‘I wish I had not to think it right that you should be beaten. And now– can you throw off political Nevil, and be sailor Nevil? I distinguish between my old friend, and my . . .our . . .’
‘Dreadful antagonist?’
‘Not so dreadful, except in the shock he gives us to find him in the opposite ranks. I am grieved. But we will finish our sail in peace. I detest controversy. I suppose, Nevil, you would have no such things as yachts? they are the enjoyments of the rich!’
He reminded her that she wished to finish her sail in peace; and he had to remind her of it more than once. Her scattered resources for argumentation sprang up from various suggestions, such as the flight of yachts, mention of the shooting season, sight of a royal palace; and adopted a continually heightened satirical form, oddly intermixed with an undisguised affectionate friendliness. Apparently she thought it possible to worry him out of his adhesion to the wrong side in politics. She certainly had no conception of the nature of his political views, for one or two extreme propositions flung to him in jest, he swallowed with every sign of a perfect facility, as if the Radical had come to regard stupendous questions as morsels barely sufficient for his daily sustenance. Cecilia reflected that he must be playing, and as it was not a subject for play she tacitly reproved him by letting him be the last to speak of it. He may not have been susceptible to the delicate chastisement, probably was not, for when he ceased it was to look on the beauty of her lowered eyelids, rather with an idea that the weight of his argument lay on them. It breathed from him; both in the department of logic and of feeling, in his plea for the poor man and his exposition of the poor man’s rightful claims, he evidently imagined that he had spoken overwhelmingly; and to undeceive him in this respect, for his own good, Cecilia calmly awaited the occasion when she might show the vanity of arguments in their effort to overcome convictions. He stood up to take his leave of her, on their return to the mouth of the Otley river, unexpectedly, so that the occasion did not arrive; but on his mentioning an engagement he had to give a dinner to a journalist and a tradesman of the town of Bevisham, by way of excuse for not complying with her gentle entreaty that he would go to Mount Laurels and wait to see the colonel that evening, ‘Oh! then your choice must be made irrevocably, I am sure,’ Miss Halkett said, relying upon intonation and manner to convey a great deal more, and not without a minor touch of resentment for his having dragged her into the discussion of politics, which she considered as a slime wherein men hustled and tussled, no doubt worthily enough, and as became them; not however to impose the strife upon the elect ladies of earth. What gentleman ever did talk to a young lady upon the dreary topic seriously? Least of all should Nevil Beauchamp have done it. That object of her high imagination belonged to the exquisite sphere of the feminine vision of the pure poetic, and she was vexed by the discord he threw between her long-cherished dream and her unanticipated realization of him:, if indeed it was he presenting himself to her in his own character, and not trifling, or not passing through a phase of young man’s madness.
Possibly he might be the victim of the latter and more pardonable state, and so thinking she gave him her hand.
‘Good-bye, Nevil. I may tell papa to expect you tomorrow?’
‘Do, and tell him to prepare for a field-day.’
She smiled. ‘A sham fight that will not win you a vote! I hope you will find your guests this evening agreeable companions.’
Beauchamp half-shrugged involuntarily. He obliterated the piece of treason toward them by saying that he hoped so; as though the meeting them, instead of slipping on to Mount Laurels with her, were an enjoyable prospect.
He was dropped by the Esperanza’s boat near Otley ferry, to walk along the beach to Bevisham, and he kept eye on the elegant vessel as she glided swan-like to her moorings off Mount Laurels park through dusky merchant craft, colliers, and trawlers, loosely shaking her towering snow-white sails, unchallenged in her scornful supremacy; an image of a refinement of beauty, and of a beautiful servicelessness.
As the yacht, so the mistress: things of wealth, owing their graces to wealth, devoting them to wealth–splendid achievements of art both! and dedicated to the gratification of the superior senses.
Say that they were precious examples of an accomplished civilization; and perhaps they did offer a visible ideal of grace for the rough world to aim at. They might in the abstract address a bit of a monition to the uncultivated, and encourage the soul to strive toward perfection, in beauty: and there is no contesting the value of beauty when the soul is taken into account. But were they not in too great a profusion in proportion to their utility? That was the question for Nevil Beauchamp. The democratic spirit inhabiting him, temporarily or permanently, asked whether they were not increasing to numbers which were oppressive? And further, whether it was good, for the country, the race, ay, the species, that they should be so distinctly removed from the thousands who fought the grand, and the grisly, old battle with nature for bread of life. Those grimy sails of the colliers and fishing-smacks, set them in a great sea, would have beauty for eyes and soul beyond that of elegance and refinement. And do but look on them thoughtfully, the poor are everlastingly, unrelievedly, in the abysses of the great sea . . . .
One cannot pursue to conclusions a line of meditation that is half-built on the sensations as well as on the mind. Did Beauchamp at all desire to have those idly lovely adornments of riches, the Yacht and the Lady, swept away? Oh, dear, no. He admired them, he was at home with them. They were much to his taste. Standing on a point of the beach for a last look at them before he set his face to the town, he prolonged the look in a manner to indicate that the place where business called him was not in comparison at all so pleasing: and just as little enjoyable were his meditations opposed to predilections. Beauty plucked the heart from his breast. But he had taken up arms; he had drunk of the questioning cup, that which denieth peace to us, and which projects us upon the missionary search of the How, the Wherefore, and the Why not, ever afterward. He questioned his justification, and yours, for gratifying tastes in an ill- regulated world of wrong-doing, suffering, sin, and bounties unrighteously dispensed–not sufficiently dispersed. He said by-and-by to pleasure, battle to-day. From his point of observation, and with the store of ideas and images his fiery yet reflective youth had gathered, he presented himself as it were saddled to that hard-riding force known as the logical impetus, which spying its quarry over precipices, across oceans and deserts, and through systems and webs, and into shops and cabinets of costliest china, will come at it, will not be refused, let the distances and the breakages be what they may. He went like the meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, too quick for a cry of protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is shot forth from the clash of a syllogism.
