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

should be continued at such a cost?

 

For years, down to one year back, and less--yesterday, it could be said--

all human blessedness appeared to him in the person of Renee, given him

under any condition whatsoever. She was not less adorable now. In her

decision, and a courage that he especially prized in women, she was a

sweeter to him than when he was with her in France: too sweet to be

looked at and refused.

 

'But we must live in England,' he cried abruptly out of his inner mind.

 

'Oh! not England, Italy, Italy!' Renee exclaimed: 'Italy, or Greece:

anywhere where we have sunlight. Mountains and valleys are my dream.

Promise it, Nevil. I will obey you; but this is my wish. Take me

through Venice, that I may look at myself and wonder. We can live at

sea, in a yacht; anywhere with you but in England. This country frowns

on me; I can hardly fetch my breath here, I am suffocated. The people

all walk in lines in England. Not here, Nevil! They are good people,

I am sure; and it is your country: but their faces chill me, their voices

grate; I should never understand them; they would be to me like their

fogs eternally; and I to them? O me! it would be like hearing sentence

in the dampness of the shroud perpetually. Again I say I do not doubt

that they are very good: they claim to be; they judge others; they may

know how to make themselves happy in their climate; it is common to most

creatures to do so, or to imagine it. Nevil! not England!'

 

Truly 'the mad commander and his French marquise' of the Bevisham

Election ballad would make a pretty figure in England!

 

His friends of his own class would be mouthing it. The story would be

a dogging shadow of his public life, and, quite as bad, a reflection on

his party. He heard the yelping tongues of the cynics. He saw the

consternation and grief of his old Bevisham hero, his leader and his

teacher.

 

'Florence,' he said, musing on the prospect of exile and idleness:

'there's a kind of society to be had in Florence.'

 

Renee asked him if he cared so much for society.

 

He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.

 

'Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.'

 

'Young women, Renee.'

 

She signified no.

 

He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.

 

Her instinct of comedy set a dimple faintly working in her cheek.

 

'Not if they love, Nevil.'

 

'At least,' said he, 'a man does not like to see the woman he loves

banished by society and browbeaten.'

 

'Putting me aside, do you care for it, Nevil?'

 

'Personally not a jot.'

 

'I am convinced of that,' said Renee.

 

She spoke suspiciously sweetly, appearing perfect candour.

 

The change in him was perceptible to her. The nature of the change was

unfathomable.

 

She tried her wits at the riddle. But though she could be an actress

before him with little difficulty, the torment of her situation roused

the fever within her at a bare effort to think acutely. Scarlet suffused

her face: her brain whirled.

 

'Remember, dearest, I have but offered myself: you have your choice.

I can pass on. Yes, I know well I speak to Nevil Beauchamp; you have

drilled me to trust you and your word as a soldier trusts to his officer

--once a faint-hearted soldier! I need not remind you: fronting the

enemy now, in hard truth. But I want your whole heart to decide. Give

me no silly, compassion! Would it have been better to me to have written

to you? If I had written I should have clipped my glorious impulse,

brought myself down to earth with my own arrow. I did not write, for I

believed in you.'

 

So firm had been her faith in him that her visions of him on the passage

to England had resolved all to one flash of blood-warm welcome awaiting

her: and it says much for her natural generosity that the savage delicacy

of a woman placed as she now was, did not take a mortal hurt from the

apparent voidness of this home of his bosom. The passionate gladness of

the lover was wanting: the chivalrous valiancy of manful joy.

 

Renee shivered at the cloud thickening over her new light of intrepid

defiant life.

 

'Think it not improbable that I have weighed everything I surrender in

quitting France,' she said.

 

Remorse wrestled with Beauchamp and flung him at her feet.

 

Renee remarked on the lateness of the hour.

 

He promised to conduct her to her hotel immediately.

 

'And to-morrow?' said Renee, simply, but breathlessly.

 

'To-morrow, let it be Italy! But first I telegraph to Roland and

Tourdestelle. I can't run and hide. The step may be retrieved: or no,

you are right; the step cannot, but the next to it may be stopped--that

was the meaning I had! I 'll try. It 's cutting my hand off, tearing my

heart out; but I will. O that you were free! You left your husband at

Tourdestelle?'

 

'I presume he is there at present: he was in Paris when I left.'

 

Beauchamp spoke hoarsely and incoherently in contrast with her composure:

'You will misunderstand me for a day or two, Renee. I say if you were

free I should have my first love mine for ever. Don't fear me: I have no

right even to press your fingers. He may throw you into my arms. Now

you are the same as if you were in your own home: and you must accept me

for your guide. By all I hope for in life, I'll see you through it, and

keep the dogs from barking, if I can. Thousands are ready to give

tongue. And if they can get me in the character of a law-breaker!--

I hear them.'

 

'Are you imagining, Nevil, that there is a possibility of my returning to

him?'

 

'To your place in the world! You have not had to endure tyranny?'

 

'I should have had a certain respect for a tyrant, Nevil. At least I

should have had an occupation in mocking him and conspiring against him.

Tyranny! There would have been some amusement to me in that.'

 

'It was neglect.'

