fly one word against a woman! With Cecilia for wife, and a year of marriage devoted to a son and heir, Nevil might be expected to resume his duties as a naval officer, and win an honourable name for the inheritance of the young one he kissed.

There was benevolence in these previsions of Mr. Romfrey, proving how good it is for us to bow to despotic authority, if only we will bring ourselves unquestioningly to accept the previous deeds of the directing hand.

Colonel Halkett gave up his daughter for lost when she did not appear at the breakfast-table: for yet more decidedly lost when the luncheon saw her empty place; and as time drew on toward the dinner-hour, he began to think her lost beyond hope, embarked for good and all with the madbrain. Some little hope of a dissension between the pair, arising from the natural antagonism of her strong sense to Nevil’s extravagance, had buoyed him until it was evident that they must have alighted at an inn to eat, which signified that they had overleaped the world and its hurdles, and were as dreamy a leash of lovers as ever made a dreamland of hard earth. The downs looked like dreamland through the long afternoon. They shone as in a veil of silk-softly fair, softly dark. No spot of harshness was on them save where a quarry South-westward gaped at the evening sun.

Red light struck into that round chalk maw, and the green slopes and channels and half-circle hollows were brought a mile-stride higher Steynham by the level beams.

The poor old colonel fell to a more frequent repetition of the ‘Well!’ with which he had been unconsciously expressing his perplexed mind in the kennels and through the covers during the day. None of the gentlemen went to dress. Mr. Culbrett was indoors conversing with Rosamund Culling.

‘What’s come to them?’ the colonel asked of Mr. Romfrey, who said shrugging, ‘Something wrong with one of the horses.’ It had happened to him on one occasion to set foot in the hole of a baked hedgehog that had furnished a repast, not without succulence, to some shepherd of the downs. Such a case might have recurred; it was more likely to cause an upset at a walk than at a gallop: or perhaps a shoe had been cast; and young people break no bones at a walking fall; ten to one if they do at their top speed. Horses manage to kill their seniors for them: the young are exempt from accident.

Colonel Halkett nodded and sighed: ‘I daresay they’re safe. It’s that man Shrapnel’s letter–that letter, Romfrey! A private letter, I know; but I’ve not heard Nevil disown the opinions expressed in it. I submit. It’s no use resisting. I treat my daughter as a woman capable of judging for herself. I repeat, I submit. I haven’t a word against Nevil except on the score of his politics. I like him. All I have to say is, I don’t approve of a republican and a sceptic for my son-in-law. I yield to you, and my daughter, if she . . . !’

‘I think she does, colonel. Marriage ‘ll cure the fellow. Nevil will slough his craze. Off! old coat. Cissy will drive him in strings. “My wife!” I hear him.’ Mr. Romfrey laughed quietly. ‘It’s all “my country,” now. The dog’ll be uxorious. He wants fixing; nothing worse.’

‘How he goes on about Shrapnel!’

‘I shouldn’t think much of him if he didn’t.’

‘You’re one in a thousand, Romfrey. I object to seeing a man worshipped.’

‘It’s Nevil’s green-sickness, and Shrapnel’s the god of it.’

‘I trust to heaven you’re right. It seems to me young fellows ought to be out of it earlier.’

‘They generally are.’ Mr. Romfrey named some of the processes by which they are relieved of brain-flightiness, adding philosophically, ‘This way or that.’

His quick ear caught a sound of hoofs cantering down the avenue on the Northern front of the house.

He consulted his watch. ‘Ten minutes to eight. Say a quarter-past for dinner. They’re here, colonel.’

Mr. Romfrey met Nevil returning from the stables. Cecilia had disappeared.

‘Had a good day?’ said Mr. Romfrey.

Beauchamp replied: ‘I’ll tell you of it after dinner,’ and passed by him.

Mr. Romfrey edged round to Colonel Halkett, conjecturing in his mind: They have not hit it; as he remarked: ‘Breakfast and luncheon have been omitted in this day’s fare,’ which appeared to the colonel a confirmation of his worst fears, or rather the extinction of his last spark of hope.

He knocked at his daughter’s door in going upstairs to dress.

Cecilia presented herself and kissed him.

‘Well?’ said he.

‘By-and-by, papa,’ she answered. ‘I have a headache. Beg Mr. Romfrey to excuse me.’

‘No news for me?’

She had no news.

