Beauchamp had gone off to his friend Lydiard, to fortify himself in his resolve to reply to that newspaper article by eliciting counsel to the contrary. Phrase by phrase he fought through the first half of his composition of the reply against Lydiard, yielding to him on a point or two of literary judgement, only the more vehemently to maintain his ideas of discretion, which were, that he would not take shelter behind a single subterfuge; that he would try this question nakedly, though he should stand alone; that he would stake his position on it, and establish his right to speak his opinions: and as for unseasonable times, he protested it was the cry of a gorged middle-class, frightened of further action, and making snug with compromise. Would it be a seasonable time when there was uproar? Then it would be a time to be silent on such themes: they could be discussed calmly now, and without danger; and whether he was hunted or not, he cared nothing. He declined to consider the peculiar nature of Englishmen: they must hear truth or perish.
Knowing the difficulty once afflicting Beauchamp in the art of speaking on politics tersely, Lydiard was rather astonished at his well-delivered cannonade; and he fancied that his modesty had been displaced by the new acquirement; not knowing the nervous fever of his friend’s condition, for which the rattle of speech was balm, and contention a native element, and the assumption of truth a necessity. Beauchamp hugged his politics like some who show their love of the pleasures of life by taking to them angrily. It was all he had: he had given up all for it. He forced Lydiard to lay down his pen and walk back to the square with him, and went on arguing, interjecting, sneering, thumping the old country, raising and oversetting her, treating her alternately like a disrespected grandmother, and like a woman anciently beloved; as a dead lump, and as a garden of seeds; reviewing prominent political men, laughing at the dwarf-giants; finally casting anchor on a Mechanics’ Institute that he had recently heard of, where working men met weekly for the purpose of reading the British poets.
‘That’s the best thing I’ve heard of late,’ he said, shaking Lydiard’s hand on the door-steps.
‘Ah! You’re Commander Beauchamp; I think I know you. I’ve seen you on a platform,’ cried a fresh-faced man in decent clothes, halting on his way along the pavement; ‘and if you were in your uniform, you damned Republican dog! I’d strip you with my own hands, for the disloyal scoundrel you are, with your pimping Republicanism and capsizing everything in a country like Old England. It’s the cat-o’-nine-tails you want, and the bosen to lay on; and I’d do it myself. And mind me, when next I catch sight of you in blue and gold lace, I’ll compel you to show cause why you wear it, and prove your case, or else I’ll make a Cupid of you, and no joke about it. I don’t pay money for a nincompoop to outrage my feelings of respect and loyalty, when he’s in my pay, d’ ye hear? You’re in my pay: and you do your duty, or I ‘ll kick ye out of it. It’s no empty threat. You look out for your next public speech, if it’s anywhere within forty mile of London. Get along.’
With a scowl, and a very ugly ‘yah!’ worthy of cannibal jaws, the man passed off.
Beauchamp kept eye on him. ‘What class does a fellow like that come of?’
‘He’s a harmless enthusiast,’ said Lydiard. ‘He has been reading the article, and has got excited over it.’
‘I wish I had the fellow’s address.’ Beauchamp looked wistfully at Lydiard, but he did not stimulate the generous offer to obtain it for him. Perhaps it was as well to forget the fellow.
‘You see the effect of those articles,’ he said.
‘You see what I mean by unseasonable times,’ Lydiard retorted.
‘He didn’t talk like a tradesman,’ Beauchamp mused.
‘He may be one, for all that. It’s better to class him as an enthusiast.’
‘An enthusiast!’ Beauchamp stamped: ‘for what?’
‘For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles he is accustomed to read in the papers. You don’t study your countrymen.’
‘I’d study that fellow, if I had the chance.’
‘You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse temper than most of them.’
Beauchamp shook Lydiard’s hand, saying, ‘The widow?’
‘There’s no woman like her!’
‘Well, now you’re free—why not? I think I put one man out of the field.’
‘Too early! Besides—’
‘Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.’
‘When shall you go down to Bevisham?’
‘When? I can’t tell: when I’ve gone through fire. There never was a home for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good girl—the best of girls! if you hadn’t a little spoilt her with your philosophy of the two sides of the case.’
‘I’ve not given her the brains.’
‘She’s always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action: she has no will. So she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her submitting, as if she must submit to me, because I’m overbearing, instead of accepting the fact.’
‘She feels your influence.’
