Beauchamp's Career — Complete. George Meredith
to my second brother. You hear them? How delightfully quick and spontaneous they are! Ah, silly creatures! they have stopped. They might have held it on for us while we were passing.’
‘Where would the naturalness have been then?’
‘Perhaps, M. Nevil, I do want commanding. I am wilful. Half my days will be spent in fits of remorse, I begin to think.’
‘Come to me to be forgiven.’
‘Shall I? I should be forgiven too readily.’
‘I am not so sure of that.’
‘Can you be harsh? No, not even with enemies. Least of all with … with us.’
Oh for the black gondola!—the little gliding dusky chamber for two; instead of this open, flaunting, gold and crimson cotton-work, which exacted discretion on his part and that of the mannerly gondoliers, and exposed him to window, balcony, bridge, and borderway.
They slipped on beneath a red balcony where a girl leaned on her folded arms, and eyed them coming and going by with Egyptian gravity.
‘How strange a power of looking these people have,’ said Renee, whose vivacity was fascinated to a steady sparkle by the girl. ‘Tell me, is she glancing round at us?’
Nevil turned and reported that she was not. She had exhausted them while they were in transit; she had no minor curiosity.
‘Let us fancy she is looking for her lover,’ he said.
Renee added: ‘Let us hope she will not escape being seen.’
‘I give her my benediction,’ said Nevil.
‘And I,’ said Renee; ‘and adieu to her, if you please. Look for Roland.’
‘You remind me; I have but a few instants.’
‘M. Nevil, you are a preux of the times of my brother’s patronymic. And there is my Roland awaiting us. Is he not handsome?’
‘How glad you are to have him to relieve guard!’
Renee bent on Nevil one of her singular looks of raillery. She had hitherto been fencing at a serious disadvantage.
‘Not so very glad,’ she said, ‘if that deprived me of the presence of his friend.’
Roland was her tower. But Roland was not yet on board. She had peeped from her citadel too rashly. Nevil had time to spring the flood of crimson in her cheeks, bright as the awning she reclined under.
‘Would you have me with you always?’
‘Assuredly,’ said she, feeling the hawk in him, and trying to baffle him by fluttering.
‘Always? forever? and—listen-give me a title?’
Renee sang out to Roland like a bird in distress, and had some trouble not to appear too providentially rescued. Roland on board, she resumed the attack.
‘M. Nevil vows he is a better brother to me than you, who dart away on an impulse and leave us threading all Venice till we do not know where we are, naughty brother!’
‘My little sister, the spot where you are,’ rejoined Roland, ‘is precisely the spot where I left you, and I defy you to say you have gone on without me. This is the identical riva I stepped out on to buy you a packet of Venetian ballads.’
They recognized the spot, and for a confirmation of the surprising statement, Roland unrolled several sheets of printed blotting-paper, and rapidly read part of a Canzonetta concerning Una Giovine who reproved her lover for his extreme addiction to wine:
‘Ma se, ma se,
Cotanto beve,
Mi no, mi no,
No ve sposero.’
‘This astounding vagabond preferred Nostrani to his heart’s mistress. I tasted some of their Nostrani to see if it could be possible for a Frenchman to exonerate him.’
Roland’s wry face at the mention of Nostrani brought out the chief gondolier, who delivered himself:
‘Signore, there be hereditary qualifications. One must be born Italian to appreciate the merits of Nostrani!’
Roland laughed. He had covered his delinquency in leaving his sister, and was full of an adventure to relate to Nevil, a story promising well for him.
CHAPTER VII. AN AWAKENING FOR BOTH
Renee was downcast. Had she not coquetted? The dear young Englishman had reduced her to defend herself, the which fair ladies, like besieged garrisons, cannot always do successfully without an attack at times, which, when the pursuer is ardent, is followed by a retreat, which is a provocation; and these things are coquettry. Her still fresh convent-conscience accused her of it pitilessly. She could not forgive her brother, and yet she dared not reproach him, for that would have inculpated Nevil. She stepped on to the Piazzetta thoughtfully. Her father was at Florian’s, perusing letters from France. ‘We are to have the marquis here in a week, my child,’ he said. Renee nodded. Involuntarily she looked at Nevil. He caught the look, with a lover’s quick sense of misfortune in it.
She heard her brother reply to him: ‘Who? the Marquis de Rouaillout? It is a jolly gaillard of fifty who spoils no fun.’
‘You mistake his age, Roland,’ she said.
‘Forty-nine, then, my sister.’
‘He is not that.’
‘He looks it.’
‘You have been absent.’
‘Probably, my arithmetical sister, he has employed the interval to grow younger. They say it is the way with green gentlemen of a certain age. They advance and they retire. They perform the first steps of a quadrille ceremoniously, and we admire them.’
‘What’s that?’ exclaimed the Comte de Croisnel. ‘You talk nonsense, Roland. M. le marquis is hardly past forty. He is in his prime.’
‘Without question, mon pere. For me, I was merely offering proof that he can preserve his prime unlimitedly.’
‘He is not a subject for mockery, Roland.’
‘Quite the contrary; for reverence!’
‘Another than you, my boy, and he would march you out.’
‘I am to imagine, then, that his hand continues firm?’
‘Imagine to the extent of your capacity; but remember that respect is always owing to your own family, and deliberate before you draw on yourself such a chastisement as mercy from an accepted member of it.’
Roland bowed and drummed on his knee.
The conversation had been originated by Renee for the enlightenment of Nevil and as a future protection to herself. Now that it had disclosed its burden she could look at him no more, and when her father addressed her significantly: ‘Marquise, you did me the honour to consent to accompany me to the Church of the Frari this afternoon?’ she felt her self-accusation of coquettry biting under her bosom like a thing alive.
Roland explained the situation to Nevil.
‘It is the mania with us, my dear Nevil, to marry our girls young to established men. Your established man carries usually all the signs, visible to the multitude or not, of the stages leading to that eminence. We cannot, I believe, unless we have the good fortune to boast the paternity of Hercules, disconnect ourselves from the steps we have mounted; not even, the priests inform us, if we are ascending to heaven; we carry them beyond the grave. However, it seems