Mrs. Culling was with her. The colonel stepped on mystified to his room.

When the door had closed Cecilia turned to Rosamund and burst into tears. Rosamund felt that it must be something grave indeed for the proud young lady so to betray a troubled spirit.

‘He is ill–Dr. Shrapnel is very ill,’ Cecilia responded to one or two subdued inquiries in as clear a voice as she could command.

‘Where have you heard of him?’ Rosamund asked.

‘We have been there.’

‘Bevisham? to Bevisham?’ Rosamund was considering the opinion Mr. Romfrey would form of the matter from the point of view of his horses.

‘It was Nevil’s wish,’ said Cecilia.

‘Yes? and you went with him,’ Rosamund encouraged her to proceed, gladdened at hearing her speak of Nevil by that name; ‘you have not been on the downs at all?’

Cecilia mentioned a junction railway station they had ridden to; and thence, boxing the horses, by train to Bevisham. Rosamund understood that some haunting anxiety had fretted Nevil during the night; in the morning he could not withstand it, and he begged Cecilia to change their destination, apparently with a vehemence of entreaty that had been irresistible, or else it was utter affection for him had reduced her to undertake the distasteful journey. She admitted that she was not the most sympathetic companion Nevil could have had on the way, either going or coming. She had not entered Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage. Remaining on horseback she had seen the poor man reclining in his garden chair. Mr. Lydiard was with him, and also his ward Miss Denham, who had been summoned by telegraph by one of the servants from Switzerland. And Cecilia had heard Nevil speak of his uncle to her, and too humbly, she hinted. Nor had the expression of Miss Denham’s countenance in listening to him pleased her; but it was true that a heavily burdened heart cannot be expected to look pleasing. On the way home Cecilia had been compelled in some degree to defend Mr. Romfrey. Blushing through her tears at the remembrance of a past emotion that had been mixed with foresight, she confessed to Rosamund she thought it now too late to prevent a rupture between Nevil and his uncle. Had some one whom Nevil trusted and cared for taken counsel with him and advised him before uncle and nephew met to discuss this most unhappy matter, then there might have been hope. As it was, the fate of Dr. Shrapnel had gained entire possession of Nevil. Every retort of his uncle’s in reference to it rose up in him: he used language of contempt neighbouring abhorrence: he stipulated for one sole thing to win back his esteem for his uncle; and that was, the apology to Dr. Shrapnel.

‘And to-night,’ Cecilia concluded, ‘he will request Mr. Romfrey to accompany. him to Bevisham to-morrow morning, to make the apology in person. He will not accept the slightest evasion. He thinks Dr. Shrapnel may die, and the honour of the family–what is it he says of it?’ Cecilia raised her eyes to the ceiling, while Rosamund blinked in impatience and grief, just apprehending the alien state of the young lady’s mind in her absence of recollection, as well as her bondage in the effort to recollect accurately.

‘Have you not eaten any food to-day, Miss Halkett?’ she said; for it might be the want of food which had broken her and changed her manner.

Cecilia replied that she had ridden for an hour to Mount Laurels.

‘Alone? Mr. Romfrey must not hear of that,’ said Rosamund.

Cecilia consented to lie down on her bed. She declined the dainties Rosamund pressed on her. She was feverish with a deep and unconcealed affliction, and behaved as if her pride had gone. But if her pride had gone she would have eased her heart by sobbing outright. A similar division harassed her as when her friend Nevil was the candidate for Bevisham. She condemned his extreme wrath with his uncle, yet was attracted and enchained by the fire of passionate attachment which aroused it: and she was conscious that she had but shown obedience to his wishes throughout the day, not sympathy with his feelings. Under cover of a patient desire to please she had nursed irritation and jealousy; the degradation of the sense of jealousy increasing the irritation. Having consented to the ride to Dr. Shrapnel, should she not, to be consistent, have dismounted there? O half heart! A whole one, though it be an erring, like that of the French lady, does at least live, and has a history, and makes music: but the faint and uncertain is jarred in action, jarred in memory, ever behind the day and in the shadow of it! Cecilia reviewed herself: jealous, disappointed, vexed, ashamed, she had been all day a graceless companion, a bad actress: and at the day’s close she was loving Nevil the better for what had dissatisfied, distressed, and wounded her. She was loving him in emulation of his devotedness to another person: and that other was a revolutionary common people’s doctor! an infidel, a traitor to his country’s dearest interests! But Nevil loved him, and it had become impossible for her not to covet the love, or to think of the old offender without the halo cast by Nevil’s attachment being upon him. So intensely was she moved by her intertwisting reflections that in an access of bodily fever she stood up and moved before the glass, to behold the image of the woman who could be the victim of these childish emotions: and no wonderful contrast struck her eyes; she appeared to herself as poor and small as they. How could she aspire to a man like Nevil Beauchamp? If he had made her happy by wooing her she would not have adored him as she did now. He likes my hair, she said, smoothing it out, and then pressing her temples, like one insane. Two minutes afterward she was telling Rosamund her head ached less.

