Beauchamp's Career. Complete. George Meredith
these waters.
‘Ah! to be unhappy here,’ sighed Renee. ‘I fancied it when I begged her to join us. It was in her voice.’
The impressionable girl trembled. He knew he was dear to her, and for that reason, judging of her by himself, he forbore to urge his advantage, conceiving it base to fear that loving him she could yield her hand to another; and it was the critical instant. She was almost in his grasp. A word of sharp entreaty would have swung her round to see her situation with his eyes, and detest and shrink from it. He committed the capital fault of treating her as his equal in passion and courage, not as metal ready to run into the mould under temporary stress of fire.
Even later in the morning, when she was cooler and he had come to speak, more than her own strength was needed to resist him. The struggle was hard. The boat’s head had been put about for Venice, and they were among the dusky-red Chioggian sails in fishing quarters, expecting momently a campanile to signal the sea-city over the level. Renee waited for it in suspense. To her it stood for the implacable key of a close and stifling chamber, so different from this brilliant boundless region of air, that she sickened with the apprehension; but she knew it must appear, and soon, and therewith the contraction and the gloom it indicated to her mind. He talked of the beauty. She fretted at it, and was her petulant self again in an epigrammatic note of discord.
He let that pass.
‘Last night you said “one night,”’ he whispered. ‘We will have another sail before we leave Venice.’
‘One night, and in a little time one hour! and next one minute! and there’s the end,’ said Renee.
Her tone alarmed him. ‘Have you forgotten that you gave me your hand?’
‘I gave my hand to my friend.’
‘You gave it to me for good.’
‘No; I dared not; it is not mine.’
‘It is mine,’ said Beauchamp.
Renee pointed to the dots and severed lines and isolated columns of the rising city, black over bright sea.
‘Mine there as well as here,’ said Beauchamp, and looked at her with the fiery zeal of eyes intent on minutest signs for a confirmation, to shake that sad negation of her face.
‘Renee, you cannot break the pledge of the hand you gave me last night.’
‘You tell me how weak a creature I am.’
‘You are me, myself; more, better than me. And say, would you not rather coast here and keep the city under water?’
She could not refrain from confessing that she would be glad never to land there.
‘So, when you land, go straight to your father,’ said Beauchamp, to whose conception it was a simple act resulting from the avowal.
‘Oh! you torture me,’ she cried. Her eyelashes were heavy with tears. ‘I cannot do it. Think what you will of me! And, my friend, help me. Should you not help me? I have not once actually disobeyed my father, and he has indulged me, but he has been sure of me as a dutiful girl. That is my source of self-respect. My friend can always be my friend.’
‘Yes, while it’s not too late,’ said Beauchamp.
She observed a sudden stringing of his features. He called to the chief boatman, made his command intelligible to that portly capitano, and went on to Roland, who was puffing his after-breakfast cigarette in conversation with the tolerant English lady.
‘You condescend to notice us, Signor Beauchamp,’ said Roland. ‘The vessel is up to some manoeuvre?’
‘We have decided not to land,’ replied Beauchamp. ‘And Roland,’ he checked the Frenchman’s shout of laughter, ‘I think of making for Trieste. Let me speak to you, to both. Renee is in misery. She must not go back.’
Roland sprang to his feet, stared, and walked over to Renee.
‘Nevil,’ said Rosamund Culling, ‘do you know what you are doing?’
‘Perfectly,’ said he. ‘Come to her. She is a girl, and I must think and act for her.’
Roland met them.
‘My dear Nevil, are you in a state of delusion? Renee denies…’
‘There’s no delusion, Roland. I am determined to stop a catastrophe. I see it as plainly as those Alps. There is only one way, and that’s the one I have chosen.’
‘Chosen! my friend’. But allow me to remind you that you have others to consult. And Renee herself…’
‘She is a girl. She loves me, and I speak for her.’
‘She has said it?’
‘She has more than said it.’
‘You strike me to the deck, Nevil. Either you are downright mad—which seems the likeliest, or we are all in a nightmare. Can you suppose I will let my sister be carried away the deuce knows where, while her father is expecting her, and to fulfil an engagement affecting his pledged word?’
Beauchamp simply replied:
‘Come to her.’
CHAPTER X. A SINGULAR COUNCIL
The four sat together under the shadow of the helmsman, by whom they were regarded as voyagers in debate upon the question of some hours further on salt water. ‘No bora,’ he threw in at intervals, to assure them that the obnoxious wind of the Adriatic need not disturb their calculations.
It was an extraordinary sitting, but none of the parties to it thought of it so when Nevil Beauchamp had plunged them into it. He compelled them, even Renee—and she would have flown had there been wings on her shoulders—to feel something of the life and death issues present to his soul, and submit to the discussion, in plain language of the market-place, of the most delicate of human subjects for her, for him, and hardly less for the other two. An overmastering fervour can do this. It upsets the vessel we float in, and we have to swim our way out of deep waters by the directest use of the natural faculties, without much reflection on the change in our habits. To others not under such an influence the position seems impossible. This discussion occurred. Beauchamp opened the case in a couple of sentences, and when the turn came for Renee to speak, and she shrank from the task in manifest pain, he spoke for her, and no one heard her contradiction. She would have wished the fearful impetuous youth to succeed if she could have slept through the storm he was rousing.
Roland appealed to her. ‘You! my sister! it is you that consent to this wild freak, enough to break your father’s heart?’
He had really forgotten his knowledge of her character—what much he knew—in the dust of the desperation flung about her by Nevil Beauchamp.
She shook her head; she had not consented.
‘The man she loves is her voice and her will,’ said Beauchamp. ‘She gives me her hand and I lead her.’
Roland questioned her. It could not be denied that she had given her hand, and her bewildered senses made her think that it had been with an entire abandonment; and in the heat of her conflict of feelings, the deliciousness of yielding to him curled round and enclosed her, as in a cool humming sea-shell.
‘Renee!’ said Roland.
‘Brother!’ she cried.
‘You see that I cannot suffer you to be borne away.’
‘No; do not!’
But the boat was flying fast from Venice, and she could have fallen at his feet and kissed them for not countermanding it.
‘You are in my charge, my sister.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now, Nevil, between us two,’ said Roland.
Beauchamp required no challenge. He seemed, to Rosamund Culling, twice older than he was, strangely adept, yet more strangely wise of worldly matters, and eloquent too. But it was the eloquence of frenzy, madness, in Roland’s ear. The arrogation of a terrible foresight that harped on