Beauchamp's Career Part 8

'Madame, if you know it too well...' she said.

'No; it is always worth seeing,' said Rosamund, 'and I think, mademoiselle, with your permission, I should accompany you.'

'It is only a whim of mine, madame. I can stay on sh.o.r.e.'

'Not when it is unnecessary to forego a pleasure.'

'Say, my last day of freedom.'

Renee kissed her hand.

She is terribly winning, Rosamund avowed. Renee was in debate whether the woman devoted to Nevil would hear her and help.

Just then Roland and Nevil returned from their boat, where they had left carpenters and upholsterers at work, and the delicate chance for an understanding between the ladies pa.s.sed by.

The young men were like waves of ocean overwhelming it, they were so full of their boat, and the scouring and cleaning out of it, and provisioning, and making it worthy of its freight. Nevil was surprised that Mrs. Culling should have consented to come, and asked her if she really wished it--really; and 'Really,' said Rosamund; 'certainly.'

'Without dubitation,' cried Roland. 'And now my little Renee has no more sh.o.r.e-qualms; she is smoothly chaperoned, and madame will present us tea on board. All the etcaeteras of life are there, and a mariner's eye in me spies a breeze at sunset to waft us out of Malamocco.'

The count listened to the recital of their preparations with his usual absent interest in everything not turning upon Art, politics, or social intrigue. He said, 'Yes, good, good,' at the proper intervals, and walked down the riva to look at the busy boat, said to Nevil, 'You are a sailor; I confide my family to you,' and prudently counselled Renee to put on the dresses she could toss to the deep without regrets. Mrs.

Culling he thanked fervently for a wonderful stretch of generosity in lending her presence to the madcaps.

Altogether the day was a reanimation of external Venice. But there was a thunderbolt in it; for about an hour before sunset, when the ladies were superintending and trying not to criticize the ingenious efforts to produce a make-believe of comfort on board for them, word was brought down to the boat by the count's valet that the Marquis de Rouaillout had arrived. Renee turned her face to her brother superciliously. Roland shrugged. 'Note this, my sister,' he said; 'an antic.i.p.ation of dates in paying visits precludes the ripeness of the sentiment of welcome. It is, however, true that the marquis has less time to spare than others.'

'We have started; we are on the open sea. How can we put back?' said Renee.

'You hear, Francois; we are on the open sea,' Roland addressed the valet.

'Monsieur has cut loose his communications with land,' Francois responded, and bowed from the landing.

Nevil hastened to make this a true report; but they had to wait for tide as well as breeze, and pilot through intricate mud-channels before they could see the outside of the Lido, and meanwhile the sun lay like a golden altarplatter on mud-banks made bare by the ebb, and curled in drowsy yellow links along the currents. All they could do was to push off and hang loose, b.u.mping to right and left in the midst of volleys and countervolleys of fishy Venetian, Chioggian, and Dalmatian, quite as strong as anything ever heard down the Ca.n.a.laggio. The representatives of these dialects trotted the decks and hung their bodies half over the sides of the vessels to deliver fire, flashed eyes and snapped fingers, not a whit less fierce than hostile crews in the old wars hurling an interchange of stink-pots, and then resumed the trot, apparently in search of fresh ammunition. An Austrian sentinel looked on pa.s.sively, and a police inspector peeringly. They were used to it. Happily, the combustible import of the language was unknown to the ladies, and Nevil's attempts to keep his crew quiet, contrasting with Roland's phlegm, which a Frenchman can a.s.sume so philosophically when his tongue is tied, amused them. During the clamour, Renee saw her father beckoning from the riva. She signified that she was no longer in command of circ.u.mstances; the vessel was off. But the count stamped his foot, and nodded imperatively. Thereupon Roland repeated the eloquent demonstrations of Renee, and the count lost patience, and Roland shouted, 'For the love of heaven, don't join this babel; we're nearly bursting.' The rage of the babel was allayed by degrees, though not appeased, for the boat was behaving wantonly, as the police officer pointed out to the count.

Renee stood up to bend her head. It was in reply to a salute from the Marquis de Rouaillout, and Nevil beheld his rival.

'M. le Marquis, seeing it is out of the question that we can come to you, will you come to us?' cried Roland.

The marquis gesticulated 'With alacrity' in every limb.

'We will bring you back on to-morrow midnight's tide, safe, we promise you.'

The marquis advanced a foot, and withdrew it. Could he have heard correctly? They were to be out a whole night at sea! The count dejectedly confessed his incapability to restrain them: the young desperadoes were ready for anything. He had tried the voice of authority, and was laughed at. As to Renee, an English lady was with her.

'The English lady must be as mad as the rest,' said the marquis.

'The English are mad,' said the count; 'but their women are strict upon the proprieties.'

'Possibly, my dear count; but what room is there for the proprieties on board a fis.h.i.+ng-boat?'

'It is even as you say, my dear marquis.'

'You allow it?'

'Can I help myself? Look at them. They tell me they have given the boat the fittings of a yacht.'

'And the young man?'

'That is the M. Beauchamp of whom I have spoken to you, the very pick of his country, fresh, lively, original; and he can converse. You will like him.'

