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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Beauchamps Career, by George Meredith, v4
+#62 in our series by George Meredith
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+Title: Beauchamps Career, v4
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+Author: George Meredith
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+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4456]
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+
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+
+
+
+BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+XXVI.     MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM
+XXVII.    A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION
+XXVIII.   TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY'S HEART AND HER INTELLECT
+XXIX.     THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP
+XXX.      THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL
+XXXI.     SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION
+XXXII.    AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP'S FASHION
+XXXIII.   THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM
+
+Some time after Beauchamp had been seen renewing his canvass in Bevisham
+a report reached Mount Laurels that he was lame of a leg.  The wits of
+the opposite camp revived the FRENCH MARQUEES, but it was generally
+acknowledged that he had come back without the lady: she was invisible.
+Cecilia Halkett rode home with her father on a dusky Autumn evening, and
+found the card of Commander Beauchamp awaiting her.  He might have stayed
+to see her, she thought.  Ladies are not customarily so very late in
+returning from a ride on chill evenings of Autumn.  Only a quarter of an
+hour was between his visit and her return.  The shortness of the interval
+made it appear the deeper gulf.  She noticed that her father particularly
+inquired of the man-servant whether Captain Beauchamp limped.  It seemed
+a piece of kindly anxiety on his part.  The captain was mounted, the man
+said.  Cecilia was conscious of rumours being abroad relating to Nevil's
+expedition to France; but he had enemies, and was at war with them, and
+she held herself indifferent to tattle.  This card bearing his name,
+recently in his hand, was much more insidious and precise.  She took it
+to her room to look at it.  Nothing but his name and naval title was
+inscribed; no pencilled line; she had not expected to discover one.  The
+simple card was her dark light, as a handkerchief, a flower, a knot of
+riband, has been for men luridly illuminated by such small sparks to
+fling their beams on shadows and read the monstrous things for truths.
+Her purer virgin blood was, not inflamed.  She read the signification of
+the card sadly as she did clearly.  What she could not so distinctly
+imagine was, how he could reconcile the devotion to his country, which he
+had taught her to put her faith in, with his unhappy subjection to Madame
+de Rouaillout.  How could the nobler sentiment exist side by side with
+one that was lawless?  Or was the wildness characteristic of his
+political views proof of a nature inclining to disown moral ties?  She
+feared so; he did not speak of the clergy respectfully.  Reading in the
+dark, she was forced to rely on her social instincts, and she distrusted
+her personal feelings as much as she could, for she wished to know the
+truth of him; anything, pain and heartrending, rather than the shutting
+of the eyes in an unworthy abandonment to mere emotion and fascination.
+Cecilia's love could not be otherwise given to a man, however near she
+might be drawn to love--though she should suffer the pangs of love
+cruelly.
+
+She placed his card in her writing-desk; she had his likeness there.
+Commander Beauchamp encouraged the art of photography, as those that make
+long voyages do, in reciprocating what they petition their friends for.
+Mrs. Rosamund Culling had a whole collection of photographs of him,
+equal to a visual history of his growth in chapters, from boyhood to
+midshipmanship and to manhood.  The specimen possessed by Cecilia was one
+of a couple that Beauchamp had forwarded to Mrs. Grancey Lespel on the
+day of his departure for France, and was a present from that lady,
+purchased, like so many presents, at a cost Cecilia would have paid
+heavily in gold to have been spared, namely, a public blush.  She was
+allowed to make her choice, and she chose the profile, repeating a remark
+of Mrs. Culling's, that it suggested an arrow-head in the upflight;
+whereupon Mr. Stukely Culbrett had said, 'Then there is the man, for he
+is undoubtedly a projectile'; nor were politically-hostile punsters on an
+arrow-head inactive.  But Cecilia was thinking of the side-face she (less
+intently than Beauchamp at hers) had glanced at during the drive into
+Bevisham.  At that moment, she fancied Madame de Rouaillout might be
+doing likewise; and oh that she had the portrait of the French lady as
+well!
+
+Next day her father tossed her a photograph of another gentleman, coming
+out of a letter he had received from old Mrs. Beauchamp.  He asked her
+opinion of it.  She said, 'I think he would have suited Bevisham better
+than Captain Baskelett.'  Of the original, who presented himself at Mount
+Laurels in the course of the week, she had nothing to say, except that he
+was very like the photograph, very unlike Nevil Beauchamp.  'Yes, there
+I'm of your opinion,' her father observed.  The gentleman was Mr.
+Blackburn Tuckham, and it was amusing to find an exuberant Tory in one
+who was the reverse of the cavalier type.  Nevil and he seemed to have
+been sorted to the wrong sides.  Mr. Tuckham had a round head, square
+flat forehead, and ruddy face; he stood as if his feet claimed the earth
+under them for his own, with a certain shortness of leg that detracted
+from the majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth Harry, but increased
+his air of solidity; and he was authoritative in speaking.  'Let me set
+you right, sir,' he said sometimes to Colonel Halkett, and that was his
+modesty.  'You are altogether wrong,' Miss Halkett heard herself
+informed, which was his courtesy.  He examined some of her water-colour
+drawings before sitting down to dinner, approved of them, but thought it
+necessary to lay a broad finger on them to show their defects.  On the
+question of politics, 'I venture to state,' he remarked, in anything but
+the tone of a venture, 'that no educated man of ordinary sense who has
+visited our colonies will come back a Liberal.'  As for a man of sense
+and education being a Radical, he scouted the notion with a pooh
+sufficient to awaken a vessel in the doldrums.  He said carelessly of
+Commander Beauchamp, that he might think himself one.  Either the Radical
+candidate for Bevisham stood self-deceived, or--the other supposition.
+Mr. Tuckham would venture to state that no English gentleman, exempt from
+an examination by order of the Commissioners of Lunacy, could be
+sincerely a Radical.  'Not a bit of it; nonsense,' he replied to Miss
+Halkett's hint at the existence of Radical views; 'that is, those views
+are out of politics; they are matters for the police.  Dutch dykes are
+built to shut away the sea from cultivated land, and of course it's a
+part of the business of the Dutch Government to keep up the dykes,--and
+of ours to guard against the mob; but that is only a political
+consideration after the mob has been allowed to undermine our defences.'
+
+'They speak,' said Miss Halkett, 'of educating the people to fit them--'
+
+'They speak of commanding the winds and tides,' he cut her short, with no
+clear analogy; 'wait till we have a storm.  It's a delusion amounting to
+dementedness to suppose, that with the people inside our defences, we can
+be taming them and tricking them.  As for sending them to school after
+giving them power, it's like asking a wild beast to sit down to dinner
+with us--he wants the whole table and us too.  The best education for the
+people is government.  They're beginning to see that in Lancashire at
+last.  I ran down to Lancashire for a couple of days on my landing, and
+I'm thankful to say Lancashire is preparing to take a step back.
+Lancashire leads the country.  Lancashire men see what this Liberalism
+has done for the Labour-market.'
+
+'Captain Beauchamp considers that the political change coming over the
+minds of the manufacturers is due to the large fortunes they have made,'
+said Miss Halkett, maliciously associating a Radical prophet with him.
+
+He was unaffected by it, and continued: 'Property is ballast as well as
+treasure.  I call property funded good sense.  I would give it every
+privilege.  If we are to speak of patriotism, I say the possession of
+property guarantees it.  I maintain that the lead of men of property is
+in most cases sure to be the safe one.'
+
+'I think so,' Colonel Halkett interposed, and he spoke as a man of
+property.
+
+Mr. Tuckham grew fervent in his allusions to our wealth and our commerce.
+Having won the race and gained the prize, shall we let it slip out of our
+grasp?  Upon this topic his voice descended to tones of priestlike awe:
+for are we not the envy of the world?  Our wealth is countless, fabulous.
+It may well inspire veneration.  And we have won it with our hands,
+thanks (he implied it so) to our religion.  We are rich in money and
+industry, in those two things only, and the corruption of an energetic
+industry is constantly threatened by the profusion of wealth giving it
+employment.  This being the case, either your Radicals do not know the
+first conditions of human nature, or they do; and if they do they are
+traitors, and the Liberals opening the gates to them are fools: and some
+are knaves.  We perish as a Great Power if we cease to look sharp ahead,
+hold firm together, and make the utmost of what we possess.  The word for
+the performance of those duties is Toryism: a word with an older flavour
+than Conservatism, and Mr. Tuckham preferred it.  By all means let
+workmen be free men but a man must earn his freedom daily, or he will
+become a slave in some form or another: and the way to earn it is by work
+and obedience to right direction.  In a country like ours, open on all
+sides to the competition of intelligence and strength, with a Press that
+is the voice of all parties and of every interest; in a country offering
+to your investments three and a half and more per cent., secure as the
+firmament!
+
+He perceived an amazed expression on Miss Halkett's countenance; and
+'Ay,' said he, 'that means the certainty of food to millions of mouths,
+and comforts, if not luxuries, to half the population.  A safe percentage
+on savings is the basis of civilization.'
+
+But he had bruised his eloquence, for though you may start a sermon from
+stones to hit the stars, he must be a practised orator who shall descend
+out of the abstract to take up a heavy lump of the concrete without
+unseating himself, and he stammered and came to a flat ending: 'In such a
+country--well, I venture to say, we have a right to condemn in advance
+disturbers of the peace, and they must show very good cause indeed for
+not being summarily held--to account for their conduct.'
+
+The allocution was not delivered in the presence of an audience other
+than sympathetic, and Miss Halkett rightly guessed that it was intended
+to strike Captain Beauchamp by ricochet.  He puffed at the mention of
+Beauchamp's name.  He had read a reported speech or two of Beauchamp's,
+and shook his head over a quotation of the stuff, as though he would have
+sprung at him like a lion, but for his enrolment as a constable.
+
+Not a whit the less did Mr. Tuckham drink his claret relishingly, and he
+told stories incidental to his travels now and then, commended the
+fishing here, the shooting there, and in some few places the cookery,
+with much bright emphasis when it could be praised; it appeared to be an
+endearing recollection to him.  Still, as a man of progress, he declared
+his belief that we English would ultimately turn out the best cooks,
+having indubitably the best material.  'Our incomprehensible political
+pusillanimity' was the one sad point about us: we had been driven from
+surrender to surrender.
+
+'Like geese upon a common, I have heard it said,' Miss Halkett assisted
+him to Dr. Shrapnel's comparison.
+
+Mr. Tuckham laughed, and half yawned and sighed, 'Dear me!'
+
+His laughter was catching, and somehow more persuasive of the soundness
+of the man's heart and head than his remarks.
+
+She would have been astonished to know that a gentleman so uncourtly,
+if not uncouth--judged by the standard of the circle she moved in--and so
+unskilled in pleasing the sight and hearing of ladies as to treat them
+like junior comrades, had raised the vow within himself on seeing her:
+You, or no woman!
+
+The colonel delighted in him, both as a strong and able young fellow, and
+a refreshingly aggressive recruit of his party, who was for onslaught,
+and invoked common sense, instead of waving the flag of sentiment in
+retreat; a very horse-artillery man of Tories.  Regretting immensely that
+Mr. Tuckham had not reached England earlier, that he might have occupied
+the seat for Bevisham, about to be given to Captain Baskelett, Colonel
+Halkett set up a contrast of Blackburn Tuckham and Nevil Beauchamp; a
+singular instance of unfairness, his daughter thought, considering that
+the distinct contrast presented by the circumstances was that of Mr.
+Tuckham and Captain Baskelett.
+
+'It seems to me, papa,--that you are contrasting the idealist and the
+realist,' she said.
+
+'Ah, well, we don't want the idealist in politics,' muttered the colonel.
+
+Latterly he also had taken to shaking his head over Nevil: Cecilia dared
+not ask him why.
+
+Mr. Tuckham arrived at Mount Laurels on the eve of the Nomination day in
+Bevisham.  An article in the Bevisham Gazette calling upon all true
+Liberals to demonstrate their unanimity by a multitudinous show of hands,
+he ascribed to the writing of a child of Erin; and he was highly diverted
+by the Liberal's hiring of Paddy to 'pen and spout' for him.
+'A Scotchman manages, and Paddy does the sermon for all their journals,'
+he said off-hand; adding: 'And the English are the compositors,
+I suppose.'  You may take that for an instance of the national spirit
+of Liberal newspapers!
+
+'Ah!'  sighed the colonel, as at a case clearly demonstrated against
+them.
+
+A drive down to Bevisham to witness the ceremony of the nomination in the
+town-hall sobered Mr. Tuckham's disposition to generalize.  Beauchamp had
+the show of hands, and to say with Captain Baskelett, that they were a
+dirty majority, was beneath Mr. Tuckham's verbal antagonism.  He fell
+into a studious reserve, noting everything, listening to everybody,
+greatly to Colonel Halkett's admiration of one by nature a talker and a
+thunderer.
+
+The show of hands Mr. Seymour Austin declared to be the most delusive of
+electoral auspices; and it proved so.  A little later than four o'clock
+in the afternoon of the election-day, Cecilia received a message from her
+father telling her that both of the Liberals were headed; 'Beauchamp
+nowhere.'
+
+Mrs. Grancey Lespel was the next herald of Beauchamp's defeat.  She
+merely stated the fact that she had met the colonel and Mr. Blackburn
+Tuckham driving on the outskirts of the town, and had promised to bring
+Cecilia the final numbers of the poll.  Without naming them, she unrolled
+the greater business in her mind.
+
+'A man who in the middle of an Election goes over to France to fight a
+duel, can hardly expect to win; he has all the morality of an English
+borough opposed to him,' she said; and seeing the young lady stiffen:
+'Oh! the duel is positive,' she dropped her voice.  'With the husband.
+Who else could it be?  And returns invalided.  That is evidence.  My
+nephew Palmet has it from Vivian Ducie, and he is acquainted with her
+tolerably intimately, and the story is, she was overtaken in her flight
+in the night, and the duel followed at eight o'clock in the morning; but
+her brother insisted on fighting for Captain Beauchamp, and I cannot tell
+you how--but his place in it I can't explain--there was a beau jeune
+homme, and it's quite possible that he should have been the person to
+stand up against the marquis.  At any rate, he insulted Captain
+Beauchamp, or thought your hero had insulted him, and the duel was with
+one or the other.  It matters exceedingly little with whom, if a duel was
+fought, and you see we have quite established that.'
+
+'I hope it is not true,' said Cecilia.
+
+'My dear, that is the Christian thing to do,' said Mrs. Lespel.
+'Duelling is horrible: though those Romfreys!--and the Beauchamps were
+just as bad, or nearly.  Colonel Richard fought for a friend's wife or
+sister.  But in these days duelling is incredible.  It was an inhuman
+practice always, and it is now worse--it is a reach of manners.  I would
+hope it is not true; and you may mean that I have it from Lord Palmet.
+But I know Vivian Ducie as well as I know my nephew, and if he distinctly
+mentions an occurrence, we may too surely rely on the truth of it; he is
+not a man to spread mischief.  Are you unaware that he met Captain
+Beauchamp at the chateau of the marquise?  The whole story was acted
+under his eyes.  He had only to take up his pen.  Generally he favours
+me with his French gossip.  I suppose there were circumstances in this
+affair more suitable to Palmet than to me.  He wrote a description of
+Madame de Rouaillout that set Palmet strutting about for an hour.  I have
+no doubt she must be a very beautiful woman, for a Frenchwoman: not
+regular features; expressive, capricious.  Vivian Ducie lays great stress
+on her eyes and eyebrows, and, I think, her hair.  With a Frenchwoman's
+figure, that is enough to make men crazy.  He says her husband deserves--
+but what will not young men write?  It is deeply to be regretted that
+Englishmen abroad--women the same, I fear--get the Continental tone in
+morals.  But how Captain Beauchamp could expect to carry on an Election
+and an intrigue together, only a head like his can tell us.  Grancey is
+in high indignation with him.  It does not concern the Election, you can
+imagine.  Something that man Dr. Shrapnel has done, which he says Captain
+Beauchamp could have prevented.  Quarrels of men!  I have instructed
+Palmet to write to Vivian Ducie for a photograph of Madame de Rouaillout.
+Do you know, one has a curiosity to see the face of the woman for whom a
+man ruins himself.  But I say again, he ought to be married.'
+
+'That there may be two victims?'  Cecilia said it smiling.
+
+She was young in suffering, and thought, as the unseasoned and
+inexperienced do, that a mask is a concealment.
+
+'Married--settled; to have him bound in honour,' said Mrs. Lespel.
+'I had a conversation with him when he was at Itchincope; and his look,
+and what I know of his father, that gallant and handsome Colonel Richard
+Beauchamp, would give one a kind of confidence in him; supposing always
+that he is not struck with one of those deadly passions that are like
+snakes, like magic.  I positively believe in them.  I have seen them.
+And if they end, they end as if the man were burnt out, and was ashes
+inside; as you see Mr. Stukely Culbrett, all cynicism.  You would not now
+suspect him of a passion!  It is true.  Oh, I know it!  That is what the
+men go to.  The women die.  Vera Winter died at twenty-three.  Caroline
+Ormond was hardly older.  You know her story; everybody knows it.  The
+most singular and convincing case was that of Lord Alfred Burnley and
+Lady Susan Gardiner, wife of the general; and there was an instance of
+two similarly afflicted--a very rare case, most rare: they never could
+meet to part!  It was almost ludicrous.  It is now quite certain that
+they did not conspire to meet.  At last the absolute fatality became so
+well understood by the persons immediately interested--You laugh?'
+
+'Do I laugh?'  said Cecilia.
+
+'We should all know the world, my dear, and you are a strong head.  The
+knowledge is only dangerous for fools.  And if romance is occasionally
+ridiculous, as I own it can be, humdrum, I protest, is everlastingly so.
+By-the-by, I should have told you that Captain Beauchamp was one hundred
+and ninety below Captain Baskelett when the state of the poll was handed
+to me.  The gentleman driving with your father compared the Liberals to a
+parachute cut away from the balloon.  Is he army or navy?'
+
+'He is a barrister, and some cousin of Captain Beauchamp.'
+
+'I should not have taken him for a Beauchamp,' said Mrs. Lespel; and,
+resuming her worldly sagacity, 'I should not like to be in opposition to
+that young man.'
+
+She seemed to have a fancy unexpressed regarding Mr. Tuckham.  Reminding
+herself that she might be behind time at Itchincope, where the guests
+would be numerous that evening, and the song of triumph loud, with
+Captain Baskelett to lead it, she kissed the young lady she had
+unintentionally been torturing so long, and drove away.
+
+Cecilia hoped it was not true.  Her heart sank heavily under the belief
+that it was.  She imagined the world abusing Nevil and casting him out,
+as those electors of Bevisham had just done, and impulsively she pleaded
+for him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her to defend
+herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful story, though
+she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by a singular
+inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it was her heart
+that condemned him.  She dwelt fondly on an image of the 'gallant and
+handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,' conjured up in her mind from the
+fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking of Nevil's father, whose chivalry
+threw a light on the son's, and whose errors, condoned by time, and with
+a certain brilliancy playing above them, interceded strangely on behalf
+of Nevil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION
+
+The brisk Election-day, unlike that wearisome but instructive canvass of
+the Englishman in his castle vicatim, teaches little; and its humours are
+those of a badly managed Christmas pantomime without a columbine--old
+tricks, no graces.  Nevertheless, things hang together so that it cannot
+be passed over with a bare statement of the fact of the Liberal-Radical
+defeat in Bevisham: the day was not without fruit in time to come for him
+whom his commiserating admirers of the non-voting sex all round the
+borough called the poor dear commander.  Beauchamp's holiday out of
+England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive restriction put upon
+him by Jenny Denham, and actively pursue the canvass and the harangue in
+person; by which conduct, as Jenny had foreseen, many temperate electors
+were alienated from Commander Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals
+were made compact: for they may be the skirmishing faction--poor
+scattered fragments, none of them sufficiently downright for the other;
+each outstripping each; rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets,
+inspired physicians, nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will;
+and still here and there a man shall arise to march them in close
+columns, if they can but trust him; in perfect subordination, a model
+even for Tories while they keep shoulder to shoulder.  And to behold such
+a disciplined body is intoxicating to the eye of a leader accustomed to
+count ahead upon vapourish abstractions, and therefore predisposed to add
+a couple of noughts to every tangible figure in his grasp.  Thus will a
+realized fifty become five hundred or five thousand to him: the very
+sense of number is instinct with multiplication in his mind; and those
+years far on in advance, which he has been looking to with some fatigue
+to the optics, will suddenly and rollickingly roll up to him at the
+shutting of his eyes in a temporary fit of gratification.  So, by looking
+and by not looking, he achieves his phantom victory--embraces his cloud.
