Chapter 310

She was listening to the voices of Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp in a fever. Ordinarily the lord of Steynham was not out of his bed later than twelve o'clock at night. His door opened at half-past one. Not a syllable was exchanged by the couple in the hall. They had fought it out. Mr. Romfrey came upstairs alone, and on the closing of his chamber-door she slipped down to Beauchamp and had a dreadful hour with him that subdued her disposition to sit in judgement upon men. The unavailing attempt to move his uncle had wrought him to the state in which passionate thoughts pass into speech like heat to flame. Rosamund strained her mental sight to gain a conception of his prodigious horror of the treatment of Dr. Shrapnel that she might think him sane: and to retain a vestige of comfort in her bosom she tried to moderate and make light of as much as she could conceive. Between the two efforts she had no sense but that of helplessness. Once more she was reduced to promise that she would speak the whole truth to Mr. Romfrey, even to the fact that she had experienced a common woman's jealousy of Dr. Shrapnel's influence, and had alluded to him jealously, spitefully, and falsely. There was no mercy in Beauchamp. He was for action at any cost, with all the forces he could gather, and without delays. He talked of Cecilia as his uncle's bride to him. Rosamund could hardly trust her ears when he informed her he had told his uncle of his determination to compel him to accomplish the act of penitence. 'Was it prudent to say it, Nevil?' she asked. But, as in his politics, he disdained prudence. A monstrous crime had been committed, involving the honour of the family. No subtlety of insinuation, no suggestion, could wean him from the fixed idea that the apology to Dr. Shrapnel must be spoken by his uncle in person.

'If one could only imagine Mr. Romfrey doing it!' Rosamund groaned.

'He shall: and you will help him,' said Beauchamp.

'If you loved a woman half as much as you do that man!'

'If I knew a woman as good, as wise, as noble as he!'

'You are losing her.'

'You expect me to go through ceremonies of courtship at a time like this! If she cares for me she will feel with me. Simple compassion--but let Miss Halkett be. I'm afraid I overtasked her in taking her to Bevisham. She remained outside the garden. Ma'am, she is unsullied by contact with a single shrub of Dr. Shrapnel's territory.'

'Do not be so bitterly ironical, Nevil. You have not seen her as I have.'

Rosamund essayed a tender sketch of the fair young lady, and fancied that she drew forth a sigh; she would have coloured the sketch, but he commanded her to hurry off to bed, and think of her morning's work.

A commission of which we feel we can accurately forecast the unsuccessful end is not likely to be undertaken with an ardour that might perhaps astound the presageing mind with unexpected issues. Rosamund fulfilled hers in the style of one who has learnt a lesson, and, exactly as she had anticipated, Mr. Romfrey accused her of coming to him from a conversation with that fellow Nevil overnight. He shrugged and left the house for his morning's walk across the fields.

Colonel Halkett and Cecilia beheld him from the breakfast-room returning with Beauchamp, who had waylaid him and was hammering his part in the now endless altercation. It could be descried at any distance; and how fine was Mr. Romfrey's bearing!--truly noble by contrast, as of a grave big dog worried by a small barking dog. There is to an unsympathetic observer an intense vexatiousness in the exhibition of such pertinacity. To a soldier accustomed at a glance to estimate powers of attack and defence, this repeated puny assailing of a, fortress that required years of siege was in addition ridiculous. Mr. Romfrey appeared impregnable, and Beauchamp mad. 'He's foaming again!' said the colonel, and was only ultra-pictorial. 'Before breakfast!' was a further slur on Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey was elevated by the extraordinary comicality of the notion of the proposed apology to heights of humour beyond laughter, whence we see the unbounded capacity of the general man for folly, and rather commiserate than deride him. He was quite untroubled. It demanded a steady view of the other side of the case to suppose of one whose control of his temper was perfect, that he could be in the wrong. He at least did not think so, and Colonel Halkett relied on his common sense. Beauchamp's brows were smouldering heavily, except when he had to talk. He looked paleish and worn, and said he had been up early. Cecilia guessed that he had not been to bed.