‘She’s against the publication of THE DAWN—for the present. It’s an “unseasonable time.” I argue with her: I don’t get hold of her mind a bit; but at last she says, “very well.” She has your head.’
And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.
They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other’s task of endurance.
As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore walking past.
‘Jack!’ he called.
Wilmore glanced round. ‘How do you do, Beauchamp?’
‘Where are you off to, Jack?’
‘Down to the Admiralty. I’m rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.’
‘Can’t you stop just a minute?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t. Good morning.’
It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive, retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.
‘That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,’ Beauchamp said to Lydiard, who answered:
‘The article did not put the idea of you into men’s minds, but gave tongue to it: you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the Press.’
‘You wouldn’t take that man and me to have been messmates for years! Old Jack Wilmore! Don’t go, Lydiard.’
Lydiard declared that he was bound to go: he was engaged to read Italian for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.
‘Then go, by all means,’ Beauchamp dismissed him.
He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the door-step, and found them of one colour. If it was an accident befalling him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an hour, what of the sentiments of universal England? Lady Barbara’s elopement with Lord Alfred last year did not rouse much execration; hardly worse than gossip and compassion. Beauchamp drank a great deal of bitterness from his reflections.
They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts from their mischances and from most occurrences. So does the world they combat win on them.
‘For,’ says Dr. Shrapnel, ‘the world and nature, which are opposed in relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the victory over the world, as over nature, is over self: and this victory lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature: for the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.’
The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp. He had never before said to himself, ‘I have done my best, and I am beaten!’ Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but here, within the walls where Renee lay silently breathing, barely breathing, it might be dying, he was overcome, and left it to circumstance to carry him to a conclusion. He went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he beheld Madame d’Auffray in conversation with Rosamund.
‘I was assured by Madame la Comtesse that I should see you to-day,’ the French lady said as she swam to meet him; ‘it is a real pleasure’: and pressing his hand she continued, ‘but I fear you will be disappointed of seeing my sister. She would rashly try your climate at its worst period. Believe me, I do not join in decrying it, except on her account: I could have forewarned her of an English Winter and early Spring. You know her impetuosity; suddenly she decided on accepting the invitation of Madame la Comtesse; and though I have no fears of her health, she is at present a victim of the inclement weather.’
‘You have seen her, madame?’ said Beauchamp. So well had the clever lady played the dupe that he forgot there was a part for him to play. Even the acquiescence of Rosamund in the title of countess bewildered him.
‘Madame d’Auffray has been sitting for an hour with Madame de Rouaillout,’ said Rosamund.
He spoke of Roland’s coming.
‘Ah?’ said Madame d’Auffray, and turned to Rosamund: ‘you have determined to surprise us: then you will have a gathering of the whole family in your hospitable house, Madame la Comtesse!
‘If M. la Marquis will do it that honour, madame!
‘My brother is in London,’ Madame d’Auffray said to Beauchamp.
The shattering blow was merited by one who could not rejoice that he had acted rightly.
CHAPTER XLIII. THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS
An extraordinary telegraphic message, followed by a still more extraordinary letter the next morning, from Rosamund Culling, all but interdicted the immediate occupation of his house in town to Everard, now Earl of Romfrey. She begged him briefly not to come until after the funeral, and proposed to give him good reasons for her request at their meeting. ‘I repeat, I pledge myself to satisfy you on this point,’ she wrote. Her tone was that of one of your heroic women of history refusing to surrender a fortress.
Everard’s wrath was ever of a complexion that could suffer postponements without his having to fear an abatement of it. He had no business to transact in London, and he had much at the Castle, so he yielded himself up to his new sensations, which are not commonly the portion of gentlemen of his years. He anticipated that Nevil would at least come down to the funeral, but there was no appearance of him, nor a word to excuse his absence. Cecil was his only supporter. They walked together between the double ranks of bare polls of the tenantry and peasantry, resembling in a fashion old Froissart engravings the earl used to dote on in his boyhood, representing bodies of manacled citizens, whose humbled heads looked like nuts to be cracked, outside the gates of captured French towns, awaiting the disposition of their conqueror, with his banner above him and prancing knights around. That was a glory of the past. He had no successor. The thought was chilling; the solitariness of childlessness to an aged man, chief of a most ancient and martial House, and proud of his blood, gave him the statue’s outlook on a desert, and made him feel that he was no more than a whirl of the dust, settling to the dust.
