George Meredith
Beauchamp's Career. Volume 5
A problem of her own conduct disturbed the young lady's clear conception of herself: and this was a ruffling of unfaithfulness in her love of Beauchamp, that was betrayed to her by her forgetfulness of him whenever she chanced to be with Seymour Austin. In Mr. Austin's company she recovered her forfeited repose, her poetry of life, her image of the independent Cecilia throned above our dust of battle, gazing on broad heaven. She carried the feeling so far that Blackburn Tuckham's enthusiasm for Mr. Austin gave him grace in her sight, and praise of her father's favourite from Mr. Austin's mouth made him welcome to her. The image of that grave capable head, dusty-grey about the temples, and the darkly sanguine face of the tried man, which was that of a seasoned warrior and inspired full trust in him, with his vivid look, his personal distinction, his plain devotion to the country's business, and the domestic solitude he lived in, admired, esteemed, loved perhaps, but unpartnered, was often her refuge and haven from tempestuous Beauchamp. She could see in vision the pride of Seymour Austin's mate. It flushed her reflectively. Conquered but not claimed, Cecilia was like the frozen earth insensibly moving round to sunshine in nature, with one white flower in her breast as innocent a sign of strong sweet blood as a woman may wear. She ascribed to that fair mate of Seymour Austin's many lofty charms of womanhood; above all, stateliness: her especial dream of an attainable superlative beauty in women. And supposing that lady to be accused of the fickle breaking of another love, who walked beside him, matched with his calm heart and one with him in counsel, would the accusation be repeated by them that beheld her husband? might it not rather be said that she had not deviated, but had only stepped higher? She chose no youth, no glistener, no idler: it was her soul striving upward to air like a seed in the earth that raised her to him: and she could say to the man once enchaining her: Friend, by the good you taught me I was led to this!
Cecilia's reveries fled like columns of mist before the gale when tidings reached her of a positive rupture between Lord Avonley and Nevil Beauchamp, and of the mandate to him to quit possession of Holdesbury and the London house within a certain number of days, because of his refusal to utter an apology to Mrs. Culling. Angrily on his behalf she prepared to humble herself to him. Louise Wardour-Devereux brought them to a meeting, at which Cecilia, with her heart in her hand, was icy. Mr. Lydiard, prompted by Mrs. Devereux, gave him better reasons for her singular coldness than Cecilia could give to herself, and some time afterward Beauchamp went to Mount Laurels, where Colonel Halkett mounted guard over his daughter, and behaved, to her thinking, cruelly. 'Now you have ruined yourself there's nothing ahead for you but to go to the Admiralty and apply for a ship,' he said, sugaring the unkindness with the remark that the country would be the gainer. He let fly a side-shot at London men calling themselves military men who sought to repair their fortunes by chasing wealthy widows, and complimented Beauchamp: 'You're not one of that sort.'
Cecilia looked at Beauchamp stedfastly. 'Speak,' said the look.
But he, though not blind, was keenly wounded.
'Money I must have,' he said, half to the colonel, half to himself.
Colonel Halkett shrugged. Cecilia waited for a directness in Beauchamp's eyes.
Her father was too wary to leave them.
Cecilia's intuition told her that by leading to a discussion of politics, and adopting Beauchamp's views, she could kindle him. Why did she refrain? It was that the conquered young lady was a captive, not an ally. To touch the subject in cold blood, voluntarily to launch on those vexed waters, as if his cause were her heart's, as much as her heart was the man's, she felt to be impossible. He at the same time felt that the heiress, endowing him with money to speed the good cause, should be his match in ardour for it, otherwise he was but a common adventurer, winning and despoiling an heiress.
They met in London. Beauchamp had not vacated either Holdesbury or the town-house; he was defying his uncle Everard, and Cecilia thought with him that it was a wise temerity. She thought with him passively altogether. On this occasion she had not to wait for directness in his eyes; she had to parry it. They were at a dinner-party at Lady Elsea's, generally the last place for seeing Lord Palmet, but he was present, and arranged things neatly for them, telling Beauchamp that he acted under Mrs. Wardour-Devereux's orders. Never was an opportunity, more propitious for a desperate lover. Had it been Renee next him, no petty worldly scruples of honour would have held him back. And if Cecilia had spoken feelingly of Dr. Shrapnel, or had she simulated a thoughtful interest in his pursuits, his hesitations would have vanished. As it was, he dared to look what he did not permit himself to speak. She was nobly lovely, and the palpable envy of men around cried fool at his delays. Beggar and heiress he said in his heart, to vitalize the three- parts fiction of the point of honour which Cecilia's beauty was fast submerging. When she was leaving he named a day for calling to see her. Colonel Halkett stood by, and she answered, 'Come.'
Beauchamp kept the appointment. Cecilia was absent.
He was unaware that her father had taken her to old Mrs. Beauchamp's death-bed. Her absence, after she had said, 'Come,' appeared a confirmation of her glacial manner when they met at the house of Mrs. Wardour-Devereux; and he charged her with waywardness. A wound of the same kind that we are inflicting is about the severest we can feel.
Beauchamp received intelligence of his venerable great-aunt's death from Blackburn Tuckham, and after the funeral he was informed that eighty thousand pounds had been bequeathed to him: a goodly sum of money for a gentleman recently beggared; yet, as the political enthusiast could not help reckoning (apart from a fervent sentiment of gratitude toward his benefactress), scarcely enough to do much more than start and push for three or more years a commanding daily newspaper, devoted to Radical interests, and to be entitled THE DAWN.
True, he might now conscientiously approach the heiress, take her hand with an open countenance, and retain it.