+
+Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and he,
+a citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit of them
+indeed as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow that
+struck him, was, it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down when he
+saw Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled to a man.
+Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they might; they
+dance on the morning.  As for their chagrin at noon, you will find
+descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno.  They are for lifting our clay
+soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great mathematicians.  They
+have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they seem to be
+producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on them.
+You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; the weight is
+immense.  Dr. Shrapnel, however, speedily looked out again on his vast
+horizon, though prostrate.  He regained his height of stature with no
+man's help.  Success was but postponed for a generation or two.  Is it so
+very distant?  Gaze on it with the eye of our parent orb!  'I shall not
+see it here; you may,' he said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his
+outlook by saying to Mr. Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or
+rather stuck, in the track of the Radicals of a generation back.  Note,
+then, that Radicals, always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and
+for Tories it is Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths!  Those Liberals,
+those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms!  glorify
+themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit,
+for which they pay with their souls.  They have no true cohesion, for
+they have no vital principle.
+
+Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work of
+the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady swing,
+from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock, which is the
+clock's life, remember that.  The Liberals are the professors of the
+practicable in politics.
+
+'A suitable image for time-servers!'  Dr. Shrapnel exclaimed, intolerant
+of any mention of the Liberals as a party, especially in the hour of
+Radical discomfiture, when the fact that compromisers should exist
+exasperates men of a principle.  'Your Liberals are the band of Pyrrhus,
+an army of bastards, mercenaries professing the practicable for pay.
+They know us the motive force, the Tories the resisting power, and they
+feign to aid us in battering our enemy, that they may stop the shock.
+We fight, they profit.  What are they?  Stranded Whigs, crotchetty
+manufacturers; dissentient religionists; the half-minded, the hare-
+hearted; the I would and I would-not--shifty creatures, with youth's
+enthusiasm decaying in them, and a purse beginning to jingle; fearing
+lest we do too much for safety, our enemy not enough for safety.  They a
+party?  Let them take action and see!  We stand a thousand defeats; they
+not one!  Compromise begat them.  Once let them leave sucking the teats
+of compromise, yea, once put on the air of men who fight and die for a
+cause, they fly to pieces.  And whither the fragments?  Chiefly, my
+friend, into the Tory ranks.  Seriously so I say.  You between future and
+past are for the present--but with the hunted look behind of all godless
+livers in the present.  You Liberals are Tories with foresight, Radicals
+without faith.  You start, in fear of Toryism, on an errand of
+Radicalism, and in fear of Radicalism to Toryism you draw back.  There is
+your pendulum-swing!'
+
+Lectures to this effect were delivered by Dr. Shrapnel throughout the
+day, for his private spiritual solace it may be supposed, unto Lydiard,
+Turbot, Beauchamp, or whomsoever the man chancing to be near him, and
+never did Sir Oracle wear so extraordinary a garb.  The favourite
+missiles of the day were flour-bags.  Dr. Shrapnel's uncommon height, and
+his outrageous long brown coat, would have been sufficient to attract
+them, without the reputation he had for desiring to subvert everything
+old English.  The first discharges gave him the appearance of a thawing
+snowman.  Drenchings of water turned the flour to ribs of paste, and in
+colour at least he looked legitimately the cook's own spitted hare,
+escaped from her basting ladle, elongated on two legs.  It ensued that
+whenever he was caught sight of, as he walked unconcernedly about, the
+young street-professors of the decorative arts were seized with a frenzy
+to add their share to the whitening of him, until he might have been
+taken for a miller that had gone bodily through his meal.  The popular
+cry proclaimed him a ghost, and he walked like one, impassive, blanched,
+and silent amid the uproar of mobs of jolly ruffians, for each of whom it
+was a point of honour to have a shy at old Shrapnel.
+
+Clad in this preparation of pie-crust, he called from time to time at
+Beauchamp's hotel, and renewed his monologue upon that Radical empire in
+the future which was for ever in the future for the pioneers of men, yet
+not the less their empire.  'Do we live in our bodies?' quoth he,
+replying to his fiery interrogation: 'Ay, the Tories! the Liberals!'
+They lived in their bodies.  Not one syllable of personal consolation did
+he vouchsafe to Beauchamp.  He did not imagine it could be required by a
+man who had bathed in the pure springs of Radicalism; and it should be
+remarked that Beauchamp deceived him by imitating his air of happy
+abstraction, or subordination of the faculties to a distant view,
+comparable to a ship's crew in difficulties receiving the report of the
+man at the masthead.  Beauchamp deceived Miss Denham too, and himself,
+by saying, as if he cherished the philosophy of defeat, besides the
+resolution to fight on:
+
+'It's only a skirmish lost, and that counts for nothing in a battle
+without end: it must be incessant.'
+
+'But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?'  was her
+memorable answer.
+
+He glanced at Lydiard, to indicate that it came of that gentleman's
+influence upon her mind.  It was impossible for him to think that women
+thought.  The idea of a pretty woman exercising her mind independently,
+and moreover moving him to examine his own, made him smile.  Could a
+sweet-faced girl, the nearest to Renee in grace of manner and in feature
+of all women known to him, originate a sentence that would set him
+reflecting?  He was unable to forget it, though he allowed her no credit
+for it.
+
+On the other hand, his admiration of her devotedness to Dr. Shrapnel was
+unbounded.  There shone a strictly feminine quality!  according to the
+romantic visions of the sex entertained by Commander Beauchamp, and by
+others who would be the objects of it.  But not alone the passive virtues
+were exhibited by Jenny Denham: she proved that she had high courage.
+No remonstrance could restrain Dr. Shrapnel from going out to watch the
+struggle, and she went with him as a matter of course on each occasion.
+Her dress bore witness to her running the gauntlet beside him.
+
+'It was not thrown at me purposely,' she said, to quiet Beauchamp's
+wrath.  She saved the doctor from being rough mobbed.  Once when they
+were surrounded she fastened his arm under hers, and by simply moving on
+with an unswerving air of serenity obtained a passage for him.  So much
+did she make herself respected, that the gallant rascals became emulous
+in dexterity to avoid powdering her, by loudly execrating any but dead
+shots at the detested one, and certain boys were maltreated for an ardour
+involving clumsiness.  A young genius of this horde conceiving, in the
+spirit of the inventors of our improved modern ordnance, that it was vain
+to cast missiles which left a thing standing, hurled a stone wrapped in
+paper.  It missed its mark.  Jenny said nothing about it.  The day closed
+with a comfortable fight or two in by-quarters of the town, probably to
+prove that an undaunted English spirit, spite of fickle Fortune, survived
+in our muscles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY'S HEART AND HER INTELLECT
+
+Mr. Tuckham found his way to Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to see his kinsman on
+the day after the election.  There was a dinner in honour of the Members
+for Bevisham at Mount Laurels in the evening, and he was five minutes
+behind military time when he entered the restive drawing-room and stood
+before the colonel.  No sooner had he stated that he had been under the
+roof of Dr. Shrapnel, than his unpunctuality was immediately overlooked
+in the burst of impatience evoked by the name.
+
+'That pestilent fellow!'  Colonel Halkett ejaculated.  'I understand he
+has had the impudence to serve a notice on Grancey Lespel about
+encroachments on common land.'
+
+Some one described Dr. Shrapnel's appearance under the flour storm.
+
+'He deserves anything,' said the colonel, consulting his mantelpiece
+clock.
+
+Captain Baskelett observed: 'I shall have my account to settle with Dr.
+Shrapnel.'  He spoke like a man having a right to be indignant, but
+excepting that the doctor had bestowed nicknames upon him in a speech at
+a meeting, no one could discover the grounds for it.  He nodded briefly.
+A Radical apple had struck him on the left cheekbone as he performed his
+triumphal drive through the town, and a slight disfigurement remained, to
+which his hand was applied sympathetically at intervals, for the cheek-
+bone was prominent in his countenance, and did not well bear enlargement.
+And when a fortunate gentleman, desiring to be still more fortunate,
+would display the winning amiability of his character, distension of one
+cheek gives him an afflictingly false look of sweetness.
+
+The bent of his mind, nevertheless, was to please Miss Halkett.  He would
+be smiling, and intimately smiling.  Aware that she had a kind of pitiful
+sentiment for Nevil, he smiled over Nevil--poor Nevil!  'I give you my
+word, Miss Halkett, old Nevil was off his head yesterday.  I daresay he
+meant to be civil.  I met him; I called out to him, "Good day, cousin,
+I'm afraid you're beaten" and says he, "I fancy you've gained it, uncle."
+He didn't know where he was; all abroad, poor boy.  Uncle!--to me!'
+
+Miss Halkett would have accepted the instance for a proof of Nevil's
+distraction, had not Mr. Seymour Austin, who sat beside her, laughed and
+said to her: 'I suppose "uncle" was a chance shot, but it's equal to a
+poetic epithet in the light it casts on the story.'  Then it seemed to
+her that Nevil had been keenly quick, and Captain Baskelett's
+impenetrability was a sign of his density.  Her mood was to think Nevil
+Beauchamp only too quick, too adventurous and restless: one that wrecked
+brilliant gifts in a too general warfare; a lover of hazards, a hater of
+laws.  Her eyes flew over Captain Baskelett as she imagined Nevil
+addressing him as uncle, and, to put aside a spirit of mockery rising
+within her, she hinted a wish to hear Seymour Austin's opinion of Mr.
+Tuckham.  He condensed it in an interrogative tone: 'The other extreme?'
+The Tory extreme of Radical Nevil Beauchamp.  She assented.  Mr. Tuckham
+was at that moment prophesying the Torification of mankind; not as the
+trembling venturesome idea which we cast on doubtful winds, but as a ship
+is launched to ride the waters, with huzzas for a thing accomplished.
+Mr. Austin raised his shoulders imperceptibly, saying to Miss Halkett:
+'The turn will come to us as to others--and go.  Nothing earthly can
+escape that revolution.  We have to meet it with a policy, and let it
+pass with measures carried and our hands washed of some of our party
+sins.  I am, I hope, true to my party, but the enthusiasm of party I do
+not share.  He is right, however, when he accuses the nation of cowardice
+for the last ten years.  One third of the Liberals have been with us at
+heart, and dared not speak, and we dared not say what we wished.  We
+accepted a compact that satisfied us both--satisfied us better than when
+we were opposed by Whigs--that is, the Liberal reigned, and we governed:
+and I should add, a very clever juggler was our common chief.  Now we
+have the consequences of hollow peacemaking, in a suffrage that bids fair
+to extend to the wearing of hats and boots for a qualification.  The
+moral of it seems to be that cowardice is even worse for nations than for
+individual men, though the consequences come on us more slowly.'
+
+'You spoke of party sins,' Miss Halkett said incredulously.
+
+'I shall think we are the redoubtable party when we admit the charge.'
+
+'Are you alluding to the landowners?'
+
+'Like the land itself, they have rich veins in heavy matter.  For
+instance, the increasing wealth of the country is largely recruiting our
+ranks; and we shall be tempted to mistake numbers for strength, and
+perhaps again be reading Conservatism for a special thing of our own--a
+fortification.  That would be a party sin.  Conservatism is a principle
+of government; the best because the safest for an old country; and the
+guarantee that we do not lose the wisdom of past experience in our
+struggle with what is doubtful.  Liberalism stakes too much on the chance
+of gain.  It is uncomfortably seated on half-a-dozen horses; and it has
+to feed them too, and on varieties of corn.'
+
+'Yes,' Miss Halkett said, pausing, 'and I know you would not talk down to
+me, but the use of imagery makes me feel that I am addressed as a
+primitive intelligence.'
+
+'That's the fault of my trying at condensation, as the hieroglyphists put
+an animal for a paragraph.  I am incorrigible, you see; but the lecture
+in prose must be for by-and-by, if you care to have it.'
+
+'If you care to read it to me.  Did a single hieroglyphic figure stand
+for so much?'
+
+'I have never deciphered one.'
+
+'You have been speaking to me too long in earnest, Mr. Austin!'
+
+'I accept the admonition, though it is wider than the truth.  Have you
+ever consented to listen to politics before?'
+
+Cecilia reddened faintly, thinking of him who had taught her to listen,
+and of her previous contempt of the subject.
+
+A political exposition devoid of imagery was given to her next day on the
+sunny South-western terrace of Mount Laurels, when it was only by
+mentally translating it into imagery that she could advance a step beside
+her intellectual guide; and she was ashamed of the volatility of her
+ideas.  She was constantly comparing Mr. Austin and Nevil Beauchamp,
+seeing that the senior and the junior both talked to her with the
+familiar recognition of her understanding which was a compliment without
+the gross corporeal phrase.  But now she made another discovery, that
+should have been infinitely more of a compliment, and it was bewildering,
+if not repulsive to her:--could it be credited?  Mr. Austin was a firm
+believer in new and higher destinies for women.  He went farther than she
+could concede the right of human speculation to go; he was, in fact, as
+Radical there as Nevil Beauchamp politically; and would not the latter
+innovator stare, perchance frown conservatively, at a prospect of woman
+taking counsel, in council, with men upon public affairs, like the women
+in the Germania!  Mr. Austin, if this time he talked in earnest, deemed
+that Englishwomen were on the road to win such a promotion, and would win
+it ultimately.  He said soberly that he saw more certain indications of
+the reality of progress among women than any at present shown by men.
+And he was professedly temperate.  He was but for opening avenues to the
+means of livelihood for them, and leaving it to their strength to conquer
+the position they might wish to win.  His belief that they would do so
+was the revolutionary sign.
+
+'Are there points of likeness between Radicals and Tories?'  she
+inquired.
+
+'I suspect a cousinship in extremes,' he answered.
+
+'If one might be present at an argument,' said she.
+
+'We have only to meet to fly apart as wide as the Poles,' Mr. Austin
+rejoined.
+
+But she had not spoken of a particular person to meet him; and how, then,
+had she betrayed herself?  She fancied he looked unwontedly arch as he
+resumed:
+
+'The end of the argument would see us each entrenched in his party.
+Suppose me to be telling your Radical friend such truisms as that we
+English have not grown in a day, and were not originally made free and
+equal by decree; that we have grown, and must continue to grow, by the
+aid and the development of our strength; that ours is a fairly legible
+history, and a fair example of the good and the bad in human growth; that
+his landowner and his peasant have no clear case of right and wrong to
+divide them, one being the descendant of strong men, the other of weak
+ones; and that the former may sink, the latter may rise--there is no
+artificial obstruction; and if it is difficult to rise, it is easy to
+sink.  Your Radical friend, who would bring them to a level by
+proclamation, could not adopt a surer method for destroying the manhood
+of a people: he is for doctoring wooden men, and I for not letting our
+stout English be cut down short as Laplanders; he would have them in a
+forcing house, and I in open air, as hitherto.  Do you perceive a
+discussion? and you apprehend the nature of it.  We have nerves.  That is
+why it is better for men of extremely opposite opinions not to meet.  I
+dare say Radicalism has a function, and so long as it respects the laws I
+am ready to encounter it where it cannot be avoided.  Pardon my prosing.'
+
+'Recommend me some hard books to study through the Winter,' said Cecilia,
+refreshed by a discourse that touched no emotions, as by a febrifuge.
+Could Nevil reply to it?  She fancied him replying, with that wild head
+of his--wildest of natures.  She fancied also that her wish was like Mr.
+Austin's not to meet him.  She was enjoying a little rest.
+
+It was not quite generous in Mr. Austin to assume that 'her Radical
+friend' had been prompting her.  However, she thanked him in her heart
+for the calm he had given her.  To be able to imagine Nevil Beauchamp
+intellectually erratic was a tonic satisfaction to the proud young lady,
+ashamed of a bondage that the bracing and pointing of her critical powers
+helped her to forget.  She had always preferred the society of men of Mr.
+Austin's age.  How old was he?  Her father would know.  And why was he
+unmarried?  A light frost had settled on the hair about his temples; his
+forehead was lightly wrinkled; but his mouth and smile, and his eyes,
+were lively as a young man's, with more in them.  His age must be
+something less than fifty.  O for peace!  she sighed.  When he stepped
+into his carriage, and stood up in it to wave adieu to her, she thought
+his face and figure a perfect example of an English gentleman in his
+prime.
+
+Captain Baskelett requested the favour of five minutes of conversation
+with Miss Halkett before he followed Mr. Austin, on his way to Steynham.
+
+She returned from that colloquy to her father and Mr. Tuckham.  The
+colonel looked straight in her face, with an elevation of the brows.
+To these points of interrogation she answered with a placid fall of her
+eyelids.  He sounded a note of approbation in his throat.
+
+All the company having departed, Mr. Tuckham for the first time spoke of
+his interview with his kinsman Beauchamp.  Yesterday evening he had
+slurred it, as if he had nothing to relate, except the finding of an old
+schoolfellow at Dr. Shrapnel's named Lydiard, a man of ability fool
+enough to have turned author on no income.  But that which had appeared
+to Miss Halkett a want of observancy, became attributable to depth of
+character on its being clear that he had waited for the departure of the
+transient guests of the house, to pour forth his impressions without
+holding up his kinsman to public scorn.  He considered Shrapnel mad and
+Beauchamp mad.  No such grotesque old monster as Dr. Shrapnel had he seen
+in the course of his travels.  He had never listened to a madman running
+loose who was at all up to Beauchamp.  At a loss for words to paint him,
+he said: 'Beauchamp seems to have a head like a firework manufactory,
+he's perfectly pyrocephalic.'  For an example of Dr. Shrapnel's talk: 'I
+happened,' said Mr. Tuckham, 'casually, meaning no harm, and not
+supposing I was throwing a lighted match on powder, to mention the word
+Providence.  I found myself immediately confronted by Shrapnel--
+overtopped, I should say.  He is a lank giant of about seven feet in
+height; the kind of show man that used to go about in caravans over the
+country; and he began rocking over me like a poplar in a gale, and cries
+out: "Stay there!  away with that!  Providence?  Can you set a thought on
+Providence, not seeking to propitiate it?  And have you not there the
+damning proof that you are at the foot of an Idol?"--The old idea about a
+special Providence, I suppose.  These fellows have nothing new but their
+trimmings.  And he went on with: "Ay, invisible," and his arm chopping,
+"but an Idol! an Idol!"--I was to think of "nought but Laws."  He
+admitted there might be one above the Laws.  "To realize him is to fry
+the brains in their pan," says he, and struck his forehead--a slap: and
+off he walked down the garden, with his hands at his coat-tails.  I
+venture to say it may be taken for a proof of incipient insanity to care
+to hear such a fellow twice.  And Beauchamp holds him up for a sage and a
+prophet!'
+
+'He is a very dangerous dog,' said Colonel Halkett.
+
+'The best of it is--and I take this for the strongest possible proof that
+Beauchamp is mad--Shrapnel stands for an advocate of morality against
+him.  I'll speak of it . . . .'
