Beauchamps Career, v5 by George Meredith (best classic books to read TXT) 📖

ill to

work, and I consider it my duty to do as much of his work as I can

undertake.'

 

'Ha! You're the old infidel's Amen clerk. It would rather astonish

orthodox congregations to see clerks in our churches getting into the

pulpit to read the sermon for sick clergymen,' said Lord Avonley. His

countenance furrowed. 'I'll pay that bill,' he added.

 

'Pay down half a million!' thundered Beauchamp; and dropping his voice,

'or go to him.'

 

'You remind me,' his uncle observed. 'I recommend you to ring that bell,

and have Mrs. Culling here.'

 

'If she comes she will hear what I think of her.'

 

'Then, out of the house!'

 

'Very well, sir. You decline to supply me with money?'

 

'I do.'

 

'I must have it!'

 

'I dare say. Money's a chain-cable for holding men to their senses.'

 

'I ask you, my lord, how I am to carry on Holdesbury?'

 

'Give it up.'

 

'I shall have to,' said Beauchamp, striving to be prudent.

 

'There isn't a doubt of it,' said his uncle, upon a series of nods

diminishing in their depth until his head assumed a droll interrogative

fixity, with an air of 'What next?'

 

BOOK 5. - CHAPTER XXXIX - BETWEEN BEAUCHAMP AND CECILIA

 

 

Beauchamp quitted the house without answering as to what next, and

without seeing Rosamund.

 

In the matter of money, as of his physical health, he wanted to do too

much at once; he had spent largely of both in his efforts to repair the

injury done to Dr. Shrapnel. He was overworked, anxious, restless,

craving for a holiday somewhere in France, possibly; he was all but

leaping on board the boat at times, and, unwilling to leave his dear old

friend who clung to him, he stayed, keeping his impulses below the tide-

mark which leads to action, but where they do not yield peace of spirit.

The tone of Renee's letters filled him with misgivings. She wrote word

that she had seen M. d'Henriel for the first time since his return from

Italy, and he was much changed, and inclined to thank Roland for the

lesson he had received from him at the sword's point. And next she urged

Beauchamp to marry, so that he and she might meet, as if she felt a

necessity for it. 'I shall love your wife; teach her to think amiably of

me,' she said. And her letter contained womanly sympathy for him in his

battle with his uncle. Beauchamp thought of his experiences of Cecilia's

comparative coldness. He replied that there was no prospect of his

marrying; he wished there were one of meeting! He forbore from writing

too fervently, but he alluded to happy days in Normandy, and proposed to

renew them if she would say she had need of him. He entreated her to

deal with him frankly; he reminded her that she must constantly look to

him, as she had vowed she would, when in any kind of trouble; and he

declared to her that he was unchanged. He meant, of an unchanged

disposition to shield and serve her; but the review of her situation, and

his knowledge of her quick blood, wrought him to some jealous lover's

throbs, which led him to impress his unchangeableness upon her, to bind

her to that standard.

 

She declined his visit: not now; 'not yet': and for that he presumed to

chide her, half-sincerely. As far as he knew he stood against everybody

save his old friend and Renee; and she certainly would have refreshed his

heart for a day. In writing, however, he had an ominous vision of the

morrow to the day; and, both for her sake and his own, he was not

unrejoiced to hear that she was engaged day and night in nursing her

husband. Pursuing his vision of the morrow of an unreproachful day with

Renee, the madness of taking her to himself, should she surrender at last

to a third persuasion, struck him sharply, now that he and his uncle were

foot to foot in downright conflict, and money was the question. He had

not much remaining of his inheritance--about fifteen hundred pounds.

He would have to vacate Holdesbury and his uncle's town-house in a month.

Let his passion be never so desperate, for a beggared man to think of

running away with a wife, or of marrying one, the folly is as big as the

worldly offence: no justification is to be imagined. Nay, and there is

no justification for the breach of a moral law. Beauchamp owned it,

and felt that Renee's resistance to him in Normandy placed her above him.

He remembered a saying of his moralist: 'We who interpret things heavenly

by things earthly must not hope to juggle with them for our pleasures,

and can look to no absolution of evil acts.' The school was a hard one.

It denied him holidays; it cut him off from dreams. It ran him in heavy

harness on a rough highroad, allowing no turnings to right or left, no

wayside croppings; with the simple permission to him that he should daily

get thoroughly tired. And what was it Jenny Denham had said on the

election day? 'Does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?'

 

His mind was clear enough to put the case, that either he beheld a

tremendous magnification of things, or else that other men did not attach

common importance to them; and he decided that the latter was the fact.

