initial commit of ebook 4458HEADmain

1 files changed, 4062 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/4458.txt b/4458.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9cf54e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/4458.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4062 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Beauchamps Career, by George Meredith, v6
+#64 in our series by George Meredith
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before distributing this or any other
+Project Gutenberg file.
+
+We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your
+own disk, thereby keeping an electronic path open for future
+readers.  Please do not remove this.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
+view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
+The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the
+information they need to understand what they may and may not
+do with the etext.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These Etexts Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
+further information, is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+
+
+
+Title: Beauchamps Career, v6
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4458]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 6, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Beauchamps Career, by George Meredith, v6
+**********This file should be named 4458.txt or 4458.zip**********
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+etexts, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2001 as we release over 50 new Etext
+files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 4000+
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 4,000 Etexts.  We need
+funding, as well as continued efforts by volunteers, to maintain
+or increase our production and reach our goals.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of January, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware,
+Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky,
+Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma,
+Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota,
+Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia,
+Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+All donations should be made to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fundraising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fundraising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
+and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
+[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
+of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
+software or any other related product without express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 6.
+
+XLII.     THE TWO PASSIONS
+XLIII.    THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS
+XLIV.     THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO
+          PASSIONS IN BEAUCHAMP.
+XLV.      A LITTLE PLOT AGAINST CECILIA
+XLVI.     AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN
+XLVII.    THE REFUSAL OF HIM
+XLVIII.   OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY
+XLIX.     A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLES
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+THE TWO PASSIONS
+
+The foggy February night refreshed his head, and the business of fetching
+the luggage from the hotel--a commission that necessitated the delivery
+of his card and some very commanding language--kept his mind in order.
+Subsequently he drove to his cousin Baskelett's Club, where he left a
+short note to say the house was engaged for the night and perhaps a week
+further.  Concise, but sufficient: and he stated a hope to his cousin
+that he would not be inconvenienced.  This was courteous.
+
+He had taken a bed at Renee's hotel, after wresting her boxes from the
+vanquished hotel proprietor, and lay there, hearing the clear sound of
+every little sentence of hers during the absence of Rosamund: her
+'Adieu,' and the strange 'Do you think so?'  and 'I know where I am; I
+scarcely know more.'  Her eyes and their darker lashes, and the fitful
+little sensitive dimples of a smile without joy, came with her voice, but
+hardened to an aspect unlike her.  Not a word could he recover of what
+she had spoken before Rosamund's intervention.  He fancied she must have
+related details of her journey.  Especially there must have been mention,
+he thought, of her drive to the station from Tourdestelle; and this
+flashed on him the scene of his ride to the chateau, and the meeting her
+on the road, and the white light on the branching river, and all that was
+Renee in the spirit of the place she had abandoned for him, believing in
+him.  She had proved that she believed in him.  What in the name of
+sanity had been the meaning of his language?  and what was it between
+them that arrested him and caused him to mumble absurdly of 'doing best,'
+when in fact he was her bondman, rejoiced to be so, by his pledged word?
+and when she, for some reason that he was sure she had stated, though he
+could recollect no more than the formless hideousness of it, was debarred
+from returning to Tourdestelle?
+
+He tossed in his bed as over a furnace, in the extremity of perplexity of
+one accustomed to think himself ever demonstrably in the right, and now
+with his whole nature in insurrection against that legitimate claim.  It
+led him to accuse her of a want of passionate warmth, in her not having
+supplicated and upbraided him--not behaving theatrically, in fine, as the
+ranting pen has made us expect of emergent ladies that they will
+naturally do.  Concerning himself, he thought commendingly, a tear would
+have overcome him.  She had not wept.  The kaleidoscope was shaken in his
+fragmentary mind, and she appeared thrice adorable for this noble
+composure, he brutish.
+
+Conscience and reason had resolved to a dead weight in him, like an
+inanimate force, governing his acts despite the man, while he was with
+Renee.  Now his wishes and waverings conjured up a semblance of a
+conscience and much reason to assure him that he had done foolishly as
+well as unkindly, most unkindly: that he was even the ghastly spectacle
+of a creature attempting to be more than he can be.  Are we never to
+embrace our inclinations?  Are the laws regulating an old dry man like
+his teacher and guide to be the same for the young and vigorous?
+
+Is a good gift to be refused?  And this was his first love!  The
+brilliant Renee, many-hued as a tropic bird! his lady of shining grace,
+with her sole fault of want of courage devotedly amended! his pupil, he
+might say, of whom he had foretold that she must come to such a pass, at
+the same time prefixing his fidelity.  And he was handing her over
+knowingly to one kind of wretchedness--'son amour, mon ami,' shot through
+him, lighting up the gulfs of a mind in wreck;--and one kind of happiness
+could certainly be promised her!
+
+All these and innumerable other handsome pleadings of the simulacra of
+the powers he had set up to rule, were crushed at daybreak by the
+realities in a sense of weight that pushed him mechanically on.  He
+telegraphed to Roland, and mentally gave chase to the message to recall
+it.  The slumberer roused in darkness by the relentless insane-seeming
+bell which hales him to duty, melts at the charms of sleep, and feels
+that logic is with him in his preference of his pillow; but the tireless
+revolving world outside, nature's pitiless antagonist, has hung one of
+its balances about him, and his actions are directed by the state of the
+scales, wherein duty weighs deep and desireability swings like a pendant
+doll: so he throws on his harness, astounded, till his blood quickens
+with work, at the round of sacrifices demanded of nature: which is indeed
+curious considering what we are taught here and there as to the
+infallibility of our august mother.  Well, the world of humanity had done
+this for Beauchamp.  His afflicted historian is compelled to fling his
+net among prosaic similitudes for an illustration of one thus degradedly
+in its grip.  If he had been off with his love like the rover! why, then
+the Muse would have loosened her lap like May showering flower-buds, and
+we might have knocked great nature up from her sleep to embellish his
+desperate proceedings with hurricanes to be danced over, to say nothing
+of imitative spheres dashing out into hurly-burly after his example.
+
+Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the well-behaved AEneas
+quitting the fair bosom of Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an
+example to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his backbone and put a
+crown upon his brows.  It happened with him that his original training
+rather imposed the idea that he was a figure to be derided.  The approval
+of him by the prudent was a disgust, and by the pious tasteless.  He had
+not any consolation in reverting to Dr. Shrapnel's heavy Puritanism.  On
+the contrary, such a general proposition as that of the sage of Bevisham
+could not for a moment stand against the pathetic special case of Renee:
+and as far as Beauchamp's active mind went, he was for demanding that
+Society should take a new position in morality, considerably broader, and
+adapted to very special cases.
+
+Nevertheless he was hardly grieved in missing Renee at Rosamund's
+breakfast-table.  Rosamund informed him that Madame de Rouaillout's door
+was locked.  Her particular news for him was of a disgraceful alarum
+raised by Captain Baskelett in the night, to obtain admission; and of an
+interview she had with him in the early morning, when he subjected her to
+great insolence.  Beauchamp's attention was drawn to her repetition of
+the phrase 'mistress of the house.'  However, she did him justice in
+regard to Renee, and thoroughly entered into the fiction of Renee's visit
+to her as her guest: he passed over everything else.
+
+To stop the mouth of a scandal-monger, he drove full speed to Cecil's
+Club, where he heard that the captain had breakfasted and had just
+departed for Romfrey Castle.  He followed to the station.  The train had
+started.  So mischief was rolling in that direction.
+
+Late at night Rosamund was allowed to enter the chill unlighted chamber,
+where the unhappy lady had been lying for hours in the gloom of a London
+Winter's daylight and gaslight.
+
+'Madame de Rouaillout is indisposed with headache,' was her report to
+Beauchamp.
+
+The conventional phraseology appeased him, though he saw his grief behind
+it.
+
+Presently he asked if Renee had taken food.
+
+'No: you know what a headache is,' Rosamund replied.
+
+It is true that we do not care to eat when we are in pain.
+
+He asked if she looked ill.
+
+'She will not have lights in the room,' said Rosamund.
+
+Piecemeal he gained the picture of Renee in an image of the death within
+which welcomed a death without.
+
+Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid.  These men!
+She remarked very honestly:
+
+'Oh, no; doctors are not needed.'
+
+'Has she mentioned me?'
+
+'Not once.'
+
+'Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma'am?'  cried Beauchamp, bounding
+off his chair.
+
+He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it;
+and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs-accompanied by her,
+of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer to a
+message was to satisfy him.
+
+'Any message would trouble her: what message would you send?'  Rosamund
+asked him.
+
+The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be
+thought of.
+
+'You are unused to real suffering--that is for women!--and want to be
+doing instead of enduring,' said Rosamund.
+
+She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally
+sick lovers.  Beauchamp's outcries against himself gave her the shadows
+of their story.  He stood in tears--a thing to see to believe of Nevil
+Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken
+her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past
+midnight.  Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate
+knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him compassionately.
+
+In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to
+England.  Rosamund tempered her report of Renee by saying of her, that
+she was very quiet.  He turned to the window.
+
+'Look, what a climate ours is!'  Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.
+'Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe!  This is what she has
+come to!  Has she spoken of me yet?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Is she dead silent?'
+
+'She answers, if I speak to her.'
+
+'I believe, ma'am,' said Beauchamp, 'that we are the coldest-hearted
+people in Europe.'
+
+Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog.  Consequently nothing was left
+for him to abuse but himself.  In that she tried to moderate him, and
+drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the
+speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another
+evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renee, would
+for love's sake be friendly to them.
+
+'I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,' said
+Rosamund.
+
+'Her brother will be here to-day; he can't be later than the evening,'
+said Beauchamp.  'Get her to eat, ma'am; you must.  Command her to eat.
+This terrible starvation!'
+
+'You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.'
+
+He surveyed the table.  'You have your cook in town, I see.  Here's a
+breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields.  Where does the
+mass of meat go?  One excess feeds another.  You're overdone with
+servants.  Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of
+unmanageable footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they're idle
+and immoral.  If--I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel
+Halkett, or any one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the
+income-tax, or some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation,
+they yell as if they were thumb-screwed: but five shillings in the pound
+goes to the kitchen as a matter of course--to puff those pompous idiots!
+and the parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer waste of food
+and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public sin, are
+maundering about schism.  There's another idle army!  Then we have
+artists, authors, lawyers, doctors--the honourable professions! all
+hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour!
+it's incubus on incubus.  In point of fact, the rider's too heavy for the
+horse in England.'
+
+He began to nibble at bread.
+
+Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of
+her own invention, such as no douse in the county of Sussex could produce
+or imitate.
+
+'What would you have the parsons do?'  she said.
+
+'Take the rich by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that
+they're swine running down to the sea with a devil in them.'  She had set
+him off again, but she had enticed him to eating.  'Pooh!  it has all
+been said before.  Stones are easier to move than your English.  May I be
+forgiven for saying it! an invasion is what they want to bring them to
+their senses.  I'm sick of the work.  Why should I be denied--am I to
+kill the woman I love that I may go on hammering at them?  Their idea of
+liberty is, an evasion of public duty.  Dr. Shrapnel's right--it's a
+money-logged Island!  Men like the Earl of Romfrey, who have never done
+work in their days except to kill bears and birds, I say they're stifled
+by wealth: and he at least would have made an Admiral of mark, or a
+General: not of much value, but useful in case of need.  But he, like a
+pretty woman, was under no obligation to contribute more than an
+ornamental person to the common good.  As to that, we count him by tens
+of thousands now, and his footmen and maids by hundreds of thousands.
+The rich love the nation through their possessions; otherwise they have
+no country.  If they loved the country they would care for the people.
+Their hearts are eaten up by property.  I am bidden to hold my tongue
+because I have no knowledge.  When men who have this "knowledge" will go
+down to the people, speak to them, consult and argue with them, and come
+into suitable relations with them--I don't say of lords and retainers,
+but of knowers and doers, leaders and followers--out of consideration for
+public safety, if not for the common good, I shall hang back gladly;
+though I won't hear misstatements.  My fault is, that I am too moderate.
+I should respect myself more if I deserved their hatred.  This flood of
+luxury, which is, as Dr. Shrapnel says, the body's drunkenness and the
+soul's death, cries for execration.  I'm too moderate.  But I shall quit
+the country: I've no place here.'
+
+Rosamund ahemed.  'France, Nevil?  I should hardly think that France
+would please you, in the present state of things over there.'
+
+Half cynically, with great satisfaction, she had watched him fretting at
+the savoury morsels of her pie with a fork like a sparrow-beak during the
+monologue that would have been so dreary to her but for her appreciation
+of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and her admiration
+of the fire of his eyes.  After finishing his plate he had less the look
+of a ship driving on to reef--some of his images of the country.  He
+called for claret and water, sighing as he munched bread in vast
+portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unbuttered bread was to
+abstain from luxury.  He praised passingly the quality of the bread.  It
+came from Steynham, and so did the, milk and cream, the butter, chicken
+and eggs.  He was good enough not to object to the expenditure upon the
+transmission of the accustomed dainties.  Altogether the gradual act of
+nibbling had conduced to his eating remarkably well-royally.  Rosamund's
+more than half-cynical ideas of men, and her custom of wringing unanimous
+verdicts from a jury of temporary impressions, inclined her to imagine
+him a lover that had not to be so very much condoled with, and a
+politician less alarming in practice than in theory:--somewhat a
+gentleman of domestic tirades on politics: as it is observed of your
+generous young Radical of birth and fortune, that he will become on the
+old high road to a round Conservatism.
+
+He pitched one of the morning papers to the floor in disorderly sheets,
+muttering: 'So they're at me!'
+
+'Is Dr. Shrapnel better?'  she asked.  'I hold to a good appetite as a
+sign of a man's recovery.'
+
+Beauchamp was confronting the fog at the window.  He swung round: 'Dr.
+Shrapnel is better.  He has a particularly clever young female cook.'
+
+'Ah!  then .  .  .'
+
+'Yes, then, naturally!  He would naturally hasten to recover to partake
+of the viands, ma'am.'
+
+Rosamund murmured of her gladness that he should be able to enjoy them.
+
+'Oddly enough, he is not an eater of meat,' said Beauchamp.
+
+'A vegetarian!'
+
+'I beg you not to mention the fact to my lord.  You see, you yourself can
+scarcely pardon it.  He does not exclude flesh from his table.  Blackburn
+Tuckham dined there once.  "You are a thorough revolutionist, Dr.
+Shrapnel," he observed.  The doctor does not exclude wine, but he does
+not drink it.  Poor Tuckham went away entirely opposed to a Radical he
+could not even meet as a boon-fellow.  I begged him not to mention the
+circumstances, as I have begged you.  He pledged me his word to that
+effect solemnly; he correctly felt that if the truth were known, there
+would be further cause for the reprobation of the man who had been his
+host.'
+
+'And that poor girl, Nevil?'
+
+'Miss Denham?  She contracted the habit of eating meat at school, and
+drinking wine in Paris, and continues it, occasionally.  Now run
+upstairs.  Insist on food.  Inform Madame de Rouaillout that her brother
+M. le comte de Croisnel will soon be here, and should not find her ill.
+Talk to her as you women can talk.  Keep the blinds down in her room;
+light a dozen wax-candles.  Tell her I have no thought but of her.  It's
+a lie: of no woman but of her: that you may say.  But that you can't say.
+You can say I am devoted--ha, what stuff!  I've only to open my mouth!--
+say nothing of me: let her think the worst--unless it comes to a question
+of her life: then be a merciful good woman .  .  .'  He squeezed her
+fingers, communicating his muscular tremble to her sensitive woman's
+frame, and electrically convincing her that he was a lover.
+
+She went up-stairs.  In ten minutes she descended, and found him pacing
+up and down the hall.  'Madame de Rouaillout is much the same,' she said.
+He nodded, looked up the stairs, and about for his hat and gloves, drew
+on the gloves, fixed the buttons, blinked at his watch, and settled his
+hat as he was accustomed to wear it, all very methodically, and talking
+rapidly, but except for certain precise directions, which were not needed
+by so careful a housekeeper and nurse as Rosamund was known to be, she
+could not catch a word of meaning.  He had some appointment, it seemed;
+perhaps he was off for a doctor--a fresh instance of his masculine
+incapacity to understand patient endurance.  After opening the housedoor,
+and returning to the foot of the stairs, listening and sighing, he
+disappeared.
+
+It struck her that he was trying to be two men at once.
+
+The litter of newspaper sheets in the morning-room brought his
+exclamation to her mind: 'They're at me!'  Her eyes ran down the columns,
+and were seized by the print of his name in large type.  A leading
+article was devoted to Commander's Beauchamp's recent speech delivered
+in the great manufacturing town of Gunningham, at a meeting under the
+presidency of the mayor, and his replies to particular questions
+addressed to him; one being, what right did he conceive himself to have
+to wear the Sovereign's uniform in professing Republican opinions?
+Rosamund winced for her darling during her first perusal of the article.
+It was of the sarcastically caressing kind, masterly in ease of style,
+as the flourish of the executioner well may be with poor Bare-back hung
+up to a leisurely administration of the scourge.  An allusion to 'Jack on
+shore' almost persuaded her that his uncle Everard had inspired the
+writer of the article.  Beauchamp's reply to the question of his loyalty
+was not quoted: he was, however, complimented on his frankness.  At the
+same time he was assured that his error lay in a too great proneness to
+make distinctions, and that there was no distinction between sovereign
+and country in a loyal and contented land, which could thank him for
+gallant services in war, while taking him for the solitary example to be
+cited at the present period of the evils of a comparatively long peace.
+
+'Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of the
+gallant commander,' etc., the termination of the article was indulgent.
+Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and though she
+loved Beauchamp, the test of her representative feminine sentiment
+regarding his political career, when personal feeling on his behalf had
+subsided, was, that the writer of the article must have received an
+intimation to deal both smartly and forbearingly with the offender: and
+from whom but her lord?  Her notions of the conduct of the Press were
+primitive.  In a summary of the article Beauchamp was treated as naughty
+boy, formerly brave boy, and likely by-and-by to be good boy.  Her secret
+heart would have spoken similarly, with more emphasis on the flattering
+terms.
+
+A telegram arrived from her lord.  She was bidden to have the house clear
+for him by noon of the next day.
+
+How could that be done?
+
+But to write blankly to inform the Earl of Romfrey that he was excluded
+from his own house was another impossibility.
+
+'Hateful man!'  she apostrophized Captain Baskelett, and sat down,
+supporting her chin in a prolonged meditation.
+
+The card of a French lady, bearing the name of Madame d'Auffray, was
+handed to her.
+
+Beauchamp had gone off to his friend Lydiard, to fortify himself in his
+resolve to reply to that newspaper article by eliciting counsel to the
+contrary.  Phrase by phrase he fought through the first half of his
+composition of the reply against Lydiard, yielding to him on a point or
+two of literary judgement, only the more vehemently to maintain his ideas
+of discretion, which were, that he would not take shelter behind a single
+subterfuge; that he would try this question nakedly, though he should
+stand alone; that he would stake his position on it, and establish his
+right to speak his opinions: and as for unseasonable times, he protested
+it was the cry of a gorged middle-class, frightened of further action,
+and making snug with compromise.  Would it be a seasonable time when
+there was uproar?  Then it would be a time to be silent on such themes:
+they could be discussed calmly now, and without danger; and whether he
+was hunted or not, he cared nothing.  He declined to consider the
+peculiar nature of Englishmen: they must hear truth or perish.