+
+Mr. Tuckham nodded to the colonel, who said: 'Speak out.  My daughter has
+been educated for a woman of the world.'
+
+'Well, sir, it's nothing to offend a young lady's ears.  Beauchamp is for
+socially enfranchising the sex--that is all.  Quite enough.  Not a whit
+politically.  Love is to be the test: and if a lady ceases to love her
+husband .  .  .  if she sets her fancy elsewhere, she's bound to leave
+him.  The laws are tyrannical, our objections are cowardly.  Well, this
+Dr. Shrapnel harangued about society; and men as well as women are to
+sacrifice their passions on that altar.  If he could burlesque himself it
+would be in coming out as a cleric--the old Pagan!'
+
+'Did he convince Captain Beauchamp?'  the colonel asked, manifestly for
+his daughter to hear the reply; which was: 'Oh dear, no!'
+
+'Were you able to gather from Captain Beauchamp's remarks whether he is
+much disappointed by the result of the election?'  said Cecilia.
+
+Mr. Tuckham could tell her only that Captain Beauchamp was incensed
+against an elector named Tomlinson for withdrawing a promised vote on
+account of lying rumours, and elated by the conquest of a Mr. Carpendike,
+who was reckoned a tough one to drag by the neck.  'The only sane
+people in the house are a Miss Denham and the cook: I lunched there,'
+Mr. Tuckham nodded approvingly.  'Lydiard must be mad.  What he's wasting
+his time there for I can't guess.  He says he's engaged there in writing
+a prefatory essay to a new publication of Harry Denham's poems--whoever
+that may be.  And why wasting it there?  I don't like it.  He ought to be
+earning his bread.  He'll be sure to be borrowing money by-and-by.  We've
+got ten thousand too many fellows writing already, and they 've seen a
+few inches of the world, on the Continent!  He can write.  But it's all
+unproductive-dead weight on the country, these fellows with their
+writings!  He says Beauchamp's praise of Miss Denham is quite deserved.
+He tells me, that at great peril to herself--and she nearly had her arm
+broken by a stone he saved Shrapnel from rough usage on the election-
+day.'
+
+'Hum!'  Colonel Halkett grunted significantly.
+
+'So I thought,' Mr. Tuckham responded.  'One doesn't want the man to be
+hurt, but he ought to be put down in some way.  My belief is he's a Fire-
+worshipper.  I warrant I would extinguish him if he came before me.  He's
+an incendiary, at any rate.'
+
+'Do you think,' said Cecilia, 'that Captain Beauchamp is now satisfied
+with his experience of politics?'
+
+'Dear me, no,' said Mr. Tuckham.  'It's the opening of a campaign.  He's
+off to the North, after he has been to Sussex and Bucks.  He's to be at
+it all his life.  One thing he shows common sense in.  If I heard him
+once I heard him say half-a-dozen times, that he must have money:--
+"I must have money!"  And so he must if he 's to head the Radicals.  He
+wants to start a newspaper!  Is he likely to get money from his uncle
+Romfrey?'
+
+'Not for his present plan of campaign.'  Colonel Halkett enunciated the
+military word sarcastically.  'Let's hope he won't get money.'
+
+'He says he must have it.'
+
+'Who is to stand and deliver, then?'
+
+'I don't know; I only repeat what he says: unless he has an eye on my
+Aunt Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for
+political campaigning.'
+
+'Money!'  Colonel Halkett ejaculated.
+
+That word too was in the heart of the heiress.
+
+Nevil must have money!  Could he have said it?  Ordinary men might say or
+think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance: but not Nevil
+Beauchamp.
+
+Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father for
+his comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on these
+occasions, had proposed to her unavailingly.  Italian and English
+gentlemen were in the list of her rejected suitors: and hitherto she had
+seen them come and go, one might say, from a watchtower in the skies.
+None of them was the ideal she waited for: what their feelings were,
+their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on.  They dotted the
+landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their fashion,
+somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields were to the
+giant's daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia.  But Nevil
+Beauchamp had compelled her to quit her lofty station, pulled her low as
+the littlest of women that throb and flush at one man's footstep: and
+being well able to read the nature and aspirations of Captain Baskelett,
+it was with the knowledge of her having been proposed to as heiress of a
+great fortune that she chanced to hear of Nevil's resolve to have money.
+If he did say it!  And was anything likelier? was anything unlikelier?
+His foreign love denied to him, why, now he devoted himself to money:
+money--the last consideration of a man so single-mindedly generous as he!
+But he must have money to pursue his contest!  But would he forfeit the
+truth in him for money for any purpose?
+
+The debate on this question grew as incessant as the thought of him.
+Was it not to be supposed that the madness of the pursuit of his
+political chimaera might change his character?
+
+She hoped he would not come to Mount Laurels, thinking she should esteem
+him less if he did; knowing that her defence of him, on her own behalf,
+against herself, depended now on an esteem lodged perhaps in her
+wilfulness.  Yet if he did not come, what an Arctic world!
+
+He came on a November afternoon when the woods glowed, and no sun.  The
+day was narrowed in mist from earth to heaven: a moveless and possessing
+mist.  It left space overhead for one wreath of high cloud mixed with
+touches of washed red upon moist blue, still as the mist, insensibly
+passing into it.  Wet webs crossed the grass, chill in the feeble light.
+The last flowers of the garden bowed to decay.  Dead leaves, red and
+brown and spotted yellow, fell straight around the stems of trees, lying
+thick.  The glow was universal, and the chill.
+
+Cecilia sat sketching the scene at a window of her study, on the level of
+the drawing-room, and he stood by outside till she saw him.  He greeted
+her through the glass, then went round to the hall door, giving her time
+to recover, if only her heart had been less shaken.
+
+Their meeting was like the features of the day she set her brush to
+picture: characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone, though
+it breathed little cheer.  Is there not a pleasure in contemplating that
+which is characteristic?  Her unfinished sketch recalled him after he had
+gone: he lived in it, to startle her again, and bid her heart gallop and
+her cheeks burn.  The question occurred to her: May not one love, not
+craving to be beloved?  Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports
+it; increases rather than diminishes our noble self-esteem.  To attain
+such a love the martyrs writhed up to the crown of saints.  For a while
+Cecilia revelled in the thought that she could love in this most saint-
+like manner.  How they fled, the sordid ideas of him which accused him
+of the world's one passion, and were transferred to her own bosom in
+reproach that she should have imagined them existing in his!  He talked
+simply and sweetly of his defeat, of time wasted away from the canvass,
+of loss of money: and he had little to spare, he said.  The water-colour
+drawing interested him.  He said he envied her that power of isolation,
+and the eye for beauty in every season.  She opened a portfolio of Mr.
+Tuckham's water-colour drawings in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia,
+and the Americas; and he was to be excused for not caring to look through
+them.  His remark, that they seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust,
+she thought, smiling to think of the critic criticized.  His wonderment
+that a young man like his Lancastrian cousin should be 'an unmitigated
+Tory' was perhaps natural.
+
+Cecilia said, 'Yet I cannot discern in him a veneration for aristocracy.'
+'That's not wanted for modern Toryism,' said Nevil.  'One may venerate
+old families when they show the blood of the founder, and are not dead
+wood.  I do.  And I believe the blood of the founder, though the man may
+have been a savage and a robber, had in his day finer elements in it than
+were common.  But let me say at a meeting that I respect true
+aristocracy, I hear a growl and a hiss beginning: why?  Don't judge them
+hastily: because the people have seen the aristocracy opposed to the
+cause that was weak, and only submitting to it when it commanded them to
+resist at their peril; clinging to traditions, and not anywhere standing
+for humanity: much more a herd than the people themselves.  Ah!  well, we
+won't talk of it now.  I say that is no aristocracy, if it does not head
+the people in virtue--military, political, national: I mean the qualities
+required by the times for leadership.  I won't bother you with my ideas
+now.  I love to see you paint-brush in hand.'
+
+Her brush trembled on the illumination of a scarlet maple.  'In this
+country we were not originally made free and equal by decree, Nevil.'
+
+'No,' said he, 'and I cast no blame on our farthest ancestors.'
+
+It struck her that this might be an outline of a reply to Mr. Austin.
+
+'So you have been thinking over it?'  he asked.
+
+'Not to conclusions,' she said, trying to retain in her mind the
+evanescent suggestiveness of his previous remark, and vexed to find
+herself upon nothing but a devious phosphorescent trail there.
+
+Her forehead betrayed the unwonted mental action.  He cried out for
+pardon.  'What right have I to bother you?  I see it annoys you.  The
+truth is, I came for peace.  I think of you when they talk of English
+homes.'
+
+She felt then that he was comparing her home with another, a foreign
+home.  After he had gone she felt that there had been a comparison of two
+persons.  She remembered one of his observations: 'Few women seem to have
+courage'; when his look at her was for an instant one of scrutiny or
+calculation.  Under a look like that we perceive that we are being
+weighed.  She had no clue to tell her what it signified.
+
+Glorious and solely glorious love, that has risen above emotion, quite
+independent of craving!  That is to be the bird of upper air, poised on
+his wings.  It is a home in the sky.  Cecilia took possession of it
+systematically, not questioning whether it would last; like one who is
+too enamoured of the habitation to object to be a tenant-at-will.  If it
+was cold, it was in recompense immeasurably lofty, a star-girdled place;
+and dwelling in it she could avow to herself the secret which was now
+working self-deception, and still preserve her pride unwounded.  Her
+womanly pride, she would have said in vindication of it: but Cecilia
+Halkett's pride went far beyond the merely womanly.
+
+Thus she was assisted to endure a journey down to Wales, where Nevil
+would surely not be.  She passed a Winter without seeing him.  She
+returned to Mount Laurels from London at Easter, and went on a visit to
+Steynham, and back to London, having sight of him nowhere, still firm in
+the thought that she loved ethereally, to bless, forgive, direct,
+encourage, pray for him, impersonally.  She read certain speeches
+delivered by Nevil at assemblies of Liberals or Radicals, which were
+reported in papers in the easy irony of the style of here and there a
+sentence, here and there a summary: salient quotations interspersed with
+running abstracts: a style terrible to friends of the speaker so
+reported, overwhelming if they differ in opinion: yet her charity was a
+match for it.  She was obliged to have recourse to charity, it should be
+observed.  Her father drew her attention to the spectacle of R. C. S.
+Nevil Beauchamp, Commander R.N., fighting those reporters with letters in
+the newspapers, and the dry editorial comment flanked by three stars on
+the left.  He was shocked to see a gentleman writing such letters to the
+papers.  'But one thing hangs on another,' said he.
+
+'But you seem angry with Nevil, papa,' said she.
+
+'I do hate a turbulent, restless fellow, my dear,' the colonel burst out.
+
+'Papa, he has really been unfairly reported.'
+
+Cecilia laid three privately-printed full reports of Commander
+Beauchamp's speeches (very carefully corrected by him) before her father.
+
+He suffered his eye to run down a page.  'Is it possible you read this?--
+this trash!--dangerous folly, I call it.'
+
+Cecilia's reply, 'In the interests of justice, I do,' was meant to
+express her pure impartiality.  By a toleration of what is detested we
+expose ourselves to the keenness of an adverse mind.
+
+'Does he write to you, too?'  said the colonel.
+
+She answered: 'Oh, no; I am not a politician.'
+
+'He seems to have expected you to read those tracts of his, though.'
+
+'Yes, I think he would convert me if he could,' said Cecilia.
+
+'Though you're not a politician.'
+
+'He relies on the views he delivers in public, rather than on writing to
+persuade; that was my meaning, papa.'
+
+'Very well,' said the colonel, not caring to show his anxiety.
+
+Mr. Tuckham dined with them frequently in London. This gentleman betrayed
+his accomplishments one by one.  He sketched, and was no artist; he
+planted, and was no gardener; he touched the piano neatly, and was no
+musician; he sang, and he had no voice.  Apparently he tried his hand at
+anything, for the privilege of speaking decisively upon all things.  He
+accompanied the colonel and his daughter on a day's expedition to Mrs.
+Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames, and they agreed that he shone to great
+advantage in her society.  Mrs. Beauchamp said she had seen her great-
+nephew Nevil, but without a comment on his conduct or his person; grave
+silence.  Reflecting on it, Cecilia grew indignant at the thought that
+Mr. Tuckham might have been acting a sinister part.  Mrs. Beauchamp
+alluded to a newspaper article of her favourite great-nephew Blackburn,
+written, Cecilia knew through her father, to controvert some tremendous
+proposition of Nevil's.  That was writing, Mrs. Beauchamp said.  'I am
+not in the habit of fearing a conflict, so long as we have stout
+defenders.  I rather like it,' she said.
+
+The colonel entertained Mrs. Beauchamp, while Mr. Tuckham led Miss
+Halkett over the garden.  Cecilia considered that his remarks upon Nevil
+were insolent.
+
+'Seriously, Miss Halkett, to take him at his best, he is a very good
+fellow, I don't doubt; I am told so; and a capital fellow among men, a
+good friend and not a bad boon-fellow, and for that matter, the smoking-
+room is a better test than the drawing-room; all he wants is emphatically
+school--school--school.  I have recommended the simple iteration of that
+one word in answer to him at his meetings, and the printing of it as a
+foot-note to his letters.'
+
+Cecilia's combative spirit precipitated her to say, 'I hear the mob in it
+shouting Captain Beauchamp down.'
+
+'Ay,' said Mr. Tuckham, 'it would be setting the mob to shout wisely at
+last.'
+
+'The mob is a wild beast.'
+
+'Then we should hear wisdom coming out of the mouth of the wild beast.'
+
+'Men have the phrase, "fair play."'
+
+'Fair play, I say, is not applicable to a man who deliberately goes about
+to stir the wild beast.  He is laughed at, plucked, hustled, and robbed,
+by those who deafen him with their "plaudits"--their roars.  Did you see
+his advertisement of a great-coat, lost at some rapscallion gathering
+down in the North, near my part of the country?  A great-coat and a
+packet of letters.  He offers a reward of L10.  But that's honest robbery
+compared with the bleeding he'll get.'
+
+'Do you know Mr. Seymour Austin?'  Miss Halkett asked him.
+
+'I met him once at your father's table.  Why?'
+
+'I think you would like to listen to him.'
+
+'Yes, my fault is not listening enough,' said Mr. Tuckham.
+
+He was capable of receiving correction.
+
+Her father told her he was indebted to Mr. Tuckham past payment in coin,
+for services rendered by him on a trying occasion among the miners in
+Wales during the first spring month.  'I dare say he can speak
+effectively to miners,' Cecilia said, outvying the contemptuous young man
+in superciliousness, but with effort and not with satisfaction.
+
+She left London in July, two days before her father could be induced to
+return to Mount Laurels.  Feverish, and strangely subject to caprices
+now, she chose the longer way round by Sussex, and alighted at the
+station near Steynham to call on Mrs. Culling, whom she knew to be at the
+Hall, preparing it for Mr. Romfrey's occupation.  In imitation of her
+father she was Rosamund's fast friend, though she had never quite
+realized her position, and did not thoroughly understand her.  Would it
+not please her father to hear that she had chosen the tedious route for
+the purpose of visiting this lady, whose champion he was?
+
+So she went to Steynham, and for hours she heard talk of no one, of
+nothing, but her friend Nevil.  Cecilia was on her guard against
+Rosamund's defence of his conduct in France.  The declaration that there
+had been no misbehaviour at all could not be accepted; but the news of
+Mr. Romfrey's having installed Nevil in Holdesbury to manage that
+property, and of his having mooted to her father the question of an
+alliance between her and Nevil, was wonderful.  Rosamund could not say
+what answer her father had made: hardly favourable, Cecilia supposed,
+since he had not spoken of the circumstance to her.  But Mr. Romfrey's
+influence with him would certainly be powerful.
+
+It was to be assumed, also, that Nevil had been consulted by his uncle.
+Rosamund said full-heartedly that this alliance had for years been her
+life's desire, and then she let the matter pass, nor did she once loop at
+Cecilia searchingly, or seem to wish to probe her.  Cecilia disagreed
+with Rosamund on an insignificant point in relation to something Mr.
+Romfrey and Captain Baskelett had done, and, as far as she could
+recollect subsequently, there was a packet of letters, or a pocket-book
+containing letters of Nevil's which he had lost, and which had been
+forwarded to Mr. Romfrey; for the pocket-book was originally his, and his
+address was printed inside.  But among these letters was one from Dr.
+Shrapnel to Nevil: a letter so horrible that Rosamund frowned at the
+reminiscence of it, holding it to be too horrible for the quotation of a
+sentence.  She owned she had forgotten any three consecutive words.  Her
+known dislike of Captain Baskelett, however, was insufficient to make her
+see that it was unjustifiable in him to run about London reading it, with
+comments of the cruellest.  Rosamund's greater detestation of Dr.
+Shrapnel blinded her to the offence committed by the man she would
+otherwise have been very ready to scorn.  So small did the circumstance
+appear to Cecilia, notwithstanding her gentle opposition at the time she
+listened to it, that she never thought of mentioning it to her father,
+and only remembered it when Captain Baskelett, with Lord Palmet in his
+company, presented himself at Mount Laurels, and proposed to the colonel
+to read to him 'a letter from that scoundrelly old Shrapnel to Nevil
+Beauchamp, upon women, wives, thrones, republics, British loyalty, et
+caetera,'--an et caetera that rolled a series of tremendous
+reverberations down the list of all things held precious by freeborn
+Englishmen.
+
+She would have prevented the reading.  But the colonel would have it.
+
+'Read on,' said he.  'Mr. Romfrey saw no harm.'
+
+Captain Baskelett held up Dr. Shrapnel's letter to Commander Beauchamp,
+at about half a yard's distance on the level of his chin, as a big-
+chested singer in a concert-room holds his music-scroll.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP
+
+Before we give ear to the recital of Dr. Shrapnel's letter to his pupil
+in politics by the mouth of Captain Baskelett, it is necessary to defend
+this gentleman, as he would handsomely have defended himself, from the
+charge that he entertained ultimate designs in regard to the really
+abominable scrawl, which was like a child's drawing of ocean with here
+and there a sail capsized, and excited his disgust almost as much as did
+the contents his great indignation.  He was prepared to read it, and
+stood blown out for the task, but it was temporarily too much for him.
+'My dear Colonel, look at it, I entreat you,' he said, handing the letter
+for exhibition, after fixing his eye-glass, and dropping it in repulsion.
+The common sentiment of mankind is offended by heterodoxy in mean attire;
+for there we see the self-convicted villain--the criminal caught in the
+act; we try it and convict it by instinct without the ceremony of a jury;
+and so thoroughly aware of our promptitude in this respect has our arch-
+enemy become since his mediaeval disgraces that his particular advice to
+his followers is now to scrupulously copy the world in externals; never
+to appear poorly clothed, nor to impart deceptive communications in bad
+handwriting.  We can tell black from white, and our sagacity has taught
+him a lesson.
+
+Colonel Halkett glanced at the detestable penmanship.  Lord Palmet did
+the same, and cried, 'Why, it's worse than mine!'
+
+Cecilia had protested against the reading of the letter, and she declined
+to look at the writing.  She was entreated, adjured to look, in Captain
+Baskelett's peculiarly pursuing fashion; a 'nay, but you shall,' that she
+had been subjected to previously, and would have consented to run like a
+schoolgirl to escape from.
+
+To resume the defence of him: he was a man incapable of forming plots,
+because his head would not hold them.  He was an impulsive man, who could
+impale a character of either sex by narrating fables touching persons of
+whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid of malice,
+unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so aggrieved that his
+original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new circumstances and be
+the parent of a line of successive impulses, in the main resembling an
+extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed back with fondness, all the
+while protesting sincerely his perfect innocence of anything of the kind.
