Beauchamp's Career. Complete. George Meredith
Giudecca was a place kept apart for the Jews, I believe. You have seen their burial-ground on the Lido. Those are, I think, the Euganean hills. You are fond of Petrarch.’
‘M. Nevil, omitting the allusion to the poet, you have, permit me to remark, the brevity without the precision of an accredited guide to notabilities.’
‘I tell you what I know,’ said Nevil, brooding on the finished tone and womanly aplomb of her language. It made him forget that she was a girl entrusted to his guardianship. His heart came out.
‘Renee, if you loved him, I, on my honour, would not utter a word for myself. Your heart’s inclinations are sacred for me. I would stand by, and be your friend and his. If he were young, that I might see a chance of it!’
She murmured, ‘You should not have listened to Roland.’
‘Roland should have warned me. How could I be near you and not… But I am nothing. Forget me; do not think I speak interestedly, except to save the dearest I have ever known from certain wretchedness. To yield yourself hand and foot for life! I warn you that it must end miserably. Your countrywomen… You have the habit in France; but like what are you treated? You! none like you in the whole world! You consent to be extinguished. And I have to look on! Listen to me now.’
Renee glanced at the gondola conveying her father. And he has not yet landed! she thought, and said, ‘Do you pretend to judge of my welfare better than my papa?’
‘Yes; in this. He follows a fashion. You submit to it. His anxiety is to provide for you. But I know the system is cursed by nature, and that means by heaven.’
‘Because it is not English?’
‘O Renee, my beloved for ever! Well, then, tell me, tell me you can say with pride and happiness that the Marquis de Rouaillout is to be your—there’s the word—husband!’
Renee looked across the water.
‘Friend, if my father knew you were asking me!’
‘I will speak to him.’
‘Useless.’
‘He is generous, he loves you.’
‘He cannot break an engagement binding his honour.’
‘Would you, Renee, would you—it must be said—consent to have it known to him—I beg for more than life—that your are not averse… that you support me?’
His failing breath softened the bluntness.
She replied, ‘I would not have him ever break an engagement binding his honour.’
‘You stretch the point of honour.’
‘It is our way. Dear friend, we are French. And I presume to think that our French system is not always wrong, for if my father had not broken it by treating you as one of us and leaving me with you, should I have heard…?’
‘I have displeased you.’
‘Do not suppose that. But, I mean, a mother would not have left me.’
‘You wished to avoid it.’
‘Do not blame me. I had some instinct; you were very pale.’
‘You knew I loved you.’
‘No.’
‘Yes; for this morning…’
This morning it seemed to me, and I regretted my fancy, that you were inclined to trifle, as, they say, young men do.’
‘With Renee?’
‘With your friend Renee. And those are the hills of Petrarch’s tomb? They are mountains.’
They were purple beneath a large brooding cloud that hung against the sun, waiting for him to enfold him, and Nevil thought that a tomb there would be a welcome end, if he might lift Renee in one wild flight over the chasm gaping for her. He had no language for thoughts of such a kind, only tumultuous feeling.
She was immoveable, in perfect armour.
He said despairingly, ‘Can you have realized what you are consenting to?’
She answered, ‘It is my duty.’
‘Your duty! it’s like taking up a dice-box, and flinging once, to certain ruin!’
‘I must oppose my father to you, friend. Do you not understand duty to parents? They say the English are full of the idea of duty.’
‘Duty to country, duty to oaths and obligations; but with us the heart is free to choose.’
‘Free to choose, and when it is most ignorant?’
‘The heart? ask it. Nothing is surer.’
‘That is not what we are taught. We are taught that the heart deceives itself. The heart throws your dicebox; not prudent parents.’
She talked like a woman, to plead the cause of her obedience as a girl, and now silenced in the same manner that she had previously excited him.
‘Then you are lost to me,’ he said.
They saw the gondola returning.
‘How swiftly it comes home; it loitered when it went,’ said Renee. ‘There sits my father, brimming with his picture; he has seen one more! We will congratulate him. This little boulevard is not much to speak of. The hills are lovely. Friend,’ she dropped her voice on the gondola’s approach, ‘we have conversed on common subjects.’
Nevil had her hand in his, to place her in the gondola.
She seemed thankful that he should prefer to go round on foot. At least, she did not join in her father’s invitation to him. She leaned back, nestling her chin and half closing her eyes, suffering herself to be divided from him, borne away by forces she acquiesced in.
Roland was not visible till near midnight on the Piazza. The promenaders, chiefly military of the garrison, were few at that period of social protestation, and he could declare his disappointment aloud, ringingly, as he strolled up to Nevil, looking as if the cigar in his mouth and the fists entrenched in his wide trowsers-pockets were mortally at feud. His adventure had not pursued its course luminously. He had expected romance, and had met merchandize, and his vanity was offended. To pacify him, Nevil related how he had heard that since the Venetian rising of ‘49, Venetian ladies had issued from the ordeal of fire and famine of another pattern than the famous old Benzon one, in which they touched earthiest earth. He praised Republicanism for that. The spirit of the new and short-lived Republic wrought that change in Venice.
‘Oh, if they’re republican as well as utterly decayed,’ said Roland, ‘I give them up; let them die virtuous.’
Nevil told Roland that he had spoken to Renee. He won sympathy, but Roland could not give him encouragement. They crossed and recrossed the shadow of the great campanile, on the warm-white stones of the square, Nevil admitting the weight of whatsoever Roland pointed to him in favour of the arrangement according to French notions, and indeed, of aristocratic notions everywhere, saving that it was imperative for Renee to be disposed of in marriage early. Why rob her of her young springtime!
‘French girls,’ replied Roland, confused by the nature of the explication in his head—‘well, they’re not English; they want a hand to shape them, otherwise they grow all awry. My father will not have one of her aunts to live with him, so there she is. But, my dear Nevil, I owe my life to you, and I was no party to this affair. I would do anything to help you. What says Renee?’
‘She obeys.’
‘Exactly. You see! Our girls are chess-pieces until they ‘re married. Then they have life and character sometimes too much.’
‘She is not like them, Roland; she is like none. When I spoke to her first, she affected no astonishment; never was there a creature so nobly sincere. She’s a girl in heart, not in mind. Think of her sacrificed to this man thrice her age!’
‘She differs from other girls only on the surface, Nevil. As for the man, I wish she were going to marry a younger. I wish, yes, my friend,’ Roland squeezed