+
+Knowing the difficulty once afflicting Beauchamp in the art of speaking
+on politics tersely, Lydiard was rather astonished at his well-delivered
+cannonade; and he fancied that his modesty had been displaced by the new
+acquirement; not knowing the nervous fever of his friend's condition, for
+which the rattle of speech was balm, and contention a native element, and
+the assumption of truth a necessity.  Beauchamp hugged his politics like
+some who show their love of the pleasures of life by taking to them
+angrily.  It was all he had: he had given up all for it.  He forced
+Lydiard to lay down his pen and walk back to the square with him, and
+went on arguing, interjecting, sneering, thumping the old country,
+raising and oversetting her, treating her alternately like a disrespected
+grandmother, and like a woman anciently beloved; as a dead lump, and as a
+garden of seeds; reviewing prominent political men, laughing at the
+dwarf-giants; finally casting anchor on a Mechanics' Institute that he
+had recently heard of, where working men met weekly for the purpose of
+reading the British poets.
+
+'That's the best thing I've heard of late,' he said, shaking Lydiard's
+hand on the door-steps.
+
+'Ah!  You're Commander Beauchamp; I think I know you.  I've seen you on a
+platform,' cried a fresh-faced man in decent clothes, halting on his way
+along the pavement; 'and if you were in your uniform, you damned
+Republican dog!  I'd strip you with my own hands, for the disloyal
+scoundrel you are, with your pimping Republicanism and capsizing
+everything in a country like Old England.  It's the cat-o'-nine-tails you
+want, and the bosen to lay on; and I'd do it myself.  And mind me, when
+next I catch sight of you in blue and gold lace, I'll compel you to show
+cause why you wear it, and prove your case, or else I'll make a Cupid of
+you, and no joke about it.  I don't pay money for a nincompoop to outrage
+my feelings of respect and loyalty, when he's in my pay, d' ye hear?
+You're in my pay: and you do your duty, or I 'll kick ye out of it.  It's
+no empty threat.  You look out for your next public speech, if it's
+anywhere within forty mile of London.  Get along.'
+
+With a scowl, and a very ugly 'yah!'  worthy of cannibal jaws, the man
+passed off.
+
+Beauchamp kept eye on him.  'What class does a fellow like that come of?'
+
+'He's a harmless enthusiast,' said Lydiard.  'He has been reading the
+article, and has got excited over it.'
+
+'I wish I had the fellow's address.'  Beauchamp looked wistfully at
+Lydiard, but he did not stimulate the generous offer to obtain it for
+him.  Perhaps it was as well to forget the fellow.
+
+'You see the effect of those articles,' he said.
+
+'You see what I mean by unseasonable times,' Lydiard retorted.
+
+'He didn't talk like a tradesman,' Beauchamp mused.
+
+'He may be one, for all that.  It's better to class him as an
+enthusiast.'
+
+'An enthusiast!'  Beauchamp stamped: 'for what?'
+
+'For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles
+he is accustomed to read in the papers.  You don't study your
+countrymen.'
+
+'I'd study that fellow, if I had the chance.'
+
+'You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse
+temper than most of them.'
+
+Beauchamp shook Lydiard's hand, saying, 'The widow?'
+
+'There's no woman like her!'
+
+'Well, now you're free--why not?  I think I put one man out of the
+field.'
+
+'Too early!  Besides--'
+
+'Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.'
+
+'When shall you go down to Bevisham?'
+
+'When?  I can't tell: when I've gone through fire.  There never was a
+home for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good girl--
+the best of girls!  if you hadn't a little spoilt her with your
+philosophy of the two sides of the case.'
+
+'I've not given her the brains.'
+
+'She's always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action: she has no will.  So
+she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her submitting, as
+if she must submit to me, because I'm overbearing, instead of accepting
+the fact.'
+
+'She feels your influence.'
+
+'She's against the publication of THE DAWN--for the present.  It's an
+"unseasonable time."  I argue with her: I don't get hold of her mind a
+bit; but at last she says, "very well."  She has your head.'
+
+And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.
+
+They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other's task of
+endurance.
+
+As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore
+walking past.
+
+'Jack!'  he called.
+
+Wilmore glanced round.  'How do you do, Beauchamp?'
+
+'Where are you off to, Jack?'
+
+'Down to the Admiralty.  I'm rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.'
+
+'Can't you stop just a minute?'
+
+'I'm afraid I can't.  Good morning.'
+
+It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive,
+retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.
+
+'That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,' Beauchamp
+said to Lydiard, who answered:
+
+'The article did not put the idea of you into men's minds, but gave
+tongue to it: you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the
+Press.'
+
+'You wouldn't take that man and me to have been messmates for years!
+Old Jack Wilmore!  Don't go, Lydiard.'
+
+Lydiard declared that he was bound to go: he was engaged to read Italian
+for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.
+
+'Then go, by all means,' Beauchamp dismissed him.
+
+He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the
+door-step, and found them of one colour.  If it was an accident befalling
+him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an hour, what of
+the sentiments of universal England?  Lady Barbara's elopement with Lord
+Alfred last year did not rouse much execration; hardly worse than gossip
+and compassion.  Beauchamp drank a great deal of bitterness from his
+reflections.
+
+They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over
+themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts
+from their mischances and from most occurrences.  So does the world they
+combat win on them.
+
+'For,' says Dr. Shrapnel, 'the world and nature, which are opposed in
+relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect
+victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the
+victory over the world, as over nature, is over self: and this victory
+lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature: for
+the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.'
+
+The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp.  He
+had never before said to himself, 'I have done my best, and I am beaten!'
+Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but here, within
+the walls where Renee lay silently breathing, barely breathing, it might
+be dying, he was overcome, and left it to circumstance to carry him to a
+conclusion.  He went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he beheld
+Madame d'Auffray in conversation with Rosamund.
+
+'I was assured by Madame la Comtesse that I should see you to-day,' the
+French lady said as she swam to meet him; 'it is a real pleasure': and
+pressing his hand she continued, 'but I fear you will be disappointed of
+seeing my sister.  She would rashly try your climate at its worst period.
+Believe me, I do not join in decrying it, except on her account: I could
+have forewarned her of an English Winter and early Spring.  You know her
+impetuosity; suddenly she decided on accepting the invitation of Madame
+la Comtesse; and though I have no fears of her health, she is at present
+a victim of the inclement weather.'
+
+'You have seen her, madame?'  said Beauchamp.  So well had the clever
+lady played the dupe that he forgot there was a part for him to play.
+Even the acquiescence of Rosamund in the title of countess bewildered
+him.
+
+'Madame d'Auffray has been sitting for an hour with Madame de
+Rouaillout,' said Rosamund.
+
+He spoke of Roland's coming.
+
+'Ah?'  said Madame d'Auffray, and turned to Rosamund: 'you have
+determined to surprise us: then you will have a gathering of the whole
+family in your hospitable house, Madame la Comtesse!
+
+'If M. la Marquis will do it that honour, madame!
+
+'My brother is in London,' Madame d'Auffray said to Beauchamp.
+
+The shattering blow was merited by one who could not rejoice that he had
+acted rightly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS
+
+An extraordinary telegraphic message, followed by a still more
+extraordinary letter the next morning, from Rosamund Culling, all but
+interdicted the immediate occupation of his house in town to Everard, now
+Earl of Romfrey.  She begged him briefly not to come until after the
+funeral, and proposed to give him good reasons for her request at their
+meeting.  'I repeat, I pledge myself to satisfy you on this point,' she
+wrote.  Her tone was that of one of your heroic women of history refusing
+to surrender a fortress.
+
+Everard's wrath was ever of a complexion that could suffer postponements
+without his having to fear an abatement of it.  He had no business to
+transact in London, and he had much at the Castle, so he yielded himself
+up to his new sensations, which are not commonly the portion of gentlemen
+of his years.  He anticipated that Nevil would at least come down to the
+funeral, but there was no appearance of him, nor a word to excuse his
+absence.  Cecil was his only supporter.  They walked together between the
+double ranks of bare polls of the tenantry and peasantry, resembling in a
+fashion old Froissart engravings the earl used to dote on in his boyhood,
+representing bodies of manacled citizens, whose humbled heads looked like
+nuts to be cracked, outside the gates of captured French towns, awaiting
+the disposition of their conqueror, with his banner above him and
+prancing knights around.  That was a glory of the past.  He had no
+successor.  The thought was chilling; the solitariness of childlessness
+to an aged man, chief of a most ancient and martial House, and proud of
+his blood, gave him the statue's outlook on a desert, and made him feel
+that he was no more than a whirl of the dust, settling to the dust.
+
+He listened to the parson curiously and consentingly.  We are ashes.  Ten
+centuries had come to an end in him to prove the formula correct.  The
+chronicle of the House would state that the last Earl of Romfrey left no
+heir.
+
+Cecil was a fine figure walking beside him.  Measured by feet, he might
+be a worthy holder of great lands.  But so heartily did the earl despise
+this nephew that he never thought of trying strength with the fellow, and
+hardly cared to know what his value was, beyond his immediate uses as an
+instrument to strike with.  Beauchamp of Romfrey had been his dream, not
+Baskelett: and it increased his disgust of Beauchamp that Baskelett
+should step forward as the man.  No doubt Cecil would hunt the county
+famously: he would preserve game with the sleepless eye of a General of
+the Jesuits.  These things were to be considered.
+
+Two days after the funeral Lord Romfrey proceeded to London.  He was met
+at the station by Rosamund, and informed that his house was not yet
+vacated by the French family.
+
+'And where have you arranged for me to go, ma'am?'  he asked her
+complacently.
+
+She named an hotel where she had taken rooms for him.
+
+He nodded, and was driven to the hotel, saying little on the road.
+
+As she expected, he was heavily armed against her and Nevil.
+
+'You're the slave of the fellow, ma'am.  You are so infatuated that you
+second his amours, in my house.  I must wait for a clearance, it seems.'
+
+He cast a comical glance of disapprobation on the fittings of the hotel
+apartment, abhorring gilt.
+
+'They leave us the day after to-morrow,' said Rosamund, out of breath
+with nervousness at the commencement of the fray, and skipping over the
+opening ground of a bold statement of facts.  'Madame de Rouaillout has
+been unwell.  She is not yet recovered; she has just risen.  Her sister-
+in-law has nursed her.  Her husband seems much broken in health; he is
+perfect on the points of courtesy.'
+
+'That is lucky, ma'am.'
+
+'Her brother, Nevil's comrade in the war, was there also.'
+
+'Who came first?'
+
+'My lord, you have only heard Captain Baskelett's version of the story.
+She has been my guest since the first day of her landing in England.
+There cannot possibly be an imputation on her.'
+
+'Ma'am, if her husband manages to be satisfied, what on earth have I to
+do with it?'
+
+'I am thinking of Nevil, my lord.'
+
+'You're never thinking of any one else, ma'am.'
+
+'He sleeps here, at this hotel.  He left the house to Madame de
+Rouaillout.  I bear witness to that.'
+
+'You two seem to have made your preparations to stand a criminal trial.'
+
+'It is pure truth, my lord.'
+
+'Do you take me to be anxious about the fellow's virtue?'
+
+'She is a lady who would please you.'
+
+'A scandal in my house does not please me.'
+
+'The only approach to a scandal was made by Captain Baskelett.'
+
+'A poor devil locked out of his bed on a Winter's night hullabaloos with
+pretty good reason.  I suppose he felt the contrast.'
+
+'My lord, this lady did me the honour to come to me on a visit.  I have
+not previously presumed to entertain a friend.  She probably formed no
+estimate of my exact position.'
+
+The earl with a gesture implied Rosamund's privilege to act the hostess
+to friends.
+
+'You invited her?'  he said.
+
+'That is, I had told her I hoped she would come to England.'
+
+'She expected you to be at the house in town on her arrival?'
+
+'It was her impulse to come.'
+
+'She came alone?'
+
+'She may have desired to be away from her own people for a time: there
+may have been domestic differences.  These cases are delicate.'
+
+'This case appears to have been so delicate that you had to lock out a
+fourth party.'
+
+'It is indelicate and base of Captain Baskelett to complain and to hint.
+Nevil had to submit to the same; and Captain Baskelett took his revenge
+on the housedoor and the bells.  The house was visited by the police next
+morning.'
+
+'Do you suspect him to have known you were inside the house that night?'
+
+She could not say so: but hatred of Cecil urged her past the bounds of
+habitual reticence to put it to her lord whether he, imagining the worst,
+would have behaved like Cecil.
+
+To this he did not reply, but remarked, 'I am sorry he annoyed you,
+ma'am.'
+
+'It is not the annoyance to me; it is the shocking, the unmanly insolence
+to a lady, and a foreign lady.'
+
+'That's a matter between him and Nevil.  I uphold him.'
+
+'Then, my lord, I am silent.'
+
+Silent she remained; but Lord Romfrey was also silent: and silence being
+a weapon of offence only when it is practised by one out of two, she had
+to reflect whether in speaking no further she had finished her business.
+
+'Captain Baskelett stays at the Castle?'  she asked.
+
+'He likes his quarters there.'
+
+'Nevil could not go down to Romfrey, my lord.  He was obliged to wait,
+and see, and help me to entertain, her brother and her husband.'
+
+'Why, ma'am?  But I have no objection to his making the marquis a happy
+husband.'
+
+'He has done what few men would have done, that she may be a self-
+respecting wife.'
+
+'The parson's in that fellow!'  Lord Romfrey exclaimed.  'Now I have the
+story.  She came to him, he declined the gift, and you were turned into
+the curtain for them.  If he had only been off with her, he would have
+done the country good service.  Here he's a failure and a nuisance; he's
+a common cock-shy for the journals.  I'm tired of hearing of him; he's a
+stench in our nostrils.  He's tired of the woman.'
+
+'He loves her.'
+
+'Ma'am, you're hoodwinked.  If he refused to have her, there 's a
+something he loves better.  I don't believe we've bred a downright
+lackadaisical donkey in our family: I know him.  He's not a fellow for
+abstract morality: I know him.  It's bargain against bargain with him;
+I'll do him that justice.  I hear he has ordered the removal of the
+Jersey bull from Holdesbury, and the beast is mine,' Lord Romfrey
+concluded in a lower key.
+
+'Nevil has taken him.'
+
+'Ha! pull and pull, then!'
+
+'He contends that he is bound by a promise to give an American gentleman
+the refusal of the bull, and you must sign an engagement to keep the
+animal no longer than two years.'
+
+'I sign no engagement.  I stick to the bull.'
+
+'Consent to see Nevil to-night, my lord.'
+
+'When he has apologized to you, I may, ma'am.'
+
+'Surely he did more, in requesting me to render him a service.'
+
+'There's not a creature living that fellow wouldn't get to serve him,
+if he knew the trick.  We should all of us be marching on London at
+Shrapnel's heels.  The political mania is just as incurable as
+hydrophobia, and he's bitten.  That's clear.'
+
+'Bitten perhaps: but not mad.  As you have always contended, the true
+case is incurable, but it is very rare: and is this one?'
+
+'It's uncommonly like a true case, though I haven't seen him foam at the
+mouth, and shun water-as his mob does.'
+
+Rosamund restrained some tears, betraying the effort to hide the
+moisture.  'I am no match for you, my lord.  I try to plead on his
+behalf;--I do worse than if I were dumb.  This I most earnestly say: he
+is the Nevil Beauchamp who fought for his country, and did not abandon
+her cause, though he stood there--we had it from Colonel Halkett--a
+skeleton: and he is the Nevil who--I am poorly paying my debt to him!
+--defended me from the aspersions of his cousin.'
+
+'Boys!'  Lord Romfrey ejaculated.
+
+'It is the same dispute between them as men.'
+
+'Have you forgotten my proposal to shield you from liars and
+scandalmongers?'
+
+'Could I ever forget it?'  Rosamund appeared to come shining out of a
+cloud.  'Princeliest and truest gentleman, I thought you then, and I know
+you to be, my dear lord.  I fancied I had lived the scandal down.  I was
+under the delusion that I had grown to be past backbiting: and that no
+man could stand before me to insult and vilify me.  But, for a woman in
+any so-called doubtful position, it seems that the coward will not be
+wanting to strike her.  In quitting your service, I am able to affirm
+that only once during the whole term of it have I consciously overstepped
+the line of my duties: it was for Nevil: and Captain Baskelett undertook
+to defend your reputation, in consequence.'
+
+'Has the rascal been questioning your conduct?'  The earl frowned.
+
+'Oh, no!  not questioning: he does not question, he accuses: he never
+doubted: and what he went shouting as a boy, is plain matter of fact to
+him now.  He is devoted to you.  It was for your sake that he desired me
+to keep my name from being mixed up in a scandal he foresaw the
+occurrence of in your house.'
+
+'He permitted himself to sneer at you?'
+
+'He has the art of sneering.  On this occasion he wished to be direct and
+personal.'
+
+'What sort of hints were they?'
+
+Lord Romfrey strode away from her chair that the answer might be easy to
+her, for she was red, and evidently suffering from shame as well as
+indignation.
+
+'The hints we call distinct.'  said Rosamund.
+
+'In words?'
+
+'In hard words.'
+
+'Then you won't meet Cecil?'
+
+Such a question, and the tone of indifference in which it came, surprised
+and revolted her so that the unreflecting reply leapt out:
+
+'I would rather meet a devil.'
+
+Of how tremblingly, vehemently, and hastily she had said it, she was
+unaware.  To her lord it was an outcry of nature, astutely touched by him
+to put her to proof.
+
+He continued his long leisurely strides, nodding over his feet.
+
+Rosamund stood up.  She looked a very noble figure in her broad black-
+furred robe.  'I have one serious confession to make, sir.'
+
+'What's that?'  said he.
+
+'I would avoid it, for it cannot lead to particular harm; but I have an
+enemy who may poison your ear in my absence.  And first I resign my
+position.  I have forfeited it.'
+
+'Time goes forward, ma'am, and you go round.  Speak to the point.  Do you
+mean that you toss up the reins of my household?'
+
+'I do.  You trace it to Nevil immediately?'
+
+'I do.  The fellow wants to upset the country, and he begins with me.'
+
+'You are wrong, my lord.  What I have done places me at Captain
+Baskelett's mercy.  It is too loathsome to think of: worse than the whip;
+worse than your displeasure.  It might never be known; but the thought
+that it might gives me courage.  You have said that to protect a woman
+everything is permissible.  It is your creed, my lord, and because the
+world, I have heard you say, is unjust and implacable to women.  In some
+cases, I think so too.  In reality I followed your instructions; I mean,
+your example.  Cheap chivalry on my part!  But it pained me not a little.
+I beg to urge that in my defence.'
+
+'Well, ma'am, you have tied the knot tight enough; perhaps now you'll cut
+it,' said the earl.
+
+Rosamund gasped softly.  'M. le Marquis is a gentleman who, after a life
+of dissipation, has been reminded by bad health that he has a young and
+beautiful wife.'
+
+'He dug his pit to fall into it:--he's jealous?'
+
+She shook her head to indicate the immeasurable.
+
+'Senile jealousy is anxious to be deceived.  He could hardly be deceived
+so far as to imagine that Madame la Marquise would visit me, such as I
+am, as my guest.  Knowingly or not, his very clever sister, a good woman,
+and a friend to husband and wife--a Frenchwoman of the purest type--gave
+me the title.  She insisted on it, and I presumed to guess that she
+deemed it necessary for the sake of peace in that home.'
+
+Lord Romfrey appeared merely inquisitive; his eyebrows were lifted in
+permanence; his eyes were mild.
+
+She continued: 'They leave England in a few hours.  They are not likely
+to return.  I permitted him to address me with the title of countess.'