+Circumstances will often interwind with the moods of simply irritated
+men.  In the present instance he could just perceive what might
+immediately come of his reading out of this atrocious epistle wherein
+Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the dangling puppet of a mountebank wire-
+pulley, infidel, agitator, leveller, and scoundrel.  Cognizant of Mr.
+Romfrey's overtures to Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming
+woman in the house at Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a
+friendly and good thing to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett
+know Mr. Nevil through a bit of his correspondence.  This, then, was a
+matter of business and duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of
+his, way to call at Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not
+to alarm the heiress.
+
+A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
+and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the
+shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
+notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
+practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
+it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
+ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
+dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection.  But an
+heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
+his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and
+the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride, all the
+habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by that
+stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her father
+with the mere lowering of her eyelids.  Conceive the highest bidder at an
+auction hearing the article announce that it will not have him!  Captain
+Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:--the girl could not
+know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he requested the world
+to partake of his astonishment.  Chronicles of the season in London
+informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom the gates were shut.
+She could hardly be thinking of Nevil?  However, let the epistle be read.
+'Now for the Shrapnel shot,' he nodded finally to Colonel Halkett,
+expanded his bosom, or natural cuirass, as before-mentioned, and was
+vocable above the common pitch:--
+
+     '"MY BRAVE BEAUCHAMP,--On with your mission, and never a summing of
+     results in hand, nor thirst for prospects, nor counting upon
+     harvests; for seed sown in faith day by day is the nightly harvest
+     of the soul, and with the soul we work.  With the soul we see."'
+
+Captain Baskelett intervened: 'Ahem!  I beg to observe that this
+delectable rubbish is underlined by old Nevil's pencil.'  He promised to
+do a little roaring whenever it occurred, and continued with ghastly
+false accentuation, an intermittent sprightliness and depression of tone
+in the wrong places.
+
+'"The soul," et caetera.  Here we are!
+
+     "Desires to realize our gains are akin to the passion of usury;
+     these are tricks of the usurer to grasp his gold in act and
+     imagination.  Have none of them.  Work at the people!"
+
+--At them, remark!--
+
+     "Moveless do they seem to you?  Why, so is the earth to the sowing
+     husbandman, and though we cannot forecast a reaping season, we have
+     in history durable testification that our seasons come in the souls
+     of men, yea, as a planet that we have set in motion, and faster and
+     faster are we spinning it, and firmer and firmer shall we set it to
+     regularity of revolution.  That means life!"
+
+--Shrapnel roars: you will have Nevil in a minute.
+
+     "Recognize that now we have bare life; at best for the bulk of men
+     the Saurian lizard's broad back soaking and roasting in primeval
+     slime; or say, in the so-called teachers of men, as much of life as
+     pricks the frog in March to stir and yawn, and up on a flaccid leap
+     that rolls him over some three inches nearer to the ditchwater
+     besought by his instinct."
+
+'I ask you, did you ever hear?  The flaccid frog!  But on we go.'
+
+     '"Professors, prophets, masters, each hitherto has had his creed and
+     system to offer, good mayhap for the term; and each has put it forth
+     for the truth everlasting, to drive the dagger to the heart of time,
+     and put the axe to human growth!--that one circle of wisdom issuing
+     of the experience and needs of their day, should act the despot over
+     all other circles for ever!--so where at first light shone to light
+     the yawning frog to his wet ditch, there, with the necessitated
+     revolution of men's minds in the course of ages, darkness radiates."
+
+'That's old Nevil.  Upon my honour, I haven't a notion of what it all
+means, and I don't believe the old rascal Shrapnel has himself.  And pray
+be patient, my dear colonel.  You will find him practical presently.
+I'll skip, if you tell me to.  Darkness radiates, does it!
+
+     '"The creed that rose in heaven sets below; and where we had an
+     angel we have claw-feet and fangs.  Ask how that is!  The creed is
+     much what it was when the followers diverged it from the Founder.
+     But humanity is not where it was when that creed was food and
+     guidance.  Creeds will not die not fighting.  We cannot root them up
+     out of us without blood."
+
+'He threatens blood!--'
+
+     '"Ours, my Beauchamp, is the belief that humanity advances beyond
+     the limits of creeds, is to be tied to none.  We reverence the
+     Master in his teachings; we behold the limits of him in his creed--
+     and that is not his work.  We truly are his disciples, who see how
+     far it was in him to do service; not they that made of his creed a
+     strait-jacket for humanity.  So, in our prayers we dedicate the
+     world to God, not calling him great for a title, no--showing him we
+     know him great in a limitless world, lord of a truth we tend to,
+     have not grasped.  I say Prayer is good.  I counsel it to you again
+     and again: in joy, in sickness of heart.  The infidel will not pray;
+     the creed-slave prays to the image in his box."'
+
+'I've had enough!'  Colonel Halkett ejaculated.
+
+'"We,"' Captain Baskelett put out his hand for silence with an ineffable
+look of entreaty, for here was Shrapnel's hypocrisy in full bloom:
+
+     '"We make prayer a part of us, praying for no gifts, no
+     interventions; through the faith in prayer opening the soul to the
+     undiscerned.  And take this, my Beauchamp, for the good in prayer,
+     that it makes us repose on the unknown with confidence, makes us
+     flexible to change, makes us ready for revolution--for life, then!
+     He who has the fountain of prayer in him will not complain of
+     hazards.  Prayer is the recognition of laws; the soul's exercise and
+     source of strength; its thread of conjunction with them.  Prayer for
+     an object is the cajolery of an idol; the resource of superstition.
+     There you misread it, Beauchamp.  We that fight the living world
+     must have the universal for succour of the truth in it.  Cast forth
+     the soul in prayer, you meet the efuence of the outer truth, you
+     join with the creative elements giving breath to you; and that crust
+     of habit which is the soul's tomb; and custom, the soul's tyrant;
+     and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks us in a crater; and fear,
+     which plucks the feathers from the wings of the soul and sits it
+     naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing of a common
+     hodman's foot above sounds like the king of terrors coming,--you are
+     free of them, you live in the day and for the future, by this
+     exercise and discipline of the soul's faith.  Me it keeps young
+     everlastingly, like the fountain of .  .  ."'
+
+'I say I cannot sit and hear any more of it!'  exclaimed the colonel,
+chafing out of patience.
+
+Lord Palmet said to Miss Halkett: 'Isn't it like what we used to remember
+of a sermon?'
+
+Cecilia waited for her father to break away, but Captain Baskelett had
+undertaken to skip, and was murmuring in sing-song some of the phrases
+that warned him off:
+
+'"History--Bible of Humanity; .  .  .  Permanency--enthusiast's dream--
+despot's aim--clutch of dead men's fingers in live flesh .  .  .  Man
+animal; man angel; man rooted; man winged": .  .  .  Really, all this is
+too bad.  Ah!  here we are: "At them with outspeaking, Beauchamp!"  Here
+we are, colonel, and you will tell me whether you think it treasonable or
+not.  "At them," et caetera: "We have signed no convention to respect
+their"--he speaks of Englishmen, Colonel Halkett--"their passive
+idolatries; a people with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship,
+but a word of dissent holds you up to execration; and only for the
+freedom won in foregone days their hate would be active.  As we have them
+in their present stage,"--old Nevil's mark--"We are not parties to the
+tacit agreement to fill our mouths and shut our eyes.  We speak because
+it is better they be roused to lapidate us than soused in their sty, with
+none to let them hear they live like swine, craving only not to be
+disturbed at the trough.  The religion of this vast English middle-class
+ruling the land is Comfort.  It is their central thought; their idea of
+necessity; their sole aim.  Whatsoever ministers to Comfort, seems to
+belong to it, pretends to support it, they yield their passive worship
+to.  Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush.  There you get at their
+point of unity.  They will pay for the security of Comfort, calling it
+national worship, or national defence, if too much money is not
+subtracted from the means of individual comfort: if too much foresight
+is not demanded for the comfort of their brains.  Have at them there.
+Speak.  Moveless as you find them, they are not yet all gross clay, and I
+say again, the true word spoken has its chance of somewhere alighting and
+striking root.  Look not to that.  Seeds perish in nature; good men fail.
+Look to the truth in you, and deliver it, with no afterthought of hope,
+for hope is dogged by dread; we give our courage as hostage for the
+fulfilment of what we hope.  Meditate on that transaction.  Hope is for
+boys and girls, to whom nature is kind.  For men to hope is to tremble.
+Let prayer--the soul's overflow, the heart's resignation--supplant it .
+.  ."
+
+'Pardon, colonel; I forgot to roar, but old Nevil marks all down that
+page for encomium,' said Captain Baskelett.  'Oh!  here we are.  English
+loyalty is the subject.  Now, pray attend to this, colonel.  Shrapnel
+communicates to Beauchamp that if ten Beauchamps were spouting over the
+country without intermission he might condescend to hope.  So on--to
+British loyalty.  We are, so long as our sovereigns are well-conducted
+persons, and we cannot unseat them--observe; he is eminently explicit,
+the old traitor!--we are to submit to the outward forms of respect, but
+we are frankly to say we are Republicans; he has the impudence to swear
+that England is a Republican country, and calls our thoroughgoing loyalty
+--yours and mine, colonel--disloyalty.  Hark: "Where kings lead, it is to
+be supposed they are wanted.  Service is the noble office on earth, and
+where kings do service let them take the first honours of the State:
+but"--hark at this--"the English middle-class, which has absorbed the
+upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the lower, will
+have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you see on a
+confectioner's twelfth-cake."'
+
+'The man deserves hanging!'  said Colonel Halkett.
+
+'Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout:
+"This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy.  Pass the lords and squires;
+they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or
+new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river
+rises, or a man speaks;--that comes of age or aping age: their hearts are
+in their holdings!  For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is the
+shopkeeper's loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual sum of
+his net profits.  It is now at high tide.  It will last with the
+prosperity of our commerce."--The insolent old vagabond!--"Let commercial
+disasters come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds of
+thousands, and howling down questioners!  In a day of bankruptcies, how
+much would you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering under deprivation
+of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared?  Ay, my Beauchamp,"--the most
+offensive thing to me is that "my Beauchamp," but old Nevil has evidently
+given himself up hand and foot to this ruffian--"ay, when you reflect
+that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class,
+which knows not Comfort, tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of
+their noisy frigid loyalty, and that the people are not with them but
+against, and yet that the people might be won by visible forthright
+kingly service to a loyalty outdoing theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that
+the people verily thirst to love and reverence; and that their love is
+the only love worth having, because it is disinterested love, and
+endures, and takes heat in adversity,--reflect on it and wonder at the
+inversion of things!  So with a Church.  It lives if it is at home with
+the poor.  In the arms of enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in
+vestments--vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it
+for one of their political truncheons--to awe the ignorant masses: I
+quote them.  So.  Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or
+in priestcraft!  They call it statesmanship.  O for a word for it!  Let
+Palsy and Cunning go to form a word.  Deadmanship, I call it."--To quote
+my uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!--"Parsons and princes are
+happy with the homage of this huge passive fleshpot class.  It is enough
+for them.  Why not?  The taxes are paid and the tithes.  Whilst
+commercial prosperity lasts!"'
+
+Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.
+
+     '"Meanwhile, note this: the people are the Power to come.
+     Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the
+     tides of the market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve,
+     committed to the shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of
+     Capital-the whited name for old accursed.  Mammon: and of all the.
+     ranked and black-uniformed host no pastor to come out of the
+     association of shepherds, and proclaim before heaven and man the
+     primary claim of their cause; they are, I say, the power, worth the
+     seduction of by another Power not mighty in England now: and likely
+     in time to set up yet another Power not existing in England now.
+     What if a passive comfortable clergy hand them over to men on the
+     models of Irish pastors, who will succour, console, enfold, champion
+     them?  what if, when they have learnt to use their majority, sick of
+     deceptions and the endless pulling of interests, they raise ONE
+     representative to force the current of action with an authority as
+     little fictitious as their preponderance of numbers?  The despot and
+     the priest!  There I see our danger, Beauchamp.  You and I and some
+     dozen labour to tie and knot them to manliness.  We are few; they
+     are many and weak.  Rome offers them real comfort in return for
+     their mites in coin, and--poor souls! mites in conscience, many of
+     them.  A Tyrant offers them to be directly their friend.  Ask,
+     Beauchamp, why they should not have comfort for pay as well as the
+     big round--"'
+
+Captain Baskelett stopped and laid the letter out for Colonel Halkett to
+read an unmentionable word, shamelessly marked by Nevil's pencil:
+
+     "--belly-class!"  Ask, too, whether the comfort they wish for is not
+     approaching divine compared with the stagnant fleshliness of that
+     fat shopkeeper's Comfort.
+
+     '"Warn the people of this.  Ay, warn the clergy.  It is not only the
+     poor that are caught by ranters.  Endeavour to make those
+     accommodating shepherds understand that they stand a chance of
+     losing rich as well as poor!  It should awaken them.  The helpless
+     poor and the uneasy rich are alike open to the seductions of Romish
+     priests and intoxicated ranters.  I say so it will be if that band
+     of forty thousand go on slumbering and nodding.  They walk in a
+     dream.  The flesh is a dream.  The soul only is life."
+
+'Now for you, colonel.
+
+     '"No extension of the army--no!  A thousand times no.  Let India go,
+     then!  Good for India that we hold India?  Ay, good: but not at such
+     a cost as an extra tax, or compulsory service of our working man.
+     If India is to be held for the good of India, throw open India to
+     the civilized nations, that they help us in a task that overstrains
+     us.  At present India means utter perversion of the policy of
+     England.  Adrift India! rather than England red-coated.  We dissent,
+     Beauchamp!  For by-and-by."
+
+'That is,' Captain Baskelett explained, 'by-and-by Shrapnel will have old
+Nevil fast enough.'
+
+'Is there more of it?'  said Colonel Halkett, flapping his forehead for
+coolness.
+
+'The impudence of this dog in presuming to talk about India!--eh,
+colonel?  Only a paragraph or two more: I skip a lot .  .  .  .  Ah!
+here we are.'  Captain Baskelett read to himself and laughed in derision:
+'He calls our Constitution a compact unsigned by the larger number
+involved in it.  What's this?  "A band of dealers in fleshpottery."  Do
+you detect a gleam of sense?  He underscores it.  Then he comes to this':
+Captain Baskelett requested Colonel Halkett to read for himself: 'The
+stench of the trail of Ego in our History.'
+
+The colonel perused it with an unsavoury expression of his features, and
+jumped up.
+
+'Oddly, Mr. Romfrey thought this rather clever,' said Captain Baskelett,
+and read rapidly:
+
+     '"Trace the course of Ego for them: first the king who conquers and
+     can govern.  In his egoism he dubs him holy; his family is of a
+     selected blood; he makes the crown hereditary--Ego.  Son by son the
+     shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary Crown, no
+     hereditary qualities.  The Barons rise.  They in turn hold sway, and
+     for their order--Ego.  The traders overturn them: each class rides
+     the classes under it while it can.  It is ego--ego, the fountain
+     cry, origin, sole source of war!  Then death to ego, I say!  If
+     those traders had ruled for other than ego, power might have rested
+     with them on broad basis enough to carry us forward for centuries.
+     The workmen have ever been too anxious to be ruled.  Now comes on
+     the workman's era.  Numbers win in the end: proof of small wisdom in
+     the world.  Anyhow, with numbers there is rough nature's wisdom and
+     justice.  With numbers ego is inter-dependent and dispersed; it is
+     universalized.  Yet these may require correctives.  If so, they will
+     have it in a series of despots and revolutions that toss, mix, and
+     bind the classes together: despots, revolutions; panting
+     alternations of the quickened heart of humanity."
+
+'Marked by our friend Nevil in notes of admiration.'
+
+'Mad as the writer,' groaned Colonel Halkett.  'Never in my life have I
+heard such stuff.'
+
+'Stay, colonel; here's Shrapnel defending Morality and Society,' said
+Captain Baskelett.
+
+Colonel Halkett vowed he was under no penal law to listen, and would not;
+but Captain Baskelett persuaded him: 'Yes, here it is: I give you my
+word.  Apparently old Nevil has been standing up for every man's right to
+run away with .  .  . Yes, really!  I give you my word; and here we have
+Shrapnel insisting on respect for the marriage laws.  Do hear this; here
+it is in black and white:--
+
+     "Society is our one tangible gain, our one roofing and flooring in a
+     world of most uncertain structures built on morasses.  Toward the
+     laws that support it men hopeful of progress give their adhesion.
+     If it is martyrdom, what then?  Let the martyrdom be.  Contumacy is
+     animalism.  And attend to me," says Shrapnel, "the truer the love
+     the readier for sacrifice!  A thousand times yes.  Rebellion against
+     Society, and advocacy of Humanity, run counter.  Tell me Society is
+     the whited sepulchre, that it is blotched, hideous, hollow: and I
+     say, add not another disfigurement to it; add to the purification of
+     it.  And you, if you answer, what can only one?  I say that is the
+     animal's answer, and applies also to politics, where the question,
+     what can one?  put in the relapsing tone, shows the country decaying
+     in the individual.  Society is the protection of the weaker,
+     therefore a shield of women, who are our temple of civilization, to
+     be kept sacred; and he that loves a woman will assuredly esteem and
+     pity her sex, and not drag her down for another example of their
+     frailty.  Fight this out within you--!"
+
+But you are right, colonel; we have had sufficient.  I shall be getting a
+democratic orator's twang, or a crazy parson's, if I go on much further.
+He covers thirty-two pages of letter-paper.  The conclusion is:--"Jenny
+sends you her compliments, respects, and best wishes, and hopes she may
+see you before she goes to her friend Clara Sherwin and the General."'
+
+'Sherwin?  Why, General Sherwin's a perfect gentleman,' Colonel Halkett
+interjected; and Lord Palmet caught the other name: 'Jenny?  That's Miss
+Denham, Jenny Denham; an amazingly pretty girl: beautiful thick brown
+hair, real hazel eyes, and walks like a yacht before the wind.'
+
+'Perhaps, colonel, Jenny accounts for the defence of society,' said
+Captain Baskelett.  'I have no doubt Shrapnel has a scheme for Jenny.
+The old communist and socialist!'  He folded up the letter: 'A curious
+composition, is it not, Miss Halkett?'
+
+Cecilia was thinking that he tempted her to be the apologist of even such
+a letter.
+
+'One likes to know the worst, and what's possible,' said the colonel.
+
+After Captain Baskelett had gone, Colonel Halkett persisted in talking of
+the letter, and would have impressed on his daughter that the person to
+whom the letter was addressed must be partly responsible for the contents
+of it.  Cecilia put on the argumentative air of a Court of Equity to
+discuss the point with him.
+
+'Then you defend that letter?'  he cried.
+
+Oh, no: she did not defend the letter; she thought it wicked and
+senseless.  'But,' said she, 'the superior strength of men to women seems
+to me to come from their examining all subjects, shrinking from none.  At
+least, I should not condemn Nevil on account of his correspondence.'
+
+'We shall see,' said her father, sighing rather heavily.  'I must have a
+talk with Mr. Romfrey about that letter.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL
+
+Captain Baskelett went down from Mount Laurels to Bevisham to arrange for
+the giving of a dinner to certain of his chief supporters in the borough,
+that they might know he was not obliged literally to sit in Parliament in
+order to pay a close attention to their affairs.  He had not
+distinguished himself by a speech during the session, but he had stored
+a political precept or two in his memory, and, as he told Lord Palmet,
+he thought a dinner was due to his villains.  'The way to manage your
+Englishman, Palmet, is to dine him.'  As the dinner would decidedly be
+dull, he insisted on having Lord Palmet's company.