 

'If I could still charge it on neglect, Nevil! Neglect is very

endurable. He rewards me for nursing him . . . he rewards me with a

little persecution: wives should be flattered by it: it comes late.'

 

'What?' cried Beauchamp, oppressed and impatient.

 

Renee sank her voice.

 

Something in the run of the unaccented French: 'Son amour, mon ami':

drove the significance of the bitterness of the life she had left behind

her burningly through him. This was to have fled from a dragon! was the

lover's thought: he perceived the motive of her flight: and it was a

vindication of it that appealed to him irresistibly. The proposal for

her return grew hideous: and this ever multiplying horror and sting of

the love of a married woman came on him with a fresh throbbing shock,

more venom.

 

He felt for himself now, and now he was full of feeling for her.

Impossible that she should return! Tourdestelle shone to him like a

gaping chasm of fire. And becoming entirely selfish he impressed his

total abnegation of self upon Renee so that she could have worshipped

him. A lover that was like a starry frost, froze her veins, bewildered

her intelligence. She yearned for meridian warmth, for repose in a

directing hand; and let it be hard as one that grasps a sword: what

matter? unhesitatingness was the warrior virtue of her desire. And for

herself the worst might happen if only she were borne along. Let her

life be torn and streaming like the flag of battle, it must be forward to

the end.

 

That was a quality of godless young heroism not unexhausted in

Beauchamp's blood. Reanimated by him, she awakened his imagination of

the vagrant splendours of existence and the rebel delights which have

their own laws and 'nature' for an applauding mother. Radiant Alps rose

in his eyes, and the morning born in the night suns that from mountain

and valley, over sea and desert, called on all earth to witness their

death. The magnificence of the contempt of humanity posed before him

superbly satanesque, grand as thunder among the crags and it was not a

sensual cry that summoned him from his pedlar labours, pack on back along

the level road, to live and breathe deep, gloriously mated: Renee kindled

his romantic spirit, and could strike the feeling into him that to be

proud of his possession of her was to conquer the fretful vanity to

possess. She was not a woman of wiles and lures.

 

Once or twice she consulted her watch: but as she professed to have no

hunger, Beauchamp's entreaty to her to stay prevailed, and the subtle

form of compliment to his knightly manliness in her remaining with him,

gave him a new sense of pleasure that hung round her companionable

conversation, deepening the meaning of the words, or sometimes

contrasting the sweet surface commonplace with the undercurrent of

strangeness in their hearts, and the reality of a tragic position. Her

musical volubility flowed to entrance and divert him, as it did.

 

Suddenly Beauchamp glanced upward.

 

Renee turned from a startled contemplation of his frown, and beheld Mrs.

Rosamund Culling in the room.

 

BOOK 5. - CHAPTER XLI - A LAME VICTORY

 

The intruder was not a person that had power to divide them; yet she came

between their hearts with a touch of steel.

 

'I am here in obedience to your commands in your telegram of this

evening,' Rosamund replied to Beauchamp's hard stare at her; she

courteously spoke French, and acquitted herself demurely of a bow to the

lady present.

 

Renee withdrew her serious eyes from Beauchamp. She rose and

acknowledged the bow.

 

'It is my first visit to England, madame!

 

'I could have desired, Madame la marquise, more agreeable weather for

you.'

 

'My friends in England will dispel the bad weather for me, madame'; Renee

smiled softly: 'I have been studying my French-English phrase-book, that

I may learn how dialogues are conducted in your country to lead to

certain ceremonies when old friends meet, and without my book I am at

fault. I am longing to be embraced by you . . . if it will not be

offending your rules?'

 

Rosamund succumbed to the seductive woman, whose gentle tooth bit through

her tutored simplicity of manner and natural graciousness, administering

its reproof, and eluding a retort or an excuse.

 

She gave the embrace. In doing so she fell upon her conscious

awkwardness for an expression of reserve that should be as good as irony

for irony, though where Madame de Rouaillout's irony lay, or whether it

was irony at all, our excellent English dame could not have stated, after

the feeling of indignant prudery responding to it so guiltily had

subsided.

 

Beauchamp asked her if she had brought servants with her; and it

gratified her to see that he was no actor fitted to carry a scene through

in virtue's name and vice's mask with this actress.

 

She replied, 'I have brought a man and a maid-servant. The establishment

will be in town the day after tomorrow, in time for my lord's return from

the Castle.'

 

'You can have them up to-morrow morning.'

 

'I could,' Rosamund admitted the possibility. Her idolatry of him was

tried on hearing him press the hospitality of the house upon Madame de

Rouaillout, and observing the lady's transparent feint of a reluctant

yielding. For the voluble Frenchwoman scarcely found a word to utter:

she protested languidly that she preferred the independence of her hotel,

and fluttered a singular look at him, as if overcome by his vehement

determination to have her in the house. Undoubtedly she had a taking

face and style. His infatuation, nevertheless, appeared to Rosamund

utter dementedness, considering this woman's position, and Cecilia

Halkett's beauty and wealth, and that the house was no longer at his

disposal. He was really distracted, to judge by his forehead, or else he

was over-acting his part.

 

The absence of a cook in the house, Rosamund remarked, must prevent her

from