+
+'Of Romfrey?'  said the earl.
+
+Rosamund bowed.
+
+His mouth contracted.  She did not expect thunder to issue from it, but
+she did fear to hear a sarcasm, or that she would have to endure a deadly
+silence: and she was gathering her own lips in imitation of his, to nerve
+herself for some stroke to come, when he laughed in his peculiar close-
+mouthed manner.
+
+'I'm afraid you've dished yourself.'
+
+'You cannot forgive me, my lord?'
+
+He indulged in more of his laughter, and abruptly summoning gravity, bade
+her talk to him of affairs.  He himself talked of the condition of the
+Castle, and with a certain off-hand contempt of the ladies of the family,
+and Cecil's father, Sir John.  'What are they to me?'  said he, and he
+complained of having been called Last Earl of Romfrey.
+
+'The line ends undegenerate,' said Rosamund fervidly, though she knew not
+where she stood.
+
+'Ends!'  quoth the earl.
+
+'I must see Stukely,' he added briskly, and stooped to her: 'I beg you to
+drive me to my Club, countess.'
+
+'Oh! sir.'
+
+'Once a countess, always a countess!'
+
+'But once an impostor, my lord?'
+
+'Not always, we'll hope.'
+
+He enjoyed this little variation in the language of comedy; letting it
+drop, to say: 'Be here to-morrow early.  Don't chase that family away
+from the house.  Do as you will, but not a word of Nevil to me: he's a
+bad mess in any man's porringer; it's time for me to claim exemption of
+him from mine.'
+
+She dared not let her thoughts flow, for to think was to triumph, and
+possibly to be deluded.  They came in copious volumes when Lord Romfrey,
+alighting at his Club, called to the coachman: 'Drive the countess home.'
+
+They were not thoughts of triumph absolutely.  In her cooler mind she
+felt that it was a bad finish of a gallant battle.  Few women had risen
+against a tattling and pelting world so stedfastly; and would it not have
+been better to keep her own ground, which she had won with tears and some
+natural strength, and therewith her liberty, which she prized?  The
+hateful Cecil, a reminder of whom set her cheeks burning and turned her
+heart to serpent, had forced her to it.  So she honestly conceived, owing
+to the circumstance of her honestly disliking the pomps of life and not
+desiring to occupy any position of brilliancy.  She thought assuredly of
+her hoard of animosity toward the scandalmongers, and of the quiet glance
+she would cast behind on them, and below.  That thought came as a fruit,
+not as a reflection.
+
+But if ever two offending young gentlemen, nephews of a long-suffering
+uncle, were circumvented, undermined, and struck to earth, with one blow,
+here was the instance.  This was accomplished by Lord Romfrey's
+resolution to make the lady he had learnt to esteem his countess: and
+more, it fixed to him for life one whom he could not bear to think of
+losing: and still more, it might be; but what more was unwritten on his
+tablets.
+
+Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step
+without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO PASSIONS IN
+BEAUCHAMP
+
+It was now the season when London is as a lighted tower to her provinces,
+and, among other gentlemen hurried thither by attraction, Captain
+Baskelett arrived.  Although not a personage in the House of Commons, he
+was a vote; and if he never committed himself to the perils of a speech,
+he made himself heard.  His was the part of chorus, which he performed
+with a fairly close imitation of the original cries of periods before
+parliaments were instituted, thus representing a stage in the human
+development besides the borough of Bevisham.  He arrived in the best of
+moods for the emission of high-pitched vowel-sounds; otherwise in the
+worst of tempers.  His uncle had notified an addition of his income to
+him at Romfrey, together with commands that he should quit the castle
+instantly: and there did that woman, Mistress Culling, do the honours to
+Nevil Beauchamp's French party.  He assured Lord Palmet of his positive
+knowledge of the fact, incredible as the sanction of such immoral
+proceedings by the Earl of Romfrey must appear to that young nobleman.
+Additions to income are of course acceptable, but in the form of a
+palpable stipulation for silence, they neither awaken gratitude nor
+effect their purpose.  Quite the contrary; they prick the moral mind to
+sit in judgement on the donor.  It means, she fears me!  Cecil
+confidently thought and said of the intriguing woman who managed his
+patron.
+
+The town-house was open to him.  Lord Romfrey was at Steynham.  Cecil
+could not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it.  He
+happened to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for
+his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English
+nobility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people.
+She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against
+him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go
+down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling's orders.  The old woman
+lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted
+the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess.  This she knew for
+a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who
+came second brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the
+very words--the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling
+for the Countess of Romfrey.  What was more, my lord's coachman caught it
+up, and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the
+footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the
+mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the
+poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had
+seen a ghost.  'She have such power,' Cecil's admirer concluded.
+
+'I wager I match her,' Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands
+and letting his lower teeth shine out.  The means of matching her were
+not so palpable as the resolution.  First he took men into his
+confidence.  Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the
+question, 'What ought I to do?'  In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey
+he ought not to pass it over, he suggested.  The ladies of the family
+urged him to go to Steynham and boldly confront the woman.  He was not
+prepared for that.  Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and
+make it the topic of the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it.
+Cecil had the ear of the town for a month.  He was in the act of slicing
+the air with his right hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady
+Elsea's, to protest how vast was the dishonour done to the family by
+Mistress Culling, when Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, 'The lady
+you speak of is the Countess of Romfrey.  I was present at the marriage.'
+
+Cecil received the shock in the attitude of those martial figures we see
+wielding two wooden swords in provincial gardens to tell the disposition
+of the wind: abruptly abandoned by it, they stand transfixed, one sword
+aloft, the other at their heels.  The resemblance extended to his
+astonished countenance.  His big chest heaved.  Like many another wounded
+giant before him, he experienced the insufficiency of interjections to
+solace pain.  For them, however, the rocks were handy to fling, the trees
+to uproot; heaven's concave resounded companionably to their bellowings.
+Relief of so concrete a kind is not to be obtained in crowded London
+assemblies.
+
+'You are jesting?--you are a jester,' he contrived to say.
+
+'It was a private marriage, and I was a witness,' replied Stukely.
+
+'Lord Romfrey has made an honest woman of her, has he?'
+
+'A peeress, you mean.'
+
+Cecil bowed.  'Exactly.  I am corrected.  I mean a peeress.'
+
+He got out of the room with as high an air as he could command, feeling
+as if a bar of iron had flattened his head.
+
+Next day it was intimated to him by one of the Steynham servants that
+apartments were ready for him at the residence of the late earl: Lord
+Romfrey's house was about to be occupied by the Countess of Romfrey.
+Cecil had to quit, and he chose to be enamoured of that dignity of
+sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man.
+
+Rosamund, Countess of Romfrey, had worse to endure from Beauchamp.
+He indeed came to the house, and he went through the formalities of
+congratulation, but his opinion of her step was unconcealed, that she had
+taken it for the title.  He distressed her by reviving the case of Dr.
+Shrapnel, as though it were a matter of yesterday, telling her she had
+married a man with a stain on him; she should have exacted the Apology
+as a nuptial present; ay, and she would have done it if she had cared
+for the earl's honour or her own.  So little did he understand men! so
+tenacious was he of his ideas!  She had almost forgotten the case of
+Dr. Shrapnel, and to see it shooting up again in the new path of her
+life was really irritating.
+
+Rosamund did not defend herself.
+
+'I am very glad you have come, Nevil,' she said; 'your uncle holds to the
+ceremony.  I may be of real use to you now; I wish to be.'
+
+'You have only to prove it,' said he.  'If you can turn his mind to
+marriage, you can send him to Bevisham.'
+
+'My chief thought is to serve you.'
+
+'I know it is, I know it is,' he rejoined with some fervour.  'You have
+served me, and made me miserable for life, and rightly.  Never mind,
+all's well while the hand's to the axe.'  Beauchamp smoothed his forehead
+roughly, trying hard to inspire himself with the tonic draughts of
+sentiments cast in the form of proverbs.  'Lord Romfrey saw her, you
+say?'
+
+'He did, Nevil, and admired her.'
+
+'Well, if I suffer, let me think of her!  For courage and nobleness I
+shall never find her equal.  Have you changed your ideas of Frenchwomen
+now?  Not a word, you say, not a look, to show her disdain of me whenever
+my name was mentioned!'
+
+'She could scarcely feel disdain.  She was guilty of a sad error.'
+
+'Through trusting in me.  Will nothing teach you where the fault lies?
+You women have no mercy for women.  She went through the parade to
+Romfrey Castle and back, and she must have been perishing at heart.
+That, you English call acting.  In history you have a respect for such
+acting up to the scaffold.  Good-bye to her!  There's a story ended.
+One thing you must promise: you're a peeress, ma'am: the story's out,
+everybody has heard of it; that babbler has done his worst: if you have
+a becoming appreciation of your title, you will promise me honestly--no,
+give me your word as a woman I can esteem--that you will not run about
+excusing me.  Whatever you hear said or suggested, say nothing yourself.
+I insist on your keeping silence.  Press my hand.'
+
+'Nevil, how foolish!'
+
+'It's my will.'
+
+'It is unreasonable.  You give your enemies licence.'
+
+'I know what's in your head.  Take my hand, and let me have your word for
+it.'
+
+'But if persons you like very much, Nevil, should hear?'
+
+'Promise.  You are a woman not to break your word.'
+
+'If I decline?'
+
+'Your hand!  I'll kiss it.'
+
+'Oh!  my darling.'  Rosamund flung her arms round him and strained him an
+instant to her bosom.  'What have I but you in the world?  My comfort was
+the hope that I might serve you.'
+
+'Yes!  by slaying one woman as an offering to another.  It would be
+impossible for you to speak the truth.  Don't you see, it would be a lie
+against her, and making a figure of me that a man would rather drop to
+the ground than have shown of him?  I was to blame, and only I.  Madame
+de Rouaillout was as utterly deceived by me as ever a trusting woman by a
+brute.  I look at myself and hardly believe it 's the same man.  I wrote
+to her that I was unchanged--and I was entirely changed, another
+creature, anything Lord Romfrey may please to call me.'
+
+'But, Nevil, I repeat, if Miss Halkett should hear .  .  . ?'
+
+'She knows by this time.'
+
+'At present she is ignorant of it.'
+
+'And what is Miss Halkett to me?'
+
+'More than you imagined in that struggle you underwent, I think, Nevil.
+Oh! if only to save her from Captain Baskelett!  He gained your uncle's
+consent when they were at the Castle, to support him in proposing for
+her.  He is persistent.  Women have been snared without loving.  She is
+a great heiress.  Reflect on his use of her wealth.  You respect her,
+if you have no warmer feeling.  Let me assure you that the husband of
+Cecilia, if he is of Romfrey blood, has the fairest chance of the
+estates.  That man will employ every weapon.  He will soon be here bowing
+to me to turn me to his purposes.'
+
+'Cecilia can see through Baskelett,' said Beauchamp.
+
+'Single-mindedly selfish men may be seen through and through, and still
+be dangerous, Nevil.  The supposition is, that we know the worst of them.
+He carries a story to poison her mind.  She could resist it, if you and
+she were in full confidence together.  If she did not love you, she could
+resist it.  She does, and for some strange reason beyond my capacity to
+fathom, you have not come to an understanding.  Sanction my speaking to
+her, just to put her on her guard, privately: not to injure that poor
+lady, but to explain.  Shall she not know the truth?  I need say but very
+little.  Indeed, all I can say is, that finding the marquise in London
+one evening, you telegraphed for me to attend on her, and I joined you.
+You shake your head.  But surely it is due to Miss Halkett.  She should
+be protected from what will certainly wound her deeply.  Her father is
+afraid of you, on the score of your theories.  I foresee it: he will hear
+the scandal: he will imagine you as bad in morals as in politics.  And
+you have lost your friend in Lord Romfrey--though he shall not be your
+enemy.  Colonel Halkett and Cecilia called on us at Steynham.  She was
+looking beautiful; a trifle melancholy.  The talk was of your--that--I do
+not like it, but you hold those opinions--the Republicanism.  She had
+read your published letters.  She spoke to me of your sincerity.  Colonel
+Halkett of course was vexed.
+
+It is the same with all your friends.  She, however, by her tone, led me
+to think that she sees you as you are, more than in what you do.  They
+are now in Wales.  They will be in town after Easter.  Then you must
+expect that her feeling for you will be tried, unless but you will!  You
+will let me speak to her, Nevil.  My position allows me certain liberties
+I was previously debarred from.  You have not been so very tender to your
+Cecilia that you can afford to give her fresh reasons for sorrowful
+perplexity.  And why should you stand to be blackened by scandalmongers
+when a few words of mine will prove that instead of weak you have been
+strong, instead of libertine blameless?  I am not using fine phrases: I
+would not.  I would be as thoughtful of you as if you were present.  And
+for her sake, I repeat, the truth should be told to her.  I have a lock
+of her hair.'
+
+'Cecilia's?  Where?'  said Beauchamp.
+
+'It is at Steynham.'  Rosamund primmed her lips at the success of her
+probing touch; but she was unaware of the chief reason for his doting on
+those fair locks, and how they coloured his imagination since the day of
+the drive into Bevisham.
+
+'Now leave me, my dear Nevil,' she said.  'Lord Romfrey will soon be
+here, and it is as well for the moment that you should not meet him, if
+it can be avoided.'
+
+Beauchamp left her, like a man out-argued and overcome.  He had no wish
+to meet his uncle, whose behaviour in contracting a misalliance and
+casting a shadow on the family, in a manner so perfectly objectless and
+senseless, appeared to him to call for the reverse of compliments.
+Cecilia's lock of hair lying at Steynham hung in his mind.  He saw the
+smooth flat curl lying secret like a smile.
+
+The graceful head it had fallen from was dimmer in his mental eye.  He
+went so far in this charmed meditation as to feel envy of the possessor
+of the severed lock: passingly he wondered, with the wonder of reproach,
+that the possessor should deem it enough to possess the lock, and resign
+it to a drawer or a desk.  And as when life rolls back on us after the
+long ebb of illness, little whispers and diminutive images of the old
+joys and prizes of life arrest and fill our hearts; or as, to men who
+have been beaten down by storms, the opening of a daisy is dearer than
+the blazing orient which bids it open; so the visionary lock of Cecilia's
+hair became Cecilia's self to Beauchamp, yielding him as much of her as
+he could bear to think of, for his heart was shattered.
+
+Why had she given it to his warmest friend?  For the asking, probably.
+
+This question was the first ripple of the breeze from other emotions
+beginning to flow fast.
+
+He walked out of London, to be alone, and to think and from the palings
+of a road on a South-western run of high land, he gazed, at the great
+city--a place conquerable yet, with the proper appliances for subjugating
+it: the starting of his daily newspaper, THE DAWN, say, as a
+commencement.  It began to seem a possible enterprise.  It soon seemed a
+proximate one.  If Cecilia!  He left the exclamation a blank, but not an
+empty dash in the brain; rather like the shroud of night on a vast and
+gloriously imagined land.
+
+Nay, the prospect was partly visible, as the unknown country becomes by
+degrees to the traveller's optics on the dark hill-tops.  It is much, of
+course, to be domestically well-mated: but to be fortified and armed by
+one's wife with a weapon to fight the world, is rare good fortune; a
+rapturous and an infinite satisfaction.  He could now support of his own
+resources a weekly paper.  A paper published weekly, however, is a poor
+thing, out of the tide, behind the date, mainly a literary periodical, no
+foremost combatant in politics, no champion in the arena; hardly better
+than a commentator on the events of the six past days; an echo, not a
+voice.  It sits on a Saturday bench and pretends to sum up.  Who listens?
+The verdict knocks dust out of a cushion.  It has no steady continuous
+pressure of influence.  It is the organ of sleepers.  Of all the bigger
+instruments of money, it is the feeblest, Beauchamp thought.  His
+constant faith in the good effects of utterance naturally inclined him to
+value six occasions per week above one; and in the fight he was for
+waging, it was necessary that he should enter the ring and hit blow for
+blow sans intermission.  A statement that he could call false must be
+challenged hot the next morning.  The covert Toryism, the fits of
+flunkeyism, the cowardice, of the relapsing middle-class, which is now
+England before mankind, because it fills the sails of the Press, must be
+exposed.  It supports the Press in its own interests, affecting to speak
+for the people.  It belies the people.  And this Press, declaring itself
+independent, can hardly walk for fear of treading on an interest here, an
+interest there.  It cannot have a conscience.  It is a bad guide, a false
+guardian; its abject claim to be our national and popular interpreter-
+even that is hollow and a mockery!  It is powerful only while
+subservient.  An engine of money, appealing to the sensitiveness of
+money, it has no connection with the mind of the nation.  And that it is
+not of, but apart from, the people, may be seen when great crises come.
+Can it stop a war?  The people would, and with thunder, had they the
+medium.  But in strong gales the power of the Press collapses; it wheezes
+like a pricked pigskin of a piper.  At its best Beauchamp regarded our
+lordly Press as a curiously diapered curtain and delusive mask, behind
+which the country struggles vainly to show an honest feature; and as a
+trumpet that deafened and terrorized the people; a mere engine of
+leaguers banded to keep a smooth face upon affairs, quite soullessly:
+he meanwhile having to be dumb.
+
+But a Journal that should be actually independent of circulation and
+advertisements: a popular journal in the true sense, very lungs to the
+people, for them to breathe freely through at last, and be heard out of
+it, with well-paid men of mark to head and aid them;--the establishment
+of such a Journal seemed to him brave work of a life, though one should
+die early.  The money launching it would be coin washed pure of its
+iniquity of selfish reproduction, by service to mankind.  This DAWN of
+his conception stood over him like a rosier Aurora for the country.  He
+beheld it in imagination as a new light rising above hugeous London.  You
+turn the sheets of THE DAWN, and it is the manhood of the land addressing
+you, no longer that alternately puling and insolent cry of the coffers.
+The health, wealth, comfort, contentment of the greater number are there
+to be striven for, in contempt of compromise and 'unseasonable times.'
+
+Beauchamp's illuminated dream of the power of his DAWN to vitalize old
+England, liberated him singularly from his wearing regrets and heart-
+sickness.
+
+Surely Cecilia, who judged him sincere, might be bent to join hands with
+him for so good a work!  She would bring riches to her husband:
+sufficient.  He required the ablest men of the country to write for him,
+and it was just that they should be largely paid.  They at least in their
+present public apathy would demand it.  To fight the brewers, distillers,
+publicans, the shopkeepers, the parsons, the landlords, the law limpets,
+and also the indifferents, the logs, the cravens and the fools, high
+talent was needed, and an ardour stimulated by rates of pay outdoing the
+offers of the lucre-journals.  A large annual outlay would therefore be
+needed; possibly for as long as a quarter of a century.  Cecilia and her
+husband would have to live modestly.  But her inheritance would be
+immense.  Colonel Halkett had never spent a tenth of his income.  In time
+he might be taught to perceive in THE DAWN the one greatly beneficent
+enterprise of his day.  He might through his daughter's eyes, and the
+growing success of the Journal.  Benevolent and gallant old man,
+patriotic as he was, and kind at heart, he might learn to see in THE DAWN
+a broader channel of philanthropy and chivalry than any we have yet had a
+notion of in England!--a school of popular education into the bargain.
+
+Beauchamp reverted to the shining curl.  It could not have been clearer
+to vision if it had lain under his eyes.
+
+Ay, that first wild life of his was dead.  He had slain it.  Now for the
+second and sober life!  Who can say?  The Countess of Romfrey suggested
+it:--Cecilia may have prompted him in his unknown heart to the sacrifice
+of a lawless love, though he took it for simply barren iron duty.
