Beauchamp's Career. Complete. George Meredith
at the hour of its delivery. I prefer the sage-femme to the prophet. From my heart, Nevil, I wish I could help you. We have charged great guns together, but a family arrangement is something different from a hostile battery. There’s Venice! and, as soon as you land, my responsibility’s ended. Reflect, I pray you, on what I have said about girls. Upon my word, I discover myself talking wisdom to you. Girls are precious fragilities. Marriage is the mould for them; they get shape, substance, solidity: that is to say, sense, passion, a will of their own: and grace and tenderness, delicacy; all out of the rude, raw, quaking creatures we call girls. Paris! my dear Nevil. Paris! It’s the book of women.’
The grandeur of the decayed sea-city, where folly had danced Parisianly of old, spread brooding along the waters in morning light; beautiful; but with that inner light of history seen through the beauty Venice was like a lowered banner. The great white dome and the campanili watching above her were still brave emblems. Would Paris leave signs of an ancient vigour standing to vindicate dignity when her fall came? Nevil thought of Renee in Paris.
She avoided him. She had retired behind her tent-curtains, and reappeared only when her father’s voice hailed the boat from a gondola. The count and the marquis were sitting together, and there was a spare gondola for the voyagers, so that they should not have to encounter another babel of the riva. Salutes were performed with lifted hats, nods, and bows.
‘Well, my dear child, it has all been very wonderful and uncomfortable?’ said the count.
‘Wonderful, papa; splendid.’
‘No qualms of any kind?’
‘None, I assure you.’ And madame?’
‘Madame will confirm it, if you find a seat for her.’
Rosamund Culling was received in the count’s gondola, cordially thanked, and placed beside the marquis.
‘I stay on board and pay these fellows,’ said Roland.
Renee was told by her father to follow madame. He had jumped into the spare gondola and offered a seat to Beauchamp.
‘No,’ cried Renee, arresting Beauchamp, ‘it is I who mean to sit with papa.’
Up sprang the marquis with an entreating, ‘Mademoiselle!’
‘M. Beauchamp will entertain you, M. le Marquis.’
‘I want him here,’ said the count; and Beauchamp showed that his wish was to enter the count’s gondola, but Renee had recovered her aplomb, and decisively said ‘No,’ and Beauchamp had to yield.
That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a formal asking of leave. She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.
Renee took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father’s arms, murmuring:
‘Do nothing—nothing! until you hear from me.’
CHAPTER XI. CAPTAIN BASKELETT
Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of course, the first to come home had the cream of the praises. She hugged them in a manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty, too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should not protest overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did cordially reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck to their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and rewarded none save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort seems to betray the sense of poverty in the article. Our England does nothing like it. All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want of them. Besides, she has to please the taxpayer. You may track a shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her domestic history: either it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought: policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly. How can she manage an enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily? The managing of it at all is the wonder. And not only has she to stupefy the taxpayer by a timely display of feastings and fireworks, she has to stop all that nonsense (to quote a satiated man lightened in his purse) at the right moment, about the hour when the old standfasts, who have simply been doing duty, return, poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto or two is the utmost she can present to them. On the other hand, it is true she gives her first loves, those early birds, fully to understand that a change has come in their island mother’s mind. If there is a balance to be righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be the season for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less; and if no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally toss a leaf of laurel on a name or two: thus in the exercise of grumbling doing good.
With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp’s heroes received the motto instead of the sweetmeat. England expected them to do their duty; they did it, and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be. Beauchamp, at a distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning the unjust measure dealt to his favourites: Captain Hardist, of the Diomed, twenty years a captain, still a captain! Young Michell denied the cross! Colonel Evans Cuff, on the heights from first to last, and not advanced a step! But Prancer, and Plunger, and Lammakin were thoroughly well taken care of, this critic of the war wrote savagely, reviving an echo of a queer small circumstance occurring in the midst of the high dolour and anxiety of the whole nation, and which a politic country preferred to forget, as we will do, for it was but an instance of strong family feeling in high quarters; and is not the unity of the country founded on the integrity of the family sentiment? Is it not certain, which the master tells us, that a line is but a continuation of a number of dots? Nevil Beauchamp was for insisting that great Government officers had paid more attention to a dot or two than to the line. He appeared to be at war with his country after the peace. So far he had a lively ally in his uncle Everard; but these remarks of his were a portion of a letter, whose chief burden was the request that Everard Romfrey would back him in proposing for the hand of a young French lady, she being, Beauchamp smoothly acknowledged, engaged to a wealthy French marquis, under the approbation of her family. Could mortal folly outstrip a petition of that sort? And apparently, according to the wording and emphasis of the letter, it was the mature age of the marquis which made Mr. Beauchamp so particularly desirous to stop the projected marriage and take the girl himself. He appealed to his uncle on the subject in a ‘really—really’ remonstrative tone, quite overwhelming to read. ‘It ought not to be permitted: by all the laws of chivalry, I should write to the girl’s father to interdict it: I really am particeps criminis in a sin against nature if I don’t!’ Mr. Romfrey interjected in burlesque of his ridiculous nephew, with collapsing laughter. But he expressed an indignant surprise at Nevil for allowing Rosamund to travel alone.
‘I can take very good care of myself,’ Rosamund protested.
‘You can do hundreds of things you should never be obliged to do while he’s at hand, or I, ma’am,’ said Mr. Romfrey. ‘The fellow’s insane. He forgets a gentleman’s duty. Here’s his “humanity” dogging a French frock, and pooh!—the age of the marquis! Fifty? A man’s beginning his prime at fifty, or there never was much man in him. It’s the mark of a fool to take everybody for a bigger fool than himself-or he wouldn’t have written this letter to me. He can’t come home yet, not yet, and he doesn’t know when he can! Has he thrown up the service? I am to preserve the alliance between England and France by getting this French girl for him in the teeth of her marquis, at my peril if I refuse!’
Rosamund asked, ‘Will you let me see where Nevil says that, sir?’
Mr. Romfrey tore the letter to strips. ‘He’s one of your fellows who cock their eyes when they mean to be cunning. He sends you to do the wheedling, that’s plain. I don’t say he has hit on a bad advocate; but tell him I back him in no mortal marriage till he shows a pair of epaulettes on his shoulders. Tell him lieutenants are fledglings—he’s not marriageable at present.