CHAPTER XVI
A PARTIAL DISPLAY OF BEAUCHAMP IN HIS COLOURS
Beauchamp presented himself at Mount Laurels next day, and formally asked Colonel Halkett for his vote, in the presence of Cecilia.
She took it for a playful glance at his new profession of politician: he spoke half-playfully. Was it possible to speak in earnest?
‘I ‘m of the opposite party,’ said the colonel; as conclusive a reply as could be: but he at once fell upon the rotten navy of a Liberal Government. How could a true sailor think of joining those Liberals! The question referred to the country, not to a section of it, Beauchamp protested with impending emphasis: Tories and Liberals were much the same in regard to the care of the navy. ‘Nevil!’ exclaimed Cecilia. He cited beneficial Liberal bills recently passed, which she accepted for a concession of the navy to the Tories, and she smiled. In spite of her dislike of politics, she had only to listen a few minutes to be drawn into the contest: and thus it is that one hot politician makes many among women and men of a people that have the genius of strife, or else in this case the young lady did unconsciously feel a deep interest in refuting and overcoming Nevil Beauchamp. Colonel Halkett denied the benefits of those bills. ‘Look,’ said he, ‘at the scarecrow plight of the army under a Liberal Government!’ This laid him open to the charge that he was for backing Administrations instead of principles.
‘I do,’ said the colonel. ‘I would rather have a good Administration than all your talk of principles: one’s a fact, but principles? principles?’ He languished for a phrase to describe the hazy things. ‘I have mine, and you have yours. It’s like a dispute between religions. There’s no settling it except by main force. That’s what principles lead you to.’
Principles may be hazy, but heavy artillery is disposable in defence of them, and Beauchamp fired some reverberating guns for the eternal against the transitory; with less of the gentlemanly fine taste, the light and easy social semi-irony, than Cecilia liked and would have expected from him. However, as to principles, no doubt Nevil was right, and Cecilia drew her father to another position. ‘Are not we Tories to have principles as well as the Liberals, Nevil?’
‘They may have what they call principles,’ he admitted, intent on pursuing his advantage over the colonel, who said, to shorten the controversy: ‘It’s a question of my vote, and my liking. I like a Tory Government, and I don’t like the Liberals. I like gentlemen; I don’t like a party that attacks everything, and beats up the mob for power, and repays it with sops, and is dragging us down from all we were proud of.’
‘But the country is growing, the country wants expansion,’ said Beauchamp; ‘and if your gentlemen by birth are not up to the mark, you must have leaders that are.’
‘Leaders who cut down expenditure, to create a panic that doubles the outlay! I know them.’
‘A panic, Nevil.’ Cecilia threw stress on the memorable word.
He would hear no reminder in it. The internal condition of the country was now the point for seriously-minded Englishmen.
‘My dear boy, what have you seen of the country?’ Colonel Halkett inquired.
‘Every time I have landed, colonel, I have gone to the mining and the manufacturing districts, the centres of industry; wherever there was dissatisfaction. I have attended meetings, to see and hear for myself. I have read the papers . . . .’
‘The papers!’
‘Well, they’re the mirror of the country.’
‘Does one see everything in a mirror, Nevil?’ said Cecilia: ‘even in the smoothest?’
He retorted softly: ‘I should be glad to see what you see,’ and felled her with a blush.
For an example of the mirror offered by the Press, Colonel Halkett touched on Mr. Timothy Turbot’s article in eulogy of the great Commander Beauchamp. ‘Did you like it?’ he asked. ‘Ah, but if you meddle with politics, you must submit to be held up on the prongs of a fork, my boy; soaped by your backers and shaved by the foe; and there’s a figure for a gentleman! as your uncle Romfrey says.’
Cecilia did not join this discussion, though she had heard from her father that something grotesque had been written of Nevil. Her foolishness in blushing vexed body and mind. She was incensed by a silly compliment that struck at her feminine nature when her intellect stood in arms. Yet more hurt was she by the reflection that a too lively sensibility might have conjured up the idea of the compliment. And again, she wondered at herself for not resenting so rare a presumption as it implied, and not disdaining so outworn a form of flattery. She wondered at herself too for thinking of resentment and disdain in relation to the familiar commonplaces of licenced impertinence. Over all which hung a darkened image of her spirit of independence, like a moon in eclipse.
Where lay his weakness? Evidently in the belief that he had thought profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight of faery in a forest bewitched.
‘Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,’ she said, after listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and indifference to the union of classes.
‘I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,’ he turned to her.
‘The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?’
‘Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets.’
‘It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have only one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas, can there be?’
‘So you call me quack?’
‘No, Nevil, no,’ she breathed a rich contralto note of denial: ‘but if the country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your prescription . . .’
‘There’s nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,’ said Nevil, blinking over it.
She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so tedious that her father struck through it with the remark:
‘Concerning that quack–that’s one in the background, though!’