+
+They crossed over to the yachting island, where portions of the letter
+of Commander Beauchamp's correspondent were read at the Club, under the
+verandah, and the question put, whether a man who held those opinions had
+a right to wear his uniform.
+
+The letter was transmitted to Steynham in time to be consigned to the
+pocket-book before Beauchamp arrived there on one of his rare visits.
+Mr. Romfrey handed him the pocketbook with the frank declaration that he
+had read Shrapnel's letter.  'All is fair in war, Sir!'  Beauchamp quoted
+him ambiguously.
+
+The thieves had amused Mr. Romfrey by their scrupulous honesty in
+returning what was useless to them, while reserving the coat: but
+subsequently seeing the advertized reward, they had written to claim it;
+and, according to Rosamund Culling, he had been so tickled that he had
+deigned to reply to them, very briefly, but very comically.
+
+Speaking of the matter with her, Beauchamp said (so greatly was he
+infatuated with the dangerous man) that the reading of a letter of Dr.
+Shrapnel's could do nothing but good to any reflecting human creature:
+he admitted that as the lost pocket-book was addressed to Mr. Romfrey,
+it might have been by mistake that he had opened it, and read the topmost
+letter lying open.  But he pressed Rosamund to say whether that one only
+had been read.
+
+'Only Dr. Shrapnel's letter,' Rosamund affirmed.  'The letter from
+Normandy was untouched by him.'
+
+'Untouched by anybody?'
+
+'Unopened, Nevil.  You look incredulous.'
+
+'Not if I have your word, ma'am.'
+
+He glanced somewhat contemptuously at his uncle Everard's anachronistic
+notions of what was fair in war.
+
+To prove to him Mr. Romfrey's affectionate interest in his fortunes,
+Rosamund mentioned the overtures which had been made to Colonel Halkett
+for a nuptial alliance between the two houses; and she said: 'Your uncle
+Everard was completely won by your manly way of taking his opposition to
+you in Bevisham.  He pays for Captain Baskelett, but you and your
+fortunes are nearest his heart, Nevil.'
+
+Beauchamp hung silent.  His first remark was, 'Yes, I want money.  I must
+have money.'  By degrees he seemed to warm to some sense of gratitude.
+'It was kind of the baron,' he said.
+
+'He has a great affection for you, Nevil, though you know he spares no
+one who chooses to be antagonistic.  All that is over.  But do you not
+second him, Nevil?  You admire her?  You are not adverse?'
+
+Beauchamp signified the horrid intermixture of yes and no, frowned in
+pain of mind, and Walked up and down.  'There's no living woman I admire
+so much.'
+
+'She has refused the highest matches.'
+
+'I hold her in every way incomparable.'
+
+'She tries to understand your political ideas, if she cannot quite
+sympathize with them, Nevil.  And consider how hard it is for a young
+English lady, bred in refinement, to understand such things.'
+
+'Yes,' Beauchamp nodded; yes.  Well, more 's the pity for me!'
+
+'Ah!  Nevil, that fatal Renee!'
+
+'Ma'am, I acquit you of any suspicion of your having read her letter in
+this pocket-book.  She wishes me to marry.  You would have seen it
+written here.  She wishes it.'
+
+'Fly, clipped wing!'  murmured Rosamund, and purposely sent a buzz into
+her ears to shut out his extravagant talk of Renee's friendly wishes.
+
+'How is it you women will not believe in the sincerity of a woman!'  he
+exclaimed.
+
+'Nevil, I am not alluding to the damage done to your election.'
+
+'To my candidature, ma'am.  You mean those rumours, those lies of the
+enemy.  Tell me how I could suppose you were alluding to them.  You bring
+them forward now to justify your charge of "fatal" against her.  She has
+one fault; she wants courage; she has none other, not one that is not
+excuseable.  We won't speak of France.  What did her father say?'
+
+'Colonel Halkett?  I do not know.  He and his daughter come here next
+week, and the colonel will expect to meet you here.  That does not look
+like so positive an objection to you?'
+
+'To me personally, no,' said Beauchamp.  'But Mr. Romfrey has not told me
+that I am to meet them.'
+
+'Perhaps he has not thought it worth while.  It is not his way.  He has
+asked you to come.  You and Miss Halkett will be left to yourselves.  Her
+father assured Mr. Romfrey that he should not go beyond advising her.
+His advice might not be exactly favourable to you at present, but if you
+sued and she accepted--and she would, I am convinced she would; she was
+here with me, talking of you a whole afternoon, and I have eyes--then he
+would not oppose the match, and then I should see you settled, the
+husband of the handsomest wife and richest heiress in England.'
+
+A vision of Cecilia swam before him, gracious in stateliness.
+
+Two weeks back Renee's expression of a wish that he would marry had
+seemed to him an idle sentence in a letter breathing of her own
+intolerable situation.  The marquis had been struck down by illness.
+What if she were to be soon suddenly free?  But Renee could not be
+looking to freedom, otherwise she never would have written the wish for
+him to marry.  She wrote perhaps hearing temptation whisper; perhaps
+wishing to save herself and him by the aid of a tie that would bring his
+honour into play and fix his loyalty.  He remembered Dr. Shrapnel's
+written words: 'Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run
+counter.'  They had a stronger effect on him than when he was ignorant of
+his uncle Everard's plan to match him with Cecilia.  He took refuge from
+them in the image of that beautiful desolate Renee, born to be beloved,
+now wasted, worse than trodden under foot--perverted; a life that looked
+to him for direction and resuscitation.  She was as good as dead in her
+marriage.  It was impossible for him ever to think of Renee without the
+surprising thrill of his enchantment with her, and tender pity that drew
+her closer to him by darkening her brightness.
+
+Still a man may love his wife.  A wife like Cecilia was not to be
+imagined coldly.  Let the knot once be tied, it would not be regretted,
+could not be; hers was a character, and hers a smile, firmly assuring him
+of that.
+
+He told Mr. Romfrey that he should be glad to meet Colonel Halkett and
+Cecilia.  Business called him to Holdesbury.  Thence he betook himself to
+Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to say farewell to Jenny Denham previous to her
+departure for Switzerland with her friend Clara Sherwin.  She had never
+seen a snow-mountain, and it was pleasant to him to observe in her eyes,
+which he had known weighing and balancing intellectual questions more
+than he quite liked, a childlike effort to conjure in imagination the
+glories of the Alps.  She appeared very happy, only a little anxious
+about leaving Dr. Shrapnel with no one to take care of him for a whole
+month.  Beauchamp promised he would run over to him from Holdesbury, only
+an hour by rail, as often as he could.  He envied her the sight of the
+Alps, he said, and tried to give her an idea of them, from which he broke
+off to boast of a famous little Jersey bull that he had won from a rival,
+an American, deeply in love with the bull; cutting him out by telegraph
+by just five minutes.  The latter had examined the bull in the island and
+had passed on to Paris, not suspecting there would be haste to sell him.
+Beauchamp, seeing the bull advertized, took him on trust, galloped to the
+nearest telegraph station forthwith, and so obtained possession of him;
+and the bull was now shipped on the voyage.  But for this precious bull,
+however, and other business, he would have been able to spend almost the
+entire month with Dr. Shrapnel, he said regretfully.  Miss Denham on the
+contrary did not regret his active occupation.  The story of his rush
+from the breakfast-table to the stables, and gallop away to the station,
+while the American Quaker gentleman soberly paced down a street in Paris
+on the same errand, in invisible rivalry, touched her risible fancy.  She
+was especially pleased to think of him living in harmony with his uncle--
+that strange, lofty, powerful man, who by plot or by violence punished
+opposition to his will, but who must be kind at heart, as well as
+forethoughtful of his nephew's good; the assurance of it being, that when
+the conflict was at an end he had immediately installed him as manager of
+one of his estates, to give his energy play and make him practically
+useful.
+
+The day before she left home was passed by the three in botanizing, some
+miles distant from Bevisham, over sand country, marsh and meadow; Dr.
+Shrapnel, deep in the science, on one side of her, and Beauchamp,
+requiring instruction in the names and properties of every plant and
+simple, on the other.  It was a day of summer sweetness, gentle laughter,
+conversation, and the happiest homeliness.  The politicians uttered
+barely a syllable of politics.  The dinner basket was emptied heartily to
+make way for herb and flower, and at night the expedition homeward was
+crowned with stars along a road refreshed by mid-day thunder-showers and
+smelling of the rain in the dust, past meadows keenly scenting, gardens
+giving out their innermost balm and odour.  Late at night they drank tea
+in Jenny's own garden.  They separated a little after two in the morning,
+when the faded Western light still lay warm on a bow of sky, and on the
+level of the East it quickened.  Jenny felt sure she should long for that
+yesterday when she was among foreign scenes, even among high Alps-those
+mysterious eminences which seemed in her imagination to know of heaven
+and have the dawn of a new life for her beyond their peaks.
+
+Her last words when stepping into the railway carriage were to Beauchamp:
+'Will you take care of him?'  She flung her arms round Dr. Shrapnel's
+neck, and gazed at him under troubled eyelids which seemed to be passing
+in review every vision of possible harm that might come to him during her
+absence; and so she continued gazing, and at no one but Dr. Shrapnel
+until the bend of the line cut him from her sight.  Beauchamp was a very
+secondary person on that occasion, and he was unused to being so in the
+society of women--unused to find himself entirely eclipsed by their
+interest in another.  He speculated on it, wondering at her concentrated
+fervency; for he had not supposed her to possess much warmth.
+
+After she was fairly off on her journey, Dr. Shrapnel mentioned to
+Beauchamp a case of a Steynham poacher, whom he had thought it his duty
+to supply with means of defence.  It was a common poaching case.
+
+Beauchamp was not surprised that Mr. Romfrey and Dr. Shrapnel should come
+to a collision; the marvel was that it had never occurred before, and
+Beauchamp said at once: 'Oh, my uncle Mr. Romfrey would rather see them
+stand their ground than not.'  He was disposed to think well of his
+uncle.  The Jersey bull called him away to Holdesbury.
+
+Captain Baskelett heard of this poaching case at Steynham, where he had
+to appear in person when he was in want of cheques, and the Bevisham
+dinner furnished an excuse for demanding one.  He would have preferred a
+positive sum annually.  Mr. Romfrey, however, though he wrote his cheques
+out like the lord he was by nature, exacted the request for them; a
+system that kept the gallant gentleman on his good behaviour, probably at
+a lower cost than the regular stipend.  In handing the cheque to Cecil
+Baskelett, Mr. Romfrey spoke of a poacher, of an old poaching family
+called the Dicketts, who wanted punishment and was to have it, but Mr.
+Romfrey's local lawyer had informed him that the man Shrapnel was, as
+usual, supplying the means of defence.  For his own part, Mr. Romfrey
+said, he had no objection to one rascal's backing another, and Shrapnel
+might hit his hardest, only perhaps Nevil might somehow get mixed up in
+it, and Nevil was going on quietly now--he had in fact just done
+capitally in lassoing with a shot of the telegraph a splendid little
+Jersey bull that a Yankee was after: and on the whole it was best to try
+to keep him quiet, for he was mad about that man Shrapnel; Shrapnel was
+his joss: and if legal knocks came of this business Nevil might be
+thinking of interfering: 'Or he and I may be getting to exchange a lot of
+shindy letters,' Mr. Romfrey said.  'Tell him I take Shrapnel just like
+any other man, and don't want to hear apologies, and I don't mix him up
+in it.  Tell him if he likes to have an explanation from me, I'll give it
+him when he comes here.  You can run over to Holdesbury the morning after
+your dinner.'
+
+Captain Baskelett said he would go.  He was pleased with his cheque at
+the time, but hearing subsequently that Nevil was coming to Steynham to
+meet Colonel Halkett and his daughter, he became displeased, considering
+it a very silly commission.  The more he thought of it the more
+ridiculous and unworthy it appeared.  He asked himself and Lord Palmet
+also why he should have to go to Nevil at Holdesbury to tell him of
+circumstances that he would hear of two or three days later at Steynham.
+There was no sense in it.  The only conclusion for him was that the
+scheming woman Culling had determined to bring down every man concerned
+in the Bevisham election, and particularly Mr. Romfrey, on his knees
+before Nevil.  Holdesbury had been placed at his disposal, and the use of
+the house in London, which latter would have been extremely serviceable
+to Cecil as a place of dinners to the Parliament of Great Britain in lieu
+of the speech-making generally expected of Members, and not so
+effectively performed.  One would think the baron had grown afraid of old
+Nevil!  He had spoken as if he were.
+
+Cecil railed unreservedly to Lord Palmet against that woman 'Mistress
+Culling,' as it pleased him to term her, and who could be offended by his
+calling her so?  His fine wit revelled in bestowing titles that were at
+once batteries directed upon persons he hated, and entrenchments for
+himself.
+
+At four o'clock on a sultry afternoon he sat at table with his Bevisham
+supporters, and pledged them correspondingly in English hotel champagne,
+sherry and claret.  At seven he was rid of them, but parched and heated,
+as he deserved to be, he owned, for drinking the poison.  It would be a
+good subject for Parliament if he could get it up, he reflected.
+
+'And now,' said he to Palmet, 'we might be crossing over to the Club if I
+hadn't to go about that stupid business to Holdesbury to-morrow morning.
+We shall miss the race, or, at least, the start.'
+
+The idea struck him: 'Ten to one old Nevil 's with Shrapnel,' and no idea
+could be more natural.
+
+'We 'll call on Shrapnel,' said Palmet.  'We shall see Jenny Denham.
+He gives her out as his niece.  Whatever she is she's a brimming little
+beauty.  I assure you, Bask, you seldom see so pretty a girl.'
+
+Wine, which has directed men's footsteps upon more marvellous adventures,
+took them to a chemist's shop for a cooling effervescent draught, and
+thence through the town to the address, furnished to them by the chemist,
+of Dr. Shrapnel on the common.
+
+Bad wine, which is responsible for the fate of half the dismal bodies
+hanging from trees, weltering by rocks, grovelling and bleaching round
+the bedabbled mouth of the poet's Cave of Despair, had rendered Captain
+Baskelett's temper extremely irascible; so when he caught sight of Dr.
+Shrapnel walling in his garden, and perceived him of a giant's height,
+his eyes fastened on the writer of the abominable letter with an
+exultation peculiar to men having a devil inside them that kicks to be
+out.  The sun was low, blazing among the thicker branches of the pollard
+forest trees, and through sprays of hawthorn.  Dr. Shrapnel stopped,
+facing the visible master of men, at the end of his walk before he turned
+his back to continue the exercise and some discourse he was holding aloud
+either to the heavens or bands of invisible men.
+
+'Ahem, Dr. Shrapnel!'  He was accosted twice, the second time
+imperiously.
+
+He saw two gentlemen outside the garden-hedge.
+
+'I spoke, sir,' said Captain Baskelett.
+
+'I hear you now, sir,' said the doctor, walking in a parallel line with
+them.
+
+'I desired to know, sir, if you are Dr. Shrapnel?'
+
+'I am.'
+
+They arrived at the garden-gate.
+
+'You have a charming garden, Dr. Shrapnel,' said Lord Palmet, very
+affably and loudly, with a steady observation of the cottage windows.
+
+Dr. Shrapnel flung the gate open.
+
+Lord Palmet raised his hat and entered, crying loudly, 'A very charming
+garden, upon my word!'
+
+Captain Baskelett followed him, bowing stiffly.
+
+'I am,' he said, 'Captain Beauchamp's cousin.  I am Captain Baskelett,
+one of the Members for the borough.'
+
+The doctor said, 'Ah.'
+
+'I wish to see Captain Beauchamp, sir.  He is absent?'
+
+'I shall have him here shortly, sir.'
+
+'Oh, you will have him!'  Cecil paused.
+
+'Admirable roses!'  exclaimed Lord Palmet.
+
+'You have him, I think,' said Cecil, 'if what we hear is correct.  I wish
+to know, sir, whether the case you are conducting against his uncle is
+one you have communicated to Captain Beauchamp.  I repeat, I am here to
+inquire if he is privy to it.  You may hold family ties in contempt--Now,
+sir!  I request you abstain from provocations with me.'
+
+Dr. Shrapnel had raised his head, with something of the rush of a rocket,
+from the stooping posture to listen, and his frown of non-intelligence
+might be interpreted as the coming on of the fury Radicals are prone to,
+by a gentleman who believed in their constant disposition to explode.
+
+Cecil made play with a pacifying hand.  'We shall arrive at no
+understanding unless you are good enough to be perfectly calm.  I repeat,
+my cousin Captain Beauchamp is more or less at variance with his family,
+owing to these doctrines of yours, and your extraordinary Michael-Scott-
+the-wizard kind of spell you seem to have cast upon his common sense as a
+man of the world.  You have him, as you say.  I do not dispute it.  I
+have no, doubt you have him fast.  But here is a case demanding a certain
+respect for decency.  Pray, if I may ask you, be still, be quiet, and
+hear me out if you can.  I am accustomed to explain myself to the
+comprehension of most men who are at large, and I tell you candidly I am
+not to be deceived or diverted from my path by a show of ignorance.'
+
+'What is your immediate object, sir?'  said Dr. Shrapnel, chagrined by
+the mystification within him, and a fear that his patience was going.
+
+'Exactly,' Cecil nodded.  He was acute enough to see that he had
+established the happy commencement of fretfulness in the victim, which is
+equivalent to a hook well struck in the mouth of your fish, and with an
+angler's joy he prepared to play his man.  'Exactly.  I have stated it.
+And you ask me.  But I really must decline to run over the whole ground
+again for you.  I am here to fulfil a duty to my family; a highly
+disagreeable one to me.  I may fail, like the lady who came here previous
+to the Election, for the result of which I am assured I ought to thank
+your eminently disinterested services.  I do.  You recollect a lady
+calling on you?'
+
+Dr. Shrapnel consulted his memory.  'I think I have a recollection of
+some lady calling.'
+
+'Oh! you think you have a recollection of some lady calling.'
+
+'Do you mean a lady connected with Captain Beauchamp?'
+
+'A lady connected with Captain Beauchamp.  You are not aware of the
+situation of the lady?'
+
+'If I remember, she was a kind of confidential housekeeper, some one
+said, to Captain Beauchamp's uncle.'
+
+'A kind of confidential housekeeper!  She is recognized in our family as
+a lady, sir.  I can hardly expect better treatment at your hands than she
+met with, but I do positively request you to keep your temper whilst I am
+explaining my business to you.  Now, sir!  what now?'
+
+A trifling breeze will set the tall tree bending, and Dr. Shrapnel did
+indeed appear to display the agitation of a full-driving storm when he
+was but harassed and vexed.
+
+'Will you mention your business concisely, if you Please?'  he said.
+
+'Precisely; it is my endeavour.  I supposed I had done so.  To be frank,
+I would advise you to summon a member of your household, wife, daughter,
+housekeeper, any one you like, to whom you may appeal, and I too,
+whenever your recollections are at fault.'
+
+'I am competent,' said the doctor.
+
+'But in justice to you,' urged Cecil considerately.
+
+Dr. Shrapnel smoothed his chin hastily.  'Have you done?'
+
+'Believe me, the instant I have an answer to my question, I have done.'
+
+'Name your question.'
+
+'Very well, sir.  Now mark, I will be plain with you.  There is no escape
+for you from this.  You destroy my cousin's professional prospects--I
+request you to listen--you blast his career in the navy; it was
+considered promising.  He was a gallant officer and a smart seaman.  Very
+well.  You set him up as a politician, to be knocked down, to a dead
+certainty.  You set him against his class; you embroil him with his
+family .  .  .'
+
+'On all those points,' interposed Dr. Shrapnel, after dashing a hand to
+straighten his forelock; but Cecil vehemently entreated him to control
+his temper.
