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

to behave himself like a

gentleman at Steynham.'

 

'He has not failed.'

 

'I'll say, then, behave himself, simply. He considers it a point of

honour to get his uncle Everard to go down on his knees to Shrapnel. But

he has no moral sense where I should like to see it: none: he confessed

it.'

 

'What were his words, papa?'

 

'I don't remember words. He runs over to France, whenever it suits him,

to carry on there . . .' The colonel ended in a hum and buzz.

 

'Has he been to France lately?' asked Cecilia.

 

Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.

 

'The woman's father is dead, I hear,' Colonel Halkett remarked.

 

'But he has not been there?'

 

'How can I tell? He's anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.'

 

'No!'

 

'I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and

scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally,

infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.'

 

'Oh no!' exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast her

eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly sure

now that her idea of Nevil's having gone over to France was groundless;

and feeling that she had been unworthy of him who strove to be 'worthier

of her, as he hoped to become.'

 

Colonel Halkett scoffed at her 'Oh no,' and called it woman's logic.

 

She could not restrain herself. 'Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa?

It is Nevil's perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you

than men who are timeservers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr.

Austin said. Nevil is not one of them. I am not able to judge or

speculate whether he has a great brain or is likely to distinguish

himself out of his profession: I would rather he did not abandon it: but

Mr. Austin said to me in talking of him . . .'

 

'That notion of Austin's of screwing women's minds up to the pitch of

men's!' interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.

 

'He said, papa, that honestly active men in a country, who decline to

practise hypocrisy, show that the blood runs, and are a sign of health.'

 

'You misunderstood him, my dear.'

 

'I think I thoroughly understood him. He did not call them wise. He

said they might be dangerous if they were not met in debate. But he

said, and I presume to think truly, that the reason why they are decried

is, that it is too great a trouble for a lazy world to meet them. And,

he said, the reason why the honest factions agitate is because they

encounter sneers until they appear in force. If they were met earlier,

and fairly--I am only quoting him--they would not, I think he said, or

would hardly, or would not generally, fall into professional agitation.'

 

'Austin's a speculative Tory, I know; and that's his weakness,' observed

the colonel. 'But I'm certain you misunderstood him. He never would

have called us a lazy people.'

 

'Not in matters of business: in matters of thought.'

 

'My dear Cecilia! You've got hold of a language!.... a way of speaking!

.... Who set you thinking on these things?'

 

'That I owe to Nevil Beauchamp!

 

Colonel Halkett indulged in a turn or two up and down the room. He threw

open a window, sniffed the moist air, and went to his daughter to speak

to her resolutely.

 

'Between a Radical and a Tory, I don't know where your head has been

whirled to, my dear. Your heart seems to be gone: more sorrow for us!

And for Nevil Beauchamp to be pretending to love you while carrying on

with this Frenchwoman!'

 

'He has never said that he loved me.'

 

The splendour of her beauty in humility flashed on her father, and he

cried out: 'You are too good for any man on earth! We won't talk in the

dark, my darling. You tell me he has never, as they say, made love to

you?'

 

'Never, papa.'

 

'Well, that proves the French story. At any rate, he 's a man of honour.

But you love him?'

 

'The French story is untrue, papa.'

 

Cecilia stood in a blush like the burning cloud of the sunset.'

 

'Tell me frankly: I'm your father, your old dada, your friend, my dear

girl! do you think the man cares for you, loves you?'

 

She replied: 'I know, papa, the French story is untrue.'

 

'But when I tell you, silly woman, he confessed it to me out of his own

mouth!'

 

'It is not true now.'

 

'It's not going on, you mean? How do you know?'

 

'I know.'

 

'Has he been swearing it?'

 

'He has not spoken of it to me.'

 

'Here I am in a woman's web!' cried the colonel. 'Is it your instinct

tells you it's not true? or what? what? You have not denied that you

love the man.'

 

'I know he is not immoral.'

 

'There you shoot again! Haven't you a yes or a no for your father?'

 

Cecilia cast her arms round his neck, and sobbed.

 

She could not bring it to her lips to say (she would have shunned the

hearing) that her defence of Beauchamp, which was a shadowed avowal of

the state of her heart, was based on his desire to read to her the

conclusion of Dr. Shrapnel's letter touching a passion to be overcome;

necessarily therefore a passion that was vanquished, and the fullest and

bravest explanation of his shifting treatment of her: nor would she

condescend to urge that her lover would have said he loved her when they

were at Steynham, but for the misery and despair of a soul too noble to

be diverted from his grief and sense of duty, and, as she believed,

unwilling to speak to win her while his material fortune was in jeopardy.

 

The colonel cherished her on his breast, with one hand regularly patting

her shoulder: a form of consolation that cures the disposition to sob as

quickly as would the drip of water.

 

Cecilia looked up into his eyes, and said, 'We will not be parted, papa,

ever.'