‘I know of none,’ said Beauchamp, well-advised enough to forbear mention of the name of Shrapnel.
Cecilia petitioned that her stumbling ignorance, which sought the road of wisdom, might be heard out. She had a reserve entanglement for her argumentative friend. ‘You were saying, Nevil, that you were for principles rather than for individuals, and you instanced Mr. Cougham, the senior Liberal candidate of Bevisham, as one whom you would prefer to see in Parliament instead of Seymour Austin, though you confess to Mr. Austin’s far superior merits as a politician and servant of his country: but Mr. Cougham supports Liberalism while Mr. Austin is a Tory. You are for the principle.’
‘I am,’ said he, bowing.
She asked: ‘Is not that equivalent to the doctrine of election by Grace?’
Beauchamp interjected: ‘Grace! election?’
Cecilia was tender to his inability to follow her allusion.
‘Thou art a Liberal–then rise to membership,’ she said. ‘Accept my creed, and thou art of the chosen. Yes, Nevil, you cannot escape from it. Papa, he preaches Calvinism in politics.’
‘We stick to men, and good men,’ the colonel flourished. ‘Old English for me!’
‘You might as well say, old timber vessels, when Iron’s afloat, colonel.’
‘I suspect you have the worst of it there, papa,’ said Cecilia, taken by the unexpectedness and smartness of the comparison coming from wits that she had been undervaluing.
‘I shall not own I’m worsted until I surrender my vote,’ the colonel rejoined.
‘I won’t despair of it,’ said Beauchamp.
Colonel Halkett bade him come for it as often as he liked. You’ll be beaten in Bevisham, I warn you. Tory reckonings are safest: it’s an admitted fact: and we know you can’t win. According to my judgement a man owes a duty to his class.’
‘A man owes a duty to his class as long as he sees his class doing its duty to the country,’ said Beauchamp; and he added, rather prettily in contrast with the sententious commencement, Cecilia thought, that the apathy of his class was proved when such as he deemed it an obligation on them to come forward and do what little they could. The deduction of the proof was not clearly consequent, but a meaning was expressed; and in that form it brought him nearer to her abstract idea of Nevil Beauchamp than when he raged and was precise.
After his departure she talked of him with her father, to be charitably satirical over him, it seemed.
The critic in her ear had pounced on his repetition of certain words that betrayed a dialectical stiffness and hinted a narrow vocabulary: his use of emphasis, rather reminding her of his uncle Everard, was, in a young man, a little distressing. ‘The apathy of the country, papa; the apathy of the rich; a state of universal apathy. Will you inform me, papa, what the Tories are doing? Do we really give our consciences to the keeping of the parsons once a week, and let them dogmatize for us to save us from exertion? We must attach ourselves to principles; nothing is permanent but principles. Poor Nevil! And still I am sure you have, as I have, the feeling that one must respect him. I am quite convinced that he supposes he is doing his best to serve his country by trying for Parliament, fancying himself a Radical. I forgot to ask him whether he had visited his great-aunt, Mrs. Beauchamp. They say the dear old lady has influence with him.’
‘I don’t think he’s been anywhere,’ Colonel Halkett half laughed at the quaint fellow. ‘I wish the other great-nephew of hers were in England, for us to run him against Nevil Beauchamp. He’s touring the world. I’m told he’s orthodox, and a tough debater. We have to take what we can get.’
‘My best wishes for your success, and you and I will not talk of politics any more, papa. I hope Nevil will come often, for his own good; he will meet his own set of people here. And if he should dogmatize so much as to rouse our apathy to denounce his principles, we will remember that we are British, and can be sweet-blooded in opposition. Perhaps he may change, even tra le tre ore a le quattro: electioneering should be a lesson. From my recollection of Blackburn Tuckham, he was a boisterous boy.’
‘He writes uncommonly clever letters home to his aunt Beauchamp. She has handed them to me to read,’ said the colonel. ‘I do like to see tolerably solid young fellows: they give one some hope of the stability of the country.’
‘They are not so interesting to study, and not half so amusing,’ said Cecilia.
Colonel Halkett muttered his objections to the sort of amusement furnished by firebrands.
‘Firebrand is too strong a word for poor Nevil,’ she remonstrated.
In that estimate of the character of Nevil Beauchamp, Cecilia soon had to confess that she had been deceived, though not by him.
CHAPTER XVII
HIS FRIEND AND FOE
Looking from her window very early on a Sunday morning, Miss Halkett saw Beauchamp strolling across the grass of the park. She dressed hurriedly and went out to greet him, smiling and thanking him for his friendliness in coming.
He said he was delighted, and appeared so, but dashed the sweetness. ‘You know I can’t canvass on Sundays!
‘I suppose not,’ she replied. ‘Have you walked up from Bevisham? You must be tired.’
‘Nothing tires me,’ said he.
With that they stepped on together.
Mount Laurels, a fair broad house backed by a wood of beeches and firs, lay open to view on the higher grassed knoll of a series of descending turfy mounds dotted with gorseclumps, and faced South-westerly along the run of the Otley river to the gleaming broad water and its opposite border of forest, beyond which the downs of the island threw long interlapping curves. Great ships passed on the line of the water to and fro; and a little mist of masts of the fishing and coasting craft by Otley village, near the river’s mouth, was like a web in air. Cecilia led him to her dusky wood of firs, where she had raised a bower for a place of poetical contemplation and reading when the clear lapping salt river beneath her was at high tide. She could hail the Esperanza from that cover; she could step from her drawing-room window, over the flower- beds, down the gravel walk to the hard, and be on board her yacht within seven minutes, out on her salt-water lake within twenty, closing her wings in a French harbour by nightfall of a summer’s day, whenever she had the whim to fly abroad. Of these enviable privileges she boasted with some happy pride.
