Beauchamp's Career Part 43

'Stay, colonel; here's Shrapnel defending Morality and Society,' said Captain Baskelett.

Colonel Halkett vowed he was under no penal law to listen, and would not; but Captain Baskelett persuaded him: 'Yes, here it is: I give you my word. Apparently old Nevil has been standing up for every man's right to run away with... Yes, really! I give you my word; and here we have Shrapnel insisting on respect for the marriage laws. Do hear this; here it is in black and white:--

"Society is our one tangible gain, our one roofing and flooring in a world of most uncertain structures built on mora.s.ses. Toward the laws that support it men hopeful of progress give their adhesion.

If it is martyrdom, what then? Let the martyrdom be. Contumacy is animalism. And attend to me," says Shrapnel, "the truer the love the readier for sacrifice! A thousand times yes. Rebellion against Society, and advocacy of Humanity, run counter. Tell me Society is the whited sepulchre, that it is blotched, hideous, hollow: and I say, add not another disfigurement to it; add to the purification of it. And you, if you answer, what can only one? I say that is the animal's answer, and applies also to politics, where the question, what can one? put in the relapsing tone, shows the country decaying in the individual. Society is the protection of the weaker, therefore a s.h.i.+eld of women, who are our temple of civilization, to be kept sacred; and he that loves a woman will a.s.suredly esteem and pity her s.e.x, and not drag her down for another example of their frailty. Fight this out within you--!"

But you are right, colonel; we have had sufficient. I shall be getting a democratic orator's tw.a.n.g, or a crazy parson's, if I go on much further.

He covers thirty-two pages of letter-paper. The conclusion is:--"Jenny sends you her compliments, respects, and best wishes, and hopes she may see you before she goes to her friend Clara Sherwin and the General."'

'Sherwin? Why, General Sherwin's a perfect gentleman,' Colonel Halkett interjected; and Lord Palmet caught the other name: 'Jenny? That's Miss Denham, Jenny Denham; an amazingly pretty girl: beautiful thick brown hair, real hazel eyes, and walks like a yacht before the wind.'

'Perhaps, colonel, Jenny accounts for the defence of society,' said Captain Baskelett. 'I have no doubt Shrapnel has a scheme for Jenny.

The old communist and socialist!' He folded up the letter: 'A curious composition, is it not, Miss Halkett?'

Cecilia was thinking that he tempted her to be the apologist of even such a letter.

'One likes to know the worst, and what's possible,' said the colonel.

After Captain Baskelett had gone, Colonel Halkett persisted in talking of the letter, and would have impressed on his daughter that the person to whom the letter was addressed must be partly responsible for the contents of it. Cecilia put on the argumentative air of a Court of Equity to discuss the point with him.

'Then you defend that letter?' he cried.

Oh, no: she did not defend the letter; she thought it wicked and senseless. 'But,' said she, 'the superior strength of men to women seems to me to come from their examining all subjects, shrinking from none. At least, I should not condemn Nevil on account of his correspondence.'

'We shall see,' said her father, sighing rather heavily. 'I must have a talk with Mr. Romfrey about that letter.'

CHAPTER x.x.x. THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL

Captain Baskelett went down from Mount Laurels to Bevisham to arrange for the giving of a dinner to certain of his chief supporters in the borough, that they might know he was not obliged literally to sit in Parliament in order to pay a close attention to their affairs. He had not distinguished himself by a speech during the session, but he had stored a political precept or two in his memory, and, as he told Lord Palmet, he thought a dinner was due to his villains. 'The way to manage your Englishman, Palmet, is to dine him.' As the dinner would decidedly be dull, he insisted on having Lord Palmet's company.

They crossed over to the yachting island, where portions of the letter of Commander Beauchamp's correspondent were read at the Club, under the verandah, and the question put, whether a man who held those opinions had a right to wear his uniform.

The letter was transmitted to Steynham in time to be consigned to the pocket-book before Beauchamp arrived there on one of his rare visits.

Mr. Romfrey handed him the pocketbook with the frank declaration that he had read Shrapnel's letter. 'All is fair in war, Sir!' Beauchamp quoted him ambiguously.

The thieves had amused Mr. Romfrey by their scrupulous honesty in returning what was useless to them, while reserving the coat: but subsequently seeing the advertized reward, they had written to claim it; and, according to Rosamund Culling, he had been so tickled that he had deigned to reply to them, very briefly, but very comically.

Speaking of the matter with her, Beauchamp said (so greatly was he infatuated with the dangerous man) that the reading of a letter of Dr.

Shrapnel's could do nothing but good to any reflecting human creature: he admitted that as the lost pocket-book was addressed to Mr. Romfrey, it might have been by mistake that he had opened it, and read the topmost letter lying open. But he pressed Rosamund to say whether that one only had been read.

'Only Dr. Shrapnel's letter,' Rosamund affirmed. 'The letter from Normandy was untouched by him.'

'Untouched by anybody?'

'Unopened, Nevil. You look incredulous.'

'Not if I have your word, ma'am.'

He glanced somewhat contemptuously at his uncle Everard's anachronistic notions of what was fair in war.

To prove to him Mr. Romfrey's affectionate interest in his fortunes, Rosamund mentioned the overtures which had been made to Colonel Halkett for a nuptial alliance between the two houses; and she said: 'Your uncle Everard was completely won by your manly way of taking his opposition to you in Bevisham. He pays for Captain Baskelett, but you and your fortunes are nearest his heart, Nevil.'