+Brooding on her, he began to fancy the victory over himself less and less
+a lame one: for it waxed less and less difficult in his contemplation of
+it.  He was looking forward instead of back.
+
+Who cut off the lock?  Probably Cecilia herself; and thinking at the
+moment that he would see it, perhaps beg for it.  The lustrous little
+ring of hair wound round his heart; smiled both on its emotions and its
+aims; bound them in one.
+
+But proportionately as he grew tender to Cecilia, his consideration for
+Renee increased; that became a law to him: pity nourished it, and
+glimpses of self-contempt, and something like worship of her high-
+heartedness.
+
+He wrote to the countess, forbidding her sharply and absolutely to
+attempt a vindication of him by explanations to any persons whomsoever;
+and stating that he would have no falsehoods told, he desired her to keep
+to the original tale of the visit of the French family to her as guests
+of the Countess of Romfrey.  Contradictory indeed.  Rosamund shook her
+head over him.  For a wilful character that is guilty of issuing
+contradictory commands to friends who would be friends in spite of him,
+appears to be expressly angling for the cynical spirit, so surely does it
+rise and snap at such provocation.  He was even more emphatic when they
+next met.  He would not listen to a remonstrance; and though, of course,
+her love of him granted him the liberty to speak to her in what tone he
+pleased, there were sensations proper to her new rank which his
+intemperateness wounded and tempted to revolt when he vexed her with
+unreason.  She had a glimpse of the face he might wear to his enemies.
+
+He was quite as resolute, too, about that slight matter of the Jersey
+bull.  He had the bull in Bevisham, and would not give him up without the
+sign manual of Lord Romfrey to an agreement to resign him over to the
+American Quaker gentleman, after a certain term.  Moreover, not once had
+he, by exclamation or innuendo, during the period of his recent grief for
+the loss of his first love, complained of his uncle Everard's refusal in
+the old days to aid him in suing for Renee.  Rosamund had expected that
+he would.  She thought it unloverlike in him not to stir the past, and to
+bow to intolerable facts.  This idea of him, coming in conjunction with
+his present behaviour, convinced her that there existed a contradiction
+in his nature: whence it ensued that she lost her warmth as an advocate
+designing to intercede for him with Cecilia; and warmth being gone, the
+power of the scandal seemed to her unassailable.  How she could ever have
+presumed to combat it, was an astonishment to her.  Cecilia might be
+indulgent, she might have faith in Nevil.  Little else could be hoped
+for.
+
+The occupations, duties, and ceremonies of her new position contributed
+to the lassitude into which Rosamund sank.  And she soon had a
+communication to make to her lord, the nature of which was more startling
+to herself, even tragic.  The bondwoman is a free woman compared with the
+wife.
+
+Lord Romfrey's friends noticed a glow of hearty health in the splendid
+old man, and a prouder animation of eye and stature; and it was agreed
+that matrimony suited him well.  Luckily for Cecil he did not sulk very
+long.  A spectator of the earl's first introduction to the House of
+Peers, he called on his uncle the following day, and Rosamund accepted
+his homage in her husband's presence.  He vowed that my lord was the
+noblest figure in the whole assembly; that it had been to him the most
+moving sight he had ever witnessed; that Nevil should have been there to
+see it and experience what he had felt; it would have done old Nevil
+incalculable good! and as far as his grief at the idea and some reticence
+would let him venture, he sighed to think of the last Earl of Romfrey
+having been seen by him taking the seat of his fathers.
+
+Lord Romfrey shouted 'Ha!' like a checked peal of laughter, and glanced
+at his wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+A LITTLE PLOT AGAINST CECILIA
+
+Some days before Easter week Seymour Austin went to Mount Laurels for
+rest, at an express invitation from Colonel Halkett.  The working
+barrister, who is also a working member of Parliament, is occasionally
+reminded that this mortal machine cannot adapt itself in perpetuity to
+the long hours of labour by night in the House of Commons as well as by
+day in the Courts, which would seem to have been arranged by a compliant
+country for the purpose of aiding his particular, and most honourable,
+ambition to climb, while continuing to fill his purse.  Mr. Austin
+broke down early in the year.  He attributed it to a cold.  Other
+representative gentlemen were on their backs, of whom he could admit that
+the protracted nightwork had done them harm, with the reservation that
+their constitutions were originally unsound.  But the House cannot get on
+without lawyers, and lawyers must practise their profession, and if they
+manage both to practise all day and sit half the night, others should be
+able to do the simple late sitting; and we English are an energetic
+people, we must toil or be beaten: and besides, 'night brings counsel,'
+men are cooler and wiser by night.  Any amount of work can be performed
+by careful feeders: it is the stomach that kills the Englishman.  Brains
+are never the worse for activity; they subsist on it.
+
+These arguments and citations, good and absurd, of a man more at home in
+his harness than out of it, were addressed to the colonel to stop his
+remonstrances and idle talk about burning the candle at both ends.  To
+that illustration Mr. Austin replied that he did not burn it in the
+middle.
+
+'But you don't want money, Austin.'
+
+'No; but since I've had the habit of making it I have taken to like it.'
+
+'But you're not ambitious.'
+
+'Very little; but I should be sorry to be out of the tideway.'
+
+'I call it a system of slaughter,' said the colonel; and Mr. Austin said,
+'The world goes in that way--love and slaughter.'
+
+'Not suicide though,' Colonel Halkett muttered.
+
+'No, that's only incidental.'
+
+The casual word 'love' led Colonel Halkett to speak to Cecilia of an old
+love-affair of Seymour Austin's, in discussing the state of his health
+with her.  The lady was the daughter of a famous admiral, handsome, and
+latterly of light fame.  Mr. Austin had nothing to regret in her having
+married a man richer than himself.
+
+'I wish he had married a good woman,' said the colonel.
+
+'He looks unwell, papa.'
+
+'He thinks you're looking unwell, my dear.'
+
+'He thinks that of me?'
+
+Cecilia prepared a radiant face for Mr. Austin.
+
+She forgot to keep it kindled, and he suspected her to be a victim of one
+of the forms of youthful melancholy, and laid stress on the benefit to
+health of a change of scene.
+
+'We have just returned from Wales,' she said.
+
+He remarked that it was hardly a change to be within shot of our
+newspapers.
+
+The colour left her cheeks.  She fancied her father had betrayed her to
+the last man who should know her secret.  Beauchamp and the newspapers
+were rolled together in her mind by the fever of apprehension wasting her
+ever since his declaration of Republicanism, and defence of it, and an
+allusion to one must imply the other, she feared: feared, but far from
+quailingly.  She had come to think that she could read the man she loved,
+and detect a reasonableness in his extravagance.  Her father had
+discovered the impolicy of attacking Beauchamp in her hearing.  The fever
+by which Cecilia was possessed on her lover's behalf, often overcame
+discretion, set her judgement in a whirl, was like a delirium.  How it
+had happened she knew not.  She knew only her wretched state; a frenzy
+seized her whenever his name was uttered, to excuse, account for, all but
+glorify him publicly.  And the immodesty of her conduct was perceptible
+to her while she thus made her heart bare.  She exposed herself once of
+late at Itchincope, and had tried to school her tongue before she went
+there.  She felt that she should inevitably be seen through by Seymour
+Austin if he took the world's view of Beauchamp, and this to her was like
+a descent on the rapids to an end one shuts eyes from.
+
+He noticed her perturbation, and spoke of it to her father.
+
+'Yes, I'm very miserable about her,' the colonel confessed.  'Girls don't
+see .  .  .  they can't guess .  .  .  they have no idea of the right
+kind of man for them.  A man like Blackburn Tuckham, now, a man a father
+could leave his girl to, with confidence!  He works for me like a slave;
+I can't guess why.  He doesn't look as if he were attracted.  There's a
+man! but, no; harum-scarum fellows take their fancy.'
+
+'Is she that kind of young lady?'  said Mr. Austin.
+
+'No one would have thought so.  She pretends to have opinions upon
+politics now.  It's of no use to talk of it!'
+
+But Beauchamp was fully indicated.
+
+Mr. Austin proposed to Cecilia that they should spend Easter week in
+Rome.
+
+Her face lighted and clouded.
+
+'I should like it,' she said, negatively.
+
+'What's the objection?'
+
+'None, except that Mount Laurels in Spring has grown dear to me; and we
+have engagements in London.  I am not quick, I suppose, at new projects.
+I have ordered the yacht to be fitted out for a cruise in the
+Mediterranean early in the Summer.  There is an objection, I am sure--
+yes; papa has invited Mr. Tuckham here for Easter.'
+
+'We could carry him with us.'
+
+'Yes, but I should wish to be entirely under your tutelage in Rome.'
+
+'We would pair: your father and he; you and I.'
+
+'We might do that.  But Mr. Tuckham is like you, devoted to work; and,
+unlike you, careless of Antiquities and Art.'
+
+'He is a hard and serious worker, and therefore the best of companions
+for a holiday.  At present he is working for the colonel, who would
+easily persuade him to give over, and come with us.'
+
+'He certainly does love papa,' said Cecilia.
+
+Mr. Austin dwelt on that subject.
+
+Cecilia perceived that she had praised Mr. Tuckham for his devotedness to
+her father without recognizing the beauty of nature in the young man who
+could voluntarily take service under the elder he esteemed, in simple
+admiration of him.  Mr. Austin scarcely said so much, or expected her to
+see the half of it, but she wished to be extremely grateful, and could
+only see at all by kindling altogether.
+
+'He does himself injustice in his manner,' said Cecilia.
+
+'That has become somewhat tempered,' Mr. Austin assured her, and he
+acknowledged what it had been with a smile that she reciprocated.
+
+A rough man of rare quality civilizing under various influences, and half
+ludicrous, a little irritating, wholly estimable, has frequently won the
+benign approbation of the sex.  In addition, this rough man over whom she
+smiled was one of the few that never worried her concerning her hand.
+There was not a whisper of it in him.  He simply loved her father.
+
+Cecilia welcomed him to Mount Laurels with grateful gladness.  The
+colonel had hastened Mr. Tuckham's visit in view of the expedition to
+Rome, and they discoursed of it at the luncheon table.  Mr. Tuckham let
+fall that he had just seen Beauchamp.
+
+'Did he thank you for his inheritance?'  Colonel Halkett inquired.
+
+'Not he!'  Tuckham replied jovially.
+
+Cecilia's eyes, quick to flash, were dropped.
+
+The colonel said: 'I suppose you told him nothing of what you had done
+for him?'  and said Tuckham: 'Oh no: what anybody else would have done';
+and proceeded to recount that he had called at Dr. Shrapnel's on the
+chance of an interview with his friend Lydiard, who used generally to be
+hanging about the cottage.  'But now he's free: his lunatic wife is dead,
+and I'm happy to think I was mistaken as to Miss Denham.  Men practising
+literature should marry women with money.  The poor girl changed colour
+when I informed her he had been released for upwards of three months.
+The old Radical's not the thing in health.  He's anxious about leaving
+her alone in the world; he said so to me.  Beauchamp's for rigging out a
+yacht to give him a sail.  It seems that salt water did him some good
+last year.  They're both of them rather the worse for a row at one of
+their meetings in the North in support of that public nuisance, the
+democrat and atheist Roughleigh.  The Radical doctor lost a hat, and
+Beauchamp almost lost an eye.  He would have been a Nelson of politics,
+if he had been a monops, with an excuse for not seeing.  It's a trifle to
+them; part of their education.  They call themselves students.  Rome will
+be capital, Miss Halkett.  You're an Italian scholar, and I beg to be
+accepted as a pupil.'
+
+'I fear we have postponed the expedition too long,' said Cecilia.  She
+could have sunk with languor.
+
+'Too long?'  cried Colonel Halkett, mystified.
+
+'Until too late, I mean, papa.  Do you not think, Mr. Austin, that a
+fortnight in Rome is too short a time?'
+
+'Not if we make it a month, my dear Cecilia.'
+
+'Is not our salt air better for you?  The yacht shall be fitted out.'
+
+'I'm a poor sailor!'
+
+'Besides, a hasty excursion to Italy brings one's anticipated regrets at
+the farewell too close to the pleasure of beholding it, for the enjoyment
+of that luxury of delight which I associate with the name of Italy.'
+
+'Why, my dear child,' said her father, 'you were all for going, the other
+day.'
+
+'I do not remember it,' said she.  'One plans agreeable schemes.  At
+least we need not hurry from home so very soon after our return.  We have
+been travelling incessantly.  The cottage in Wales is not home.  It is
+hardly fair to Mount Laurels to quit it without observing the changes of
+the season in our flowers and birds here.  And we have visitors coming.
+Of course, papa, I would not chain you to England.  If I am not well
+enough to accompany you, I can go to Louise for a few weeks.'
+
+Was ever transparency so threadbare?  Cecilia shrank from herself in
+contemplating it when she was alone; and Colonel Halkett put the question
+to Mr. Austin, saying to him privately, with no further reserve: 'It's
+that fellow Beauchamp in the neighbourhood; I'm not so blind.  He'll be
+knocking at my door, and I can't lock him out.  Austin, would you guess
+it was my girl speaking?  I never in my life had such an example of
+intoxication before me.  I 'm perfectly miserable at the sight.  You.
+know her; she was the proudest girl living.  Her ideas were orderly and
+sound; she had a good intellect.  Now she more than half defends him--
+a naval officer! good Lord!--for getting up in a public room to announce
+that he 's a Republican, and writing heaps of mad letters to justify
+himself.  He's ruined in his profession: hopeless!  He can never get a
+ship: his career's cut short, he's a rudderless boat.  A gentleman
+drifting to Bedlam, his uncle calls him.  I call his treatment of Grancey
+Lespel anything but gentlemanly.  This is the sort of fellow my girl
+worships!  What can I do?  I can't interdict the house to him: it would
+only make matters worse.  Thank God, the fellow hangs fire somehow, and
+doesn't come to me.  I expect it every day, either in a letter or the man
+in person.  And I declare to heaven I'd rather be threading a Khyber Pass
+with my poor old friend who fell to a shot there.'
+
+'She certainly has another voice,' Mr. Austin assented gravely.
+
+He did not look on Beauchamp as the best of possible husbands for
+Cecilia.
+
+'Let her see that you're anxious, Austin,' said the colonel.  'I'm her
+old opponent in this affair.  She loves me, but she's accustomed to think
+me prejudiced: you she won't.  You may have a good effect.'
+
+'Not by speaking.'
+
+'No, no; no assault: not a word, and not a word against him.  Lay the
+wind to catch a gossamer.  I've had my experience of blowing cold, and
+trying to run her down.  He's at Shrapnel's.  He'll be up here to-day,
+and I have an engagement in the town.  Don't quit her side.  Let her
+fancy you are interested in some discussion--Radicalism, if you like.'
+
+Mr. Austin readily undertook to mount guard over her while her father
+rode into Bevisham on business.
+
+The enemy appeared.
+
+Cecilia saw him, and could not step to meet him for trouble of heart.
+It was bliss to know that he lived and was near.
+
+A transient coldness following the fit of ecstasy enabled her to swin
+through the terrible first minutes face to face with him.
+
+He folded her round like a mist; but it grew a problem to understand why
+Mr. Austin should be perpetually at hand, in the garden, in the woods, in
+the drawing-room, wheresoever she wakened up from one of her trances to
+see things as they were.
+
+Yet Beauchamp, with a daring and cunning at which her soul exulted, and
+her feminine nature trembled, as at the divinely terrible, had managed to
+convey to her no less than if they had been alone together.
+
+His parting words were: 'I must have five minutes with your father to-
+morrow.'
+
+How had she behaved?  What could be Seymour Austin's idea of her?
+
+She saw the blind thing that she was, the senseless thing, the shameless;
+and vulture-like in her scorn of herself, she alighted on that disgraced
+Cecilia and picked her to pieces hungrily.  It was clear: Beauchamp had
+meant nothing beyond friendly civility: it was only her abject greediness
+pecking at crumbs.  No! he loved her.  Could a woman's heart be mistaken?
+She melted and wept, thanking him: she offered him her remnant of pride,
+pitiful to behold.
+
+And still she asked herself between-whiles whether it could be true of an
+English lady of our day, that she, the fairest stature under sun, was
+ever knowingly twisted to this convulsion.  She seemed to look forth from
+a barred window on flower, and field, and hill.  Quietness existed as a
+vision.  Was it impossible to embrace it?  How pass into it?  By
+surrendering herself to the flames, like a soul unto death!  For why, if
+they were overpowering, attempt to resist them?  It flattered her to
+imagine that she had been resisting them in their present burning might
+ever since her lover stepped on the Esperanza's deck at the mouth of
+Otley River.  How foolish, seeing that they are fatal!  A thrill of
+satisfaction swept her in reflecting that her ability to reason was thus
+active.  And she was instantly rewarded for surrendering; pain fled, to
+prove her reasoning good; the flames devoured her gently they cared not
+to torture so long as they had her to themselves.
+
+At night, candle in hand, on the corridor, her father told her he had
+come across Grancey Lespel in Bevisham, and heard what he had not quite
+relished of the Countess of Romfrey.  The glittering of Cecilia's eyes
+frightened him.  Taking her for the moment to know almost as much as he,
+the colonel doubted the weight his communication would have on her; he
+talked obscurely of a scandalous affair at Lord Romfrey's house in town,
+and Beauchamp and that Frenchwoman.  'But,' said he, 'Mrs. Grancey will
+be here to-morrow.'
+
+'So will Nevil, papa,' said Cecilia.
+
+'Ah!  he's coming, yes; well!'  the colonel puffed.  'Well, I shall see
+him, of course, but I .  .  .  I can only say that if his oath 's worth
+having, I .  .  .  and I think you too, my dear, if you .  .  .  but it's
+no use anticipating.  I shall stand out for your honour and happiness.
+There, your cheeks are flushed.  Go and sleep.'
+
+Some idle tale!  Cecilia murmured to herself a dozen times, undisturbed
+by the recurrence of it.  Nevil was coming to speak to her father
+tomorrow!  Adieu to doubt and division!  Happy to-morrow!  and dear Mount
+Laurels!  The primroses were still fair in the woods: and soon the
+cowslips would come, and the nightingale; she lay lapt in images of
+everything innocently pleasing to Nevil.  Soon the Esperanza would be
+spreading wings.  She revelled in a picture of the yacht on a tumbling
+Mediterranean Sea, meditating on the two specks near the tiller,--who
+were blissful human creatures, blest by heaven and in themselves--with
+luxurious Olympian benevolence.
+
+For all that, she awoke, starting up in the first cold circle of
+twilight, her heart in violent action.  She had dreamed that the vessel
+was wrecked.  'I did not think myself so cowardly,' she said aloud,
+pressing her side and then, with the dream in her eyes, she gasped: 'It
+would be together!'
+
+Strangely chilled, she tried to recover some fallen load.  The birds of
+the dawn twittered, chirped, dived aslant her window, fluttered back.
+Instead of a fallen load, she fancied presently that it was an
+expectation she was desiring to realize: but what?  What could be
+expected at that hour?  She quitted her bed, and paced up and down the
+room beneath a gold-starred ceiling.  Her expectation, she resolved to
+think, was of a splendid day of the young Spring at Mount Laurels--a day
+to praise to Nevil.
+
+She raised her window-blind at a window letting in sweet air, to gather
+indications of promising weather.  Her lover stood on the grass-plot
+among the flower-beds below, looking up, as though it had been his
+expectation to see her which had drawn her to gaze out with an idea of
+some expectation of her own.  So visionary was his figure in the grey
+solitariness of the moveless morning that she stared at the apparition,
+scarce putting faith in him as man, until he kissed his hand to her, and
+had softly called her name.