He listened to the parson curiously and consentingly. We are ashes. Ten centuries had come to an end in him to prove the formula correct. The chronicle of the House would state that the last Earl of Romfrey left no heir.
Cecil was a fine figure walking beside him. Measured by feet, he might be a worthy holder of great lands. But so heartily did the earl despise this nephew that he never thought of trying strength with the fellow, and hardly cared to know what his value was, beyond his immediate uses as an instrument to strike with. Beauchamp of Romfrey had been his dream, not Baskelett: and it increased his disgust of Beauchamp that Baskelett should step forward as the man. No doubt Cecil would hunt the county famously: he would preserve game with the sleepless eye of a General of the Jesuits. These things were to be considered.
Two days after the funeral Lord Romfrey proceeded to London. He was met at the station by Rosamund, and informed that his house was not yet vacated by the French family.
‘And where have you arranged for me to go, ma’am?’ he asked her complacently.
She named an hotel where she had taken rooms for him.
He nodded, and was driven to the hotel, saying little on the road.
As she expected, he was heavily armed against her and Nevil.
‘You’re the slave of the fellow, ma’am. You are so infatuated that you second his amours, in my house. I must wait for a clearance, it seems.’
He cast a comical glance of disapprobation on the fittings of the hotel apartment, abhorring gilt.
‘They leave us the day after to-morrow,’ said Rosamund, out of breath with nervousness at the commencement of the fray, and skipping over the opening ground of a bold statement of facts. ‘Madame de Rouaillout has been unwell. She is not yet recovered; she has just risen. Her sister-in-law has nursed her. Her husband seems much broken in health; he is perfect on the points of courtesy.’
‘That is lucky, ma’am.’
‘Her brother, Nevil’s comrade in the war, was there also.’
‘Who came first?’
‘My lord, you have only heard Captain Baskelett’s version of the story. She has been my guest since the first day of her landing in England. There cannot possibly be an imputation on her.’
‘Ma’am, if her husband manages to be satisfied, what on earth have I to do with it?’
‘I am thinking of Nevil, my lord.’
‘You’re never thinking of any one else, ma’am.’
‘He sleeps here, at this hotel. He left the house to Madame de Rouaillout. I bear witness to that.’
‘You two seem to have made your preparations to stand a criminal trial.’
‘It is pure truth, my lord.’
‘Do you take me to be anxious about the fellow’s virtue?’
‘She is a lady who would please you.’
‘A scandal in my house does not please me.’
‘The only approach to a scandal was made by Captain Baskelett.’
‘A poor devil locked out of his bed on a Winter’s night hullabaloos with pretty good reason. I suppose he felt the contrast.’
‘My lord, this lady did me the honour to come to me on a visit. I have not previously presumed to entertain a friend. She probably formed no estimate of my exact position.’
The earl with a gesture implied Rosamund’s privilege to act the hostess to friends.
‘You invited her?’ he said.
‘That is, I had told her I hoped she would come to England.’
‘She expected you to be at the house in town on her arrival?’
‘It was her impulse to come.’
‘She came alone?’
‘She may have desired to be away from her own people for a time: there may have been domestic differences. These cases are delicate.’
‘This case appears to have been so delicate that you had to lock out a fourth party.’
‘It is indelicate and base of Captain Baskelett to complain and to hint. Nevil had to submit to the same; and Captain Baskelett took his revenge on the housedoor and the bells. The house was visited by the police next morning.’
‘Do you suspect him to have known you were inside the house that night?’
She could not say so: but hatred of Cecil urged her past the bounds of habitual reticence to put it to her lord whether he, imagining the worst, would have behaved like Cecil.
To this he did not reply, but remarked, ‘I am sorry he annoyed you, ma’am.’
‘It is not the annoyance to me; it is the shocking, the unmanly insolence to a lady, and a foreign lady.’
‘That’s a matter between him and Nevil. I uphold him.’
‘Then, my lord, I am silent.’
Silent she remained; but Lord Romfrey was also silent: and silence being a weapon of offence only when it is practised by one out of two, she had to reflect whether in speaking no further she had finished her business.
‘Captain Baskelett stays at the Castle?’ she asked.
‘He likes his quarters there.’
‘Nevil could not go down to Romfrey, my lord. He was obliged to wait, and see, and help me to entertain, her brother and her husband.’