Beauchamp hung silent. His first remark was, 'Yes, I want money. I must have money.' By degrees he seemed to warm to some sense of grat.i.tude.

'It was kind of the baron,' he said.

'He has a great affection for you, Nevil, though you know he spares no one who chooses to be antagonistic. All that is over. But do you not second him, Nevil? You admire her? You are not adverse?'

Beauchamp signified the horrid intermixture of yes and no, frowned in pain of mind, and Walked up and down. 'There's no living woman I admire so much.'

'She has refused the highest matches.'

'I hold her in every way incomparable.'

'She tries to understand your political ideas, if she cannot quite sympathize with them, Nevil. And consider how hard it is for a young English lady, bred in refinement, to understand such things.'

'Yes,' Beauchamp nodded; yes. Well, more 's the pity for me!'

'Ah! Nevil, that fatal Renee!'

'Ma'am, I acquit you of any suspicion of your having read her letter in this pocket-book. She wishes me to marry. You would have seen it written here. She wishes it.'

'Fly, clipped wing!' murmured Rosamund, and purposely sent a buzz into her ears to shut out his extravagant talk of Renee's friendly wishes.

'How is it you women will not believe in the sincerity of a woman!' he exclaimed.

'Nevil, I am not alluding to the damage done to your election.'

'To my candidature, ma'am. You mean those rumours, those lies of the enemy. Tell me how I could suppose you were alluding to them. You bring them forward now to justify your charge of "fatal" against her. She has one fault; she wants courage; she has none other, not one that is not excuseable. We won't speak of France. What did her father say?'

'Colonel Halkett? I do not know. He and his daughter come here next week, and the colonel will expect to meet you here. That does not look like so positive an objection to you?'

'To me personally, no,' said Beauchamp. 'But Mr. Romfrey has not told me that I am to meet them.'

'Perhaps he has not thought it worth while. It is not his way. He has asked you to come. You and Miss Halkett will be left to yourselves. Her father a.s.sured Mr. Romfrey that he should not go beyond advising her.

His advice might not be exactly favourable to you at present, but if you sued and she accepted--and she would, I am convinced she would; she was here with me, talking of you a whole afternoon, and I have eyes--then he would not oppose the match, and then I should see you settled, the husband of the handsomest wife and richest heiress in England.'

A vision of Cecilia swam before him, gracious in stateliness.

Two weeks back Renee's expression of a wish that he would marry had seemed to him an idle sentence in a letter breathing of her own intolerable situation. The marquis had been struck down by illness. What if she were to be soon suddenly free? But Renee could not be looking to freedom, otherwise she never would have written the wish for him to marry. She wrote perhaps hearing temptation whisper; perhaps wis.h.i.+ng to save herself and him by the aid of a tie that would bring his honour into play and fix his loyalty. He remembered Dr. Shrapnel's written words: 'Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run counter.'

They had a stronger effect on him than when he was ignorant of his uncle Everard's plan to match him with Cecilia. He took refuge from them in the image of that beautiful desolate Renee, born to be beloved, now wasted, worse than trodden under foot--perverted; a life that looked to him for direction and resuscitation. She was as good as dead in her marriage. It was impossible for him ever to think of Renee without the surprising thrill of his enchantment with her, and tender pity that drew her closer to him by darkening her brightness.

Still a man may love his wife. A wife like Cecilia was not to be imagined coldly. Let the knot once be tied, it would not be regretted, could not be; hers was a character, and hers a smile, firmly a.s.suring him of that.

He told Mr. Romfrey that he should be glad to meet Colonel Halkett and Cecilia. Business called him to Holdesbury. Thence he betook himself to Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to say farewell to Jenny Denham previous to her departure for Switzerland with her friend Clara Sherwin. She had never seen a snow-mountain, and it was pleasant to him to observe in her eyes, which he had known weighing and balancing intellectual questions more than he quite liked, a childlike effort to conjure in imagination the glories of the Alps. She appeared very happy, only a little anxious about leaving Dr. Shrapnel with no one to take care of him for a whole month. Beauchamp promised he would run over to him from Holdesbury, only an hour by rail, as often as he could. He envied her the sight of the Alps, he said, and tried to give her an idea of them, from which he broke off to boast of a famous little Jersey bull that he had won from a rival, an American, deeply in love with the bull; cutting him out by telegraph by just five minutes. The latter had examined the bull in the island and had pa.s.sed on to Paris, not suspecting there would be haste to sell him. Beauchamp, seeing the bull advertized, took him on trust, galloped to the nearest telegraph station forthwith, and so obtained possession of him; and the bull was now s.h.i.+pped on the voyage. But for this precious bull, however, and other business, he would have been able to spend almost the entire month with Dr. Shrapnel, he said regretfully.

Miss Denham on the contrary did not regret his active occupation. The story of his rush from the breakfast-table to the stables, and gallop away to the station, while the American Quaker gentleman soberly paced down a street in Paris on the same errand, in invisible rivalry, touched her risible fancy. She was especially pleased to think of him living in harmony with his uncle--that strange, lofty, powerful man, who by plot or by violence punished opposition to his will, but who must be kind at heart, as well as forethoughtful of his nephew's good; the a.s.surance of it being, that when the conflict was at an end he had immediately installed him as manager of one of his estates, to give his energy play and make him practically useful.