+
+Impulsively she waved a hand from her lips.
+
+Now there was no retreat for either of them!
+
+She awoke to this conviction after a flight of blushes that burnt her
+thoughts to ashes as they sprang.  Thoughts born blushing, all of the
+crimson colour, a rose-garden, succeeded, and corresponding with their
+speed her feet paced the room, both slender hands crossed at her throat
+under an uplifted chin, and the curves of her dark eyelashes dropped as
+in a swoon.
+
+'He loves me!'  The attestation of it had been visible.  'No one but me!'
+Was that so evident?
+
+Her father picked up silly stories of him--a man who made enemies
+recklessly!
+
+Cecilia was petrified by a gentle tapping at her door.  Her father called
+to her, and she threw on her dressing-gown, and opened the door.
+
+The colonel was in his riding-suit.
+
+'I haven't slept a wink, and I find it's the same with you,' he said,
+paining her with his distressed kind eyes.  'I ought not to have hinted
+anything last night without proofs.  Austin's as unhappy as I am.'
+
+'At what, my dear papa, at what?'  cried Cecilia.
+
+'I ride over to Steynham this morning, and I shall bring you proofs, my
+poor child, proofs.  That foreign tangle of his .  .  .'
+
+'You speak of Nevil, papa?'
+
+'It's a common scandal over London.  That Frenchwoman was found at Lord
+Romfrey's house; Lady Romfrey cloaked it.  I believe the woman would
+swear black's white to make Nevil Beauchamp appear an angel; and he's a
+desperately cunning hand with women.  You doubt that.'
+
+She had shuddered slightly.
+
+'You won't doubt if I bring you proofs.  Till I come back from Steynham,
+I ask you not to see him alone: not to go out to him.'
+
+The colonel glanced at her windows.
+
+Cecilia submitted to the request, out of breath, consenting to feel like
+a tutored girl, that she might conceal her guilty knowledge of what was
+to be seen through the windows.
+
+'Now I'm off,' said he, and kissed her.
+
+'If you would accept Nevil's word!'  she murmured.
+
+'Not where women are concerned!'
+
+He left her with this remark, which found no jealous response in her
+heart, yet ranged over certain dispersed inflammable grains, like a match
+applied to damp powder; again and again running in little leaps of
+harmless firm keeping her alive to its existence, and surprising her
+that it should not have been extinguished.
+
+Beauchamp presented himself rather late in the afternoon, when Mr. Austin
+and Blackburn Tuckham were sipping tea in Cecilia's boudoir with that
+lady, and a cousin of her sex, by whom she was led to notice a faint
+discoloration over one of his eyes, that was, considering whence it came,
+repulsive to compassion.  A blow at a Radical meeting!  He spoke of Dr.
+Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the latter was
+unsympathetic in regard to the old man's health, though when he said,
+'Poor old man!  he fears he will die!'  Tuckham rejoined: 'He had better
+make his peace.'
+
+'He fears he will die, because of his leaving Miss Denham unprotected,'
+said Beauchamp.
+
+'Well, she's a good-looking girl: he'll be able to leave her something,
+and he might easily get her married, I should think,' said Tuckham.
+
+'He's not satisfied with handing her to any kind of man.'
+
+'If the choice is to be among Radicals and infidels, I don't wonder.  He
+has come to one of the tests.'
+
+Cecilia heard Beauchamp speaking of a newspaper.  A great Radical
+Journal, unmatched in sincerity, superior in ability, soon to be equal in
+power, to the leader and exemplar of the lucre-Press, would some day see
+the light.
+
+'You'll want money for that,' said Tuckham.
+
+'I know,' said Beauchamp.
+
+'Are you prepared to stand forty or fifty thousand a year?'
+
+'It need not be half so much.,
+
+'Counting the libels, I rate the outlay rather low.'
+
+'Yes, lawyers, judges, and juries of tradesmen, dealing justice to a
+Radical print!'
+
+Tuckham brushed his hand over his mouth and ahemed.  'It's to be a penny
+journal?'
+
+'Yes, a penny.  I'd make it a farthing--'
+
+'Pay to have it read?'
+
+'Willingly.'
+
+Tuckham did some mental arithmetic, quaintly, with rapidly blinking
+eyelids and open mouth.  'You may count it at the cost of two paying
+mines,' he said firmly.  'That is, if it's to be a consistently Radical
+Journal, at law with everybody all round the year.  And by the time it
+has won a reputation, it will be undermined by a radicaller Radical
+Journal.  That's how we've lowered the country to this level.  That's an
+Inferno of Circles, down to the ultimate mire.  And what on earth are you
+contending for?'
+
+'Freedom of thought, for one thing.'
+
+'We have quite enough free-thinking.'
+
+'There's not enough if there's not perfect freedom.'
+
+'Dangerous!' quoth Mr. Austin.
+
+'But it's that danger which makes men, sir; and it's fear of the danger
+that makes our modern Englishman.'
+
+'Oh!  Oh!'  cried Tuckham in the voice of a Parliamentary Opposition.
+'Well, you start your paper, we'll assume it: what class of men will you
+get to write?'
+
+'I shall get good men for the hire.'
+
+'You won't get the best men; you may catch a clever youngster or two, and
+an old rogue of talent; you won't get men of weight.  They're prejudiced,
+I dare say.  The Journals which are commercial speculations give us a
+guarantee that they mean to be respectable; they must, if they wouldn't
+collapse.  That's why the best men consent to write for them.'
+
+'Money will do it,' said Beauchamp.
+
+Mr. Austin disagreed with that observation.
+
+'Some patriotic spirit, I may hope, sir.'
+
+Mr. Austin shook his head.  'We put different constructions upon
+patriotism.'
+
+'Besides--fiddle! nonsense!'  exclaimed Tuckham in the mildest
+interjections he could summon for a vent in society to his offended
+common sense; 'the better your men the worse your mark.  You're not
+dealing with an intelligent people.'
+
+'There's the old charge against the people.'
+
+'But they're not.  You can madden, you can't elevate them by writing and
+writing.  Defend us from the uneducated English!  The common English are
+doltish; except in the North, where you won't do much with them.  Compare
+them with the Yankees for shrewdness, the Spaniards for sobriety, the
+French for ingenuity, the Germans for enlightenment, the Italians in the
+Arts; yes, the Russians for good-humour and obedience--where are they?
+They're only worth something when they're led.  They fight well; there's
+good stuff in them.'
+
+'I've heard all that before,' returned Beauchamp, unruffled.  'You don't
+know them.  I mean to educate them by giving them an interest in their
+country.  At present they have next to none.  Our governing class is
+decidedly unintelligent, in my opinion brutish, for it's indifferent.  My
+paper shall render your traders justice for what they do, and justice for
+what they don't do.'
+
+'My traders, as you call them, are the soundest foundation for a
+civilized state that the world has yet seen.'
+
+'What is your paper to be called?'  said Cecilia.
+
+'The DAWN,' Beauchamp answered.
+
+She blushed fiery red, and turned the leaves of a portfolio of drawings.
+
+'The DAWN!'  ejaculated Tuckham.  'The grey-eyed, or the red?
+Extraordinary name for a paper, upon my word!'
+
+'A paper that doesn't devote half its columns to the vices of the rich--
+to money-getting, spending and betting--will be an extraordinary paper.'
+
+'I have it before me now!--two doses of flattery to one of the whip.  No,
+no; you haven't hit the disease.  We want union, not division.  Turn your
+mind to being a moralist, instead of a politician.'
+
+'The distinction shouldn't exist!'
+
+'Only it does!'
+
+Mrs. Grancey Lespel's entrance diverted their dialogue from a theme
+wearisome to Cecilia, for Beauchamp shone but darkly in it, and Mr.
+Austin did not join in it.  Mrs. Grancey touched Beauchamp's fingers.
+'Still political?'  she said.  'You have been seen about London with a
+French officer in uniform.'
+
+'It was M. le comte de Croisnel, a very old friend and comrade of mine,'
+Beauchamp replied.
+
+'Why do those Frenchmen everlastingly wear their uniforms?--tell me!
+Don't you think it detestable style?'
+
+'He came over in a hurry.'
+
+'Now, don't be huffed.  I know you, for defending your friends, Captain
+Beauchamp!  Did he not come over with ladies?'
+
+'With relatives, yes.'
+
+'Relatives of course.  But when British officers travel with ladies,
+relatives or other, they prefer the simplicity of mufti, and so do I, as
+a question of taste, I must say.'
+
+'It was quite by misadventure that M. de Croisnel chanced to come in his
+uniform.'
+
+'Ah!  I know you, for defending your friends, Captain Beauchamp.  He was
+in too great a hurry to change his uniform before he started, or en
+route?'
+
+'So it happened.'
+
+Mrs. Grancey let a lingering eye dwell maliciously on Beauchamp, who
+said, to shift the burden of it: 'The French are not so jealous of
+military uniforms as we are.  M. de Croisnel lost his portmanteau.'
+
+'Ah!  lost it!  Then of course he is excuseable, except to the naked eye.
+Dear me! you have had a bruise on yours.  Was Monsieur votre ami in the
+Italian campaign?'
+
+'No, poor fellow, he was not.  He is not an Imperialist; he had to remain
+in garrison.'
+
+'He wore a multitude of medals, I have been told.  A cup of tea, Cecilia.
+And how long did he stay in England with his relatives?'
+
+'Two days.'
+
+'Only two days!  A very short visit indeed--singularly short.  Somebody
+informed me of their having been seen at Romfrey Castle, which cannot
+have been true.'
+
+She turned her eyes from Beauchamp silent to Cecilia's hand on the
+teapot.  'Half a cup,' she said mildly, to spare the poor hand its
+betrayal of nervousness, and relapsed from her air of mistress of the
+situation to chatter to Mr. Austin.
+
+Beauchamp continued silent.  He took up a book, and presently a pencil
+from his pocket, then talked of the book to Cecilia's cousin; and leaving
+a paper-cutter between the leaves, he looked at Cecilia and laid the book
+down.
+
+She proceeded to conduct Mrs. Grancey Lespel to her room.
+
+'I do admire Captain Beauchamp's cleverness; he is as good as a French
+romance!'  Mrs. Grancey exclaimed on the stairs.  'He fibs charmingly.
+I could not help drawing him out.  Two days!  Why, my dear, his French
+party were a fortnight in the country.  It was the marquise, you know--
+the old affair; and one may say he's a constant man.'
+
+'I have not heard Captain Beauchamp's cleverness much praised,' said
+Cecilia.  'This is your room, Mrs. Grancey.'
+
+'Stay with me a moment.  It is the room I like.  Are we to have him at
+dinner?'
+
+Cecilia did not suppose that Captain Beauchamp would remain to dine.
+Feeling herself in the clutches of a gossip, she would fain have gone.
+
+'I am just one bit glad of it, though I can't dislike him personally,'
+said Mrs. Grancey, detaining her and beginning to whisper.  'It was
+really too bad.  There was a French party at the end, but there was only
+one at the commencement.  The brother was got over for a curtain, before
+the husband arrived in pursuit.  They say the trick Captain Beauchamp
+played his cousin Cecil, to get him out of the house when he had made a
+discovery, was monstrous--fiendishly cunning.  However, Lady Romfrey, as
+that woman appears to be at last, covered it all.  You know she has one
+of those passions for Captain Beauchamp which completely blind women to
+right and wrong.  He is her saint, let him sin ever so!  The story's in
+everybody's mouth.  By the way, Palmet saw her.  He describes her pale as
+marble, with dark long eyes, the most innocent look in the world, and a
+walk, the absurd fellow says, like a statue set gliding.  No doubt
+Frenchwomen do walk well.  He says her eyes are terrible traitors; I need
+not quote Palmet.  The sort of eyes that would look fondly on a stone,
+you know.  What her reputation is in France I have only indistinctly
+heard.  She has one in England by this time, I can assure you.  She found
+her match in Captain Beauchamp for boldness.  Where any other couple
+would have seen danger, they saw safety; and they contrived to accomplish
+it, according to those horrid talebearers.  You have plenty of time to
+dress, my dear; I have an immense deal to talk about.  There are half-a-
+dozen scandals in London already, and you ought to know them, or you will
+be behind the tittle-tattle when you go to town; and I remember, as a
+girl, I knew nothing so excruciating as to hear blanks, dashes, initials,
+and half words, without the key.  Nothing makes a girl look so silly and
+unpalatable.  Naturally, the reason why Captain Beauchamp is more talked
+about than the rest is the politics.  Your grand reformer should be
+careful.  Doubly heterodox will not do!  It makes him interesting to
+women, if you like, but he won't soon hear the last of it, if he is for a
+public career.  Grancey literally crowed at the story.  And the wonderful
+part of it is, that Captain Beauchamp refused to be present at the earl's
+first ceremonial dinner in honour of his countess.  Now, that, we all
+think, was particularly ungrateful: now, was it not?'
+
+'If the countess--if ingratitude had anything to do with it,' said
+Cecilia.
+
+She escaped to her room and dressed impatiently.
+
+Her boudoir was empty: Beauchamp had departed.  She recollected his look
+at her, and turned over the leaves of the book he had been hastily
+scanning, and had condescended to approve of.  On the two pages where the
+paper-cutter was fixed she perceived small pencil dots under certain
+words.  Read consecutively, with a participle termination struck out to
+convey his meaning, they formed the pathetically ungrammatical line:
+
+'Hear: none: but: accused: false.'
+
+Treble dots were under the word 'to-morrow.'  He had scored the margin of
+the sentences containing his dotted words, as if in admiration of their
+peculiar wisdom.
+
+She thought it piteous that he should be reduced to such means of
+communication.  The next instant Cecilia was shrinking from the adept
+intriguer--French-taught!
+
+In the course of the evening her cousin remarked:
+
+'Captain Beauchamp must see merit in things undiscoverable by my poor
+faculties.  I will show you a book he has marked.'
+
+'Did you see it?  I was curious to examine it,' interposed Cecilia; 'and
+I am as much at a loss as you to understand what could have attracted
+him.  One sentence .  .  .'
+
+'About the sheikh in the stables, where he accused the pretended
+physician?  Yes, what was there in that?'
+
+'Where is the book?'  said Mrs. Grancey.
+
+'Not here, I think.'  Cecilia glanced at the drawing-room book-table, and
+then at Mr. Austin, the victim of an unhappy love in his youth, and
+unhappy about her, as her father had said.  Seymour Austin was not one to
+spread the contagion of intrigue!  She felt herself caught by it, even
+melting to feel enamoured of herself in consequence, though not loving
+Beauchamp the more.
+
+'This newspaper, if it's not merely an airy project, will be ruination,'
+said Tuckham.  'The fact is, Beauchamp has no bend in him.  He can't meet
+a man without trying a wrestle, and as long as he keeps his stiffness, he
+believes he has won.  I've heard an oculist say that the eye that doesn't
+blink ends in blindness, and he who won't bend breaks.  It's a pity, for
+he's a fine fellow.  A Radical daily Journal of Shrapnel's colour, to
+educate the people by giving them an interest in the country!  Goodness,
+what a delusion!  and what a waste of money!  He'll not be able to carry
+it on a couple of years.  And there goes his eighty thousand!'
+
+Cecilia's heart beat fast.  She had no defined cause for its excitement.
+
+Colonel Halkett returned to Mount Laurels close upon midnight, very
+tired, coughing and complaining of the bitter blowing East.  His guests
+shook hands with him, and went to bed.
+
+'I think I'll follow their example,' he said to Cecilia, after drinking a
+tumbler of mulled wine.
+
+'Have you nothing to tell me, dear papa?'  said she, caressing him
+timidly.
+
+'A confirmation of the whole story from Lord Romfrey in person--that's
+all.  He says Beauchamp's mad.  I begin to believe it.  You must use your
+judgement.  I suppose I must not expect you to consider me.  You might
+open your heart to Austin.  As to my consent, knowing what I do, you will
+have to tear it out of me.  Here's a country perfectly contented, and
+that fellow at work digging up grievances to persuade the people they're
+oppressed by us.  Why should I talk of it?  He can't do much harm; unless
+he has money--money!  Romfrey says he means to start a furious paper.
+He'll make a bonfire of himself.  I can't stand by and see you in it too.
+I may die; I may be spared the sight.'
+
+Cecilia flung her arms round his neck.  'Oh! papa.'
+
+'I don't want to make him out worse than he is, my dear.  I own to his
+gallantry--in the French sense as well as the English, it seems!  It's
+natural that Romfrey should excuse his wife.  She's another of the women
+who are crazy about Nevil Beauchamp.  She spoke to me of the "pleasant
+visit of her French friends," and would have enlarged on it, but Romfrey
+stopped her.  By the way, he proposes Captain Baskelett for you, and
+we're to look for Baskelett's coming here, backed by his uncle.  There's
+no end to it; there never will be till you're married: and no peace for
+me!  I hope I shan't find myself with a cold to-morrow.'
+
+The colonel coughed, and perhaps exaggerated the premonitory symptoms of
+a cold.
+
+'Italy, papa, would do you good,' said Cecilia.
+
+'It might,' said he.
+
+'If we go immediately, papa; to-morrow, early in the morning, before
+there is a chance of any visitors coming to the house.'
+
+'From Bevisham?'
+
+'From Steynham.  I cannot endure a second persecution.'
+
+'But you have a world of packing, my dear.'
+
+'An hour before breakfast will be sufficient for me.'
+
+'In that case, we might be off early, as you say, and have part of the
+Easter week in Rome.'
+
+'Mr. Austin wishes it greatly, papa, though he has not mentioned it.'
+
+'Austin, my darling girl, is not one of your impatient men who burst with
+everything they have in their heads or their hearts.'
+
+'Oh!  but I know him so well,' said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent
+enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp suffering.
+The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an enigma
+concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had not
+hitherto known at all.  Her curiosity to pierce it faded.  She and her
+maid were packing through the night.  At dawn she requested her maid to
+lift the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather.  'Grey,
+Miss,' the maid reported.  It signified to Cecilia: no one roaming
+outside.
+
+The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she
+commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil's
+disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and
+motives.--'I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my
+weakness.'--Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be
+jealous, nor any right to reproach him.  Her task was to climb back to
+those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her
+down.
+
+Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN
+
+It was in Italy that Cecilia's maiden dreams of life had opened.  She
+hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind
+untainted.  Italy was to be her reviving air.
+
+While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at
+speed to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France--she simply
+remembered Nevil: he was distant; he had no place in the storied
+landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men who
+bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth's for those adoring
+them.  If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted her
+through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her
+flight released her.  France, too, her rival!--the land of France,
+personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative
+gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.--'She knew him first: she
+was his first love.'  The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them,
+renewed Cecilia's lofty-perching youth.  Then--I am in Italy!  she sighed
+with rapture.  The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.
+
+But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on
+over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to
+the soul.  In Rome Cecilia's vision of her track to Rome was of a run of
+fire over a heath.  She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome.  It
+seemed burnt out.
+
+Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment
+she had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it
+like nothing she had yet experienced.  Previous pains were but Summer
+lightnings, passing shadows.  She could have believed in sorcery:
+the man had eaten her heart!
+
+A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the
+notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird.  It served
+to veil her dulness.  An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking
+to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a
+young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to
+be followed by their footman in the melancholy pomp of state livery.
+Wherever she encountered them Cecilia talked Nevil Beauchamp.  Even Mr.