'I hope so,' said the marquis, and roused a doleful laugh. 'It would seem that one does not arrive by hastening!'

'Oh! but my dear marquis, you have paid the compliment; you are like Spring thrusting in a bunch of lilac while the winds of winter blow. If you were not expected, your expeditiousness is appreciated, be sure.'

Roland fortunately did not hear the marquis compared to Spring. He was saying: 'I wonder what those two elderly gentlemen are talking about'; and Nevil confused his senses by trying to realize that one of them was destined to be the husband of his now speechless Renee. The marquis was clad in a white silken suit, and a dash of red round the neck set off his black beard; but when he lifted his broad straw hat, a baldness of sconce shone. There was elegance in his gestures; he looked a gentleman, though an ultra-Gallican one, that is, too scrupulously finished for our taste, smelling of the valet. He had the habit of balancing his body on the hips, as if to emphasize a juvenile vigour, and his general att.i.tude suggested an idea that he had an oration for you. Seen from a distance, his baldness and strong nasal projection were not winning features; the youthful standard he had evidently prescribed to himself in his dress and his ready jerks of acquiescence and delivery might lead a forlorn rival to conceive him something of an ogre straining at an Adonis. It could not be disputed that he bore his disappointment remarkably well; the more laudably, because his position was within a step of the ridiculous, for he had shot himself to the mark, despising sleep, heat, dust, dirt, diet, and lo, that charming object was deliberately slipping out of reach, proving his headlong journey an absurdity.

As he stood declining to partic.i.p.ate in the lunatic voyage, and bidding them perforce good speed off the tips of his fingers, Renee turned her eyes on him, and away. She felt a little smart of pity, arising partly from her antagonism to Roland's covert laughter: but it was the colder kind of feminine pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness.

She sat still, placid outwardly, in fear of herself, so strange she found it to be borne out to sea by her sailor lover under the eyes of her betrothed. She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations, none of them of a very healthy kind, coming as it were from an unlocked chamber of her bosom, hitherto of unimagined contents; and the marquis being now on the spot to defend his own, she no longer blamed Nevil: it was otherwise utterly. All the sweeter side of pity was for him.

He was at first amazed by the sudden exquisite transition. Tenderness breathed from her, in voice, in look, in touch; for she accepted his help that he might lead her to the stern of the vessel, to gaze well on setting Venice, and sent lightnings up his veins; she leaned beside him over the vessel's rails, not separated from him by the breadth of a fluttering riband. Like him, she scarcely heard her brother when for an instant he intervened, and with Nevil she said adieu to Venice, where the faint red Doge's palace was like the fading of another sunset north-westward of the glory along the hills. Venice dropped lower and lower, breasting the waters, until it was a thin line in air. The line was broken, and ran in dots, with here and there a pillar standing on opal sky. At last the topmost campanile sank.

Renee looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged city.

'It is gone!' she said, as though a marvel had been worked; and swiftly: 'we have one night!'

She breathed it half like a question, like a pet.i.tion, catching her breath. The adieu to Venice was her a.s.surance of liberty, but Venice hidden rolled on her the sense of the return and plucked shrewdly at her tether of bondage.

They set their eyes toward the dark gulf ahead. The night was growing starry. The softly ruffled Adriatic tossed no foam.

'One night?' said Nevil; 'one? Why only one?'

Renee shuddered. 'Oh! do not speak.'

'Then, give me your hand.'

'There, my friend.'

He pressed a hand that was like a quivering chord. She gave it as though it had been his own to claim. But that it meant no more than a hand he knew by the very frankness of her compliance, in the manner natural to her; and this was the charm, it filled him with her peculiar image and spirit, and while he held it he was subdued.

Lying on the deck at midnight, wrapt in his cloak and a coil of rope for a pillow, considerably apart from jesting Roland, the recollection of that little sanguine spot of time when Renee's life-blood ran with his, began to heave under him like a swelling sea. For Nevil the starred black night was Renee. Half his heart was in it: but the combative division flew to the morning and the deadly iniquity of the marriage, from which he resolved to save her; in pure devotedness, he believed.

And so he closed his eyes. She, a girl, with a heart fluttering open and fearing, felt only that she had lost herself somewhere, and she had neither sleep nor symbols, nothing but a sense of infinite strangeness, as though she were borne superhumanly through s.p.a.ce.

CHAPTER IX. MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS

The breeze blew steadily, enough to swell the sails and sweep the vessel on smoothly. The night air dropped no moisture on deck.

Nevil Beauchamp dozed for an hour. He was awakened by light on his eyelids, and starting up beheld the many pinnacles of grey and red rocks and shadowy high white regions at the head of the gulf waiting for the sun; and the sun struck them. One by one they came out in crimson flame, till the vivid host appeared to have stepped forward. The shadows on the snow-fields deepened to purple below an irradiation of rose and pink and dazzling silver. There of all the world you might imagine G.o.ds to sit.

A crowd of mountains endless in range, erect, or flowing, shattered and arid, or leaning in smooth l.u.s.tre, hangs above the gulf. The mountains are sovereign Alps, and the sea is beneath them. The whole gigantic body keeps the sea, as with a hand, to right and left.