 

An incessant struggle of one man with the world, which position usually

ranks his relatives against him, does not conduce to soundness of

judgement. He may nevertheless be right in considering that he is right

in the main. The world in motion is not so wise that it can pretend to

silence the outcry of an ordinarily generous heart even--the very infant

of antagonism to its methods and establishments. It is not so difficult

to be right against the world when the heart is really active; but the

world is our book of humanity, and before insisting that his handwriting

shall occupy the next blank page of it, the noble rebel is bound for the

sake of his aim to ask himself how much of a giant he is, lest he fall

like a blot on the page, instead of inscribing intelligible characters

there.

 

Moreover, his relatives are present to assure him that he did not jump

out of Jupiter's head or come of the doctor. They hang on him like an

ill-conditioned prickly garment; and if he complains of the irritation

they cause him, they one and all denounce his irritable skin.

 

Fretted by his relatives he cannot be much of a giant.

 

Beauchamp looked from Dr. Shrapnel in his invalid's chair to his uncle

Everard breathing robustly, and mixed his uncle's errors with those of

the world which honoured and upheld him. His remainder of equability

departed; his impatience increased. His appetite for work at Dr.

Shrapnel's writing-desk was voracious. He was ready for any labour, the

transcribing of papers, writing from dictation, whatsoever was of service

to Lord Avonley's victim: and he was not like the Spartan boy with the

wolf at his vitals; he betrayed it in the hue his uncle Everard detested,

in a visible nervousness, and indulgence in fits of scorn. Sharp

epigrams and notes of irony provoked his laughter more than fun. He

seemed to acquiesce in some of the current contemporary despair of our

immoveable England, though he winced at a satire on his country, and

attempted to show that the dull dominant class of moneymakers was the

ruin of her. Wherever he stood to represent Dr. Shrapnel, as against Mr.

Grancey Lespel on account of the Itchincope encroachments, he left a

sting that spread the rumour of his having become not only a black torch

of Radicalism--our modern provincial estateholders and their wives bestow

that reputation lightly--but a gentleman with the polish scratched off

him in parts. And he, though individually he did not understand how

there was to be game in the land if game-preserving was abolished, signed

his name R. C. S. NEVIL BEAUCHAMP for Dr. SHRAPNEL, in the

communications directed to solicitors of the persecutors of poachers.

 

His behaviour to Grancey Lespel was eclipsed by his treatment of Captain

Baskelett. Cecil had ample reason to suppose his cousin to be friendly

with him. He himself had forgotten Dr. Shrapnel, and all other

dissensions, in a supremely Christian spirit. He paid his cousin the

compliment to think that he had done likewise. At Romfrey and in London

he had spoken to Nevil of his designs upon the widow: Nevil said nothing

against it and it was under Mrs. Wardour-Devereux's eyes, and before a

man named Lydiard, that, never calling to him to put him on his guard,

Nevil fell foul of him with every capital charge that can be brought

against a gentleman, and did so abuse, worry, and disgrace him as to

reduce him to quit the house to avoid the scandal of a resort to a

gentleman's last appeal in vindication of his character. Mrs. Devereux

spoke of the terrible scene to Cecilia, and Lydiard to Miss Denham. The

injured person communicated it to Lord Avonley, who told Colonel Halkett

emphatically that his nephew Cecil deserved well of him in having kept

command of his temper out of consideration for the family. There was a

general murmur of the family over this incident. The widow was rich, and

it ranked among the unwritten crimes against blood for one offshoot of a

great house wantonly to thwart another in the wooing of her by humbling

him in her presence, doing his utmost to expose him as a schemer, a

culprit, and a poltroon.

 

Could it be that Beauchamp had reserved his wrath with his cousin to

avenge Dr. Shrapnel upon him signally? Miss Denham feared her guardian

was the cause. Lydiard was indefinitely of her opinion. The idea struck

Cecilia Halkett, and as an example of Beauchamp's tenacity of purpose and

sureness of aim it fascinated her. But Mrs. Wardour-Devereux did not

appear to share it. She objected to Beauchamp's intemperateness and

unsparingness, as if she was for conveying a sisterly warning to Cecilia;

and that being off her mind, she added, smiling a little and colouring a

little: 'We learn only from men what men are.' How the scene commenced

and whether it was provoked, she failed to recollect. She described

Beauchamp as very self-contained in manner throughout his tongue was the

scorpion. Cecilia fancied he must have resembled his uncle Everard.

 

Cecilia was conquered, but unclaimed. While supporting and approving him

in her heart she was dreading to receive some new problem of his conduct;

and still while she blamed him for not seeking an interview with her, she

liked him for this instance of delicacy in the present state of his

relations with Lord Avonley.

 

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