+
+'I say you embroil him with his family, you cause him to be in
+everlasting altercation with his uncle Mr. Romfrey, materially to his
+personal detriment; and the question of his family is one that every man
+of sense would apprehend on the spot; for we, you should know, have, sir,
+an opinion of Captain Beauchamp's talents and abilities forbidding us to
+think he could possibly be the total simpleton you make him appear,
+unless to the seductions of your political instructions, other seductions
+were added .  .  .  .  You apprehend me, I am sure.'
+
+'I don't,' cried the doctor, descending from his height and swinging
+about forlornly.
+
+'Oh!  yes, you do; you do indeed, you cannot avoid it; you quite
+apprehend me; it is admitted that you take my meaning: I insist on that.
+I have nothing to say but what is complimentary of the young lady,
+whoever she may turn out to be; bewitching, no doubt; and to speak
+frankly, Dr. Shrapnel, I, and I am pretty certain every honest man would
+think with me, I take it to be ten times more creditable to my cousin
+Captain Beauchamp that he should be under a lady's influence than under
+yours.  Come, sir!  I ask you.  You must confess that a gallant officer
+and great admirer of the sex does not look such a donkey if he is led in
+silken strings by a beautiful creature.  And mark--stop!  mark this, Dr.
+Shrapnel: I say, to the lady we can all excuse a good deal, and at the
+same time you are to be congratulated on first-rate diplomacy in
+employing so charming an agent.  I wish, I really wish you did it
+generally, I assure you: only, mark this--I do beg you to contain
+yourself for a minute, if possible--I say, my cousin Captain Beauchamp is
+fair game to hunt, and there is no law to prevent the chase, only you
+must not expect us to be quiet spectators of your sport; and we have, I
+say, undoubtedly a right to lay the case before the lady, and induce her
+to be a peace-agent in the family if we can.  Very well.'
+
+'This garden is redolent of a lady's hand,' sighed Palmet, poetical in
+his dejection.
+
+'Have you taken too much wine, gentlemen?'  said Dr. Shrapnel.
+
+Cecil put this impertinence aside with a graceful sweep of his fingers.
+'You attempt to elude me, sir.'
+
+'Not I!  You mention some lady.'
+
+'Exactly.  A young lady.'
+
+'What is the name of the lady?'
+
+'Oh! You ask the name of the lady.  And I too.  What is it?  I have heard
+two or three names.'
+
+'Then you have heard villanies.'
+
+'Denham, Jenny Denham, Miss Jenny Denham,' said Palmet, rejoiced at the
+opportunity of trumpeting her name so that she should not fail to hear
+it.
+
+'I stake my reputation I have heard her called Shrapnel--Miss Shrapnel,'
+said Cecil.
+
+The doctor glanced hastily from one to the other of his visitors.  'The
+young lady is my ward; I am her guardian,' he said.
+
+Cecil pursed his mouth.  'I have heard her called your niece.'
+
+'Niece--ward; she is a lady by birth and education, in manners,
+accomplishments, and character; and she is under my protection,' cried
+Dr. Shrapnel.
+
+Cecil bowed.  'So you are for gentle birth?  I forgot you are for
+morality too, and for praying; exactly; I recollect.  But now let me tell
+you, entirely with the object of conciliation, my particular desire is to
+see the young lady, in your presence of course, and endeavour to persuade
+her, as I have very little doubt I shall do, assuming that you give me
+fair play, to exercise her influence, on this occasion contrary to yours,
+and save my cousin Captain Beauchamp from a fresh misunderstanding with
+his uncle Mr. Romfrey.  Now, sir; now, there!'
+
+'You will not see Miss Denham with my sanction ever,' said Dr. Shrapnel.
+
+'Oh!  Then I perceive your policy.  Mark, sir, my assumption was that the
+young lady would, on hearing my representations, exert herself to heal
+the breach between Captain Beauchamp and his family.  You stand in the
+way.  You treat me as you treated the lady who came here formerly to
+wrest your dupe from your clutches.  If I mistake not, she saw the young
+lady you acknowledge to be your ward.'
+
+Dr. Shrapnel flashed back: 'I acknowledge?  Mercy and justice!  is there
+no peace with the man?  You walk here to me, I can't yet guess why, from
+a town where I have enemies, and every scandal flies touching me and
+mine; and you--' He stopped short to master his anger.  He subdued it so
+far as to cloak it in an attempt to speak reasoningly, as angry men
+sometimes deceive themselves in doing, despite the good maxim for the
+wrathful--speak not at all.  'See,' said he, 'I was never married.  My
+dear friend dies, and leaves me his child to protect and rear; and though
+she bears her father's name, she is most wrongly and foully made to share
+the blows levelled at her guardian.  Ay, have at me, all of you, as much
+as you will!  Hold off from her.  Were it true, the cowardice would be
+not a whit the smaller.  Why, casting a stone like that, were it the size
+of a pebble and the weight of a glance, is to toss the whole cowardly
+world on an innocent young girl.  And why suspect evil?  You talk of that
+lady who paid me a visit here once, and whom I treated becomingly, I
+swear.  I never do otherwise.  She was a handsome woman; and what was
+she?  The housekeeper of Captain Beauchamp's uncle.  Hear me, if you
+please!  To go with the world, I have as good a right to suppose the
+worst of an attractive lady in that situation as you regarding my ward:
+better warrant for scandalizing, I think; to go with the world.
+But now--'
+
+Cecil checked him, ejaculating, 'Thank you, Dr. Shrapnel; I thank you
+most cordially,' with a shining smile.  'Stay, sir!  no more.  I take my
+leave of you.  Not another word.  No "buts"!  I recognize that
+conciliation is out of the question: you are the natural protector of
+poachers, and you will not grant me an interview with the young lady you
+call your ward, that I may represent to her, as a person we presume to
+have a chance of moving you, how easily--I am determined you shall hear
+me, Dr. Shrapnel!--how easily the position of Captain Beauchamp may
+become precarious with his uncle Mr. Romfrey.  And let me add--"but" and
+"but" me till Doomsday, sir!--if you were--I do hear you, sir, and you
+shall hear me--if you were a younger man, I say, I would hold you
+answerable to me for your scandalous and disgraceful insinuations.'
+
+Dr. Shrapnel was adroitly fenced and over-shouted.  He shrugged,
+stuttered, swayed, wagged a bulrush-head, flapped his elbows, puffed like
+a swimmer in the breakers, tried many times to expostulate, and finding
+the effort useless, for his adversary was copious and commanding,
+relapsed, eyeing him as an object far removed.
+
+Cecil rounded one of his perplexingly empty sentences and turned on his
+heel.
+
+'War, then!'  he said.
+
+'As you like,' retorted the doctor.
+
+'Oh!  Very good.  Good evening.'  Cecil slightly lifted his hat, with the
+short projection of the head of the stately peacock in its walk, and
+passed out of the garden.  Lord Palmet, deeply disappointed and
+mystified, went after him, leaving Dr. Shrapnel to shorten his garden
+walk with enormous long strides.
+
+'I'm afraid you didn't manage the old boy,' Palmet complained.  'They're
+people who have tea in their gardens; we might have sat down with them
+and talked, the best friends in the world, and come again to-morrow might
+have called her Jenny in a week.  She didn't show her pretty nose at any
+of the windows.'
+
+His companion pooh-poohed and said: 'Foh!  I'm afraid I permitted myself
+to lose my self-command for a moment.'
+
+Palmet sang out an amorous couplet to console himself.  Captain Baskelett
+respected the poetic art for its magical power over woman's virtue, but
+he disliked hearing verses, and they were ill-suited to Palmet.  He
+abused his friend roundly, telling him it was contemptible to be quoting
+verses.  He was irritable still.
+
+He declared himself nevertheless much refreshed by his visit to Dr.
+Shrapnel.  'We shall have to sleep tonight in this unhallowed town,
+but I needn't be off to Holdesbury in the morning; I've done my business.
+I shall write to the baron to-night, and we can cross the water to-morrow
+in time for operations.'
+
+The letter to Mr. Romfrey was composed before midnight.  It was a long
+one, and when he had finished it, Cecil remembered that the act of
+composition had been assisted by a cigar in his mouth, and Mr. Romfrey
+detested the smell of tobacco.  There was nothing to be done but to write
+the letter over again, somewhat more briefly: it ran thus:
+
+'Thinking to kill two birds at a blow, I went yesterday with Palmet after
+the dinner at this place to Shrapnel's house, where, as I heard, I stood
+a chance of catching friend Nevil.  The young person living under the
+man's protection was absent, and so was the "poor dear commander,"
+perhaps attending on his bull.  Shrapnel said he was expecting him.  I
+write to you to confess I thought myself a cleverer fellow than I am.  I
+talked to Shrapnel and tried hard to reason with him.  I hope I can keep
+my temper under ordinary circumstances.  You will understand that it
+required remarkable restraint when I make you acquainted with the fact
+that a lady's name was introduced, which, as your representative in
+relation to her, I was bound to defend from a gratuitous and scoundrelly
+aspersion.  Shrapnel's epistle to "brave Beauchamp" is Church
+hymnification in comparison with his conversation.  He is indubitably one
+of the greatest ruffians of his time.
+
+'I took the step with the best of intentions, and all I can plead is that
+I am not a diplomatist of sixty.  His last word was that he is for war
+with us.  As far as we men are concerned it is of small importance.  I
+should think that the sort of society he would scandalize a lady in is
+not much to be feared.  I have given him his warning.  He tops me by
+about a head, and loses his temper every two minutes.  I could have drawn
+him out deliciously if he had not rather disturbed mine.  By this time my
+equanimity is restored.  The only thing I apprehend is your displeasure
+with me for having gone to the man.  I have done no good, and it prevents
+me from running over to Holdesbury to see Nevil, for if "shindy letters,"
+as you call them, are bad, shindy meetings are worse.  I should be
+telling him my opinion of Shrapnel, he would be firing out, I should
+retort, he would yell, I should snap my fingers, and he would go into
+convulsions.  I am convinced that a cattle-breeder ought to keep himself
+particularly calm.  So unless I have further orders from you I refrain
+from going.
+
+'The dinner was enthusiastic.  I sat three hours among my Commons, they
+on me for that length of time--fatiguing, but a duty.'
+
+Cecil subscribed his name with the warmest affection toward his uncle.
+
+The brevity of the second letter had not brought him nearer to the truth
+in rescinding the picturesque accessories of his altercation with Dr.
+Shrapnel, but it veraciously expressed the sentiments he felt, and that
+was the palpable truth for him.
+
+He posted the letter next morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION
+
+About noon the day following, on board the steam-yacht of the Countess of
+Menai, Cecil was very much astonished to see Mr. Romfrey descending into
+a boat hard by, from Grancey Lespel's hired cutter.  Steam was up, and
+the countess was off for a cruise in the Channel, as it was not a race-
+day, but seeing Mr. Romfrey's hand raised, she spoke to Cecil, and
+immediately gave orders to wait for the boat.  This lady was a fervent
+admirer of the knightly gentleman, and had reason to like him, for he had
+once been her champion.  Mr. Romfrey mounted the steps, received her
+greeting, and beckoned to Cecil.  He carried a gold-headed horsewhip
+under his arm.  Lady Menai would gladly have persuaded him to be one of
+her company for the day's voyage, but he said he had business in
+Bevisham, and moving aside with Cecil, put the question to him abruptly:
+'What were the words used by Shrapnel?'
+
+'The identical words?'  Captain Baskelett asked.  He could have tripped
+out the words with the fluency of ancient historians relating what great
+kings, ambassadors, or Generals may well have uttered on State occasions,
+but if you want the identical words, who is to remember them the day
+after they have been delivered?  He said:
+
+'Well, as for the identical words, I really, and I was tolerably excited,
+sir, and upon my honour, the identical words are rather difficult to....'
+He glanced at the horsewhip, and pricked by the sight of it to proceed,
+thought it good to soften the matter if possible.  'I don't quite
+recollect .  .  .  I wrote off to you rather hastily.  I think he said--
+but Palmet was there.'
+
+'Shrapnel spoke the words before Lord Palmet?'  said Mr. Romfrey
+austerely.
+
+Captain Baskelett summoned Palmet to come near, and inquired of him what
+he had heard Shrapnel say, suggesting: 'He spoke of a handsome woman for
+a housekeeper, and all the world knew her character?'
+
+Mr. Romfrey cleared his throat.
+
+'Or knew she had no character,' Cecil pursued in a fit of gratified
+spleen, in scorn of the woman.  'Don't you recollect his accent in
+pronouncing housekeeper?'
+
+The menacing thunder sounded from Mr. Romfrey.  He was patient in
+appearance, and waited for Cecil's witness to corroborate the evidence.
+
+It happened (and here we are in one of the circles of small things
+producing great consequences, which have inspired diminutive philosophers
+with ironical visions of history and the littleness of man), it happened
+that Lord Palmet, the humanest of young aristocrats, well-disposed toward
+the entire world, especially to women, also to men in any way related to
+pretty women, had just lit a cigar, and it was a cigar that he had been
+recommended to try the flavour of; and though he, having his wits about
+him, was fully aware that shipboard is no good place for a trial of the
+delicacy of tobacco in the leaf, he had begun puffing and sniffing in a
+critical spirit, and scarcely knew for the moment what to decide as to
+this particular cigar.  He remembered, however, Mr. Romfrey's objection
+to tobacco.  Imagining that he saw the expression of a profound distaste
+in that gentleman's more than usually serious face, he hesitated between
+casting the cigar into the water and retaining it.  He decided upon the
+latter course, and held the cigar behind his back, bowing to Mr. Romfrey
+at about a couple of yards distance, and saying to Cecil, 'Housekeeper;
+yes, I remember hearing housekeeper.  I think so.  Housekeeper?  yes, oh
+yes.'
+
+'And handsome housekeepers were doubtful characters,' Captain Baskelett
+prompted him.
+
+Palmet laughed out a single 'Ha!'  that seemed to excuse him for
+lounging away to the forepart of the vessel, where he tugged at his fine
+specimen of a cigar to rekindle it, and discharged it with a wry grimace,
+so delicate is the flavour of that weed, and so adversely ever is it
+affected by a breeze and a moist atmosphere.  He could then return
+undivided in his mind to Mr. Romfrey and Cecil, but the subject was not
+resumed in his presence.
+
+The Countess of Menai steamed into Bevisham to land Mr. Romfrey there.
+'I can be out in the Channel any day; it is not every day that I see
+you,' she said, in support of her proposal to take him over.
+
+They sat together conversing, apart from the rest of the company, until
+they sighted Bevisham, when Mr. Romfrey stood up, and a little crowd of
+men came round him to enjoy his famous racy talk.  Captain Baskelett
+offered to land with him.  He declined companionship.  Dropping her hand
+in his, the countess asked him what he had to do in that town, and he
+replied, 'I have to demand an apology.'
+
+Answering the direct look of his eyes, she said, 'Oh, I shall not speak
+of it.'
+
+In his younger days, if the rumour was correct, he had done the same on
+her account.
+
+He stepped into the boat, and presently they saw him mount the pier-
+steps, with the riding-whip under his arm, his head more than commonly
+bent, a noticeable point in a man of his tall erect figure.  The ladies
+and some of the gentlemen thought he was looking particularly grave, even
+sorrowful.
+
+Lady Menai inquired of Captain Baskelett whether he knew the nature of
+his uncle's business in Bevisham, the town he despised.
+
+What could Cecil say but no?  His uncle had not imparted it to him.
+
+She was flattered in being the sole confidante, and said no more.
+
+The sprightly ingenuity of Captain Baskelett's mind would have informed
+him of the nature of his uncle's expedition, we may be sure, had he put
+it to the trial; for Mr. Romfrey was as plain to read as a rudimentary
+sum in arithmetic, and like the tracings of a pedigree-map his
+preliminary steps to deeds were seen pointing on their issue in lines of
+straight descent.  But Cecil could protest that he was not bound to know,
+and considering that he was neither bound to know nor to speculate, he
+determined to stand on his right.  So effectually did he accomplish the
+task, that he was frequently surprised during the evening and the night
+by the effervescence of a secret exultation rising imp-like within him,
+that was, he assured himself, perfectly unaccountable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP'S FASHION
+
+The day after Mr. Romfrey's landing in Bevisham a full South-wester
+stretched the canvas of yachts of all classes, schooner, cutter and yawl,
+on the lively green water between the island and the forest shore.
+Cecilia's noble schooner was sure to be out in such a ringing breeze, for
+the pride of it as well as the pleasure.  She landed her father at the
+Club steps, and then bore away Eastward to sight a cutter race, the
+breeze beginning to stiffen.  Looking back against sun and wind, she saw
+herself pursued by a saucy little 15-ton craft that had been in her track
+since she left the Otley river before noon, dipping and straining, with
+every inch of sail set; as mad a stern chase as ever was witnessed: and
+who could the man at the tiller, clad cap-A-pie in tarpaulin, be?  She
+led him dancing away, to prove his resoluteness and laugh at him.  She
+had the powerful wings, and a glory in them coming of this pursuit: her
+triumph was delicious, until the occasional sparkle of the tarpaulin was
+lost, the small boat appeared a motionless object far behind, and all
+ahead of her exceedingly dull, though the race hung there and the crowd
+of sail.
+
+Cecilia's transient flutter of coquettry created by the animating air and
+her queenly flight was over.  She fled splendidly and she came back
+graciously.  But he refused her open hand, as it were.  He made as if to
+stand across her tack, and, reconsidering it, evidently scorned his
+advantage and challenged the stately vessel for a beat up against the
+wind.  It was as pretty as a Court minuet.  But presently Cecilia stood
+too far on one tack, and returning to the centre of the channel, found
+herself headed by seamanship.  He waved an ironical salute with his
+sou'wester.  Her retort consisted in bringing her vessel to the wind, and
+sending a boat for him.
+
+She did it on the impulse; had she consulted her wishes she would rather
+have seen him at his post, where he seemed in his element, facing the
+spray and cunningly calculating to get wind and tide in his favour.
+Partly with regret she saw him, stripped of his tarpaulin, jump into her
+boat, as though she had once more to say farewell to sailor Nevil
+Beauchamp; farewell the bright youth, the hero, the true servant of his
+country!
+
+That feeling of hers changed when he was on board.  The stirring cordial
+day had put new breath in him.
+
+'Should not the flag be dipped?'  he said, looking up at the peak, where
+the white flag streamed.
+
+'Can you really mistake compassion for defeat?'  said she, with a smile.
+
+'Oh! before the wind of course I hadn't a chance.'
+
+'How could you be so presumptuous as to give chase?  And who has lent you
+that little cutter?'
+
+Beauchamp had hired her for a month, and he praised her sailing, and
+pretended to say that the race was not always to the strong in a stiff
+breeze.
+
+'But in point' of fact I was bent on trying how my boat swims, and had no
+idea of overhauling you.  To-day our salt-water lake is as fine as the
+Mediterranean.'
+
+'Omitting the islands and the Mediterranean colour, it is.  I have often
+told you how I love it.  I have landed papa at the Club.  Are you aware
+that we meet you at Steynham the day after to-morrow?'
+
+'Well, we can ride on the downs.  The downs between three and four of a
+summer's morning are as lovely as anything in the world.  They have the
+softest outlines imaginable .  .  .  and remind me of a friend's upper
+lip when she deigns to smile.'
+
+'Is one to rise at that hour to behold the effect?  And let me remind you
+further, Nevil, that the comparison of nature's minor work beside her
+mighty is an error, if you will be poetical.'
+
+She cited a well-known instance of degradation in verse.
+
+But a young man who happens to be intimately acquainted with a certain
+'dark eye in woman' will not so lightly be brought to consider that the
+comparison of tempestuous night to the flashing of those eyes of hers
+topples the scene headlong from grandeur.  And if Beauchamp remembered
+rightly, the scene was the Alps at night.