It was dexterously contrived by her host, in spite of the colonel's manifest anxiety to keep them asunder, that she should have some minutes with Beauchamp out in the gardens. Mr. Romfrey led them out, and then led the colonel away to offer him a choice of pups of rare breed.

'Nevil,' said Cecilia, 'you will not think it presumption in me to give you advice?'

Her counsel to him was, that he should leave Steynham immediately, and trust to time for his uncle to reconsider his conduct.

Beauchamp urged the counter-argument of the stain on the family honour.

She hinted at expediency; he frankly repudiated it.

The downs faced them, where the heavenly vast 'might have been' of yesterday wandered thinner than a shadow of to-day; weaving a story without beginning, crisis, or conclusion, flowerless and fruitless, but with something of infinite in it sweeter to brood on than the future of her life to Cecilia.

'If meanwhile Dr. Shrapnel should die, and repentance comes too late!' said Beauchamp.

She had no clear answer to that, save the hope of its being an unfounded apprehension. 'As far as it is in my power, Nevil, I will avoid injustice to him in my thoughts.'

He gazed at her thankfully. 'Well,' said he, 'that's like sighting the cliffs. But I don't feel home round me while the colonel is so strangely prepossessed. For a high-spirited gentleman like your father to approve, or at least accept, an act so barbarous is incomprehensible. Speak to him, Cecilia, will you? Let him know your ideas.'

She assented. He said instantly, 'Persuade him to speak to my uncle Everard.'

She was tempted to smile.

'I must do only what I think wise, if I am to be of service, Nevil.'

'True, but paint that scene to him. An old man, utterly defenceless, making no defence! a cruel error. The colonel can't, or he doesn't, clearly get it inside him, otherwise I'm certain it would revolt him: just as I am certain my uncle Everard is at this moment a stone-blind man. If he has done a thing, he can't question it, won't examine it. The thing becomes a part of him, as much as his hand or his head. He 's a man of the twelfth century. Your father might be helped to understand him first.'

'Yes,' she said, not very warmly, though sadly.

'Tell the colonel how it must have been brought about. For Cecil Baskelett called on Dr. Shrapnel two days before Mr. Romfrey stood at his gate.'

The name of Cecil caused her to draw in her shoulders in a half-shudder. 'It may indeed be Captain Baskelett who set this cruel thing in motion!'

'Then point that out to your father, said he, perceiving a chance of winning her to his views through a concrete object of her dislike, and cooling toward the woman who betrayed a vulgar characteristic of her sex; who was merely woman, unable sternly to recognize the doing of a foul wrong because of her antipathy, until another antipathy enlightened her.

He wanted in fact a ready-made heroine, and did not give her credit for the absence of fire in her blood, as well as for the unexercised imagination which excludes young women from the power to realize unwonted circumstances. We men walking about the world have perhaps no more imagination of matters not domestic than they; but what we have is quick with experience: we see the thing we hear of: women come to it how they can.

Cecilia was recommended to weave a narrative for her father, and ultimately induce him, if she could, to give a gentleman's opinion of the case to Mr. Romfrey.

Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she received. 'Your father will say so and so: answer him with this and that.' Beauchamp supplied her with phrases. She was to renew and renew the attack; hammer as he did. Yesterday she had followed him: to-day she was to march beside him--hardly as an equal. Patience! was the word she would have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his nature which this hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with unusual perspicacity. Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit that he had grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings.

He said: 'I go to Dr. Shrapnel's cottage, and don't know how to hold up my head before Miss Denham. She confided him to me when she left for Switzerland!'

There was that to be thought of, certainly.

Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing together in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny.

'I've been calling you several times, my dear,' he complained. 'We start in seven minutes. Bustle, and bonnet at once. Nevil, I'm sorry for this business. Good-bye. Be a good boy, Nevil,' he murmured kindheartedly, and shook Beauchamp's hand with the cordiality of an extreme relief in leaving him behind.

The colonel and Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp were standing on the hall-steps when Rosamund beckoned the latter and whispered a request for that letter of Dr. Shrapnel's. 'It is for Miss Halkett, Nevil.'

He plucked the famous epistle from his bulging pocketbook, and added a couple of others in the same handwriting.