‘Why, ma’am? But I have no objection to his making the marquis a happy husband.’
‘He has done what few men would have done, that she may be a self-respecting wife.’
‘The parson’s in that fellow!’ Lord Romfrey exclaimed. ‘Now I have the story. She came to him, he declined the gift, and you were turned into the curtain for them. If he had only been off with her, he would have done the country good service. Here he’s a failure and a nuisance; he’s a common cock-shy for the journals. I’m tired of hearing of him; he’s a stench in our nostrils. He’s tired of the woman.’
‘He loves her.’
‘Ma’am, you’re hoodwinked. If he refused to have her, there ‘s a something he loves better. I don’t believe we’ve bred a downright lackadaisical donkey in our family: I know him. He’s not a fellow for abstract morality: I know him. It’s bargain against bargain with him; I’ll do him that justice. I hear he has ordered the removal of the Jersey bull from Holdesbury, and the beast is mine,’ Lord Romfrey concluded in a lower key.
‘Nevil has taken him.’
‘Ha! pull and pull, then!’
‘He contends that he is bound by a promise to give an American gentleman the refusal of the bull, and you must sign an engagement to keep the animal no longer than two years.’
‘I sign no engagement. I stick to the bull.’
‘Consent to see Nevil to-night, my lord.’
‘When he has apologized to you, I may, ma’am.’
‘Surely he did more, in requesting me to render him a service.’
‘There’s not a creature living that fellow wouldn’t get to serve him, if he knew the trick. We should all of us be marching on London at Shrapnel’s heels. The political mania is just as incurable as hydrophobia, and he’s bitten. That’s clear.’
‘Bitten perhaps: but not mad. As you have always contended, the true case is incurable, but it is very rare: and is this one?’
‘It’s uncommonly like a true case, though I haven’t seen him foam at the mouth, and shun water-as his mob does.’
Rosamund restrained some tears, betraying the effort to hide the moisture. ‘I am no match for you, my lord. I try to plead on his behalf;—I do worse than if I were dumb. This I most earnestly say: he is the Nevil Beauchamp who fought for his country, and did not abandon her cause, though he stood there—we had it from Colonel Halkett—a skeleton: and he is the Nevil who—I am poorly paying my debt to him!—defended me from the aspersions of his cousin.’
‘Boys!’ Lord Romfrey ejaculated.
‘It is the same dispute between them as men.’
‘Have you forgotten my proposal to shield you from liars and scandalmongers?’
‘Could I ever forget it?’ Rosamund appeared to come shining out of a cloud. ‘Princeliest and truest gentleman, I thought you then, and I know you to be, my dear lord. I fancied I had lived the scandal down. I was under the delusion that I had grown to be past backbiting: and that no man could stand before me to insult and vilify me. But, for a woman in any so-called doubtful position, it seems that the coward will not be wanting to strike her. In quitting your service, I am able to affirm that only once during the whole term of it have I consciously overstepped the line of my duties: it was for Nevil: and Captain Baskelett undertook to defend your reputation, in consequence.’
‘Has the rascal been questioning your conduct?’ The earl frowned.
‘Oh, no! not questioning: he does not question, he accuses: he never doubted: and what he went shouting as a boy, is plain matter of fact to him now. He is devoted to you. It was for your sake that he desired me to keep my name from being mixed up in a scandal he foresaw the occurrence of in your house.’
‘He permitted himself to sneer at you?’
‘He has the art of sneering. On this occasion he wished to be direct and personal.’
‘What sort of hints were they?’
Lord Romfrey strode away from her chair that the answer might be easy to her, for she was red, and evidently suffering from shame as well as indignation.
‘The hints we call distinct.’ said Rosamund.
‘In words?’
‘In hard words.’
‘Then you won’t meet Cecil?’
Such a question, and the tone of indifference in which it came, surprised and revolted her so that the unreflecting reply leapt out:
‘I would rather meet a devil.’
Of how tremblingly, vehemently, and hastily she had said it, she was unaware. To her lord it was an outcry of nature, astutely touched by him to put her to proof.
He continued his long leisurely strides, nodding over his feet.
Rosamund stood up. She looked a very noble figure in her broad black-furred robe. ‘I have one serious confession to make, sir.’
‘What’s that?’ said he.
‘I would avoid it, for it cannot lead to particular harm; but I have an enemy who may poison your ear in my absence. And first I resign my position. I have forfeited it.’