+
+He was prepared to contest Cecilia's judgement.  At that moment the
+breeze freshened and the canvas lifted from due South the yacht swung her
+sails to drive toward the West, and Cecilia's face and hair came out
+golden in the sunlight.  Speech was difficult, admiration natural, so he
+sat beside her, admiring in silence.
+
+She said a good word for the smartness of his little yacht.
+
+'This is my first trial of her,' said Beauchamp.  'I hired her chiefly to
+give Dr. Shrapnel a taste of salt air.  I 've no real right to be idling
+about.  His ward Miss Denham is travelling in Switzerland; the dear old
+man is alone, and not quite so well as I should wish.  Change of scene
+will do him good.  I shall land him on the French coast for a couple of
+days, or take him down Channel.'
+
+Cecilia gazed abstractedly at a passing schooner.
+
+'He works too hard,' said Beauchamp.
+
+'Who does?'
+
+'Dr. Shrapnel.'
+
+Some one else whom we have heard of works too hard, and it would be happy
+for mankind if he did not.
+
+Cecilia named the schooner; an American that had beaten our crack yachts.
+Beauchamp sprang up to spy at the American.
+
+'That's the Corinne, is she!'
+
+Yankee craftiness on salt water always excited his respectful attention
+as a spectator.
+
+'And what is the name of your boat, Nevil?'
+
+'The fool of an owner calls her the Petrel.  It's not that I'm
+superstitious, but to give a boat a name of bad augury to sailors appears
+to me .  .  .  however, I 've argued it with him and I will have her
+called the Curlew.  Carrying Dr. Shrapnel and me, Petrel would be thought
+the proper title for her isn't that your idea?'
+
+He laughed and she smiled, and then he became overcast with his political
+face, and said, 'I hope--I believe--you will alter your opinion of him.
+Can it be an opinion when it's founded on nothing?  You know really
+nothing of him.  I have in my pocket what I believe would alter your mind
+about him entirely.  I do think so; and I think so because I feel you
+would appreciate his deep sincerity and real nobleness.'
+
+'Is it a talisman that you have, Nevil?'
+
+'No, it's a letter.'
+
+Cecilia's cheeks took fire.
+
+'I should so much like to read it to you,' said he.
+
+'Do not, please,' she replied with a dash of supplication in her voice.
+
+'Not the whole of it--an extract here and there?  I want you so much to
+understand him.'
+
+'I am sure I should not.'
+
+'Let me try you!'
+
+'Pray do not.'
+
+'Merely to show you...'
+
+'But, Nevil, I do not wish to understand him.'
+
+'But you have only to listen for a few minutes, and I want you to know
+what good reason I have to reverence him as a teacher and a friend.'
+
+Cecilia looked at Beauchamp with wonder.  A confused recollection of the
+contents of the letter declaimed at Mount Laurels in Captain Baskelett's
+absurd sing-song, surged up in her mind revoltingly.  She signified a
+decided negative.  Something of a shudder accompanied the expression of
+it.
+
+But he as little as any member of the Romfrey blood was framed to let the
+word no stand quietly opposed to him.  And the no that a woman utters!
+It calls for wholesome tyranny.  Those old, those hoar-old duellists, Yes
+and No, have rarely been better matched than in Beauchamp and Cecilia.
+For if he was obstinate in attack she had great resisting power.  Twice
+to listen to that letter was beyond her endurance.  Indeed it cast a
+shadow on him and disfigured him; and when, affecting to plead, he said:
+'You must listen to it to please me, for my sake, Cecilia,' she answered:
+'It is for your sake, Nevil, I decline to.'
+
+'Why, what do you know of it?'  he exclaimed.
+
+'I know the kind of writing it would be.'
+
+'How do you know it?'
+
+'I have heard of some of Dr. Shrapnel's opinions.'
+
+'You imagine him to be subversive, intolerant, immoral, and the rest!
+all that comes under your word revolutionary.'
+
+'Possibly; but I must defend myself from hearing what I know will be
+certain to annoy me.'
+
+'But he is the reverse of immoral: and I intend to read you parts of the
+letter to prove to you that he is not the man you would blame, but I, and
+that if ever I am worthier .  .  .  worthier of you, as I hope to become,
+it will be owing to this admirable and good old man.'
+
+Cecilia trembled: she was touched to the quick.  Yet it was not pleasant
+to her to be wooed obliquely, through Dr. Shrapnel.
+
+She recognized the very letter, crowned with many stamps, thick with many
+pages, in Beauchamp's hands.
+
+'When you are at Steynham you will probably hear my uncle Everard's
+version of this letter,' he said.  'The baron chooses to think everything
+fair in war, and the letter came accidentally into his hands with the
+seal broken; well, he read it.  And, Cecilia, you can fancy the sort of
+stuff he would make of it.  Apart from that, I want you particularly to
+know how much I am indebted to Dr. Shrapnel.  Won't you learn to like him
+a little?  Won't you tolerate him?--I could almost say, for my sake!  He
+and I are at variance on certain points, but taking him altogether, I am
+under deeper obligations to him than to any man on earth.  He has found
+where I bend and waver.'
+
+'I recognize your chivalry, Nevil.'
+
+'He has done his best to train me to be of some service.  Where's the
+chivalry in owning a debt?  He is one of our true warriors; fearless and
+blameless.  I have had my heroes before.  You know how I loved Robert
+Hall: his death is a gap in my life.  He is a light for fighting
+Englishmen--who fight with the sword.  But the scale of the war, the
+cause, and the end in view, raise Dr. Shrapnel above the bravest I have
+ever had the luck to meet.  Soldiers and sailors have their excitement to
+keep them up to the mark; praise and rewards.  He is in his eight-and-
+sixtieth year, and he has never received anything but obloquy for his
+pains.  Half of the small fortune he has goes in charities and
+subscriptions.  Will that touch you?  But I think little of that, and so
+does he.  Charity is a common duty.  The dedication of a man's life and
+whole mind to a cause, there's heroism.  I wish I were eloquent; I wish I
+could move you.'
+
+Cecilia turned her face to him.  'I listen to you with pleasure, Nevil;
+but please do not read the letter.'
+
+'Yes; a paragraph or two I must read.'
+
+She rose.
+
+He was promptly by her side.  'If I say I ask you for one sign that you
+care for me in some degree?'
+
+'I have not for a moment ceased to be your friend, Nevil, since I was a
+child.'
+
+'But if you allow yourself to be so prejudiced against my best friend
+that you will not hear a word of his writing, are you friendly?'
+
+'Feminine, and obstinate,' said Cecilia.
+
+'Give me your eyes an instant.  I know you think me reckless and lawless:
+now is not that true?  You doubt whether, if a lady gave me her hand I
+should hold to it in perfect faith.  Or, perhaps not that: but you do
+suspect I should be capable of every sophism under the sun to persuade a
+woman to break her faith, if it suited me: supposing some passion to be
+at work.  Men who are open to passion have to be taught reflection before
+they distinguish between the woman they should sue for love because she
+would be their best mate, and the woman who has thrown a spell on them.
+Now, what I beg you to let me read you in this letter is a truth nobly
+stated that has gone into my blood, and changed me.  It cannot fail, too,
+in changeing your opinion of Dr. Shrapnel.  It makes me wretched that you
+should be divided from me in your ideas of him.  I, you see--and I
+confess I think it my chief title to honour--reverence him.'
+
+'I regret that I am unable to utter the words of Ruth,' said Cecilia, in
+a low voice.  She felt rather tremulously; opposed only to the letter and
+the writer of it, not at all to Beauchamp, except on account of his
+idolatry of the wicked revolutionist.  Far from having a sense of
+opposition to Beauchamp; she pitied him for his infatuation, and in her
+lofty mental serenity she warmed to him for the seeming boyishness of his
+constant and extravagant worship of the man, though such an enthusiasm
+cast shadows on his intellect.
+
+He was reading a sentence of the letter.
+
+'I hear nothing but the breeze, Nevil,' she said.
+
+The breeze fluttered the letter-sheets: they threatened to fly.  Cecilia
+stepped two paces away.
+
+'Hark; there is a military band playing on the pier,' said she.  'I am so
+fond of hearing music a little off shore.'
+
+Beauchamp consigned the letter to his pocket.
+
+'You are not offended, Nevil?'
+
+'Dear me, no.  You haven't a mind for tonics, that's all.'
+
+'Healthy persons rarely have,' she remarked, and asked him, smiling
+softly, whether he had a mind for music.
+
+His insensibility to music was curious, considering how impressionable he
+was to verse, and to songs of birds.  He listened with an oppressed look,
+as to something the particular secret of which had to be reached by a
+determined effort of sympathy for those whom it affected.  He liked it if
+she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he liked it, clearly
+trying hard to comprehend it, as unmoved by the swell and sigh of the
+resonant brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit thrilled to
+it, and was bountiful in glowing visions and in tenderness.
+
+There hung her hand.  She would not have refused to yield it.  The hero
+of her childhood, the friend of her womanhood, and her hero still, might
+have taken her with half a word.
+
+Beauchamp was thinking: She can listen to that brass band, and she shuts
+her ears to this letter:
+
+The reading of it would have been a prelude to the opening of his heart
+to her, at the same time that it vindicated his dear and honoured master,
+as he called Dr. Shrapnel.  To speak, without the explanation of his
+previous reticence which this letter would afford, seemed useless: even
+the desire to speak was absent, passion being absent.
+
+'I see papa; he is getting into a boat with some one,' said Cecilia, and
+gave orders for the yacht to stand in toward the Club steps.  'Do you
+know, Nevil, the Italian common people are not so subject to the charm of
+music as other races?  They have more of the gift, and I think less of
+the feeling.  You do not hear much music in Italy.  I remember in the
+year of Revolution there was danger of a rising in some Austrian city,
+and a colonel of a regiment commanded his band to play.  The mob was put
+in good humour immediately.'
+
+'It's a soporific,' said Beauchamp.
+
+'You would not rather have had them rise to be slaughtered?'
+
+'Would you have them waltzed into perpetual servility?'
+
+Cecilia hummed, and suggested: 'If one can have them happy in any way?'
+
+'Then the day of destruction may almost be dated.'
+
+'Nevil, your terrible view of life must be false.'
+
+'I make it out worse to you than to any one else, because I want our
+minds to be united.'
+
+'Give me a respite now and then.'
+
+'With all my heart.  And forgive me for beating my drum.  I see what
+others don't see, or else I feel it more; I don't know; but it appears to
+me our country needs rousing if it's to live.  There 's a division
+between poor and rich that you have no conception of, and it can't safely
+be left unnoticed.  I've done.'
+
+He looked at her and saw tears on her under-lids.
+
+'My dearest Cecilia!'
+
+'Music makes me childish,' said she.
+
+Her father was approaching in the boat.  Beside him sat the Earl of
+Lockrace, latterly classed among the suitors of the lady of Mount
+Laurels.
+
+A few minutes remained to Beauchamp of his lost opportunity.  Instead of
+seizing them with his usual promptitude, he let them slip, painfully
+mindful of his treatment of her last year after the drive into Bevisham,
+when she was England, and Renee holiday France.
+
+This feeling he fervently translated into the reflection that the bride
+who would bring him beauty and wealth, and her especial gift of tender
+womanliness, was not yet so thoroughly mastered as to grant her husband
+his just prevalence with her, or even indeed his complete independence of
+action, without which life itself was not desireable.
+
+Colonel Halkett stared at Beauchamp as if he had risen from the deep.
+
+'Have you been in that town this morning?' was one of his first
+questions to him when he stood on board.
+
+'I came through it,' said Beauchamp, and pointed to his little cutter
+labouring in the distance.  'She's mine for a month; I came from
+Holdesbury to try her; and then he stated how he had danced attendance on
+the schooner for a couple of hours before any notice was taken of him,
+and Cecilia with her graceful humour held up his presumption to scorn.
+
+Her father was eyeing Beauchamp narrowly, and appeared troubled.
+
+'Did you see Mr. Romfrey yesterday, or this morning?'  the colonel asked
+him, mentioning that Mr. Romfrey had been somewhere about the island
+yesterday, at which Beauchamp expressed astonishment, for his uncle
+Everard seldom visited a yachting station.
+
+Colonel Halkett exchanged looks with Cecilia.  Hers were inquiring, and
+he confirmed her side-glance at Beauchamp.  She raised her brows; he
+nodded, to signify that there was gravity in the case.  Here the
+signalling stopped short; she had to carry on a conversation with Lord
+Lockrace, one of those men who betray the latent despot in an exhibition
+of discontentment unless they have all a lady's hundred eyes attentive to
+their discourse.
+
+At last Beauchamp quitted the vessel.
+
+When he was out of hearing, Colonel Halkett said to Cecilia: 'Grancey
+Lespel tells me that Mr. Romfrey called on the man Shrapnel yesterday
+evening at six o'clock.'
+
+'Yes, Papa?'
+
+'Now come and see the fittings below,' the colonel addressed Lord
+Lockrace, and murmured to his daughter:
+
+'And soundly horsewhipped him!'
+
+Cecilia turned on the instant to gaze after Nevil Beauchamp.  She could
+have wept for pity.  Her father's emphasis on 'soundly' declared an
+approval of the deed, and she was chilled by a sickening abhorrence and
+dread of the cruel brute in men, such as, awakened by she knew not what,
+had haunted her for a year of her girlhood.
+
+'And he deserved it!'  the colonel pursued, on emerging from the cabin at
+Lord Lockrace's heels.  'I've no doubt he richly deserved it.  The writer
+of that letter we heard Captain Baskelett read the other day deserves the
+very worst he gets.'
+
+'Baskelett bored the Club the other night with a letter of a Radical
+fellow,' said Lord Lockrace.  'Men who write that stuff should be strung
+up and whipped by the common hangman.'
+
+'It was a private letter,' said Cecilia.
+
+'Public or private, Miss Halkett.'
+
+Her mind flew back to Seymour Austin for the sense of stedfastness when
+she heard such language as this, which, taken in conjunction with Dr.
+Shrapnel's, seemed to uncloak our Constitutional realm and show it
+boiling up with the frightful elements of primitive societies.
+
+'I suppose we are but half civilized,' she said.
+
+'If that,' said the earl.
+
+Colonel Halkett protested that he never could quite make out what
+Radicals were driving at.
+
+'The rents,' Lord Lockrace observed in the conclusive tone of brevity.
+He did not stay very long.
+
+The schooner was boarded subsequently by another nobleman, an Admiral of
+the Fleet and ex-minister of the Whig Government, Lord Croyston, who was
+a friend of Mr. Romfrey's, and thought well of Nevil Beauchamp as a
+seaman and naval officer, but shook an old head over him as a politician.
+He came to beg a passage across the water to his marine Lodge, an
+accident having happened early in the morning to his yacht, the Lady
+Violet.  He was able to communicate the latest version of the
+horsewhipping of Dr. Shrapnel, from which it appeared that after Mr.
+Romfrey had handsomely flogged the man he flung his card on the prostrate
+body, to let men know who was responsible for the act.  He expected that
+Mr. Romfrey would be subjected to legal proceedings.  'But if there's a
+pleasure worth paying for it's the trouncing of a villain,' said he; and
+he had been informed that Dr. Shrapnel was a big one.  Lord Croyston's
+favourite country residence was in the neighbourhood of old Mrs.
+Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames.  Speaking of Nevil Beauchamp a second
+time, he alluded to his relations with his great-aunt, said his prospects
+were bad, that she had interdicted her house to him, and was devoted to
+her other great-nephew.
+
+'And so she should be,' said Colonel Halkett.  'That's a young man who's
+an Englishman without French gunpowder notions in his head.  He works for
+us down at the mine in Wales a good part of the year, and has tided us
+over a threatening strike there: gratuitously: I can't get him to accept
+anything.  I can't think why he does it.'
+
+'He'll have plenty,' said Lord Croyston, levelling his telescope to sight
+the racing cutters.
+
+Cecilia fancied she descried Nevil's Petrel, dubbed Curlew, to Eastward,
+and had a faint gladness in the thought that his knowledge of his uncle
+Everard's deed of violence would be deferred for another two or three
+hours.
+
+She tried to persuade her father to wait for Nevil, and invite him to
+dine at Mount Laurels, and break the news to him gently.  Colonel Halkett
+argued that in speaking of the affair he should certainly not commiserate
+the man who had got his deserts, and saying this he burst into a petty
+fury against the epistle of Dr. Shrapnel, which appeared to be growing
+more monstrous in proportion to his forgetfulness of the details, as
+mountains gather vastness to the eye at a certain remove.  Though he
+could not guess the reason for Mr. Romfrey's visit to Bevisham, he was,
+he said, quite prepared to maintain that Mr. Romfrey had a perfect
+justification for his conduct.
+
+Cecilia hinted at barbarism.  The colonel hinted at high police duties
+that gentlemen were sometimes called on to perform for the protection of
+society.  'In defiance of its laws?'  she asked; and he answered: 'Women
+must not be judging things out of their sphere,' with the familiar accent
+on 'women' which proves their inferiority.  He was rarely guilty of it
+toward his daughter.  Evidently he had resolved to back Mr. Romfrey
+blindly.  That epistle of Dr. Shrapnel's merited condign punishment and
+had met with it, he seemed to rejoice in saying: and this was his
+abstract of the same: 'An old charlatan who tells his dupe to pray every
+night of his life for the beheading of kings and princes, and scattering
+of the clergy, and disbanding the army, that he and his rabble may fall
+upon the wealthy, and show us numbers win; and he'll undertake to make
+them moral!'
+
+'I wish we were not going to Steynham,' said Cecilia.
+
+'So do I.  Well, no, I don't,' the colonel corrected himself, 'no; it 's
+an engagement.  I gave my consent so far.  We shall see whether Nevil
+Beauchamp's a man of any sense.'
+
+Her heart sank.  This was as much as to let her know that if Nevil broke
+with his uncle, the treaty of union between the two families, which her
+father submitted to entertain out of consideration for Mr. Romfrey, would
+be at an end.
+
+The wind had fallen.  Entering her river, Cecilia gazed back at the
+smooth broad water, and the band of golden beams flung across it from the
+evening sun over the forest.  No little cutter was visible.  She could
+not write to Nevil to bid him come and concert with her in what spirit to
+encounter his uncle Everard at Steynham.  And guests would be at Mount
+Laurels next day; Lord Lockrace, Lord Croyston, and the Lespels; she
+could not drive down to Bevisham on the chance of seeing him.  Nor was it
+to be acknowledged even to herself that she so greatly desired to see him
+and advise him.  Why not?  Because she was one of the artificial
+creatures called women (with the accent) who dare not be spontaneous, and
+cannot act independently if they would continue to be admirable in the
+world's eye, and who for that object must remain fixed on shelves, like
+other marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shattering or
+tarnishing.  This is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of
+Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves
+to the dealers.  Their artificiality is at once their bane and their
+source of superior pride.
+
+Seymour Austin might have reason for seeking to emancipate them, she
+thought, and blushed in thought that she could never be learning anything
+but from her own immediate sensations.
+
+Of course it was in her power to write to Beauchamp, just as it had been
+in his to speak to her, but the fire was wanting in her blood and absent
+from his mood, so they were kept apart.
+
+Her father knew as little as she what was the positive cause of Mr.
+Romfrey's chastisement of Dr. Shrapnel.  'Cause enough, I don't doubt,'
+he said, and cited the mephitic letter.
+
+Cecilia was not given to suspicions, or she would have had them kindled
+by a certain wilfulness in his incessant reference to the letter, and
+exoneration, if not approval, of Mr. Romfrey's conduct.