 

The colonel said absently: 'No'; and, surprised at himself, added: 'No,

certainly not. How can we be parted? You won't run away from me? No,

you know too well I can't resist you. I appeal to your judgement, and I

must accept what you decide. But he is immoral. I repeat that. He has

no roots. We shall discover it before it's too late, I hope.'

 

Cecilia gazed away, breathing through tremulous dilating nostrils.

 

'One night after dinner at Steynham,' pursued the colonel, 'Nevil was

rattling against the Press, with Stukely Culbrett to prime him: and he

said editors of papers were growing to be like priests, and as timid as

priests, and arrogant: and for one thing, it was because they supposed

themselves to be guardians of the national morality. I forget exactly

what the matter was: but he sneered at priests and morality.'

 

A smile wove round Cecilia's lips, and in her towering superiority to one

who talked nonsense, she slipped out of maiden shame and said: 'Attack

Nevil for his political heresies and his wrath with the Press for not

printing him. The rest concerns his honour, where he is quite safe, and

all are who trust him.'

 

'If you find out you're wrong?'

 

She shook her head.

 

'But if you find out you're wrong about him,' her father reiterated

piteously, 'you won't tear me to strips to have him in spite of it?'

 

'No, papa, not I. I will not.'

 

'Well, that's something for me to hold fast to,' said Colonel Halkett,

sighing.

 

 

BOOK 5. - CHAPTER XXXVIII - LORD AVONLEY

 

Mr. Everard Romfrey was now, by consent, Lord Avonley, mounted on his

direct heirship and riding hard at the earldom. His elevation occurred

at a period of life that would have been a season of decay with most men;

but the prolonged and lusty Autumn of the veteran took new fires from a

tangible object to live for. His brother Craven's death had slightly

stupefied, and it had grieved him: it seemed to him peculiarly pathetic;

for as he never calculated on the happening of mortal accidents to men of

sound constitution, the circumstance imparted a curious shake to his own

solidity. It was like the quaking of earth, which tries the balance of

the strongest. If he had not been raised to so splendid a survey of the

actual world, he might have been led to think of the imaginary, where

perchance a man may meet his old dogs and a few other favourites, in a

dim perpetual twilight. Thither at all events Craven had gone, and

goodnight to him! The earl was a rapidly lapsing invalid. There could

be no doubt that Everard was to be the head of his House.

 

Outwardly he was the same tolerant gentleman who put aside the poor fools

of the world to walk undisturbed by them in the paths he had chosen: in

this aspect he knew himself: nor was the change so great within him as to

make him cognizant of a change. It was only a secret turn in the bent of

the mind, imperceptible as the touch of the cunning artist's brush on a

finished portrait, which will alter the expression without discomposing a

feature, so that you cannot say it is another face, yet it is not the

former one. His habits were invariable, as were his meditations.

He thought less of Romfrey Castle than of his dogs and his devices for

trapping vermin; his interest in birds and beasts and herbs, 'what

ninnies call Nature in books,' to quote him, was undiminished;

imagination he had none to clap wings to his head and be off with it.

He betrayed as little as he felt that the coming Earl of Romfrey was

different from the cadet of the family.

 

A novel sharpness in the 'Stop that,' with which he crushed Beauchamp's

affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening of the vexed Shrapnel

question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a

different spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that welcomed and

lured on an adversary to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful preoccupation

is, however, to be expected in the man who has lost a brother, and some

degree of irritability at the intrusion of past disputes. He chose to

repeat a similar brief forbidding of the subject before they started

together for the scene of the accident and Romfrey Castle. No notice was

taken of Beauchamp's remark, that he consented to go though his duty lay

elsewhere. Beauchamp had not the faculty of reading inside men, or he

would have apprehended that his uncle was engaged in silently heaping

aggravations to shoot forth one fine day a thundering and astonishing

counterstroke.

 

He should have known his uncle Everard better.

 

In this respect he seemed to have no memory. But who has much that has

given up his brains for a lodging to a single idea? It is at once a

devouring dragon, and an intractable steamforce; it is a tyrant that

has eaten up a senate, and a prophet with a message. Inspired of

solitariness and gigantic size, it claims divine origin. The world

can have no peace for it.

 

Cecilia had not pleased him; none had. He did not bear in mind that the

sight of Dr. Shrapnel sick and weak, which constantly reanimated his

feelings of pity and of wrath, was not given to the others of whom he

demanded a corresponding energy of just indignation and sympathy. The

sense that he was left unaided to the task of bending his tough uncle,

combined with his appreciation of the righteousness of the task to

embitter him and set him on a pedestal, from which he descended at every

sign of an opportunity for striking, and to which he retired continually

baffled and wrathful, in isolation.

 

Then ensued the dreadful division in his conception of his powers: for he

who alone saw the just and right thing to do, was incapable of compelling

it to be done. Lay on to his uncle as he would, that wrestler shook him

off. And here was one man