‘This terrible Dr. Shrapnel!’ Rosamund exclaimed, but reported that no loud voices were raised in the dining-room.

Colonel Halkett came to see his daughter, full of anxiety and curiosity. Affairs had been peaceful below, for he was ignorant of the expedition to Bevisham. On hearing of it he frowned, questioned Cecilia as to whether she had set foot on that man’s grounds, then said: ‘Ah! well, we leave to-morrow: I must go, I have business at home; I can’t delay it. I sanctioned no calling there, nothing of the kind. From Steynham to Bevisham? Goodness, it’s rank madness. I’m not astonished you’re sick and ill.’

He waited till he was assured Cecilia had no special matter to relate, and recommending her to drink the tea Mrs. Culling had made for her, and then go to bed and sleep, he went down to the drawing-room, charged with the worst form of hostility toward Nevil, the partly diplomatic.

Cecilia smiled at her father’s mention of sleep. She was in the contest of the two men, however inanimately she might be lying overhead, and the assurance in her mind that neither of them would give ground, so similar were they in their tenacity of will, dissimilar in all else, dragged her this way and that till she swayed lifeless between them. One may be as a weed of the sea while one’s fate is being decided. To love is to be on the sea, out of sight of land: to love a man like Nevil Beauchamp is to be on the sea in tempest. Still to persist in loving would be noble, and but for this humiliation of utter helplessness an enviable power. Her thoughts ran thus in shame and yearning and regret, dimly discerning where her heart failed in the strength which was Nevil’s, though it was a full heart, faithful and not void of courage. But he never brooded, he never blushed from insufficiency-the faintness of a desire, the callow passion that cannot fly and feed itself: he never tottered; he walked straight to his mark. She set up his image and Renee’s, and cowered under the heroical shapes till she felt almost extinct. With her weak limbs and head worthlessly paining, the little infantile I within her ceased to wail, dwindled beyond sensation. Rosamund, waiting on her in the place of her maid, saw two big drops come through her closed eyelids, and thought that if it could be granted to Nevil to look for a moment on this fair and proud young lady’s loveliness in abandonment, it would tame, melt, and save him. The Gods presiding over custom do not permit such renovating sights to men.

CHAPTER XXXVI

PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF Mr. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL

The contest, which was an alternation of hard hitting and close wrestling, had recommenced when Colonel Halkett stepped into the drawing- room.

‘Colonel, I find they’ve been galloping to Bevisham and back,’ said Mr. Romfrey.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ the colonel replied. Not perceiving a sign of dissatisfaction on his friend’s face, he continued:: ‘To that man Shrapnel.’

‘Cecilia did not dismount,’ said Beauchamp.

‘You took her to that man’s gate. It was not with my sanction. You know my ideas of the man.’

‘If you were to see him now, colonel, I don’t think you would speak harshly of him.’

‘We ‘re not obliged to go and look on men who have, had their measure dealt them.’

‘Barbarously,’ said Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey in the most placid manner took a chair. ‘Windy talk, that!’ he said.

Colonel Halkett seated himself. Stukely Culbrett turned a sheet of manuscript he was reading.

Beauchamp began a caged lion’s walk on the rug under the mantelpiece.

‘I shall not spare you from hearing what I think of it, sir.’

‘We ‘ve had what you think of it twice over,’ said Mr. Romfrey. ‘I suppose it was the first time for information, the second time for emphasis, and the rest counts to keep it alive in your recollection.’

‘This is what you have to take to heart, sir; that Dr. Shrapnel is now seriously ill.’

‘I’m sorry for it, and I’ll pay the doctor’s bill.’

‘You make it hard for me to treat you with respect.’