+
+How did that chivalrous gentleman justify himself for condescending to
+such an extreme as the use of personal violence?  Was there a possibility
+of his justifying it to Nevil?  She was most wretched in her reiteration
+of these inquiries, for, with a heart subdued, she had still a mind whose
+habit of independent judgement was not to be constrained, and while she
+felt that it was only by siding with Nevil submissively and blindly in
+this lamentable case that she could hope for happiness, she foresaw the
+likelihood of her not being able to do so as much as he would desire and
+demand.  This she took for the protest of her pure reason.  In reality,
+grieved though she was on account of that Dr. Shrapnel, her captive heart
+resented the anticipated challenge to her to espouse his cause or
+languish.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM
+
+The judge pronouncing sentence of condemnation on the criminal is
+proverbially a sorrowfully-minded man; and still more would he be so had
+he to undertake the part of executioner as well.  This is equivalent to
+saying that the simple pleasures are no longer with us; it must be a
+personal enemy now to give us any satisfaction in chastising and slaying.
+Perhaps by-and-by that will be savourless: we degenerate.  There is,
+nevertheless, ever (and let nature be praised for it) a strong
+sustainment in the dutiful exertion of our physical energies, and Mr.
+Everard Romfrey experienced it after he had fulfilled his double office
+on the person of Dr. Shrapnel by carrying out his own decree.  His
+conscience approved him cheerlessly, as it is the habit of that secret
+monitor to do when we have no particular advantage coming of the act we
+have performed; but the righteous labour of his arm gave him high
+breathing and an appetite.
+
+He foresaw that he and Nevil would soon be having a wrestle over the
+matter, hand and thigh; but a gentleman in the right engaged with a
+fellow in the wrong has nothing to apprehend; is, in fact, in the
+position of a game-preserver with a poacher.  The nearest approach to
+gratification in that day's work which Mr. Romfrey knew was offered by
+the picture of Nevil's lamentable attitude above his dirty idol.  He
+conceived it in the mock-mediaeval style of our caricaturists:--Shrapnel
+stretched at his length, half a league, in slashed yellows and blacks,
+with his bauble beside him, and prodigious pointed toes; Nevil in parti-
+coloured tights, on one leg, raising his fists in imprecation to a nose
+in the firmament.
+
+Gentlemen of an unpractised imaginative capacity cannot vision for
+themselves exactly what they would, being unable to exercise authority
+over the proportions and the hues of the objects they conceive, which are
+very much at the mercy of their sportive caprices; and the state of mind
+of Mr. Romfrey is not to be judged by his ridiculous view of the pair.
+In the abstract he could be sorry for Shrapnel.  As he knew himself
+magnanimous, he promised himself to be forbearing with Nevil.
+
+Moreover, the month of September was drawing nigh; he had plenty to think
+of.  The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy the
+situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling the same
+thought in connection with September.  Our England holds possession of a
+considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps the world in awe to see
+her bestowing so considerable a portion of her intelligence upon her
+recreations.  To prosecute them with her whole heart is an ingenious
+exhibition of her power.  Mr. Romfrey was of those who said to his
+countrymen, 'Go yachting; go cricketing; go boat-racing; go shooting; go
+horseracing, nine months of the year, while the other Europeans go
+marching and drilling.'  Those occupations he considered good for us; and
+our much talking, writing, and thinking about them characteristic, and
+therefore good.  And he was not one of those who do penance for that
+sweating indolence in the fits of desperate panic.  Beauchamp's argument
+that the rich idler begets the idling vagabond, the rich wagerer the
+brutal swindler, the general thirst for a mad round of recreation a
+generally-increasing disposition to avoid serious work, and the unbraced
+moral tone of the country an indifference to national responsibility (an
+argument doubtless extracted from Shrapnel, talk tall as the very
+demagogue when he stood upright), Mr. Romfrey laughed at scornfully,
+affirming that our manufactures could take care of themselves.  As for
+invasion, we are circled by the sea.  Providence has done that for us,
+and may be relied on to do more in an emergency.--The children of wealth
+and the children of the sun alike believe that Providence is for them,
+and it would seem that the former can do without it less than the latter,
+though the former are less inclined to give it personification.
+
+This year, however, the array of armaments on the Continent made Mr.
+Romfrey anxious about our navy.  Almost his first topic in welcoming
+Colonel Halkett and Cecilia to Steynham was the rottenness of navy
+administration; for if Providence is to do anything for us it must have a
+sea-worthy fleet for the operation.  How loudly would his contemptuous
+laughter have repudiated the charge that he trusted to supernatural
+agency for assistance in case of need!  But so it was: and he owned to
+believing in English luck.  Partly of course he meant that steady fire of
+combat which his countrymen have got heated to of old till fortune
+blessed them.
+
+'Nevil is not here?'  the colonel asked.
+
+'No, I suspect he's gruelling and plastering a doctor of his
+acquaintance,' Mr. Romfrey said, with his nasal laugh composed of scorn
+and resignation.
+
+'Yes, yes, I've heard,' said Colonel Halkett hastily.
+
+He would have liked to be informed of Dr. Shrapnel's particular offence:
+he mentioned the execrable letter.
+
+Mr. Romfrey complacently interjected: 'Drug-vomit!'  and after an
+interval: 'Gallows!'
+
+'That man has done Nevil Beauchamp a world of mischief, Romfrey.'
+
+'We'll hope for a cure, colonel.'
+
+'Did the man come across you?'
+
+'He did.'
+
+Mr. Romfrey was mute on the subject.  Colonel Halkett abstained from
+pushing his inquiries.
+
+Cecilia could only tell her father when they were alone in the drawing-
+room a few minutes before dinner that Mrs. Culling was entirely ignorant
+of any cause to which Nevil's absence might be attributed.
+
+'Mr. Romfrey had good cause,' the colonel said, emphatically.
+
+He repeated it next day, without being a bit wiser of the cause.
+
+Cecilia's happiness or hope was too sensitive to allow of a beloved
+father's deceiving her in his opposition to it.
+
+She saw clearly now that he had fastened on this miserable incident,
+expecting an imbroglio that would divide Nevil and his uncle, and be an
+excuse for dividing her and Nevil.  O for the passionate will to make
+head against what appeared as a fate in this matter!  She had it not.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, Sir John and Lady Baskelett, and the
+Countess of Welshpool, another sister of Mr. Romfrey's, arrived at
+Steynham for a day and a night.  Lady Baskelett and Lady Welshpool came
+to see their brother, not to countenance his household; and Mr. Wardour-
+Devereux could not stay longer than a certain number of hours under a
+roof where tobacco was in evil odour.  From her friend Louise, his wife,
+Cecilia learnt that Mr. Lydiard had been summoned to Dr. Shrapnel's
+bedside, as Mrs. Devereux knew by a letter she had received from Mr.
+Lydiard, who was no political devotee of that man, she assured Cecilia,
+but had an extraordinary admiration for the Miss Denham living with him.
+This was kindly intended to imply that Beauchamp was released from his
+attendance on Dr. Shrapnel, and also that it was not he whom the Miss
+Denham attracted.
+
+'She is in Switzerland,' said Cecilia.
+
+'She is better there,' said Mrs. Devereux.
+
+Mr. Stukely Culbrett succeeded to these visitors.  He heard of the case
+of Dr. Shrapnel from Colonel Halkett, and of Beauchamp's missing of his
+chance with the heiress from Mr. Romfrey.
+
+Rosamund Culling was in great perplexity about Beauchamp's prolonged
+absence; for he had engaged to come, he had written to her to say he
+would be sure to come; and she feared he was ill.  She would have
+persuaded Mr. Culbrett to go down to Bevisham to see him: she declared
+that she could even persuade herself to call on Dr. Shrapnel a second
+time, in spite of her horror of the man.  Her anger at the thought of his
+keeping Nevil away from good fortune and happiness caused her to speak in
+resentment and loathing of the man.
+
+'He behaved badly when you saw him, did he?'  said Stukely.
+
+'Badly, is no word.  He is detestable,' Rosamund replied.
+
+'You think he ought to be whipped?'
+
+She feigned an extremity of vindictiveness, and twisted her brows in
+comic apology for the unfeminine sentiment, as she said: 'I really do.'
+
+The feminine gentleness of her character was known to Stukely, so she
+could afford to exaggerate the expression of her anger, and she did not
+modify it, forgetful that a woman is the representative of the sex with
+cynical men, and escapes from contempt at the cost of her sisterhood.
+
+Looking out of an upper window in the afternoon she beheld Nevil
+Beauchamp in a group with his uncle Everard, the colonel and Cecilia, and
+Mr. Culbrett.  Nevil was on his feet; the others were seated under the
+great tulip-tree on the lawn.
+
+A little observation of them warned her that something was wrong.  There
+was a vacant chair; Nevil took it in his hand at times, stamped it to the
+ground, walked away and sharply back fronting his uncle, speaking
+vehemently, she perceived, and vainly, as she judged by the cast of his
+uncle's figure.  Mr. Romfrey's head was bent, and wagged slightly, as he
+screwed his brows up and shot his eyes, queerly at the agitated young
+man.  Colonel Halkett's arms crossed his chest.  Cecilia's eyelids
+drooped their, lashes.  Mr. Culbrett was balancing on the hind-legs of
+his chair.  No one appeared to be speaking but Nevil.
+
+It became evident that Nevil was putting a series of questions to his
+uncle.  Mechanical nods were given him in reply.
+
+Presently Mr. Romfrey rose, thundering out a word or two, without a
+gesture.
+
+Colonel Halkett rose.
+
+Nevil flung his hand out straight to the house.
+
+Mr. Romfrey seemed to consent; the colonel shook his head: Nevil
+insisted.
+
+A footman carrying a tea-tray to Miss Halkett received some commission
+and swiftly disappeared, making Rosamund wonder whether sugar, milk or
+cream had been omitted.
+
+She met him on the first landing, and heard that Mr. Romfrey requested
+her to step out on the lawn.
+
+Expecting to hear of a piece of misconduct on the part of the household
+servants, she hurried forth, and found that she had to traverse the whole
+space of the lawn up to the tuliptree.  Colonel Halkett and Mr. Romfrey
+had resumed their seats.  The colonel stood up and bowed to her.
+
+Mr. Romfrey said: 'One question to you, ma'am, and you shall not be
+detained.  Did not that man Shrapnel grossly insult you on the day you
+called on him to see Captain Beauchamp about a couple of months before
+the Election?'
+
+'Look at me when you speak, ma'am,' said Beauchamp.
+
+Rosamund looked at him.
+
+The whiteness of his face paralyzed her tongue.  A dreadful levelling of
+his eyes penetrated and chilled her.  Instead of thinking of her answer
+she thought of what could possibly have happened.
+
+'Did he insult you at all, ma'am?'  said Beauchamp.
+
+Mr. Romfrey reminded him that he was not a cross-examining criminal
+barrister.
+
+They waited for her to speak.
+
+She hesitated, coloured, betrayed confusion; her senses telling her of a
+catastrophe, her conscience accusing her as the origin of it.
+
+'Did Dr. Shrapnel, to your belief, intentionally hurt your feelings or
+your dignity?'  said Beauchamp, and made the answer easier:
+
+'Not intentionally, surely: not .  .  .  I certainly do not accuse him.'
+
+'Can you tell me you feel that he wounded you in the smallest degree?
+And if so, how?  I ask you this, because he is anxious, if he lives, to
+apologize to you for any offence that he may have been guilty of: he was
+ignorant of it.  I have his word for that, and his commands to me to bear
+it to you.  I may tell you I have never known him injure the most feeble
+thing--anything alive, or wish to.'
+
+Beauchamp's voice choked.  Rosamund saw tears leap out of the stern face
+of her dearest now in wrath with her.
+
+'Is he ill?'  she faltered.
+
+'He is.  You own to a strong dislike of him, do you not?'
+
+'But not to desire any harm to him.'
+
+'Not a whipping,' Mr. Culbrett murmured.
+
+Everard Romfrey overheard it.
+
+He had allowed Mrs. Culling to be sent for, that she might with a bare
+affirmative silence Nevil, when his conduct was becoming intolerable
+before the guests of the house.
+
+'That will do, ma'am,' he dismissed her.
+
+Beauchamp would not let her depart.
+
+'I must have your distinct reply, and in Mr. Romfrey's presence:--say,
+that if you accused him you were mistaken, or that they were mistaken who
+supposed you had accused him.  I must have the answer before you go.'
+
+'Sir, will you learn manners!'  Mr. Romfrey said to him, with a rattle of
+the throat.
+
+Beauchamp turned his face from-her.
+
+Colonel Halkett offered her his arm to lead her away.
+
+'What is it?  Oh, what is it?'  she whispered, scarcely able to walk, but
+declining the colonel's arm.
+
+'You ought not to have been dragged out here,' said he.  'Any one might
+have known there would be no convincing of Captain Beauchamp.  That old
+rascal in Bevisham has been having a beating; that's all.  And a very
+beautiful day it is!--a little too hot, though.  Before we leave, you
+must give me a lesson or two in gardening.'
+
+'Dr. Shrapnel--Mr. Romfrey!'  said Rosamund half audibly under the
+oppression of the more she saw than what she said.
+
+The colonel talked of her renown in landscape-gardening.  He added
+casually: 'They met the other day.'
+
+'By accident?'
+
+'By chance, I suppose.  Shrapnel defends one of your Steynham poaching
+vermin.'
+
+'Mr. Romfrey struck him?--for that?  Oh, never!'  Rosamund exclaimed.
+
+'I suppose he had a long account to settle.'
+
+She fetched her breath painfully.  'I shall never be forgiven.'
+
+'And I say that a gentleman has no business with idols,' the colonel
+fumed as he spoke.  'Those letters of Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp are a
+scandal on the name of Englishman.'
+
+'You have read that shocking one, Colonel Halkett?'
+
+'Captain Baskelett read it out to us.'
+
+'He?  Oh!  then .  .  .'  She stopped:--Then the author of this mischief
+is clear to me!  her divining hatred of Cecil would have said, but her
+humble position did not warrant such speech.  A consideration of the
+lowliness necessitating this restraint at a moment when loudly to
+denounce another's infamy with triumphant insight would have solaced and
+supported her, kept Rosamund dumb.
+
+She could not bear to think of her part in the mischief.
+
+She was not bound to think of it, knowing actually nothing of the
+occurrence.
+
+Still she felt that she was on her trial.  She detected herself running
+in and out of her nature to fortify it against accusations rather than
+cleanse it for inspection.  It was narrowing in her own sight.  The
+prospect of her having to submit to a further interrogatory, shut it up
+entrenched in the declaration that Dr. Shrapnel had so far outraged her
+sentiments as to be said to have offended her: not insulted, perhaps, but
+certainly offended.
+
+And this was a generous distinction.  It was generous; and, having
+recognized the generosity, she was unable to go beyond it.
+
+She was presently making the distinction to Miss Halkett.  The colonel
+had left her at the door of the house: Miss Halkett sought admission to
+her private room on an errand of condolence, for she had sympathized with
+her very much in the semi-indignity Nevil had forced her to undergo: and
+very little indeed had she been able to sympathize with Nevil, who had
+been guilty of the serious fault of allowing himself to appear moved by
+his own commonplace utterances; or, in other words, the theme being
+hostile to his audience, he had betrayed emotion over it without first
+evoking the spirit of pathos.
+
+'As for me,' Rosamund replied, to some comforting remarks of Miss
+Halkett's, 'I do not understand why I should be mixed up in Dr.
+Shrapnel's misfortunes: I really am quite unable to recollect his words
+to me or his behaviour: I have only a positive impression that I left his
+house, where I had gone to see Captain Beauchamp, in utter disgust, so
+repelled by his language that I could hardly trust myself to speak of the
+man to Mr. Romfrey when he questioned me.  I did not volunteer it.  I am
+ready to say that I believe Dr. Shrapnel did not intend to be insulting.
+I cannot say that he was not offensive.
+
+You know, Miss Halkett, I would willingly, gladly have saved him from
+anything like punishment.'
+
+'You are too gentle to have thought of it,' said Cecilia.
+
+'But I shall never be forgiven by Captain Beauchamp.  I see in his eyes
+that he accuses me and despises me.'
+
+'He will not be so unjust, Mrs. Culling.'
+
+Rosamund begged that she might hear what Nevil had first said on his
+arrival.
+
+Cecilia related that they had seen him walking swiftly across the park,
+and that Mr. Romfrey had hailed him, and held his hand out; and that
+Captain Beauchamp had overlooked it, saying he feared Mr. Romfrey's work
+was complete.  He had taken her father's hand and hers and his touch was
+like ice.
+
+'His worship of that Dr. Shrapnel is extraordinary,' quoth Rosamund.
+'And how did Mr. Romfrey behave to him?'
+
+'My father thinks, very forbearingly.'
+
+Rosamund sighed and made a semblance of wringing her hands.  'It seems to
+me that I anticipated ever since I heard of the man .  .  .  or at least
+ever since I saw him and heard him, he would be the evil genius of us
+all: if I dare include myself.  But I am not permitted to escape!  And,
+Miss Halkett, can you tell me how it was that my name--that I became
+involved?  I cannot imagine the circumstances which would bring me
+forward in this unhappy affair.'
+
+Cecilia replied: 'The occasion was, that Captain Beauchamp so scornfully
+contrasted the sort of injury done by Dr. Shrapnel's defence of a poacher
+on his uncle's estate, with the severe chastisement inflicted by Mr.
+Romfrey in revenge for it.  He would not leave the subject.'
+
+'I see him--see his eyes!'  cried Rosamund, her bosom heaving and sinking
+deep, as her conscience quavered within her.  'At last Mr. Romfrey
+mentioned me?'
+
+'He stood up and said you had been personally insulted by Dr. Shrapnel.'
+
+Rosamund meditated in a distressing doubt of her conscientious
+truthfulness.
+
+'Captain Beauchamp will be coming to me; and how can I answer him?
+Heaven knows I would have shielded the poor man, if possible--poor
+wretch!  Wicked though he is, one has only to hear of him suffering!
+But what can I answer?  I do recollect now that Mr. Romfrey compelled
+me from question to question to confess that the man had vexed me.
+Insulted, I never said.  At the worst, I said vexed.  I would not have
+said insulted, or even offended, because Mr. Romfrey .  .  .  ah!  we
+know him.  What I did say, I forget.  I have no guide to what I said but
+my present feelings, and they are pity for the unfortunate man much more
+than dislike.--Well, I must go through the scene with Nevil!'  Rosamund
+concluded her outcry of ostensible exculpation.
+
+She asked in a cooler moment how it was that Captain Beauchamp had so far
+forgotten himself as to burst out on his uncle before the guests of the
+house.  It appeared that he had wished his uncle to withdraw with him,
+and Mr. Romfrey had bidden him postpone private communications.  Rosamund
+gathered from one or two words of Cecilia's that Mr. Romfrey, until
+finally stung by Nevil, had indulged in his best-humoured banter.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Alike believe that Providence is for them
+Better for men of extremely opposite opinions not to meet
+Convict it by instinct without the ceremony of a jury
+Cowardice is even worse for nations than for individual men
+Give our courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope
+Good maxim for the wrathful--speak not at all
+Impossible for him to think that women thought
+Leader accustomed to count ahead upon vapourish abstractions
+Love, that has risen above emotion, quite independent of craving
+Made of his creed a strait-jacket for humanity
+Mankind is offended by heterodoxy in mean attire
+May not one love, not craving to be beloved?
+People with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship
+Prayer for an object is the cajolery of an idol
+Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run counter
+Small things producing great consequences
+That a mask is a concealment
+The girl could not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly
+The religion of this vast English middle-class--Comfort
+The turn will come to us as to others--and go
+Women must not be judging things out of their sphere
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Beauchamp's Career, v4
+by George Meredith
+
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