+Tuckham perceived it.  She was extremely uncharitable: she extended her
+ungenerous criticism to the institution of the footman: England, and the
+English, were lashed.
+
+'These people are caricatures,' Tuckham said, in apology for poor England
+burlesqued abroad.  'You must not generalize on them.  Footmen are
+footmen all the world over.  The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.'
+
+'They are at home.  Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe.
+We cannot but be despised.  One comes abroad foredoomed to share the
+sentiment.  This is your middle-class!  What society can they move in,
+that sanctions a vulgarity so perplexing?  They have the air of ornaments
+on a cottager's parlour mantelpiece.'
+
+Tuckham laughed.  'Something of that,' he said.
+
+'Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,' she
+continued.  'It is not wonderful that we have so much satirical writing
+in England, with such objects of satire.  It may be as little wonderful
+that the satire has no effect.  Immense wealth and native obtuseness
+combine to disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say
+monstrosity.  I fall in love with the poor, and think they have a cause
+to be pleaded, when I look at those people.  We scoff at the vanity of
+the French, but it is a graceful vanity; pardonable compared with ours.'
+
+'I've read all that a hundred times,' quoth Tuckham bluntly.
+
+'So have I.  I speak of it because I see it.  We scoff at the simplicity
+of the Germans.'
+
+'The Germans live in simple fashion, because they're poor.  French
+vanity's pretty and amusing.  I don't know whether it's deep in them, for
+I doubt their depth; but I know it's in their joints.  The first spring
+of a Frenchman comes of vanity.  That you can't say of the English.
+Peace to all! but I abhor cosmopolitanism.  No man has a firm foothold
+who pretends to it.  None despises the English in reality.  Don't be
+misled, Miss Halkett.  We're solid: that is the main point.  The world
+feels our power, and has confidence in our good faith.  I ask for no
+more.'
+
+'With Germans we are supercilious Celts; with Frenchmen we are sneering
+Teutons:--Can we be loved, Mr. Tuckham?'
+
+'That's a quotation from my friend Lydiard.  Loved?  No nation ever was
+loved while it lived.  As Lydiard says, it may be a good beast or a bad,
+but a beast it is.  A nation's much too big for refined feelings and
+affections.  It must be powerful or out of the way, or down it goes.
+When a nation's dead you may love it; but I don't see the use of dying to
+be loved.  My aim for my country is to have the land respected.  For that
+purpose we must have power; for power wealth; for wealth industry; for
+industry internal peace: therefore no agitation, no artificial divisions.
+All's plain in history and fact, so long as we do not obtrude
+sentimentalism.  Nothing mixes well with that stuff--except poetical
+ideas!'
+
+Contrary to her anticipation, Cecilia was thrown more into companionship
+with Mr. Tuckham than with Mr. Austin; and though it often vexed her, she
+acknowledged that she derived a benefit from his robust antagonism of
+opinion.  And Italy had grown tasteless to her.  She could hardly
+simulate sufficient curiosity to serve for a vacant echo to Mr. Austin's
+historic ardour.  Pliny the Younger might indeed be the model of a
+gentleman of old Rome; there might be a scholarly pleasure in
+calculating, as Mr. Austin did, the length of time it took Pliny to
+journey from the city to his paternal farm, or villa overlooking the
+lake, or villa overlooking the bay, and some abstruse fun in the tender
+ridicule of his readings of his poems to friends; for Mr. Austin smiled
+effusively in alluding to the illustrious Roman pleader's foible of
+verse: but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil
+Beauchamp: she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer,
+student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern
+English gentleman, though he was.  'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly
+to Seymour Austin's fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!'
+conclusively: like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables.
+She was unworthy of the society of a scholar.  Nor could she kneel at the
+feet of her especial heroes: Dante, Raphael, Buonarotti: she was unworthy
+of them.  She longed to be at Mount Laurels.  Mr. Tuckham's conversation
+was the nearest approach to it--as it were round by Greenland; but it was
+homeward.
+
+She was really grieved to lose him.  Business called him to England.
+
+'What business can it be, papa?'  she inquired: and the colonel replied
+briefly: 'Ours.'
+
+Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in the
+ancient life of the Eternal City.  He had certain volumes of Livy,
+Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning
+the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no
+jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient.  A gentle
+cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and
+laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome: she pulled
+for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome
+of the wise and clement emperors.  To Cecilia's mind Rome rocked at a
+period so closely neighbouring her decay: to him, with an imagination
+brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the
+sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished
+supreme, and men eminent for culture: the finest flowers of our race, he
+thought them: and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.
+
+Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not have
+framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and
+elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism
+of the Roman pattern:--he rejected the French.  She mused on dim old
+thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman's life under high
+governorship.  Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step.  The
+trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for
+women aspiring to moral beauty and distinction.  Beside such they should
+be planted, if they would climb!  Her walks and conversations with
+Seymour Austin charmed her as the haze of a summer evening charms the
+sight.
+
+Upon the conclusion of her term of exile Cecilia would gladly have
+remained in Italy another month.  An appointment of her father's with Mr.
+Tuckham at Mount Laurels on a particular day she considered as of no
+consequence whatever, and she said so, in response to a meaningless nod.
+But Mr. Austin was obliged to return to work.  She set her face homeward
+with his immediately, and he looked pleased: he did not try to dissuade
+her from accompanying him by affecting to think it a sacrifice: clearly
+he knew that to be near him was her greatest delight.
+
+Thus do we round the perilous headland called love by wooing a good man
+for his friendship, and requiting him with faithful esteem for the grief
+of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth!
+
+Cecilia would not suffer her fancy to go very far in pursuit of the
+secret of Mr. Austin's present feelings.  Until she reached Mount Laurels
+she barely examined her own.  The sight of the house warned her instantly
+that she must have a defence: and then, in desperation but with perfect
+distinctness, she entertained the hope of hearing him speak the
+protecting words which could not be broken through when wedded to her
+consent.
+
+If Mr. Austin had no intentions, it was at least strange that he did not
+part from her in London.
+
+He whose coming she dreaded had been made aware of the hour of her
+return, as his card, with the pencilled line, 'Will call on the 17th,'
+informed her.  The 17th was the morrow.
+
+After breakfast on the morning of the 17th Seymour Austin looked her in
+the eyes longer than it is customary for ladies to have to submit to keen
+inspection.
+
+'Will you come into the library?'  he said.
+
+She went with him into the library.
+
+Was it to speak of his anxiousness as to the state of her father's health
+that he had led her there, and that he held her hand?  He alarmed her,
+and he pacified her alarm, yet bade her reflect on the matter, saying
+that her father, like other fathers, would be more at peace upon the
+establishment of his daughter.  Mr. Austin remarked that the colonel was
+troubled.
+
+'Does he wish for my pledge never to marry without his approval?  I will
+give it,' said Cecilia.
+
+'He would like you to undertake to marry the man of his choice.'
+Cecilia's features hung on an expression equivalent to:--I could almost
+do that.'
+
+At the same time she felt it was not Seymour Austin's manner of speaking.
+He seemed to be praising an unknown person--some gentleman who was rough,
+but of solid promise and singular strength of character.
+
+The house-bell rang.  Believing that Beauchamp had now come, she showed a
+painful ridging of the brows, and Mr. Austin considerately mentioned the
+name of the person he had in his mind.
+
+She readily agreed with him regarding Mr. Tuckham's excellent qualities
+--if that was indeed the name; and she hastened to recollect how little
+she had forgotten Mr. Tuckham's generosity to Beauchamp, and confessed to
+herself it might as well have been forgotten utterly for the thanks he
+had received.  While revolving these ideas she was listening to Mr.
+Austin; gradually she was beginning to understand that she was parting
+company with her original conjectures, but going at so swift a pace in so
+supple and sure a grasp, that, like the speeding train slipped on new
+lines of rails by the pointsman, her hurrying sensibility was not
+shocked, or the shock was imperceptible, when she heard him proposing Mr.
+Tuckham to her for a husband, by her father's authority, and with his own
+warm seconding.  He had not dropped her hand: he was very eloquent, a
+masterly advocate: he pleaded her father's cause; it was not put to her
+as Mr. Tuckham's: her father had set his heart on this union he was
+awaiting her decision.
+
+'Is it so urgent?'  she asked.
+
+'It is urgent.  It saves him from an annoyance.  He requires a son-in-law
+whom he can confidently rely on to manage the estates, which you are
+woman of the world enough to know should be in strong hands.  He gives
+you to a man of settled principles.  It is urgent, because he may wish to
+be armed with your answer at any instant.'
+
+Her father entered the library.  He embraced her, and 'Well?'  he said.
+
+'I must think, papa, I must think.'
+
+She pressed her hand across her eyes.  Disillusioned by Seymour Austin,
+she was utterly defenceless before Beauchamp: and possibly Beauchamp was
+in the house.  She fancied he was, by the impatient brevity of her
+father's voice.
+
+Seymour Austin and Colonel Halkett left the room, and Blackburn Tuckham
+walked in, not the most entirely self-possessed of suitors, puffing
+softly under his breath, and blinking eyes as rapidly as a skylark claps
+wings on the ascent.
+
+Half an hour later Beauchamp appeared.  He asked to see the colonel,
+delivered himself of his pretensions and wishes to the colonel, and was
+referred to Cecilia; but Colonel Halkett declined to send for her.
+Beauchamp declined to postpone his proposal until the following day.
+He went outside the house and walked up and down the grass-plot.
+
+Cecilia came to him at last.
+
+'I hear, Nevil, that you are waiting to speak to me.'
+
+'I've been waiting some weeks.  Shall I speak here?'
+
+'Yes, here, quickly.'
+
+'Before the house?  I have come to ask you for your hand.'
+
+'Mine?  I cannot .  .  .'
+
+'Step into the park with me.  I ask you to marry me.'
+
+'It is too late.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII
+
+THE REFUSAL OF HIM
+
+Passing from one scene of excitement to another, Cecilia was perfectly
+steeled for her bitter task; and having done that which separated her a
+sphere's distance from Beauchamp, she was cold, inaccessible to the face
+of him who had swayed her on flood and ebb so long, incapable of tender
+pity, even for herself.  All she could feel was a harsh joy to have
+struck off her tyrant's fetters, with a determination to cherish it
+passionately lest she should presently be hating herself: for the shadow
+of such a possibility fell within the narrow circle of her strung
+sensations.  But for the moment her delusion reached to the idea that she
+had escaped from him into freedom, when she said, 'It is too late.'
+Those words were the sum and voice of her long term of endurance.  She
+said them hurriedly, almost in a whisper, in the manner of one changeing
+a theme of conversation for subjects happier and livelier, though none
+followed.
+
+The silence bore back on her a suspicion of a faint reproachfulness in
+the words; and perhaps they carried a poetical tone, still more
+distasteful.
+
+'You have been listening to tales of me,' said Beauchamp.
+
+'Nevil, we can always be friends, the best of friends.'
+
+'Were you astonished at my asking you for your hand?  You said "mine?"
+as if you wondered.  You have known my feelings for you.  Can you deny
+that?  I have reckoned on yours--too long?--But not falsely?  No, hear me
+out.  The truth is, I cannot lose you.  And don't look so resolute.
+Overlook little wounds: I was never indifferent to you.  How could I be--
+with eyes in my head?  The colonel is opposed to me of course: he will
+learn to understand me better: but you and I! we cannot be mere friends.
+It's like daylight blotted out--or the eyes gone blind:--Too late?  Can
+you repeat it?  I tried to warn you before you left England: I should
+have written a letter to put you on your guard against my enemies:--
+I find I have some: but a letter is sure to stumble; I should have been
+obliged to tell you that I do not stand on my defence; and I thought I
+should see you the next day.  You went: and not a word for me!  You gave
+me no chance.  If you have no confidence in me I must bear it.  I may say
+the story is false.  With your hand in mine I would swear it.'
+
+'Let it be forgotten,' said Cecilia, surprised and shaken to think that
+her situation required further explanations; fascinated and unnerved by
+simply hearing him.  'We are now--we are walking away from the house.'
+
+'Do you object to a walk with me?'
+
+They had crossed the garden plot and were at the gate of the park leading
+to the Western wood.  Beauchamp swung the gate open.  He cast a look at
+the clouds coming up from the South-west in folds of grey and silver.
+
+'Like the day of our drive into Bevisham!--without the storm behind,' he
+said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of her hair
+in sunless light.  'There are flowers that grow only in certain valleys,
+and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for Italy.
+You colour the whole region for me.  When you were absent, you were here.
+I called here six times, and walked and talked with you.'
+
+Cecilia set her face to the garden.  Her heart had entered on a course of
+heavy thumping, like a sapper in the mine.
+
+Pain was not unwelcome to her, but this threatened weakness.
+
+What plain words could she use?  If Mr. Tuckham had been away from the
+house, she would have found it easier to speak of her engagement; she
+knew not why.  Or if the imperative communication could have been
+delivered in Italian or French, she was as little able to say why it
+should have slipped from her tongue without a critic shudder to arrest
+it.  She was cold enough to revolve the words: betrothed, affianced,
+plighted: and reject them, pretty words as they are.  Between the
+vulgarity of romantic language, and the baldness of commonplace, it
+seemed to her that our English gives us no choice; that we cannot be
+dignified in simplicity.  And for some reason, feminine and remote, she
+now detested her 'hand' so much as to be unable to bring herself to the
+metonymic mention of it.  The lady's difficulty was peculiar to sweet
+natures that have no great warmth of passion; it can only be indicated.
+Like others of the kind, it is traceable to the most delicate of
+sentiments, and to the flattest:--for Mr. Blackburn's Tuckham's figure
+was (she thought of it with no personal objection) not of the graceful
+order, neither cavalierly nor kingly: and imagining himself to say, 'I am
+engaged,' and he suddenly appearing on the field, Cecilia's whole mind
+was shocked in so marked a way did he contrast with Beauchamp.
+
+This was the effect of Beauchamp's latest words on her.  He had disarmed
+her anger.
+
+'We must have a walk to-day,' he said commandingly, but it had stolen
+into him that he and she were not walking on the same bank of the river,
+though they were side by side: a chill water ran between them.  As in
+other days, there hung her hand: but not to be taken.  Incredible as it
+was, the icy sense of his having lost her benumbed him.  Her beautiful
+face and beautiful tall figure, so familiar to him that they were like a
+possession, protested in his favour while they snatched her from him all
+the distance of the words 'too late.'
+
+'Will you not give me one half-hour?'
+
+'I am engaged,' Cecilia plunged and extricated herself, 'I am engaged to
+walk with Mr. Austin and papa.'
+
+Beauchamp tossed his head.  Something induced him to speak of Mr.
+Tuckham.  'The colonel has discovered his Tory young man!  It's an object
+as incomprehensible to me as a Tory working-man.  I suppose I must take
+it that they exist.  As for Blackburn Tuckham, I have nothing against
+him.  He's an honourable fellow enough, and would govern Great Britain as
+men of that rich middle-class rule their wives--with a strict regard for
+ostensible humanity and what the law allows them.  His manners have
+improved.  Your cousin Mary seems to like him: it struck me when I saw
+them together.  Cecilia! one half-hour!  You refuse me: you have not
+heard me.  You will not say too late.'
+
+'Nevil, I have said it finally.  I have no longer the right to conceive
+it unsaid.'
+
+'So we speak!  It's the language of indolence, temper, faint hearts.
+"Too late" has no meaning.  Turn back with me to the park.  I offer you
+my whole heart; I love you.  There's no woman living who could be to me
+the wife you would be.  I'm like your male nightingale that you told me
+of: I must have my mate to sing to--that is, work for and live for; and
+she must not delay too long.  Did I?  Pardon me if you think I did.  You
+have known I love you.  I have been distracted by things that kept me
+from thinking of myself and my wishes: and love's a selfish business
+while .  .  .  while one has work in hand.  It's clear I can't do two
+things at a time--make love and carry on my taskwork.  I have been idle
+for weeks.  I believed you were mine and wanted no lovemaking.  There's
+no folly in that, if you understand me at all.  As for vanity about
+women, I 've outlived it.  In comparison with you I'm poor, I know:--you
+look distressed, but one has to allude to it:--I admit that wealth would
+help me.  To see wealth supporting the cause of the people for once
+would--but you say, too late!  Well, I don't renounce you till I see you
+giving your hand to a man who's not myself.  You have been offended:
+groundlessly, on my honour!  You are the woman of all women in the world
+to hold me fast in faith and pride in you.  It's useless to look icy: you
+feel what I say.'
+
+'Nevil, I feel grief, and beg you to cease.  I am----It is-----'
+
+"'Too late' has not a rag of meaning, Cecilia!  I love your name.  I love
+this too: this is mine, and no one can rob me of it.'
+
+He drew forth a golden locket and showed her a curl of her hair.
+
+Crimsoning, she said instantly: 'Language of the kind I used is open to
+misconstruction, I fear.  I have not even the right to listen to you.  I
+am .  .  .  You ask me for what I have it no longer in my power to give.
+I am engaged.'
+
+The shot rang through him and partly stunned him; but incredulity made a
+mocking effort to sustain him.  The greater wounds do not immediately
+convince us of our fate, though we may be conscious that we have been
+hit.
+
+'Engaged in earnest?'  said he.
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'Of your free will?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+Her father stepped out on the terrace, from one of the open windows,
+trailing a newspaper like a pocket-handkerchief.  Cecilia threaded the
+flower-beds to meet him.
+
+'Here's an accident to one of our ironclads,' he called to Beauchamp.
+
+'Lives lost, sir?'
+
+'No, thank heaven!  but, upon my word, it's a warning.  Read the
+telegram; it's the Hastings.  If these are our defences, at a cost of
+half a million of money, each of them, the sooner we look to our land
+forces the better.'
+
+'The Shop will not be considered safe!'  said Beauchamp, taking in the
+telegram at a glance.  'Peppel's a first-rate officer too: she couldn't
+have had a better captain.  Ship seriously damaged!'
+
+He handed back the paper to the colonel.
+
+Cecilia expected him to say that he had foreseen such an event.
+
+He said nothing; and with a singular contraction of the heart she
+recollected how he had denounced our system of preparing mainly for the
+defensive in war, on a day when they stood together in the park, watching
+the slow passage of that very ship, the Hastings, along the broad water,
+distant below them.  The 'swarms of swift vessels of attack,' she
+recollected particularly, and 'small wasps and rams under mighty steam-
+power,' that he used to harp on when declaring that England must be known
+for the assailant in war: she was to 'ray out' her worrying fleets.  'The
+defensive is perilous policy in war': he had said it.  She recollected
+also her childish ridicule of his excess of emphasis: he certainly had
+foresight.'
+
+Mr. Austin and Mr. Tuckham came strolling in conversation round the house
+to the terrace.  Beauchamp bowed to the former, nodded to the latter,
+scrutinizing him after he had done so, as if the flash of a thought were
+in his mind.  Tuckham's radiant aspect possibly excited it: 'Congratulate
+me!'  was the honest outcry of his face and frame.  He was as over-
+flowingly rosy as a victorious candidate at the hustings commencing a
+speech.  Cecilia laid her hand on an urn, in dread of the next words from
+either of the persons present.  Her father put an arm in hers, and leaned
+on her.  She gazed at her chamber window above, wishing to be wafted
+thither to her seclusion within.  The trembling limbs of physical
+irresoluteness was a new experience to her.
+
+'Anything else in the paper, colonel?  I've not seen it to-day,' said
+Beauchamp, for the sake of speaking.
+
+'No, I don't think there's anything,' Colonel Halkett replied.  'Our
+diplomatists haven't been shining much: that 's not our forte.'