‘It’s the finest yachting-station in England,’ said Beauchamp.
She expressed herself very glad that he should like it so much. Unfortunately she added, ‘I hope you will find it pleasanter to be here than canvassing.’
‘I have no pleasure in canvassing,’ said he. ‘I canvass poor men accustomed to be paid for their votes, and who get nothing from me but what the baron would call a parsonical exhortation. I’m in the thick of the most spiritless crew in the kingdom. Our southern men will not compare with the men of the north. But still, even among these fellows, I see danger for the country if our commerce were to fail, if distress came on them. There’s always danger in disunion. That’s what the rich won’t see. They see simply nothing out of their own circle; and they won’t take a thought of the overpowering contrast between their luxury and the way of living, that’s half-starving, of the poor. They understand it when fever comes up from back alleys and cottages, and then they join their efforts to sweep the poor out of the district. The poor are to get to their work anyhow, after a long morning’s walk over the proscribed space; for we must have poor, you know. The wife of a parson I canvassed yesterday, said to me, “Who is to work for us, if you do away with the poor, Captain Beauchamp?”‘
Cecilia quitted her bower and traversed the wood silently.
‘So you would blow up my poor Mount Laurels for a peace-offering to the lower classes?’
‘I should hope to put it on a stronger foundation, Cecilia.’
‘By means of some convulsion?’
‘By forestalling one.’
‘That must be one of the new ironclads,’ observed Cecilia, gazing at the black smoke-pennon of a tower that slipped along the water-line. ‘Yes? You were saying? Put us on a stronger—-?’
‘It’s, I think, the Hastings: she broke down the other day on her trial trip,’ said Beauchamp, watching the ship’s progress animatedly. ‘Peppel commands her–a capital officer. I suppose we must have these costly big floating barracks. I don’t like to hear of everything being done for the defensive. The defensive is perilous policy in war. It’s true, the English don’t wake up to their work under half a year. But, no: defending and looking to defences is bad for the fighting power; and there’s half a million gone on that ship. Half a million! Do you know how many poor taxpayers it takes to make up that sum, Cecilia?’
‘A great many,’ she slurred over them; ‘but we must have big ships, and the best that are to be had.’
‘Powerful fast rams, sea-worthy and fit for running over shallows, carrying one big gun; swarms of harryers and worriers known to be kept ready for immediate service; readiness for the offensive in case of war –there’s the best defence against a declaration of war by a foreign State.’
‘I like to hear you, Nevil,’ said Cecilia, beaming: ‘Papa thinks we have a miserable army–in numbers. He says, the wealthier we become the more difficult it is to recruit able-bodied men on the volunteering system. Yet the wealthier we are the more an army is wanted, both to defend our wealth and to preserve order. I fancy he half inclines to compulsory enlistment. Do speak to him on that subject.’
Cecilia must have been innocent of a design to awaken the fire-flash in Nevil’s eyes. She had no design, but hostility was latent, and hence perhaps the offending phrase.
He nodded and spoke coolly. ‘An army to preserve order? So, then, an army to threaten civil war!’
‘To crush revolutionists.’
‘Agitators, you mean. My dear good old colonel–I have always loved him –must not have more troops at his command.’
‘Do you object to the drilling of the whole of the people?’
‘Does not the colonel, Cecilia? I am sure he does in his heart, and, for different reasons, I do. He won’t trust the working-classes, nor I the middle.’
‘Does Dr. Shrapnel hate the middle-class?’
‘Dr. Shrapnel cannot hate. He and I are of opinion, that as the middle- class are the party in power, they would not, if they knew the use of arms, move an inch farther in Reform, for they would no longer be in fear of the class below them.’
‘But what horrible notions of your country have you, Nevil! It is dreadful to hear. Oh! do let us avoid politics for ever. Fear!’
‘All concessions to the people have been won from fear.’
‘I have not heard so.’
‘I will read it to you in the History of England.’
‘You paint us in a condition of Revolution.’
‘Happily it’s not a condition unnatural to us. The danger would be in not letting it be progressive, and there’s a little danger too at times in our slowness. We change our blood or we perish.’
‘Dr. Shrapnel?’
‘Yes, I have heard Dr. Shrapnel say that. And, by-the-way, Cecilia–will you? can you?–take me for the witness to his character. He is the most guileless of men, and he’s the most unguarded. My good Rosamund saw him. She is easily prejudiced when she is a trifle jealous, and you may hear from her that he rambles, talks wildly. It may seem so. I maintain there is wisdom in him when conventional minds would think him at his wildest. Believe me, he is the humanest, the best of men, tenderhearted as a child: the most benevolent, simple-minded, admirable old man–the man I am proudest to think of as an Englishman and a man living in my time, of all men existing. I can’t overpraise him.’
‘He has a bad reputation.’
‘Only with the class that will not meet him and answer him.’
‘Must we invite him to our houses?’
‘It would be difficult to get him to come, if you did. I mean, meet him in debate and answer his arguments. Try the question by brains.’
‘Before mobs?’
‘Not before mobs. I punish you by answering you seriously.’
‘I am sensible of the flattery.’