'Tell her, a first reading--it's difficult to read at first,' he said, and burned to read it to Cecilia himself: to read it to her with his comments and explanations appeared imperative. It struck him in a flash that Cecilia's counsel to him to quit Steynham for awhile was good. And if he went to Bevisham he would be assured of Dr. Shrapnel's condition: notes and telegrams from the cottage were too much tempered to console and deceive him.

'Send my portmanteau and bag after me to Bevisham,' he said Rosamund, and announced to the woefully astonish colonel that he would have the pleasure of journeying in his company as far as the town.

'Are you ready? No packing?' said the colonel.

'It's better to have your impediments in the rear of you, and march!' said Mr. Romfrey.

Colonel Halkett declined to wait for anybody. He shouted for his daughter. The lady's maid appeared, and then Cecilia with Rosamund.

'We can't entertain you, Nevil; we're away to the island: I'm sorry,' said the colonel; and observing Cecilia's face in full crimson, he looked at her as if he had lost a battle by the turn of events at the final moment.

Mr. Romfrey handed Cecilia into the carriage. He exchanged a friendly squeeze with the colonel, and offered his hand to his nephew. Beauchamp passed him with a nod and 'Good-bye, sir.'

'Have ready at Holdesbury for the middle of the month,' said Mr. Romfrey, unruffled, and bowed to Cecilia.

'If you think of bringing my cousin Baskelett, give me warning, sir,' cried Beauchamp.

'Give me warning, if you want the house for Shrapnel,' replied his uncle, and remarked to Rosamund, as the carriage wheeled round the mounded laurels to the avenue, 'He mayn't be quite cracked. The fellow seems to have a turn for catching his opportunity by the tail. He had better hold fast, for it's his last.'

CHAPTER XXXVII

CECILIA CONQUERED

The carriage rolled out of the avenue and through the park, for some time parallel with the wavy downs. Once away from Steynham Colonel Halkett breathed freely, as if he had dropped a load: he was free of his bond to Mr. Romfrey, and so great was the sense of relief in him that he resolved to do battle against his daughter, supposing her still lively blush to be the sign of the enemy's flag run up on a surrendered citadel. His authority was now to be thought of: his paternal sanction was in his own keeping. Beautiful as she looked, it was hardly credible that a fellow in possession of his reason could have let slip his chance of such a prize; but whether he had or had not, the colonel felt that he occupied a position enabling him either to out-manoeuvre, or, if need were, interpose forcibly and punish him for his half-heartedness.

Cecilia looked the loveliest of women to Beauchamp's eyes, with her blush, and the letters of Dr. Shrapnel in her custody, at her express desire. Certain terms in the letters here and there, unsweet to ladies, began to trouble his mind.

'By the way, colonel,' he said, 'you had a letter of Dr. Shrapnel's read to you by Captain Baskelett.'

'Iniquitous rubbish!'

'With his comments on it, I dare say you thought it so. I won't speak of his right to make it public. He wanted to produce his impressions of it and me, and that is a matter between him and me. Dr. Shrapnel makes use of strong words now and then, but I undertake to produce a totally different impression on you by reading the letter myself--sparing you' (he turned to Cecilia) 'a word or two, common enough to men who write in black earnest and have humour.' He cited his old favourite, the black and bright lecturer on Heroes. 'You have read him, I know, Cecilia. Well, Dr. Shrapnel is another, who writes in his own style, not the leading-article style or modern pulpit stuff. He writes to rouse.'

'He does that to my temper,' said the colonel.

'Perhaps here and there he might offend Cecilia's taste,' Beauchamp pursued for her behoof. 'Everything depends on the mouthpiece. I should not like the letter to be read without my being by;--except by men: any just-minded man may read it: Seymour Austin, for example. Every line is a text to the mind of the writer. Let me call on you to-morrow.'

'To-morrow?' Colonel Halkett put on a thoughtful air. 'To-morrow we're off to the island for a couple of days; and there's Lord Croyston's garden party, and the Yacht Ball. Come this evening-dine with us. No reading of letters, please. I can't stand it, Nevil.'