‘Fire away. Those Radical friends of yours have to learn a lesson, and it’s worth a purse to teach them that a lady, however feeble she may seem to them, is exactly of the strength of the best man of her acquaintance.’

‘That’s well said!’ came from Colonel Halkett.

Beauchamp stared at him, amazed by the commendation of empty language.

‘You acted in error; barbarously, but in error,’ he addressed his uncle.

‘And you have got a fine topic for mouthing,’ Mr. Romfrey rejoined.

‘You mean to sit still under Dr. Shrapnel’s forgiveness?’

‘He’s taken to copy the Christian religion, has he?’

‘You know you were deluded when you struck him.’

‘Not a whit.’

‘Yes, you know it now: Mrs. Culling–‘

‘Drag in no woman, Nevil Beauchamp!’

‘She has confessed to you that Dr. Shrapnel neither insulted her nor meant to ruffle her.’

‘She has done no such nonsense.’

‘If she has not!–but I trust her to have done it.’

‘You play the trumpeter, you terrorize her.’

‘Into opening her lips wider; nothing else. I’ll have the truth from her, and no mincing: and from Cecil Baskelett and Palmet.’

‘Give Cecil a second licking, if you can, and have him off to Shrapnel.’

‘You!’ cried Beauchamp.

At this juncture Stukely Culbrett closed the manuscript in his hands, and holding it out to Beauchamp, said:

‘Here’s your letter, Nevil. It’s tolerably hard to decipher. It’s mild enough; it’s middling good pulpit. I like it.’

‘What have you got there?’ Colonel Halkett asked him.

‘A letter of his friend Dr. Shrapnel on the Country. Read a bit, colonel.’

‘I? That letter! Mild, do you call it?’ The colonel started back his chair in declining to touch the letter.

‘Try it,’ said Stukely. ‘It’s the letter they have been making the noise about. It ought to be printed. There’s a hit or two at the middle-class that I should like to see in print. It’s really not bad pulpit; and I suspect that what you object to, colonel, is only the dust of a well- thumped cushion. Shrapnel thumps with his fist. He doesn’t say much that’s new. If the parsons were men they’d be saying it every Sunday. If they did, colonel, I should hear you saying, amen.’

‘Wait till they do say it.’

‘That’s a long stretch. They’re turn-cocks of one Water-company–to wash the greasy citizens!’

‘You’re keeping Nevil on the gape;’ said Mr. Romfrey, with a whimsical shrewd cast of the eye at Beauchamp, who stood alert not to be foiled, arrow-like in look and readiness to repeat his home-shot. Mr. Romfrey wanted to hear more of that unintelligible ‘You!’ of Beauchamp’s. But Stukely Culbrett intended that the latter should be foiled, and he continued his diversion from the angry subject.

‘We’ll drop the sacerdotals,’ he said. ‘They’re behind a veil for us, and so are we for them. I’m with you, colonel; I wouldn’t have them persecuted; they sting fearfully when whipped. No one listens to them now except the class that goes to sleep under them, to “set an example” to the class that can’t understand them. Shrapnel is like the breeze shaking the turf-grass outside the church-doors; a trifle fresher. He knocks nothing down.’

‘He can’t!’ ejaculated the colonel.

‘He sermonizes to shake, that’s all. I know the kind of man.’

‘Thank heaven, it’s not a common species in England!’

‘Common enough to be classed.’

Beauchamp struck through the conversation of the pair: ‘Can I see you alone to-night, sir, or to-morrow morning?’

‘You may catch me where you can,’ was Mr. Romfrey’s answer.

‘Where’s that? It’s for your sake and mine, not for Dr. Shrapnel’s. I have to speak to you, and must. You have done your worst with him; you can’t undo it. You have to think of your honour as a gentleman. I intend to treat you with respect, but wolf is the title now, whether I say it or not.’

‘Shrapnel’s a rather long-legged sheep?’

‘He asks for nothing from you.’

‘He would have got nothing, at a cry of peccavi!’

‘He was innocent, perfectly blameless; he would not lie to save himself. You mistook that for–but you were an engine shot along a line of rails. He does you the justice to say you acted in error.’

‘And you’re his parrot.’

‘He pardons you.’

‘Ha! t’ other cheek!’

‘You went on that brute’s errand in ignorance. Will you keep to the character now you know the truth? Hesitation about it doubles the infamy. An old man! the best of men! the kindest and truest! the most unselfish!’

‘He tops me by half a head, and he’s my junior.’

Beauchamp suffered himself to give out a groan of sick derision: ‘Ah!’

‘And it was no joke holding him tight,’ said Mr. Romfrey, ‘I ‘d as lief snap an ash. The fellow (he leaned round to Colonel Halkett) must be a fellow of a fine constitution. And he took his punishment like a man. I’ve known worse: and far worse: gentlemen by birth. There’s the choice of taking it upright or fighting like a rabbit with a weasel in his hole. Leave him to think it over, he’ll come right. I think no harm of him, I’ve no animus. A man must have his lesson at some time of life. I did what I had to do.’

‘Look here, Nevil,’ Stukely Culbrett checked Beauchamp in season: ‘I beg to inquire what Dr. Shrapnel means by “the people.” We have in our country the nobles and the squires, and after them, as I understand it, the people: that’s to say, the middle-class and the working-class–fat and lean. I’m quite with Shrapnel when he lashes the fleshpots. They want it, and they don’t get it from “their organ,” the Press. I fancy you and I agree about their organ; the dismallest organ that ever ground a hackneyed set of songs and hymns to madden the thoroughfares.’

‘The Press of our country!’ interjected Colonel Halkett in moaning parenthesis.

‘It’s the week-day Parson of the middle-class, colonel. They have their thinking done for them as the Chinese have their dancing. But, Nevil, your Dr. Shrapnel seems to treat the traders as identical with the aristocracy in opposition to his “people.” The traders are the cursed middlemen, bad friends of the “people,” and infernally treacherous to the nobles till money hoists them. It’s they who pull down the country. They hold up the nobles to the hatred of the democracy, and the democracy to scare the nobles. One’s when they want to swallow a privilege, and the other’s when they want to ring-fence their gains. How is it Shrapnel doesn’t expose the trick? He must see through it. I like that letter of his. People is one of your Radical big words that burst at a query. He can’t mean Quince, and Bottom, and Starveling, Christopher Sly, Jack Cade, Caliban, and poor old Hodge? No, no, Nevil. Our clowns are the stupidest in Europe. They can’t cook their meals. They can’t spell; they can scarcely speak. They haven’t a jig in their legs. And I believe they’re losing their grin! They’re nasty when their blood’s up. Shakespeare’s Cade tells you what he thought of Radicalizing the people. “And as for your mother, I ‘ll make her a duke”; that ‘s one of their songs. The word people, in England, is a dyspeptic agitator’s dream when he falls nodding over the red chapter of French history. Who won the great liberties for England? My book says, the nobles. And who made the great stand later?–the squires. What have the middlemen done but bid for the people they despise and fear, dishonour us abroad and make a hash of us at home? Shrapnel sees that. Only he has got the word people in his mouth. The people of England, my dear fellow, want heading. Since the traders obtained power we have been a country on all fours. Of course Shrapnel sees it: I say so. But talk to him and teach him where to look for the rescue.’

Colonel Halkett said to Stukely: ‘If you have had a clear idea in what you have just spoken, my head’s no place for it!’

Stukely’s unusually lengthy observations had somewhat heated him, and he protested with earnestness: ‘It was pure Tory, my dear colonel.’

But the habitually and professedly cynical should not deliver themselves at length: for as soon as they miss their customary incision of speech they are apt to aim to recover it in loquacity, and thus it may be that the survey of their ideas becomes disordered.

Mr. Culbrett endangered his reputation for epigram in a good cause, it shall be said.

These interruptions were torture to Beauchamp. Nevertheless the end was gained. He sank into a chair silent.

Mr. Romfrey wished to have it out with his nephew, of whose comic appearance as a man full of thunder, and occasionally rattling, yet all the while trying to be decorous and politic, he was getting tired. He foresaw that a tussle between them in private would possibly be too hot for his temper, admirably under control though it was.

‘Why not drag Cecil to Shrapnel?’ he said, for a provocation.

Beauchamp would not be goaded.

Colonel Halkett remarked that he would have to leave Steynham the next day. His host remonstrated with him. The colonel said: ‘Early.’ He had very particular business at home. He was positive, and declined every inducement to stay. Mr. Romfrey glanced at Nevil, thinking, You poor fool! And then he determined to let the fellow have five minutes alone with him.

This occurred at midnight, in that half-armoury, half-library, which was his private room.