‘Before mobs!’ Nevil ejaculated. ‘It’s the Tories that mob together and cry down every man who appears to them to threaten their privileges. Can you guess what Dr. Shrapnel compares them to?’
‘Indeed, Nevil, I have not an idea. I only wish your patriotism were large enough to embrace them.’
‘He compares them to geese claiming possession of the whole common, and hissing at every foot of ground they have to yield. They’re always having to retire and always hissing. “Retreat and menace,” that’s the motto for them.’
‘Very well, Nevil, I am a goose upon a common.’
So saying, Cecilia swam forward like a swan on water to give the morning kiss to her papa, by the open window of the breakfast-room.
Never did bird of Michaelmas fling off water from her feathers more thoroughly than this fair young lady the false title she pretended to assume.
‘I hear you’re of the dinner party at Grancey Lespel’s on Wednesday,’ the colonel said to Beauchamp. ‘You’ll have to stand fire.’
‘They will, papa,’ murmured Cecilia. ‘Will Mr. Austin be there?’
‘I particularly wish to meet Mr. Austin,’ said Beauchamp.
‘Listen to him, if you do meet him,’ she replied.
His look was rather grave.
‘Lespel ‘s a Whig,’ he said.
The colonel answered. ‘Lespel was a Whig. Once a Tory always a Tory,– but court the people and you’re on quicksands, and that’s where the Whigs are. What he is now I don’t think he knows himself. You won’t get a vote.’
Cecilia watched her friend Nevil recovering from his short fit of gloom. He dismissed politics at breakfast and grew companionable, with the charm of his earlier day. He was willing to accompany her to church too.
‘You will hear a long sermon,’ she warned him.
‘Forty minutes.’ Colonel Halkett smothered a yawn that was both retro and prospective.
‘It has been fifty, papa.’
‘It has been an hour, my dear.’
It was good discipline nevertheless, the colonel affirmed, and Cecilia praised the Rev. Mr. Brisk of Urplesdon vicarage as one of our few remaining Protestant clergymen.
‘Then he ought to be supported,’ said Beauchamp. ‘In the dissensions of religious bodies it is wise to pat the weaker party on the back–I quote Stukely Culbrett.’
‘I ‘ve heard him,’ sighed the colonel. ‘He calls the Protestant clergy the social police of the English middle-class. Those are the things he lets fly. I have heard that man say that the Church stands to show the passion of the human race for the drama. He said it in my presence. And there ‘s a man who calls himself a Tory
You have rather too much of that playing at grudges and dislikes at Steynham, with squibs, nicknames, and jests at things that–well, that our stability is bound up in. I hate squibs.’
‘And I,’ said Beauchamp. Some shadow of a frown crossed him; but Stukely Culbrett’s humour seemed to be a refuge. ‘Protestant parson-not clergy,’ he corrected the colonel. ‘Can’t you hear Mr. Culbrett, Cecilia? The Protestant parson is the policeman set to watch over the respectability of the middle-class. He has sharp eyes for the sins of the poor. As for the rich, they support his church; they listen to his sermon–to set an example: discipline, colonel. You discipline the tradesman, who’s afraid of losing your custom, and the labourer, who might be deprived of his bread. But the people? It’s put down to the wickedness of human nature that the parson has not got hold of the people. The parsons have lost them by senseless Conservatism, because they look to the Tories for the support of their Church, and let the religion run down the gutters. And how many thousands have you at work in the pulpit every Sunday? I’m told the Dissenting ministers have some vitality.’
Colonel Halkett shrugged with disgust at the mention of Dissenters.
‘And those thirty or forty thousand, colonel, call the men that do the work they ought to be doing demagogues. The parsonry are a power absolutely to be counted for waste, as to progress.’
Cecilia perceived that her father was beginning to be fretted.
She said, with a tact that effected its object: ‘I am one who hear Mr. Culbrett without admiring his wit.’
‘No, and I see no good in this kind of Steynham talk,’ Colonel Halkett said, rising. ‘We’re none of us perfect. Heaven save us from political parsons!’
Beauchamp was heard to utter, ‘Humanity.’
The colonel left the room with Cecilia, muttering the Steynham tail to that word: ‘tomtity,’ for the solace of an aside repartee.
She was on her way to dress for church. He drew her into the library, and there threw open a vast placard lying on the table. It was printed in blue characters and red. ‘This is what I got by the post this morning. I suppose Nevil knows about it. He wants tickling, but I don’t like this kind of thing. It ‘s not fair war. It ‘s as bad as using explosive bullets in my old game.’
‘Can he expect his adversaries to be tender with him?’ Cecilia simulated vehemence in an underbreath. She glanced down the page:
‘FRENCH MARQUEES’ caught her eye.
It was a page of verse. And, oh! could it have issued from a Tory Committee?
‘The Liberals are as bad, and worse,’ her father said.
She became more and more distressed. ‘It seems so very mean, papa; so base. Ungenerous is no word for it. And how vulgar! Now I remember, Nevil said he wished to see Mr. Austin.’
‘Seymour Austin would not sanction it.’
‘No, but Nevil might hold him responsible for it.’
‘I suspect Mr. Stukely Culbrett, whom he quotes, and that smoking-room lot at Lespel’s. I distinctly discountenance it. So I shall tell them on Wednesday night. Can you keep a secret?’
‘And after all Nevil Beauchamp is very young, papa!–of course I can keep a secret.’
The colonel exacted no word of honour, feeling quite sure of her.
He whispered the secret in six words, and her cheeks glowed vermilion.
‘But they will meet on Wednesday after this,’ she said, and her sight went dancing down the column of verse, of which the following trotting couplet is a specimen:–
‘O did you ever, hot in love, a little British middy see, Like Orpheus asking what the deuce to do without Eurydice?’
The middy is jilted by his FRENCH MARQUEES, whom he ‘did adore,’ and in his wrath he recommends himself to the wealthy widow Bevisham, concerning whose choice of her suitors there is a doubt: but the middy is encouraged to persevere:
‘Up, up, my pretty middy; take a draught of foaming Sillery; Go in and win the uriddy with your Radical artillery.’
And if Sillery will not do, he is advised, he being for superlatives, to try the sparkling Sillery of the Radical vintage, selected grapes.
This was but impudent nonsense. But the reiterated apostrophe to ‘MY FRENCH MARQUEES’ was considered by Cecilia to be a brutal offence.
She was shocked that her party should have been guilty of it. Nevil certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid squib did appear to her a debasing weapon to use.
‘I cannot congratulate you on your choice of a second candidate, papa,’ she said scornfully.
‘I don’t much congratulate myself,’ said the colonel.
‘Here’s a letter from Mrs. Beauchamp informing me that her boy Blackburn will be home in a month. There would have been plenty of time for him. However, we must make up our minds to it. Those two ‘ll be meeting on Wednesday, so keep your secret. It will be out tomorrow week.’
‘But Nevil will be accusing Mr. Austin.’
‘Austin won’t be at Lespel’s. And he must bear it, for the sake of peace.’
‘Is Nevil ruined with his uncle, papa?’
‘Not a bit, I should imagine. It’s Romfrey’s fun.’
‘And this disgraceful squib is a part of the fun?’
‘That I know nothing about, my dear. I’m sorry, but there’s pitch and tar in politics as well as on shipboard.’
‘I do not see that there should be,’ said Cecilia resolutely.
‘We can’t hope to have what should be.’
‘Why not? I would have it: I would do my utmost to have it,’ she flamed out.
‘Your utmost?’ Her father was glancing at her foregone mimicry of Beauchamp’s occasional strokes of emphasis. ‘Do your utmost to have your bonnet on in time for us to walk to church. I can’t bear driving there.’
Cecilia went to her room with the curious reflection, awakened by what her father had chanced to suggest to her mind, that she likewise could be fervid, positive, uncompromising–who knows? Radicalish, perhaps, when she looked eye to eye on an evil. For a moment or so she espied within herself a gulf of possibilities, wherein black night-birds, known as queries, roused by shot of light, do flap their wings.–Her utmost to have be what should be! And why not?
But the intemperate feeling subsided while she was doing duty before her mirror, and the visionary gulf closed immediately.
She had merely been very angry on Nevil Beauchamp’s behalf, and had dimly seen that a woman can feel insurgent, almost revolutionary, for a personal cause, Tory though her instinct of safety and love of smoothness make her.
No reflection upon this casual piece of self or sex revelation troubled her head. She did, however, think of her position as the friend of Nevil in utter antagonism to him. It beset her with contradictions that blew rough on her cherished serenity; for she was of the order of ladies who, by virtue of their pride and spirit, their port and their beauty, decree unto themselves the rank of princesses among women, before our world has tried their claim to it. She had lived hitherto in upper air, high above the clouds of earth. Her ideal of a man was of one similarly disengaged and lofty-loftier. Nevil, she could honestly say, was not her ideal; he was only her old friend, and she was opposed to him in his present adventure. The striking at him to cure him of his mental errors and excesses was an obligation; she could descend upon him calmly with the chastening rod, pointing to the better way; but the shielding of him was a different thing; it dragged her down so low, that in her condemnation of the Tory squib she found herself asking herself whether haply Nevil had flung off the yoke of the French lady; with the foolish excuse for the question, that if he had not, he must be bitterly sensitive to the slightest public allusion to her. Had he? And if not, how desperately faithful he was! or else how marvellously seductive she!
Perhaps it was a lover’s despair that had precipitated him into the mire of politics. She conceived the impression that it must be so, and throughout the day she had an inexplicable unsweet pleasure in inciting him to argumentation and combating him, though she was compelled to admit that he had been colloquially charming antecedent to her naughty provocation; and though she was indebted to him for his patient decorum under the weary wave of the Reverend Mr. Brisk. Now what does it matter what a woman thinks in politics? But he deemed it of great moment. Politically, he deemed that women have souls, a certain fire of life for exercise on earth. He appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions. He quoted the Bevisham doctor
‘Convictions are generally first impressions that are sealed with later prejudices,’ and insisted there was wisdom in it. Nothing tired him, as he had said, and addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of hopeless effort daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of judgement in politics–his notion of an error. The value he put upon speaking, urging his views, was really fanatical. It appeared that he canvassed the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing would persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched Tory like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.
Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the sturdy beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without shame that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal; penetrating malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to exhort bedraggled mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed to rebuffs from impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied, shouting speeches to roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of the mob! . . .
Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind’s picture of him. But the blinding curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could not but be the desperation of a lover abandoned. She feared it was, she feared it was not. Nevil Beauchamp’s foe persisted in fearing that it was not; his friend feared that it was. Yet why? For if it was, then he could not be quite in earnest, and might be cured. Nay, but earnestness works out its own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be preferable to think him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken. Cecilia could not decide upon what she dared wish for his health’s good. Friend and foe were not further separable within her bosom than one tick from another of a clock; they changed places, and next his friend was fearing what his foe had feared: they were inextricable.
Why had he not sprung up on a radiant aquiline ambition, whither one might have followed him, with eyes and prayers for him, if it was not possible to do so companionably? At present, in the shape of a canvassing candidate, it was hardly honourable to let imagination dwell on him, save compassionately.
When he rose to take his leave, Cecilia said, ‘Must you go to Itchincope on Wednesday, Nevil?’
Colonel Halkett added: ‘I don’t think I would go to Lespel’s if I were you. I rather suspect Seymour Austin will be coming on Wednesday, and that ‘ll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for an evening.’
‘I have particular reasons for going to Lespel’s; I hear he wavers toward a Tory conspiracy of some sort,’ said Beauchamp.
The colonel held his tongue.
The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven o’clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass of the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not but approve.
Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young fellow so misguided.
The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said whimsically, ‘He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in it!’
Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be losing his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his in Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking as well as ever.
‘He dresses just as he used to dress,’ she observed.
The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness, like the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the thought, like something flashing black, crossed her–how attractive such a style must be to a Frenchwoman!
‘He may look a little worn,’ she acquiesced.
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING
Tories dread the restlessness of Radicals, and Radicals are in awe of the organization of Tories. Beauchamp thought anxiously of the high degree of confidence existing in the Tory camp, whose chief could afford to keep aloof, while he slaved all day and half the night to thump ideas into heads, like a cooper on a cask:–an impassioned cooper on an empty cask! if such an image is presentable. Even so enviously sometimes the writer and the barrister, men dependent on their active wits, regard the man with a business fixed in an office managed by clerks. That man seems by comparison celestially seated. But he has his fits of trepidation; for new tastes prevail and new habits are formed, and the structure of his business will not allow him to adapt himself to them in a minute. The secure and comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity they enjoy. Mr. Seymour Austin candidly avowed to Colonel Halkett, on his arrival at Mount Laurels, that he was advised to take up his quarters in the neighbourhood of Bevisham by a recent report of his committee, describing the young Radical’s canvass as redoubtable. Cougham he did not fear: he could make a sort of calculation of the votes for the Liberal thumping on the old drum of Reform; but the number for him who appealed to feelings and quickened the romantic sentiments of the common people now huddled within our electoral penfold, was not calculable. Tory and Radical have an eye for one another, which overlooks the Liberal at all times except when he is, as they imagine, playing the game of either of them.
‘Now we shall see the passions worked,’ Mr. Austin said, deploring the extension of the franchise.
He asked whether Beauchamp spoke well.
Cecilia left it to her father to reply; but the colonel appealed to her, saying, ‘Inclined to dragoon one, isn’t he?’
She did not think that. ‘He speaks . . . he speaks well in conversation. I fancy he would be liked by the poor. I should doubt his being a good public speaker. He certainly has command of his temper: that is one thing. I cannot say whether it favours oratory. He is indefatigable. One may be sure he will not faint by the way. He quite believes in himself. But, Mr. Austin, do you really regard him as a serious rival?’
Mr. Austin could not tell. No one could tell the effect of an extended franchise. The untried venture of it depressed him. ‘Men have come suddenly on a borough before now and carried it,’ he said.
‘Not a borough like Bevisham?’
He shook his head. ‘A fluid borough, I’m afraid.’
Colonel Halkettt interposed: ‘But Ferbrass is quite sure of his district.’
Cecilia wished to know who the man was, of the mediaevally sounding name.
‘Ferbrass is an old lawyer, my dear. He comes of five generations of lawyers, and he ‘s as old in the county as Grancey Lespel. Hitherto he has always been to be counted on for marching his district to the poll like a regiment. That’s our strength–the professions, especially lawyers.’
‘Are not a great many lawyers Liberals, papa?’
‘A great many barristers are, my dear.’
Thereat the colonel and Mr. Austin smiled together.
It was a new idea to Cecilia that Nevil Beauchamp should be considered by a man of the world anything but a well-meaning, moderately ridiculous young candidate; and the fact that one so experienced as Seymour Austin deemed him an adversary to be grappled with in earnest, created a small revolution in her mind, entirely altering her view of the probable pliability of his Radicalism under pressure of time and circumstances. Many of his remarks, that she had previously half smiled at, came across her memory hard as metal. She began to feel some terror of him, and said, to reassure herself: ‘Captain Beauchamp is not likely to be a champion with a very large following. He is too much of a political mystic, I think.’
‘Many young men are, before they have written out a fair copy of their meaning,’ said Mr. Austin.
Cecilia laughed to herself at the vision of the fiery Nevil engaged in writing out a fair copy of his meaning. How many erasures! what foot- notes!
The arrangement was for Cecilia to proceed to Itchincope alone for a couple of days, and bring a party to Mount Laurels through Bevisham by the yacht on Thursday, to meet Mr. Seymour Austin and Mr. Everard Romfrey. An early day of the next week had been agreed on for the unmasking of the second Tory candidate. She promised that in case Nevil Beauchamp should have the hardihood to enter the enemy’s nest at Itchincope on Wednesday, at the great dinner and ball there, she would do her best to bring him back to Mount Laurels, that he might meet his uncle Everard, who was expected there. At least he may consent to come for an evening,’ she said. ‘Nothing will take him from that canvassing. It seems to me it must be not merely distasteful . . . ?’
Mr. Austin replied: ‘It ‘s disagreeable, but it’s’ the practice. I would gladly be bound by a common undertaking to abstain.’
‘Captain Beauchamp argues that it would be all to your advantage. He says that a personal visit is the only chance for an unknown candidate to make the people acquainted with him.’
‘It’s a very good opportunity for making him acquainted with them; and I hope he may profit by it.’
‘Ah! pah! “To beg the vote and wink the bribe,”‘ Colonel Halkett subjoined abhorrently:
“‘It well becomes the Whiggish tribe To beg the vote and wink the bribe.”
Canvassing means intimidation or corruption.’
‘Or the mixture of the two, called cajolery,’ said Mr. Austin; ‘and that was the principal art of the Whigs.’
Thus did these gentlemen converse upon canvassing.
It is not possible to gather up in one volume of sound the rattle of the knocks at Englishmen’s castle-gates during election days; so, with the thunder of it unheard, the majesty of the act of canvassing can be but barely appreciable, and he, therefore, who would celebrate it must follow the candidate obsequiously from door to door, where, like a cross between a postman delivering a bill and a beggar craving an alms, patiently he attempts the extraction of the vote, as little boys pick periwinkles with a pin.
‘This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,’ is pretty nearly the form of the supplication.
How if, instead of the solicitation of the thousands by the unit, the meritorious unit were besought by rushing thousands?–as a mound of the plains that is circumvented by floods, and to which the waters cry, Be thou our island. Let it be answered the questioner, with no discourteous adjectives, Thou fool! To come to such heights of popular discrimination and political ardour the people would have to be vivified to a pitch little short of eruptive: it would be Boreas blowing AEtna inside them; and we should have impulse at work in the country, and immense importance attaching to a man’s whether he will or he won’t–enough to womanize him. We should be all but having Parliament for a sample of our choicest rather than our likest: and see you not a peril in that?
Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed by the head with a vengeance: all the rest of the country being base members indeed; Spartans–helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither to the root: fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it: we could never laugh at our masters, or command them: and that good old-fashioned shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops progress, like a block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal before the law, puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one or the other, and renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming through ultimately, would be transformed to a painful orderliness, like a City procession under the conduct of the police, and to classifications of things according to their public value: decidedly no benefit to burly freedom. None, if there were no shouldering and hustling, could tell whether actually the fittest survived; as is now the case among survivors delighting in a broad-chested fitness.
And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential elect, seeing below them none to resemble them! Do you not hear in imagination the land’s regrets for that amiable nobility whose pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air? Ah, that these unchallengeable new lords could be exchanged for those old ones! These, with the traditions of how great people should look in our country, these would pass among us like bergs of ice–a pure Polar aristocracy, inflicting the woes of wintriness upon us. Keep them from concentrating! At present I believe it to be their honest opinion, their wise opinion, and the sole opinion common to a majority of them, that it is more salutary, besides more diverting, to have the fools of the kingdom represented than not. As professors of the sarcastic art they can easily take the dignity out of the fools’ representative at their pleasure, showing him at antics while he supposes he is exhibiting an honourable and a decent series of movements. Generally, too, their archery can check him when he is for any of his measures; and if it does not check, there appears to be such a property in simple sneering, that it consoles even when it fails to right the balance of power. Sarcasm, we well know, confers a title of aristocracy straightway and sharp on the sconce of the man who does but imagine that he is using it. What, then, must be the elevation of these princes of the intellect in their own minds! Hardly worth bartering for worldly commanderships, it is evident.
Briefly, then, we have a system, not planned but grown, the outcome and image of our genius, and all are dissatisfied with parts of it; but, as each would preserve his own, the surest guarantee is obtained for the integrity of the whole by a happy adjustment of the energies of opposition, which–you have only to look to see–goes far beyond concord in the promotion of harmony. This is our English system; like our English pudding, a fortuitous concourse of all the sweets in the grocer’s shop, but an excellent thing for all that, and let none threaten it. Canvassing appears to be mixed up in the system; at least I hope I have shown that it will not do to reverse the process, for fear of changes leading to a sovereignty of the austere and antipathetic Intellect in our England, that would be an inaccessible tyranny of a very small minority, necessarily followed by tremendous convulsions.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A dash of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin Aimlessness of a woman’s curiosity
All concessions to the people have been won from fear Appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions Automatic creature is subject to the laws of its construction Beautiful servicelessness
Canvassing means intimidation or corruption Comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity Consult the family means–waste your time Convictions are generally first impressions Country can go on very well without so much speech-making Crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke (of history) Dialectical stiffness
Effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative Give our consciences to the keeping of the parsons Hates a compromise
Man owes a duty to his class
Mark of a fool to take everybody for a bigger fool than himself Martyrs of love or religion are madmen
Never pretend to know a girl by her face No stopping the Press while the people have an appetite for it Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid tides Parliament, is the best of occupations for idle men Protestant clergy the social police of the English middle-class The defensive is perilous policy in war
The family view is everlastingly the shopkeeper’s The infant candidate delights in his honesty There is no first claim
There’s nothing like a metaphor for an evasion They’re always having to retire and always hissing Those happy men who enjoy perceptions without opinions Those whose humour consists of a readiness to laugh Threatened powerful drugs for weak stomachs To beg the vote and wink the bribe
We can’t hope to have what should be We have a system, not planned but grown
World cannot pardon a breach of continuity