The invitation was necessarily declined by a gentleman who could not expect to be followed by supplies of clothes and linen for evening wear that day.

'Ah, we shall see you some day or other,' said the colonel.

Cecilia was less alive to Beauchamp's endeavour to prepare her for the harsh words in the letter than to her father's insincerity. She would have asked her friend to come in the morning next day, but for the dread of deepening her blush.

'Do you intend to start so early in the morning, papa?' she ventured to say; and he replied, 'As early as possible.'

'I don't know what news I shall have in Bevisham, or I would engage to run over to the island,' said Beauchamp, with a flattering persistency or singular obtuseness.

'You will dance,' he subsequently observed to Cecilia, out of the heart of some reverie. He had been her admiring partner on the night before the drive from Itchincope into Bevisham, and perhaps thought of her graceful dancing at the Yacht Ball, and the contrast it would present to his watch beside a sick man-struck down by one of his own family.

She could have answered, 'Not if you wish me not to'; while smiling at the quaint sorrowfulness of his tone.

'Dance!' quoth Colonel Halkett, whose present temper discerned a healthy antagonism to misanthropic Radicals in the performance, 'all young people dance. Have you given over dancing?'

'Not entirely, colonel.'

Cecilia danced with Mr. Tuckham at the Yacht Ball, and was vividly mindful of every slight incident leading to and succeeding her lover's abrupt, 'You will dance' which had all passed by her dream-like up to that hour his attempt to forewarn her of the phrases she would deem objectionable in Dr. Shrapnel's letter; his mild acceptation of her father's hostility; his adieu to her, and his melancholy departure on foot from the station, as she drove away to Mount Laurels and gaiety. Why do I dance? she asked herself. It was not in the spirit of happiness. Her heart was not with Dr. Shrapnel, but very near him, and heavy as a chamber of the sick. She was afraid of her father's favourite, imagining, from the colonel's unconcealed opposition to Beauchamp, that he had designs in the interests of Mr. Tuckham. But the hearty gentleman scattered her secret terrors by his bluffness and openness. He asked her to remember that she had recommended him to listen to Seymour Austin, and he had done so, he said. Undoubtedly he was much improved, much less overbearing.

He won her confidence by praising and loving her father, and when she alluded to the wonderful services he had rendered on the Welsh estate, he said simply that her father's thanks repaid him. He recalled his former downrightness only in speaking of the case of Dr. Shrapnel, upon which, both with the colonel and with her, he was unreservedly condemnatory of Mr. Romfrey. Colonel Halkett's defence of the true knight and guardian of the reputation of ladies, fell to pieces in the presence of Mr. Tuckham. He had seen Dr. Shrapnel, on a visit to Mr. Lydiard, whom he described as hanging about Bevisham, philandering as a married man should not, though in truth he might soon expect to be released by the death of his crazy wife. The doctor, he said, had been severely shaken by the monstrous assault made on him, and had been most unrighteously handled. The doctor was an inoffensive man in his private life, detestable and dangerous though his teachings were. Outside politics Mr. Tuckham went altogether with Beauchamp. He promised also that old Mrs. Beauchamp should be accurately informed of the state of matters between Captain Beauchamp and Mr. Romfrey. He left Mount Laurels to go back in attendance on the venerable lady, without once afflicting Cecilia with a shiver of well-founded apprehension, and she was grateful to him almost to friendly affection in the vanishing of her unjust suspicion, until her father hinted that there was the man of his heart. Then she closed all avenues to her own.

A period of maidenly distress not previously unknown to her ensued. Proposals of marriage were addressed to her by two untitled gentlemen, and by the Earl of Lockrace: three within a fortnight. The recognition of the young heiress's beauty at the Yacht Ball was accountable for the bursting out of these fires. Her father would not have deplored her acceptance of the title of Countess of Lockrace. In the matter of rejections, however, her will was paramount, and he was on her side against relatives when the subject was debated among them. He called her attention to the fact impressively, telling her that she should not hear a syllable from him to persuade her to marry: the emphasis of which struck the unspoken warning on her intelligence: Bring no man to me of whom I do not approve!