+
+'No: it's our field for younger sons.'
+
+'Is it?  Ah!  There's an expedition against the hilltribes in India, and
+we're such a peaceful nation, eh?  We look as if we were in for a
+complication with China.'
+
+'Well, sir, we must sell our opium.'
+
+'Of course we must.  There's a man writing about surrendering Gibraltar!'
+
+'I'm afraid we can't do that.'
+
+'But where do you draw the line?'  quoth Tuckham, very susceptible to a
+sneer at the colonel, and entirely ignorant of the circumstances
+attending Beauchamp's position before him.  'You defend the Chinaman; and
+it's questionable if his case is as good as the Spaniard's.'
+
+'The Chinaman has a case against our traders.  Gibraltar concerns our
+imperial policy.'
+
+'As to the case against the English merchants, the Chinaman is for
+shutting up his millions of acres of productive land, and the action of
+commerce is merely a declaration of a universal public right, to which
+all States must submit.'
+
+'Immorality brings its punishment, be sure of that.  Some day we shall
+have enough of China.  As to the Rock, I know the argument; I may be
+wrong.  I've had the habit of regarding it as necessary to our naval
+supremacy.'
+
+'Come!  there we agree.'
+
+'I'm not so certain.'
+
+'The counter-argument, I call treason.'
+
+'Well,' said Beauchamp, 'there's a broad policy, and a narrow.  There's
+the Spanish view of the matter--if you are for peace and harmony and
+disarmament.'
+
+'I'm not.'
+
+'Then strengthen your forces.'
+
+'Not a bit of it!'
+
+'Then bully the feeble and truckle to the strong; consent to be hated
+till you have to stand your ground.'
+
+'Talk!'
+
+'It seems to me logical.'
+
+'That's the French notion--c'est lodgique!'
+
+Tuckham's pronunciation caused Cecilia to level her eyes at him
+passingly.
+
+'By the way,' said Colonel Halkett, 'there are lots of horrors in the
+paper to-day; wife kickings, and starvations--oh, dear me!  and the
+murder of a woman: two columns to that.'
+
+'That, the Tory reaction is responsible for!'  said Tuckham, rather by
+way of a joke than a challenge.
+
+Beauchamp accepted it as a challenge.  Much to the benevolent amusement
+of Mr. Austin and Colonel Halkett, he charged the responsibility of every
+crime committed in the country, and every condition of misery, upon the
+party which declined to move in advance, and which therefore apologized
+for the perpetuation of knavery, villany, brutality, injustice, and foul
+dealing.
+
+'Stick to your laws and systems and institutions, and so long as you
+won't stir to amend them, I hold you accountable for that long newspaper
+list daily.'
+
+He said this with a visible fire of conviction.
+
+Tuckham stood bursting at the monstrousness of such a statement.
+
+He condensed his indignant rejoinder to: 'Madness can't go farther!'
+
+'There's an idea in it,' said Mr. Austin.
+
+'It's an idea foaming at the mouth, then.'
+
+'Perhaps it has no worse fault than that of not marching parallel with
+the truth,' said Mr. Austin, smiling.  'The party accusing in those terms
+.  .  .  what do you say, Captain Beauchamp?--supposing us to be pleading
+before a tribunal?'
+
+Beauchamp admitted as much as that he had made the case gigantic, though
+he stuck to his charge against the Tory party.  And moreover: the Tories-
+and the old Whigs, now Liberals, ranked under the heading of Tories--
+those Tories possessing and representing the wealth of the country, yet
+had not started one respectable journal that a lady could read through
+without offence to her, or a gentleman without disgust!  If there was not
+one English newspaper in existence independent of circulation and
+advertisements, and of the tricks to win them, the Tories were answerable
+for the vacancy.  They, being the rich who, if they chose, could set an
+example to our Press by subscribing to maintain a Journal superior to the
+flattering of vile appetites--'all that nauseous matter,' Beauchamp
+stretched his fingers at the sheets Colonel Halkett was holding, and
+which he had not read--'those Tories,' he bowed to the colonel, 'I'm
+afraid I must say you, sir, are answerable for it.'
+
+'I am very well satisfied with my paper,' said the colonel.
+
+Beauchamp sighed to himself.  'We choose to be satisfied,' he said.
+His pure and mighty DAWN was in his thoughts: the unborn light of a day
+denied to earth!
+
+One of the doctors of Bevisham, visiting a sick maid of the house,
+trotted up the terrace to make his report to her master of the state of
+her health.  He hoped to pull her through with the aid of high feeding.
+He alluded cursorily to a young girl living on the outskirts of the town,
+whom he had been called in to see at the eleventh hour, and had lost,
+owing to the lowering of his patient from a prescription of a vegetable
+diet by a certain Dr. Shrapnel.
+
+That ever-explosive name precipitated Beauchamp to the front rank of the
+defence.
+
+'I happen to be staying with Dr. Shrapnel,' he observed.  'I don't eat
+meat there because he doesn't, and I am certain I take no harm by
+avoiding it.  I think vegetarianism a humaner system, and hope it may be
+wise.  I should like to set the poor practising it, for their own sakes;
+and I have half an opinion that it would be good for the rich--if we are
+to condemn gluttony.'
+
+'Ah?  Captain Beauchamp!' the doctor bowed to him.  'But my case was one
+of poor blood requiring to be strengthened.  The girl was allowed to sink
+so low that stimulants were ineffective when I stepped in.  There's the
+point.  It 's all very well while you are in health.  You may do without
+meat till your system demands the stimulant, or else--as with this poor
+girl!  And, indeed, Captain Beauchamp, if I may venture the remark--I had
+the pleasure of seeing you during the last Election in our town--and if I
+may be so bold, I should venture to hint that the avoidance of animal
+food--to judge by appearances--has not been quite wholesome for you.'
+
+Eyes were turned on Beauchamp.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY
+
+Cecilia softly dropped her father's arm, and went into the house.  The
+exceeding pallor of Beauchamp's face haunted her in her room.  She heard
+the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn
+Tuckham's: 'Immorality of meat-eating?  What nonsense are they up to
+now?'
+
+Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two.  As usual, he was the
+solitary minority.
+
+But how mournfully changed he was!  She had not noticed it, agitated
+by her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen.
+He was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of the
+Esperanza out of Lieutenant Wilmore's boat, that sunny breezy day which
+was the bright first chapter of her new life--of her late life, as it
+seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the
+coldest of the women of earth.  She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth,
+flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden
+and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had
+ceased to speak.
+
+How much he must have suffered of late!  The room she had looked to as a
+refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had
+incredibly accepted.  She remained there, the victim of a heart malady,
+under the term of headache.  Feeling entrapped, she considered that she
+must have been encircled and betrayed.  She looked back on herself as a
+giddy figure falling into a pit: and in the pit she lay.
+
+And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the
+generous and stedfast man of earth!  He never abandoned a common
+friendship.  His love of his country was love still, whatever the form it
+had taken.  His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for which
+men laughed at him, was beautiful.
+
+Where am I?  she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by
+his wan features.  She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave.  Even Mr.
+Austin had conspired against him: for only she read Nevil justly.  His
+defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned
+the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to
+creep into sunshine.
+
+The only worthy thing she could think of doing was (it must be mentioned
+for a revelation of her fallen state, and, moreover, she was not lusty of
+health at the moment) to abjure meat.  The body loathed it, and
+consequently the mind of the invalided lady shrank away in horror of the
+bleeding joints, and the increasingly fierce scramble of Christian souls
+for the dismembered animals: she saw the innocent pasturing beasts, she
+saw the act of slaughter.  She had actually sweeping before her sight a
+spectacle of the ludicrous-terrific, in the shape of an entire community
+pursuing countless herds of poor scampering animal life for blood: she,
+meanwhile, with Nevil and Dr. Shrapnel, stood apart contemning.  For
+whoso would not partake of flesh in this kingdom of roast beef must be of
+the sparse number of Nevil's execrated minority in politics.
+
+The example will show that she touched the borders of delirium.
+Physically, the doctor pronounces her bilious.  She was in earnest so far
+as to send down to the library for medical books, and books upon diet.
+These, however, did not plead for the beasts.  They treated the subject
+without question of man's taking that which he has conquered.  Poets and
+philosophers did the same.  Again she beheld Nevil Beauchamp solitary in
+the adverse rank to the world;--to his countrymen especially.  But that
+it was no material cause which had wasted his cheeks and lined his
+forehead, she was sure: and to starve with him, to embark with him in his
+little boat on the seas he whipped to frenzy, would have been a dream of
+bliss, had she dared to contemplate herself in a dream as his companion.
+
+It was not to be thought of.
+
+No: but this was, and to be thought of seriously: Cecilia had said to
+herself for consolation that Beauchamp was no spiritual guide; he had her
+heart within her to plead for him, and the reflection came to her, like a
+bubble up from the heart, that most of our spiritual guides neglect the
+root to trim the flower: and thence, turning sharply on herself, she
+obtained a sudden view of her allurement and her sin in worshipping
+herself, and recognized that the aim at an ideal life closely approaches,
+or easily inclines, to self-worship; to which the lady was woman and
+artist enough to have had no objection, but that therein visibly she
+discerned the retributive vain longings, in the guise of high individual
+superiority and distinction, that had thwarted her with Nevil Beauchamp,
+never permitting her to love single-mindedly or whole-heartedly, but
+always in reclaiming her rights and sighing for the loss of her ideal;
+adoring her own image, in fact, when she pretended to cherish, and regret
+that she could not sufficiently cherish, the finer elements of nature.
+What was this ideal she had complained of losing?  It was a broken
+mirror: she could think of it in no other form.
+
+Dr. Shrapnel's 'Ego-Ego' yelped and gave chase to her through the pure
+beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets.  It hunted
+all the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their
+heads-her favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.
+
+The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
+bilious.  He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
+parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a
+consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel.  'The very family to
+require strong nourishment,' said the doctor.
+
+Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
+and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
+labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world's weight.
+Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp's track to experience that.
+She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
+Homoeopathy, hydropathy,--the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.
+Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
+promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
+been so deferential to a diseased mind.  Beyond calling her by her
+Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of
+their new relations together.  He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount
+Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one deposited
+on a mudbank after buffeting the waves.  She learnt that her father had
+seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her personal
+dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal of her
+feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her where she
+now lay helpless, almost inanimate.
+
+She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a
+marriage-day.  It told her that she lived and was moving.  The fear of
+death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than Cecilia's
+shunning of such a day.  The naming of it numbed her blood like a
+snakebite.  Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily for
+Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few and
+short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him to
+alarm her.
+
+Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
+sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge,
+or at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed.
+He was never intrusive, never pressing.  He did not vex, because he
+absolutely trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself
+that she belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon
+Beauchamp.  With a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a
+collection of treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and
+pencil-marked to simplify her study of the question.  They sketched in
+company; she played music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it
+well.  He seemed to feel the beauty of it sensitively, as she did
+critically.  In other days the positions had been reversed.  He
+invariably talked of Beauchamp with kindness, deploring only that he
+should be squandering his money on workmen's halls and other hazy
+projects down in Bevisham.
+
+'Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and has
+actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten thousand
+pounds on a single building outside the town, and he'll have to endow it
+to support it--a Club to educate Radicals.  The fact is, he wants to jam
+the business of two or three centuries into a life-time.  These men of
+their so-called progress are like the majority of religious minds: they
+can't believe without seeing and touching.  That is to say, they don't
+believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly by agitating,
+and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass they can
+believe in.  You see it in their way of arguing; it's half done with the
+fist.  Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible despondency about
+progress.  Ha! ha!  Beauchamp's no Radical.  He hasn't forgiven the
+Countess of Romfrey for marrying above her rank.  He may be a bit of a
+Republican: but really in this country Republicans are fighting with the
+shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse.  I beg to state that I have a
+reverence for constituted authority: I speak of what those fellows are
+contending with.'
+
+'Right,' said Colonel Halkett.  'But "the shadow of an old hat and a
+cockhorse": what does that mean?'
+
+'That's what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.'
+
+'Ah!  so; yes,' quoth the colonel.  'And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
+that what we've grown up well with, powerfully with, it's base
+ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.'
+
+He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he affirmed
+of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect Beauchamp's
+interests.
+
+A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement of
+the earl's expectations of a son and heir.  The earl wrote to Colonel
+Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time
+there.
+
+'Now, that's brave news!'  the colonel exclaimed.
+
+He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so to
+Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord's hand and congratulate him with
+all his heart.  Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of any
+description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in the
+peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day to be
+fixed.  Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at wonderful
+colours of a Western sky: an oblivion of earthly dates and obligations.
+What mattered it that there were gales in August?  She loved the sea,
+and the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and plunging gannet,
+the sun on the waves, and the torn cloud.  The revelling libertine open
+sea wedded her to Beauchamp in that veiled cold spiritual manner she
+could muse on as a circumstance out of her life.
+
+Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind.  The gales of August
+mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped at
+a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon as
+they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw
+beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting
+sea.  Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof.  As the
+Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself
+through her love of it; quite to herself.  It was delicious to look round
+and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her from
+thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was abroad.
+
+The hard dry gale increased.  Her father, stretched beside her, drew her
+attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib
+on the Esperanza's weather bow--a gallant boat carefully handled.  She
+watched it with some anxiety, but the Esperanza was bound for a Devon
+bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the
+little cutter to run into haven if she pleased.  The passing her was no
+event.--In a representation of the common events befalling us in these
+times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at
+whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect
+tense.  For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with
+Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened to
+cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened?  Cecilia gathered
+it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and pleasure, she
+found at Romfrey Castle.  Her friend Louise received a letter from Mr.
+Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman's log of a cruise of a
+fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch of Beauchamp
+standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up to nine at
+night, munching a biscuit for nourishment.  The beautiful widow prepared
+the way for what was very soon to be publicly known concerning herself by
+reading out this passage of her correspondent's letter in the breakfast
+room.
+
+'Yes, the fellow's a sailor!'  said Lord Romfrey.
+
+The countess rose from her chair and walked out.
+
+'Now, was that abuse of the fellow?'  the old lord asked Colonel Halkett.
+'I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else.  He is a sailor, and he's
+fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends his neck
+never 's nearer it.'
+
+He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.
+
+Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window overlooking
+the swelling woods of Romfrey.  She praised the loveliness of the view.
+
+'It is fire to me,' said Rosamund.
+
+Cecilia looked at her, startled.  Rosamund said no more.
+
+She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in
+company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did
+she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a
+shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant
+pain.
+
+We will make no mystery about it.  I would I could.  Those happy tales of
+mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of
+bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the attentive
+mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the familiar
+urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise.  And oh, the
+refreshment there is in dealing with characters either contemptibly
+beneath us or supernaturally above!  My way is like a Rhone island in the
+summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between the two
+forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight mankind--
+honour to the conjurors!  My people conquer nothing, win none; they are
+actual, yet uncommon.  It is the clock-work of the brain that they are
+directed to set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant benches!--
+the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to; and
+if you are there impervious to them, we are lost: back I go to my
+wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit of
+listening to my own voice more than is good: The burden of a child in her
+bosom had come upon Rosamund with the visage of the Angel of Death
+fronting her in her path.  She believed that she would die; but like much
+that we call belief, there was a kernel of doubt in it, which was lively
+when her frame was enlivened, and she then thought of the giving birth to
+this unloved child, which was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose
+interest solely (so she could presume to think, because it had been her
+motive reason) she had married the earl.  She had no wish to be a mother;
+but that prospect, and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she
+could have submitted to for Lord Romfrey's sake.  It struck her like a
+scoffer's blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have
+become the instrument for dispossessing him.  The revulsion of her
+feelings enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to
+fathom him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had
+been his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a
+woman to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the
+trifles daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her
+resentment, like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines.
+Nevil's loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she
+was lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham.  Lord Romfrey had
+repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental
+questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was
+more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor.  Latterly, with
+the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of
+hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking the
+hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her.  Now and
+then they occurred perforce.  The presence of Cecilia exasperated
+Rosamund's peculiar sensitiveness.  It required Louise Wardour-Devereux's
+apologies and interpretations to account for what appeared to Cecilia
+strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady Romfrey's behaviour.
+The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady Romfrey had paid Mrs.
+Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly one Sunday in the
+London season, for the purpose, as it became evident, of meeting Mr.
+Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr. Tuckham would be
+there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was, Louise assured Cecilia,
+purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were present: but the countess
+obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr. Tuckham came from it
+declaring it to have been more terrible than any he had ever been called
+upon to endure.  The object of the countess was to persuade him to
+renounce his bride.
+
+Louise replied to the natural inquiry--'Upon what plea?'  with a
+significant evasiveness.  She put her arms round Cecilia's neck: 'I trust
+you are not unhappy.  You will get no release from him.'
+
+'I am not unhappy,' said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her friend.
+
+She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining
+her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of
+marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her weep.
+Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had been
+more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the deeps,
+perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her tears--for Lady
+Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she could hope for no
+release, gave her some of the firmness which her nature craved in this
+trial.
+
+From saying quietly to her: 'I thought once you loved him,' when alluding
+to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by degrees on
+to direct entreaties.  She related the whole story of Renee in England,
+and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia's mildness
+after hearing it.  Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral
+sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the poor lady's mind was
+distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp.  Cecilia's high
+conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of our English
+civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not explain it.
+She bowed to Lady Romfrey's praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to be
+wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to
+be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution
+to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge.  In truth, it was
+too late to speak of Renee to her now.  It did not beseem Cecilia to
+remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and while
+confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a necessary
+strength from them--in the comfort of the consciousness of pain, for
+example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in her own breast might
+deaden her to Nevil's jealousy, the meanest of the errors of a lofty
+soul, yielded no extract beyond the bare humiliation proper to an
+acknowledgement that it had existed: so she discarded the recollection of
+the passion which had wrought the mischief.  Since we cannot have a
+peerless flower of civilization without artificial aid, it may be
+understood how it was that Cecilia could extinguish some lights in her
+mind and kindle others, and wherefore what it was not natural for her to
+do, she did.  She had, briefly, a certain control of herself.
+
+Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot and
+measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful of the
+effect of that story of Renee.  A wooden young woman, or a galvanized
+(sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader--so moveable they
+are!) would have seen her business at this point, and have glided melting
+to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic fiction ends joyously.
+Rosamund had counted on it.
+
+She looked intently at Cecilia.  'He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he
+has lost you--I am the cause!'  she cried in a convulsion of grief.
+
+'Dear Lady Romfrey!'  Cecilia would have consoled her.  'There is nothing
+to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame for
+anything: how can you be?'
+
+'I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause.  It lies on me! it
+pursues me.  Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as
+I do, to get nearer to Nevil--I cannot have peace!  His heart has turned
+from me.  He despises me.  If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham,
+as he commanded me, you and he--Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is
+the chief evil in the world.  He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will
+die.'
+
+'Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?'
+
+'No! no!'  Rosamund exclaimed; 'it is by not hearing that I know it!'
+
+With the assistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to
+what was going on in the house.  There had been a correspondence between
+Miss Denham and the countess.  Letters from Bevisham had suddenly ceased.
+Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have been for a
+tragic reason.
+
+Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.
+
+He pressed her hand and said: 'You don't know what that man suffers.
+Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact is
+Nevil is down with fever.  It 's in the papers now; he may be able to
+conceal it, and I hope he will.  There'll be a crisis, and then he can
+tell her good news--a little illness and all right now!  Of course,' the
+colonel continued buoyantly, 'Nevil will recover; he's a tough wiry young
+fellow, but poor Romfrey's fears are natural enough about the countess.
+Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there--Shrapnel, I mean; and
+she's exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst--in case of any
+accident in Bevisham.'
+
+'Is it not a kind of cowardice to conceal it?'  Cecilia suggested.
+
+'It saves her from fretting,' said the colonel.
+
+'But she is fretting!  If Lord Romfrey would confide in her and trust to
+her courage, papa, it would be best.'
+
+Colonel Halkett thought that Lord Romfrey was the judge.
+
+Cecilia wished to leave a place where this visible torture of a human
+soul was proceeding, and to no purpose.  She pointed out to her father,
+by a variety of signs, that Lady Romfrey either knew or suspected the
+state of affairs in Bevisham, and repeated her remarks upon Nevil's
+illness.  But Colonel Halkett was restrained from departing by the earl's
+constant request to him to stay.  Old friendship demanded it of him.
+He began to share his daughter's feelings at the sight of Lady Romfrey.
+She was outwardly patient and submissive; by nature she was a strong
+healthy woman; and she attended to all her husband's prescriptions for
+the regulating of her habits, walked with him, lay down for the
+afternoon's rest, appeared amused when he laboured to that effect, and
+did her utmost to subdue the worm devouring her heart but the hours of
+the delivery of the letter-post were fatal to her.  Her woeful: 'No
+letter for me!'  was piteous.  When that was heard no longer, her silence
+and famished gaze chilled Cecilia.  At night Rosamund eyed her husband
+expressionlessly, with her head leaning back in her chair, to the sorrow
+of the ladies beholding her.  Ultimately the contagion of her settled
+misery took hold of Cecilia.  Colonel Halkett was induced by his daughter
+and Mrs. Devereux to endeavour to combat a system that threatened
+consequences worse than those it was planned to avert.  He by this time
+was aware of the serious character of the malady which had prostrated
+Nevil.  Lord Romfrey had directed his own medical man to go down to
+Bevisham, and Dr. Gannet's report of Nevil was grave.  The colonel made
+light of it to his daughter, after the fashion he condemned in Lord
+Romfrey, to whom however he spoke earnestly of the necessity for
+partially taking his wife into his confidence to the extent of letting
+her know that a slight fever was running its course with Nevil.
+
+'There will be no slight fever in my wife's blood,' said the earl.  'I
+stand to weather the cape or run to wreck, and it won't do to be taking
+in reefs on a lee-shore.  You don't see what frets her, colonel.  For
+years she has been bent on Nevil's marriage.  It's off: but if you catch
+Cecilia by the hand and bring her to us--I swear she loves the fellow!--
+that's the medicine for my wife.  Say: will you do it?  Tell Lady Romfrey
+it shall be done.  We shall stand upright again!'
+
+'I'm afraid that's impossible, Romfrey,' said the colonel.
+
+'Play at it, then!  Let her think it.  You're helping me treat an
+invalid.  Colonel!  my old friend!  You save my house and name if you do
+that.  It's a hand round a candle in a burst of wind.  There's Nevil
+dragged by a woman into one of their reeking hovels--so that Miss Denham
+at Shrapnel's writes to Lady Romfrey--because the woman's drunken husband
+voted for him at the Election, and was kicked out of employment, and fell
+upon the gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died starving, and the man
+sickened of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits with him!  Out of that
+tangle of folly is my house to be struck down?  It looks as if the fellow
+with his infernal "humanity," were the bad genius of an old nurse's tale.
+He's a good fellow, colonel, he means well.  This fever will cure him,
+they say it sobers like bloodletting.  He's a gallant fellow; you know
+that.  He fought to the skeleton in our last big war.  On my soul, I
+believe he's good for a husband.  Frenchwoman or not, that affair's over.
+He shall have Steynham and Holdesbury.  Can I say more?  Now, colonel,
+you go in to the countess.  Grasp my hand.  Give me that help, and God
+bless you!  You light up my old days.  She's a noble woman: I would not
+change her against the best in the land.  She has this craze about Nevil.
+I suppose she'll never get over it.  But there it is: and we must feed
+her with the spoon.'
+
+Colonel Halkett argued stutteringly with the powerful man: 'It's the
+truth she ought to hear, Romfrey; indeed it is, if you 'll believe me.
+It 's his life she is fearing for.  She knows half.'
+
+'She knows positively nothing, colonel.  Miss Denham's first letter spoke
+of the fellow's having headaches, and staggering.  He was out on a
+cruise, and saw your schooner pass, and put into some port, and began
+falling right and left, and they got him back to Shrapnel's: and here it
+is--that if you go to him you'll save him, and if you go to my wife
+you'll save her: and there you have it: and I ask my old friend, I beg
+him to go to them both.'
+
+'But you can't surely expect me to force my daughter's inclinations, my
+dear Romfrey?'
+
+'Cecilia loves the fellow!'
+
+'She is engaged to Mr. Tuckham.'
+
+'I'll see the man Tuckham.'
+
+'Really, my dear lord!'
+
+'Play at it, Halkett, play at it!  Tide us over this!  Talk to her: hint
+it and nod it.  We have to round November.  I could strangle the world
+till that month's past.  You'll own,' he added mildly after his thunder,
+'I'm not much of the despot Nevil calls me.  She has not a wish I don't
+supply.  I'm at her beck, and everything that's mine.  She's a brave good
+woman.  I don't complain.  I run my chance.  But if we lose the child--
+good night!  Boy or girl!--boy!'
+
+Lord Romfrey flung an arm up.  The child of his old age lived for him
+already: he gave it all the life he had.  This miracle, this young son
+springing up on an earth decaying and dark, absorbed him.  This reviver
+of his ancient line must not be lost.  Perish every consideration to
+avert it!  He was ready to fear, love, or hate terribly, according to the
+prospects of his child.
+
+Colonel Halkett was obliged to enter into a consultation, of a shadowy
+sort, with his daughter, whose only advice was that they should leave the
+castle.  The penetrable gloom there, and the growing apprehension
+concerning the countess and Nevil, tore her to pieces.  Even if she could
+have conspired with the earl to hoodwink his wife, her strong sense told
+her it would be fruitless, besides base.  Father and daughter had to make
+the stand against Lord Romfrey.  He saw their departure from the castle
+gates, and kissed his hand to Cecilia, courteously, without a smile.
+
+'He may well praise the countess, papa,' said Cecilia, while they were
+looking back at the castle and the moveless flag that hung in folds by
+the mast above it.  'She has given me her promise to avoid questioning
+him and to accept his view of her duty.  She said to me that if Nevil
+should die she .  .  .'
+
+Cecilia herself broke down, and gave way to sobs in her father's arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX
+
+A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLE
+
+The earl's precautions did duty night and day in all the avenues leading
+to the castle and his wife's apartments; and he could believe that he had
+undertaken as good a defence as the mountain guarding the fertile vale
+from storms: but him the elements pelted heavily.  Letters from
+acquaintances of Nevil, from old shipmates and from queer political
+admirers and opponents, hailed on him; things not to be frigidly read
+were related of the fellow.
+
+Lord Romfrey's faith in the power of constitution to beat disease battled
+sturdily with the daily reports of his physician and friends, whom he had
+directed to visit the cottage on the common outside Bevisham, and with
+Miss Denham's intercepted letters to the countess.  Still he had to
+calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his constitution,
+which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle of life and
+death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the war.  That
+latest freak of the fellow's, the abandonment of our natural and
+wholesome sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the reckoning.
+Dr. Gannet did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did; and the earl
+meditated with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that such a folly as
+this of one old vegetable idiot influencing a younger noodle, might
+strike his House to the dust.
+
+His watch over his wife had grown mechanical: he failed to observe that
+her voice was missing.  She rarely spoke.  He lost the art of observing
+himself: the wrinkling up and dropping of his brows became his habitual
+language.  So long as he had not to meet inquiries or face tears, he
+enjoyed the sense of security.  He never quitted his wife save to walk to
+the Southern park lodge, where letters and telegrams were piled awaiting
+him; and she was forbidden to take the air on the castle terrace without
+his being beside her, lest a whisper, some accident of the kind that
+donkeys who nod over their drowsy nose-length-ahead precautions call
+fatality, should rouse her to suspect, and in a turn of the hand undo his
+labour: for the race was getting terrible: Death had not yet stepped out
+of that evil chamber in Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to aim his javelin at the
+bosom containing the prized young life to come, but, like the smoke of
+waxing fire, he shadowed forth his presence in wreaths blacker and
+thicker day by day: and Everard Romfrey knew that the hideous beast of
+darkness had only to spring up and pass his guard to deal a blow to his
+House the direr from all he supposed himself to have gained by masking it
+hitherto.  The young life he looked to for renewal swallowed him: he
+partly lost human feeling for his wife in the tremendous watch and strain
+to hurry her as a vessel round the dangerous headland.  He was oblivious
+that his eyebrows talked, that his head was bent low, that his mouth was
+shut, and that where a doubt had been sown, silence and such signs are
+like revelations in black night to the spirit of a woman who loves.
+
+One morning after breakfast Rosamund hung on his arm, eyeing him neither
+questioningly nor invitingly, but long.  He kissed her forehead.  She
+clung to him and closed her eyes, showing him a face of slumber, like a
+mask of the dead.
+
+Mrs. Devereux was present.  Cecilia had entreated her to stay with Lady
+Romfrey.  She stole away, for the time had come which any close observer
+of the countess must have expected.
+
+The earl lifted his wife, and carried her to her sitting-room.  A sunless
+weltering September day whipped the window-panes and brought the roar of
+the beaten woods to her ears.  He was booted and gaitered for his
+customary walk to the park lodge, and as he bent a knee beside her, she
+murmured: 'Don't wait; return soon.'
+
+He placed a cord attached to the bellrope within her reach.  This utter
+love of Nevil Beauchamp was beyond his comprehension, but there it was,
+and he had to submit to it and manoeuvre.  His letters and telegrams told
+the daily tale.  'He's better,' said the earl, preparing himself to
+answer what his wife's look had warned him would come.
+
+She was an image of peace, in the same posture on the couch where he had
+left her, when he returned.  She did not open her eyes, but felt about
+for his hand, and touching it, she seemed to weigh the fingers.
+
+At last she said: 'The fever should be at its height.'
+
+'Why, my dear brave girl, what ails you?'  said he.
+
+'Ignorance.'
+
+She raised her eyelids.  His head was bent down over her, like a raven's
+watching, a picture of gravest vigilance.
+
+Her bosom rose and sank.  'What has Miss Denham written to-day?'
+
+'To-day?'  he asked her gently.
+
+'I shall bear it,' she answered.  'You were my master before you were my
+husband.  I bear anything you think is good for my government.  Only, my
+ignorance is fever; I share Nevil's.'
+
+'Have you been to my desk at all?'
+
+'No.  I read your eyes and your hands: I have been living on them.  To-
+day I find that I have not gained by it, as I hoped I should.  Ignorance
+kills me.  I really have courage to bear to hear just at this moment I
+have.'
+
+'There's no bad news, my love,' said the earl.
+
+'High fever, is it?'
+
+'The usual fever.  Gannet's with him.  I sent for Gannet to go there, to
+satisfy you.'
+
+'Nevil is not dead?'
+
+'Lord!  ma'am, my dear soul!'
+
+'He is alive?'
+
+'Quite: certainly alive; as much alive as I am; only going a little
+faster, as fellows do in the jumps of a fever.  The best doctor in
+England is by his bed.  He 's doing fairly.  You should have let me know
+you were fretting, my Rosamund.'
+
+'I did not wish to tempt you to lie, my dear lord.'
+
+'Well, there are times when a woman .  .  .  as you are: but you're a
+brave woman, a strong heart, and my wife.  You want some one to sit with
+you, don't you?  Louise Devereux is a pleasant person, but you want a man
+to amuse you.  I'd have sent to Stukely, but you want a serious man, I
+fancy.'
+
+So much had the earl been thrown out of his plan for protecting his wife,
+that he felt helpless, and hinted at the aids and comforts of religion.
+He had not rejected the official Church, and regarding it now as in
+alliance with great Houses, he considered that its ministers might also
+be useful to the troubled women of noble families.  He offered, if she
+pleased, to call in the rector to sit with her--the bishop of the
+diocese, if she liked.
+
+'But just as you like, my love,' he added.  'You know you have to avoid
+fretting.  I've heard my sisters talk of the parson doing them good off
+and on about the time of their being brought to bed.  He elevated their
+minds, they said.  I'm sure I've no objection.  If he can doctor the
+minds of women he's got a profession worth something.'
+
+Rosamund smothered an outcry.  'You mean that Nevil is past hope!'
+
+'Not if he's got a fair half of our blood in him.  And Richard Beauchamp
+gave the fellow good stock.  He has about the best blood in England.
+That's not saying much when they've taken to breed as they build--stuff
+to keep the plasterers at work; devil a thought of posterity!'
+
+'There I see you and Nevil one, my dear lord,' said Rosamund.  'You think
+of those that are to follow us.  Talk to me of him.  Do not say, "the
+fellow."  Say "Nevil."  No, no; call him "the fellow."  He was alive and
+well when you used to say it.  But smile kindly, as if he made you love
+him down in your heart, in spite of you.  We have both known that love,
+and that opposition to him; not liking his ideas, yet liking him so: we
+were obliged to laugh--I have seen you! as love does laugh!  If I am not
+crying over his grave, Everard?  Oh!'
+
+The earl smoothed her forehead.  All her suspicions were rekindled.
+'Truth!  truth!  give me truth.  Let me know what world I am in.'
+
+'My dear, a ship's not lost because she's caught in a squall; nor a man
+buffeting the waves for an hour.  He's all right: he keeps up.'
+
+'He is delirious?  I ask you--I have fancied I heard him.'
+
+Lord Romfrey puffed from his nostrils: but in affecting to blow to the
+winds her foolish woman's wildness of fancy, his mind rested on Nevil,
+and he said: 'Poor boy!  It seems he's chattering hundreds to the
+minute.'
+
+His wife's looks alarmed him after he had said it, and he was for toning
+it and modifying it, when she gasped to him to help her to her feet; and
+standing up, she exclaimed: 'O heaven!  now I hear you; now I know he
+lives.  See how much better it is for me to know the real truth.  It
+takes me to his bedside.  Ignorance and suspense have been poison.  I
+have been washed about like a dead body.  Let me read all my letters now.
+Nothing will harm me now.  You will do your best for me, my husband, will
+you not?'  She tore at her dress at her throat for coolness, panting and
+smiling.  'For me--us--yours--ours!  Give me my letters, lunch with me,
+and start for Bevisham.  Now you see how good it is for me to hear the
+very truth, you will give me your own report, and I shall absolutely
+trust in it, and go down with it if it's false!  But you see I am
+perfectly strong for the truth.  It must be you or I to go.  I burn to
+go; but your going will satisfy me.  If you look on him, I look.  I feel
+as if I had been nailed down in a coffin, and have got fresh air.  I
+pledge you my word, sir, my honour, my dear husband, that I will think
+first of my duty.  I know it would be Nevil's wish.  He has not quite
+forgiven me--he thought me ambitious--ah! stop: he said that the birth
+of our child would give him greater happiness than he had known for
+years: he begged me to persuade you to call a boy Nevil Beauchamp, and a
+girl Renee.  He has never believed in his own long living.'
+
+Rosamund refreshed her lord's heart by smiling archly as she said: 'The
+boy to be educated to take the side of the people, of course!  The girl
+is to learn a profession.'
+
+'Ha!  bless the fellow!'  Lord Romfrey interjected.  'Well, I might go
+there for an hour.  Promise me, no fretting!  You have hollows in your
+cheeks, and your underlip hangs: I don't like it.  I haven't seen that
+before.'
+
+'We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive,' said Rosamund.
+'My letters!  my letters!'
+
+Lord Romfrey went to fetch them.  They were intact in his desk.  His
+wife, then, had actually been reading the facts through a wall!  For he
+was convinced of Mrs. Devereux's fidelity, as well as of the colonel's
+and Cecilia's.  He was not a man to be disobeyed: nor was his wife the
+woman to court or to acquiesce in trifling acts of disobedience to him.
+He received the impression, consequently, that this matter of the visit
+to Nevil was one in which the poor loving soul might be allowed to guide
+him, singular as the intensity of her love of Nevil Beauchamp was,
+considering that they were not of kindred blood.
+
+He endeavoured to tone her mind for the sadder items in Miss Denham's
+letters.
+
+'Oh!'  said Rosamund, 'what if I shed the "screaming eyedrops," as you
+call them?  They will not hurt me, but relieve.  I was sure I should
+someday envy that girl!  If he dies she will have nursed him and had the
+last of him.'
+
+'He's not going to die!'  said Everard powerfully.
+
+'We must be prepared.  These letters will do that for me.  I have written
+out the hours of your trains.  Stanton will attend on you.  I have
+directed him to telegraph to the Dolphin in Bevisham for rooms for the
+night: that is to-morrow night.  To-night you sleep at your hotel in
+London, which will be ready to receive you, and is more comfortable than
+the empty house.  Stanton takes wine, madeira and claret, and other small
+necessaries.  If Nevil should be very unwell, you will not leave him
+immediately.  I shall look to the supplies.  You will telegraph to me
+twice a day, and write once.  We lunch at half-past twelve, so that you
+may hit the twenty-minutes-to-two o'clock train.  And now I go to see
+that the packing is done.'
+
+She carried off her letters to her bedroom, where she fell upon the bed,
+shutting her eyelids hard before she could suffer her eyes to be the
+intermediaries of that fever-chamber in Bevisham and her bursting heart.
+But she had not positively deceived her husband in the reassurance she
+had given him by her collectedness and by the precise directions she had
+issued for his comforts, indicating a mind so much more at ease.  She was
+firmer to meet the peril of her beloved: and being indeed, when thrown on
+her internal resources, one among the brave women of earth, though also
+one who required a lift from circumstances to take her stand calmly
+fronting a menace to her heart, she saw the evidence of her influence
+with Lord Romfrey: the level she could feel that they were on together so
+long as she was courageous, inspirited her sovereignly.
+
+He departed at the hour settled for him.  Rosamund sat at her boudoir
+window, watching the carriage that was conducting him to the railway
+station.  Neither of them had touched on the necessity of his presenting
+himself at the door of Dr. Shrapnel's house.  That, and the disgust
+belonging to it, was a secondary consideration with Lord Romfrey, after
+he had once resolved on it as the right thing to do: and his wife admired
+and respected him for so supreme a loftiness.  And fervently she prayed
+that it might not be her evil fate to disappoint his hopes.  Never had
+she experienced so strong a sense of devotedness to him as when she saw
+the carriage winding past the middle oak-wood of the park, under a wet
+sky brightened from the West, and on out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A tear would have overcome him--She had not wept
+Art of speaking on politics tersely
+Death within which welcomed a death without
+Dignity of sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man
+Grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth
+He lost the art of observing himself
+Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us
+Infallibility of our august mother
+Inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him
+Love's a selfish business one has work in hand
+No man has a firm foothold who pretends to it
+Silence and such signs are like revelations in black night
+The defensive is perilous policy in war
+The greater wounds do not immediately convince us of our fate
+The rider's too heavy for the horse in England
+The weighty and the trivial contended
+Their hearts are eaten up by property
+Unanimous verdicts from a jury of temporary impressions
+We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive
+Well, sir, we must sell our opium
+Won't do to be taking in reefs on a lee-shore
+Wooing a good man for his friendship
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Beauchamp's Career, v6
+by George Meredith
+