Could he do so quite conscientiously? The point of honour had been centred in his condition of beggary. Something still was in his way. A quick spring of his blood for air, motion, excitement, holiday freedom, sent his thoughts travelling whither they always shot away when his redoubtable natural temper broke loose.
In the case of any other woman than Cecilia Halkett he would not have been obstructed by the minor consideration as to whether he was wholly heart-free to ask her in marriage that instant; for there was no hindrance, and she was beautiful. She was exceedingly beautiful; and she was an unequalled heiress. She would be able with her wealth to float his newspaper, THE DAWN, so desired of Dr. Shrapnel!—the best restorative that could be applied to him! Every temptation came supplicating him to take the step which indeed he wished for: one feeling opposed. He really respected Cecilia: it is not too much to say that he worshipped her with the devout worship rendered to the ideal Englishwoman by the heart of the nation. For him she was purity, charity, the keeper of the keys of whatsoever is held precious by men; she was a midway saint, a light between day and darkness, in whom the spirit in the flesh shone like the growing star amid thin sanguine colour, the sweeter, the brighter, the more translucent the longer known. And if the image will allow it, the nearer down to him the holier she seemed.
How offer himself when he was not perfectly certain that he was worthy of her?
Some jugglery was played by the adept male heart in these later hesitations. Up to the extent of his knowledge of himself, the man was fairly sincere. Passion would have sped him to Cecilia, but passion is not invariably love; and we know what it can be.
The glance he cast over the water at Normandy was withdrawn. He went to Bevisham to consult with Dr. Shrapnel about the starting of a weekly journal, instead of a daily, and a name for it—a serious question: for though it is oftener weekly than daily that the dawn is visible in England, titles must not invite the public jest; and the glorious project of the daily DAWN was prudently abandoned for by-and-by. He thought himself rich enough to put a Radical champion weekly in the field and this matter, excepting the title, was arranged in Bevisham. Thence he proceeded to Holdesbury, where he heard that the house, grounds, and farm were let to a tenant preparing to enter. Indifferent to the blow, he kept an engagement to deliver a speech at the great manufacturing town of Gunningham, and then went to London, visiting his uncle's town-house for recent letters. Not one was from Renee: she had not written for six weeks, not once for his thrice! A letter from Cecil Baskelett informed him that 'my lord' had placed the town-house at his disposal. Returning to dress for dinner on a thick and murky evening of February, Beauchamp encountered his cousin on the steps. He said to Cecil, 'I sleep here to- night: I leave the house to you tomorrow.'
Cecil struck out his underjaw to reply: 'Oh! good. You sleep here to- night. You are a fortunate man. I congratulate you. I shall not disturb you. I have just entered on my occupation of the house. I have my key. Allow me to recommend you to go straight to the drawing-room. And I may inform you that the Earl of Romfrey is at the point of death. My lord is at the castle.'
Cecil accompanied his descent of the steps with the humming of an opera melody: Beauchamp tripped into the hall-passage. A young maid-servant held the door open, and she accosted him: 'If you please, there is a lady up-stairs in the drawing-room; she speaks foreign English, sir.'
Beauchamp asked if the lady was alone, and not waiting for the answer, though he listened while writing, and heard that she was heavily veiled, he tore a strip from his notebook, and carefully traced half-a-dozen telegraphic words to Mrs. Culling at Steynham. His rarely failing promptness, which was like an inspiration, to conceive and execute measures for averting peril, set him on the thought of possibly counteracting his cousin Cecil's malignant tongue by means of a message to Rosamund, summoning her by telegraph to come to town by the next train that night. He despatched the old woman keeping the house, as trustier than the young one, to the nearest office, and went up to the drawing- room, with a quick thumping heart that was nevertheless as little apprehensive of an especial trial and danger as if he had done nothing at all to obviate it. Indeed he forgot that he had done anything when he turned the handle of the drawing-room door.
CHAPTER XL
A TRIAL OF HIM
A low-burning lamp and fire cast a narrow ring on the shadows of the dusky London room. One of the window-blinds was drawn up. Beauchamp discerned a shape at that window, and the fear seized him that it might be Madame d'Auffray with evil news of Renee: but it was Renee's name he called. She rose from her chair, saying, 'I!'
She was trembling.
Beauchamp asked her whisperingly if she had come alone.
'Alone; without even a maid,' she murmured.
He pulled down the blind of the window exposing them to the square, and led her into the light to see her face.
The dimness of light annoyed him, and the miserable reception of her; this English weather, and the gloomy house! And how long had she been waiting for him? and what was the mystery? Renee in England seemed magical; yet it was nothing stranger than an old dream realized. He wound up the lamp, holding her still with one hand. She was woefully pale; scarcely able to bear the increase of light.
'It is I who come to you': she was half audible.
'This time!' said he. 'You have been suffering?'
'No.'
Her tone was brief; not reassuring.
'You came straight to me?'
'Without a deviation that I know of.'
'From Tourdestelle?'
'You have not forgotten Tourdestelle, Nevil?'
The memory of it quickened his rapture in reading her features. It was his first love, his enchantress, who was here: and how? Conjectures shot through him like lightnings in the dark.
Irrationally, at a moment when reason stood in awe, he fancied it must be that her husband was dead. He forced himself to think it, and could have smiled at the hurry of her coming, one, without even a maid: and deeper down in him the devouring question burned which dreaded the answer.
But of old, in Normandy, she had pledged herself to join him with no delay when free, if ever free!
So now she was free.
One side of him glowed in illumination; the other was black as Winter night; but light subdues darkness; and in a situation like Beauchamp's, the blood is livelier 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 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.