‘Time goes forward, ma’am, and you go round. Speak to the point. Do you mean that you toss up the reins of my household?’
‘I do. You trace it to Nevil immediately?’
‘I do. The fellow wants to upset the country, and he begins with me.’
‘You are wrong, my lord. What I have done places me at Captain Baskelett’s mercy. It is too loathsome to think of: worse than the whip; worse than your displeasure. It might never be known; but the thought that it might gives me courage. You have said that to protect a woman everything is permissible. It is your creed, my lord, and because the world, I have heard you say, is unjust and implacable to women. In some cases, I think so too. In reality I followed your instructions; I mean, your example. Cheap chivalry on my part! But it pained me not a little. I beg to urge that in my defence.’
‘Well, ma’am, you have tied the knot tight enough; perhaps now you’ll cut it,’ said the earl.
Rosamund gasped softly. ‘M. le Marquis is a gentleman who, after a life of dissipation, has been reminded by bad health that he has a young and beautiful wife.’
‘He dug his pit to fall into it:—he’s jealous?’
She shook her head to indicate the immeasurable.
‘Senile jealousy is anxious to be deceived. He could hardly be deceived so far as to imagine that Madame la Marquise would visit me, such as I am, as my guest. Knowingly or not, his very clever sister, a good woman, and a friend to husband and wife—a Frenchwoman of the purest type—gave me the title. She insisted on it, and I presumed to guess that she deemed it necessary for the sake of peace in that home.’
Lord Romfrey appeared merely inquisitive; his eyebrows were lifted in permanence; his eyes were mild.
She continued: ‘They leave England in a few hours. They are not likely to return. I permitted him to address me with the title of countess.’
‘Of Romfrey?’ said the earl.
Rosamund bowed.
His mouth contracted. She did not expect thunder to issue from it, but she did fear to hear a sarcasm, or that she would have to endure a deadly silence: and she was gathering her own lips in imitation of his, to nerve herself for some stroke to come, when he laughed in his peculiar close-mouthed manner.
‘I’m afraid you’ve dished yourself.’
‘You cannot forgive me, my lord?’
He indulged in more of his laughter, and abruptly summoning gravity, bade her talk to him of affairs. He himself talked of the condition of the Castle, and with a certain off-hand contempt of the ladies of the family, and Cecil’s father, Sir John. ‘What are they to me?’ said he, and he complained of having been called Last Earl of Romfrey.
‘The line ends undegenerate,’ said Rosamund fervidly, though she knew not where she stood.
‘Ends!’ quoth the earl.
‘I must see Stukely,’ he added briskly, and stooped to her: ‘I beg you to drive me to my Club, countess.’
‘Oh! sir.’
‘Once a countess, always a countess!’
‘But once an impostor, my lord?’
‘Not always, we’ll hope.’
He enjoyed this little variation in the language of comedy; letting it drop, to say: ‘Be here to-morrow early. Don’t chase that family away from the house. Do as you will, but not a word of Nevil to me: he’s a bad mess in any man’s porringer; it’s time for me to claim exemption of him from mine.’
She dared not let her thoughts flow, for to think was to triumph, and possibly to be deluded. They came in copious volumes when Lord Romfrey, alighting at his Club, called to the coachman: ‘Drive the countess home.’
They were not thoughts of triumph absolutely. In her cooler mind she felt that it was a bad finish of a gallant battle. Few women had risen against a tattling and pelting world so stedfastly; and would it not have been better to keep her own ground, which she had won with tears and some natural strength, and therewith her liberty, which she prized? The hateful Cecil, a reminder of whom set her cheeks burning and turned her heart to serpent, had forced her to it. So she honestly conceived, owing to the circumstance of her honestly disliking the pomps of life and not desiring to occupy any position of brilliancy. She thought assuredly of her hoard of animosity toward the scandalmongers, and of the quiet glance she would cast behind on them, and below. That thought came as a fruit, not as a reflection.
But if ever two offending young gentlemen, nephews of a long-suffering uncle, were circumvented, undermined, and struck to earth, with one blow, here was the instance. This was accomplished by Lord Romfrey’s resolution to make the lady he had learnt to esteem his countess: and more, it fixed to him for life one whom he could not bear to think of losing: and still more, it might be; but what more was unwritten on his tablets.
Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.