'Worthier of you, as I hope to become,' Beauchamp had said. Cecilia lit on that part of Dr. Shrapnel's letter where 'Fight this out within you,' distinctly alluded to the unholy love. Could she think ill of the man who thus advised him? She shared Beauchamp's painful feeling for him in a sudden tremour of her frame; as it were through his touch. To the rest of the letter her judgement stood opposed, save when a sentence here and there reminded her of Captain Baskelett's insolent sing-song declamation of it: and that would have turned Sacred Writing to absurdity.

Beauchamp had mentioned Seymour Austin as one to whom he would willingly grant a perusal of the letter. Mr. Austin came to Mount Laurels about the close of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel Halkett had spent his customary days of September shooting at Steynham. Beauchamp's folly was the colonel's theme, for the fellow had dragged Lord Palmet there, and driven his uncle out of patience. Mr. Romfrey's monumental patience had been exhausted by him. The colonel boiled over with accounts of Beauchamp's behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet, and Baskelett, and Mrs. Culling: how he flew at and worried everybody who seemed to him to have had a hand in the proper chastisement of that man Shrapnel. That pestiferous letter of Shrapnel's was animadverted on, of course; and, 'I should like you to have heard it, Austin,' the colonel said, 'just for you to have a notion of the kind of universal blow-up those men are scheming, and would hoist us with, if they could get a little more blasting-powder than they mill in their lunatic heads.'

Now Cecilia wished for Mr. Austin's opinion of Dr. Shrapnel; and as the delicate state of her inclinations made her conscious that to give him the letter covertly would be to betray them to him, who had once, not knowing it, moved her to think of a possible great change in her life, she mustered courage to say, 'Captain Beauchamp at my request lent me the letter to read; I have it, and others written by Dr. Shrapnel.'

Her father hummed to himself, and immediately begged Seymour Austin not to waste his time on the stuff, though he had no idea that a perusal of it could awaken other than the gravest reprehension in so rational a Tory gentleman.

Mr. Austin read the letter through. He asked to see the other letters mentioned by Cecilia, and read them calmly, without a frown or an interjection. She sat sketching, her father devouring newspaper columns.

'It's the writing of a man who means well,' Mr. Austin delivered his opinion.

'Why, the man's an infidel!' Colonel Halkett exclaimed.

'There are numbers.'

'They have the grace not to confess, then.'

'It's as well to know what the world's made of, colonel. The clergy shut their eyes. There's no treating a disease without reading it; and if we are to acknowledge a "vice," as Dr. Shrapnel would say of the so-called middle-class, it is the smirking over what they think, or their not caring to think at all. Too many time-servers rot the State. I can understand the effect of such writing on a mind like Captain Beauchamp's. It would do no harm to our young men to have those letters read publicly and lectured on-by competent persons. Half the thinking world may think pretty much the same on some points as Dr. Shrapnel; they are too wise or too indolent to say it: and of the other half, about a dozen members would be competent to reply to him. He is the earnest man, and flies at politics as uneasy young brains fly to literature, fancying they can write because they can write with a pen. He perceives a bad adjustment of things: which is correct. He is honest, and takes his honesty for a virtue: and that entitles him to believe in himself: and that belief causes him to see in all opposition to him the wrong he has perceived in existing circumstances: and so in a dream of power he invokes the people: and as they do not stir, he takes to prophecy. This is the round of the politics of impatience. The study of politics should be guided by some light of statesmanship, otherwise it comes to this wild preaching.

These men are theory-tailors, not politicians. They are the men who make the "strait-waistcoat for humanity." They would fix us to first principles like tethered sheep or hobbled horses. I should enjoy replying to him, if I had time. The whole letter is composed of variations upon one idea. Still I must say the man interests me; I should like to talk to him.'

Mr. Austin paid no heed to the colonel's 'Dear me! dear me!' of amazement. He said of the style of the letters, that it was the puffing of a giant: a strong wind rather than speech: and begged Cecilia to note that men who labour to force their dreams on mankind and turn vapour into fact, usually adopt such a style. Hearing that this private letter had been deliberately read through by Mr. Romfrey, and handed by him to Captain Baskelett, who had read it out in various places, Mr. Austin said: