Beauchamps Career, v5 - George Meredith (top novels TXT) 📗

than the prophetic mind.

 

'Why did you tell me to marry? What did that mean?' said he. 'Did you

wish me to be the one in chains? And you have come quite alone!--you

will give me an account of everything presently:--You are here! in

England! and what a welcome for you! You are cold.'

 

'I am warmly clad,' said Renee, suffering her hand to be drawn to his

breast at her arm's-length, not bending with it.

 

Alive to his own indirectness, he was conscious at once of the slight

sign of reservation, and said: 'Tell me . . .' and swerved sheer away

from his question: 'how is Madame d'Auffray?'

 

'Agnes? I left her at Tourdestelle,' said Renee.

 

'And Roland? He never writes to me.'

 

'Neither he nor I write much. He is at the military camp of instruction

in the North.'

 

'He will run over to us.'

 

'Do not expect it.'

 

'Why not?'

 

Renee sighed. 'We shall have to live longer than I look for . . .'

she stopped. 'Why do you ask me why not? He is fond of us both, and

sorry for us; but have you forgotten Roland that morning on the

Adriatic?'

 

Beauchamp pressed her hand. The stroke of Then and Now rang in his

breast like a bell instead of a bounding heart. Something had stunned

his heart. He had no clear central feeling; he tried to gather it from

her touch, from his joy in beholding her and sitting with her alone, from

the grace of her figure, the wild sweetness of her eyes, and the beloved

foreign lips bewitching him with their exquisite French and perfection of

speech.

 

His nature was too prompt in responding to such a call on it for resolute

warmth.

 

'If I had been firmer then, or you one year older!' he said.

 

'That girl in Venice had no courage,' said Renee.

 

She raised her head and looked about the room.

 

Her instinct of love sounded her lover through, and felt the deficiency

or the contrariety in him, as surely as musical ears are pained by a

discord that they require no touchstone to detect. Passion has the

sensitiveness of fever, and is as cruelly chilled by a tepid air.

 

'Yes, a London house after Venice and Normandy!' said Beauchamp,

following her look.

 

'Sicily: do not omit Syracuse; you were in your naval uniform: Normandy

was our third meeting,' said Renee. 'This is the fourth. I should have

reckoned that.'

 

'Why? Superstitiously?'

 

'We cannot be entirely wise when we have staked our fate. Sailors are

credulous: you know them. Women are like them when they embark . . .

Three chances! Who can boast of so many, and expect one more! Will you

take me to my hotel, Nevil?'

 

The fiction of her being free could not be sustained.

 

'Take you and leave you? I am absolutely at your command. But leave

you? You are alone: and you have told me nothing.'

 

What was there to tell? The desperate act was apparent, and told all.

 

Renee's dark eyelashes lifted on him, and dropped.

 

'Then things are as I left them in Normandy?' said he.

 

She replied: 'Almost.'

 

He quivered at the solitary word; for his conscience was on edge. It ran

the shrewdest irony through him, inexplicably. 'Almost': that is, 'with

this poor difference of one person, now finding herself worthless,

subtracted from the list; no other; it should be little to them as it is

little to you': or, reversing it, the substance of the word became

magnified and intensified by its humble slightness: 'Things are the same,

but for the jewel of the province, a lustre of France, lured hither to

her eclipse'--meanings various, indistinguishable, thrilling and piercing

sad as the half-tones humming round the note of a strung wire, which is a

blunt single note to the common ear.

 

Beauchamp sprang to his feet and bent above her: 'You have come to me,

for the love of me, to give yourself to me, and for ever, for good, till

death? Speak, my beloved Renee.'

 

Her eyes were raised to his: 'You see me here. It is for you to speak.'

 

'I do. There's nothing I ask for now--if the step can't be retrieved.'

 

'The step retrieved, my friend? There is no step backward in life.'

 

'I am thinking of you, Renee.'

 

'Yes, I know,' she answered hurriedly.

 

'If we discover that the step is a wrong one?' he pursued: 'why is there

no step backward?'

 

'I am talking of women,' said Renee.

 

'Why not for women?'

 

'Honourable women, I mean,' said Renee.

 

Beauchamp inclined to forget his position in finding matter to contest.

 

Yet it is beyond contest that there is no step backward in life. She

spoke well; better than he, and she won his deference by it. Not only

she spoke better: she was truer, distincter, braver: and a man ever on

the look-out for superior qualities, and ready to bow to them, could not

refuse her homage. With that a saving sense of power quitted him.

 

'You wrote to me that you were unchanged, Nevil.'

 

'I am.'

 

'So, then, I came.'

 

His rejoinder was the dumb one, commonly eloquent and satisfactory.

 

Renee shut her eyes with a painful rigour of endurance. She opened them

to look at him steadily.

 

The desperate act of her flight demanded immediate recognition from him

in simple language and a practical seconding of it. There was the test.

 

'I cannot stay in this house, Nevil; take me away.'

 

She named her hotel in her French English, and the sound of it penetrated

him with remorseful pity. It was for him, and of his doing, that she was

in an alien land and an outcast!

 

'This house is wretched for you,' said he: 'and you must be hungry. Let

me . . .'

 

'I cannot eat. I will ask you': she paused, drawing on her energies, and

keeping down the throbs of her heart: 'this: do you love me?'

 

'I love you with all my heart and soul.'

 

'As in Normandy?'

 

'Yes.'

 

'In Venice?'

 

'As from the first, Renee! That I can swear.'

 

'Oaths are foolish. I meant to ask you--my friend, there is no question

in my mind of any other woman: I see you love me: I am so used to

consider myself the vain and cowardly creature, and you the boldest and

faithfullest of men, that I could not abandon the habit if I would: I

started confiding in you, sure that I should come to land. But I have to

ask you: to me you are truth: I have no claim on my lover for anything

but the answer to this:--Am I a burden to you?'

 

His brows flew up in furrows. He drew a heavy breath, for never had he

loved her more admiringly, and never on such equal terms. She was his

mate in love and daring at least. A sorrowful comparison struck him, of

a little boat sailing out to a vessel in deep seas and left to founder.

 

Without knotting his mind to acknowledge or deny the burden, for he could

do neither, he stood silent, staring at her, not so much in weakness as

in positive mental division. No, would be false; and Yes, not less

false; and if the step was irretrievable, to say Yes would be to plunge a

dagger in her bosom; but No was a vain deceit involving a double wreck.

Assuredly a man standing against the world in a good cause, with a

runaway wife on his hands, carries a burden, however precious it be to

him.

 

A smile of her lips, parted in an anguish of expectancy, went to death

over Renee's face. She looked at him tenderly. 'The truth,' she

murmured to herself, and her eyelids fell.

 

'I am ready to bear anything,' said Beauchamp. 'I weigh what you ask me,

that is all. You a burden to me? But when you ask me, you make me turn

round and inquire how we stand before the world.'

 

'The world does not stone men,' said Renee.

 

'Can't I make you feel that I am not thinking of myself?' Beauchamp

stamped in his extreme perplexity. He was gagged; he could not possibly

talk to her, who had cast the die, of his later notions of morality and

the world's dues, fees, and claims on us.

 

'No, friend, I am not complaining.' Renee put out her hand to him; with

compassionate irony feigning to have heard excuses. 'What right have I

to complain? I have not the sensation. I could not expect you to be

everlastingly the sentinel of love. Three times I rejected you! Now

that I have lost my father--Oh! poor father: I trifled with my lover,

I tricked him that my father might live in peace. He is dead. I wished

you to marry one of your own countrywomen, Nevil. You said it was

impossible; and I, with my snake at my heart, and a husband grateful

for nursing and whimpering to me for his youth like a beggar on the road,

I thought I owed you this debt of body and soul, to prove to you I have

some courage; and for myself, to reward myself for my long captivity and

misery with one year of life: and adieu to Roland my brother! adieu to

friends! adieu to France! Italy was our home. I dreamed of one year in

Italy; I fancied it might be two; more than that was unimaginable.

Prisoners of long date do not hope; they do not calculate: air, light,

they say; to breathe freely and drop down! They are reduced to the

instincts of the beasts. I thought I might give you happiness, pay part

of my debt to you. Are you remembering Count Henri? That paints what I

was! I could fly to that for a taste of life! a dance to death! And

again you ask: Why, if I loved you then, not turn to you in preference?

No, you have answered it yourself, Nevil;--on that day in the boat, when

generosity in a man so surprised me, it seemed a miracle to me; and it

was, in its divination. How I thank my dear brother Roland for saving me

the sight of you condemned to fight, against your conscience! He taught

poor M. d'Henriel his lesson. You, Nevil, were my teacher. And see how

it hangs: there was mercy for me in not having drawn down my father's

anger on my heart's beloved. He loved you. He pitied us. He reproached

himself. In his last days he was taught to suspect our story: perhaps

from Roland; perhaps I breathed it without speaking. He called heaven's

blessings on you. He spoke of you with tears, clutching my hand. He

made me feel he would have cried out: "If I were leaving her with Nevil

Beauchamp!" and "Beauchamp," I heard him murmuring once: "take down

Froissart": he named a chapter. It was curious: if he uttered my name

Renee, yours, "Nevil," soon followed. That was noticed by Roland. Hope

for us, he could not have had; as little as I! But we were his two: his

children. I buried him--I thought he would know our innocence, and now

pardon our love. I read your letters, from my name at the beginning, to

yours at the end, and from yours back to mine, and between the lines, for

any doubtful spot: and oh, rash! But I would not retrace the step for my

own sake. I am certain of your love for me, though . . .' She paused:

'Yes, I am certain of it. And if I am a burden to you?'

 

'About as much as the air, which I can't do without since I began to

breathe it,' said Beauchamp, more clear-mindedly now that he supposed he

was addressing a mind, and with a peril to himself that escaped his

vigilance. There was a secret intoxication for him already in the half-

certainty that the step could not be retraced. The idea that he might

reason with her, made her seductive to the heart and head of him.

 

'I am passably rich, Nevil,' she said. 'I do not care for money, except

that it gives wings. Roland inherits the chateau in Touraine. I have

one in Burgundy, and rentes and shares, my notary informs me.'

 

'I have money,' said he. His heart began beating violently. He lost

sight of his intention of reasoning. 'Good God! if you were free!'

 

She faltered: 'At Tourdestelle . . .'

 

'Yes, and I am unchanged,' Beauchamp cried out. 'Your life there was

horrible, and mine's intolerable.' He stretched his arms cramped like

the yawning of a wretch in fetters. That which he would and would not

became so intervolved that he deemed it reasonable to instance their

common misery as a ground for their union against the world. And what

has that world done for us, that a joy so immeasurable should be rejected

on its behalf? And what have we succeeded in doing, that the childish

effort to move it