CAPTAIN BASKELETT
Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war,
counting the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and
soothing the taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of
course, the first to come home had the cream of the praises. She hugged
them in a manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must
be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty,
too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should
not protest overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were
such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did
cordially reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most
naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to
have stuck to their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the
Spartans, who were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical
conduct, and rewarded none save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort
seems to betray the sense of poverty in the article. Our England does
nothing like it. All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want
of them. Besides, she has to please the taxpayer. You may track a
shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her
domestic history: either it is the forethought finding it necessary to
stir up an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the
afterthought: policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly.
How can she manage an enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other
than a little clumsily? The managing of it at all is the wonder. And
not only has she to stupefy the taxpayer by a timely display of
feastings and fireworks, she has to stop all that nonsense (to quote a
satiated man lightened in his purse) at the right moment, about the
hour when the old standfasts, who have simply been doing duty, return,
poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto or two is the utmost
she can present to them. On the other hand, it is true she gives her
first loves, those early birds, fully to understand that a change has
come in their island mother’s mind. If there is a balance to be
righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be the season
for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less; and if
no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally toss a
leaf of laurel on a name or two: thus in the exercise of grumbling
doing good.
With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp’s heroes received the motto
instead of the sweetmeat. England expected them to do their duty; they
did it, and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be. Beauchamp, at
a distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning
the unjust measure dealt to his favourites: Captain Hardist, of the
_Diomed_, twenty years a captain, still a captain! Young Michell denied
the cross! Colonel Evans Cuff, on the heights from first to last, and
not advanced a step! But Prancer, and Plunger, and Lammakin were
thoroughly _well taken care of_, this critic of the war wrote savagely,
reviving an echo of a queer small circumstance occurring in the midst
of the high dolour and anxiety of the whole nation, and which a politic
country preferred to forget, as we will do, for it was but an instance
of strong family feeling in high quarters; and is not the unity of the
country founded on the integrity of the family sentiment? Is it not
certain, which the master tells us, that a line is but a continuation
of a number of dots? Nevil Beauchamp was for insisting that great
Government officers had paid more attention to a dot or two than to the
line. He appeared to be at war with his country after the peace. So far
he had a lively ally in his uncle Everard; but these remarks of his
were a portion of a letter, whose chief burden was the request that
Everard Romfrey would back him in proposing for the hand of a young
French lady, she being, Beauchamp smoothly acknowledged, engaged to a
wealthy French marquis, under the approbation of her family. Could
mortal folly outstrip a petition of that sort? And apparently,
according to the wording and emphasis of the letter, it was the mature
age of the marquis which made Mr. Beauchamp so particularly desirous to
stop the projected marriage and take the girl himself. He appealed to
his uncle on the subject in a “really—really” remonstrative tone, quite
overwhelming to read. “It ought not to be permitted: by all the laws of
chivalry, I should write to the girl’s father to interdict it: I really
am particeps criminis in a sin against nature if I don’t!” Mr. Romfrey
interjected in burlesque of his ridiculous nephew, with collapsing
laughter. But he expressed an indignant surprise at Nevil for allowing
Rosamund to travel alone.
“I can take very good care of myself,” Rosamund protested.
“You can do hundreds of things you should never be obliged to do while
he’s at hand, or I, ma’am,” said Mr. Romfrey. “The fellow’s insane. He
forgets a gentleman’s duty. Here’s his ‘humanity’ dogging a French
frock, and pooh!—the age of the marquis! Fifty? A man’s beginning his
prime at fifty, or there never was much man in him. It’s the mark of a
fool to take everybody for a bigger fool than himself—or he wouldn’t
have written this letter to me. He can’t come home yet, not yet, and he
doesn’t know when he can! Has he thrown up the service? I am to
preserve the alliance between England and France by getting this French
girl for him in the teeth of her marquis, at my peril if I refuse!”
Rosamund asked, “Will you let me see where Nevil says that, sir?”
Mr. Romfrey tore the letter to strips. “He’s one of your fellows who
cock their eyes when they mean to be cunning. He sends you to do the
wheedling, that’s plain. I don’t say he has hit on a bad advocate; but
tell him I back him in no mortal marriage till he shows a pair of
epaulettes on his shoulders. Tell him lieutenants are fledglings—he’s
not marriageable at present. It’s a very pretty sacrifice of himself he
intends for the sake of the alliance, tell him that, but a lieutenant’s
not quite big enough to establish it. You will know what to tell him,
ma’am. And say, it’s the fellow’s best friend that advises him to be
out of it and home quick. If he makes one of a French trio, he’s
dished. He’s too late for his luck in England. Have him out of that
mire, we can’t hope for more now.”
Rosamund postponed her mission to plead. Her heart was with Nevil; her
understanding was easily led to side against him, and for better
reasons than Mr. Romfrey could be aware of: so she was assured by her
experience of the character of Mademoiselle de Croisnel. A certain
belief in her personal arts of persuasion had stopped her from writing
on her homeward journey to inform him that Nevil was not accompanying
her, and when she drove over Steynham Common, triumphal arches and the
odour of a roasting ox richly browning to celebrate the hero’s return
afflicted her mind with all the solid arguments of a common-sense
country in contravention of a wild lover’s vaporous extravagances. Why
had he not come with her? The disappointed ox put the question in a
wavering drop of the cheers of the villagers at the sight of the
carriage without their bleeding hero. Mr. Romfrey, at his hall-doors,
merely screwed his eyebrows; for it was the quality of this gentleman
to foresee most human events, and his capacity to stifle astonishment
when they trifled with his prognostics. Rosamund had left Nevil fast
bound in the meshes of the young French sorceress, no longer leading,
but submissively following, expecting blindly, seeing strange new
virtues in the lurid indication of what appeared to border on the
reverse. How could she plead for her infatuated darling to one who was
common sense in person?
Everard’s pointed interrogations reduced her to speak defensively,
instead of attacking and claiming his aid for the poor enamoured young
man. She dared not say that Nevil continued to be absent because he was
now encouraged by the girl to remain in attendance on her, and was more
than half inspired to hope, and too artfully assisted to deceive the
count and the marquis under the guise of simple friendship. Letters
passed between them in books given into one another’s hands with an
audacious openness of the saddest augury for the future of the pair,
and Nevil could be so lost to reason as to glory in Renée’s
intrepidity, which he justified by their mutual situation, and
cherished for a proof that she was getting courage. In fine, Rosamund
abandoned her task of pleading. Nevil’s communications gave the case a
worse and worse aspect: Renée was prepared to speak to her father; she
delayed it; then the two were to part; they were unable to perform the
terrible sacrifice and slay their last hope; and then Nevil wrote of
destiny—language hitherto unknown to him, evidently the tongue of
Renée. He slipped on from Italy to France. His uncle was besieged by a
series of letters, and his cousin, Cecil Baskelett, a captain in
England’s grand reserve force—her Horse Guards, of the Blue
division—helped Everard Romfrey to laugh over them.
It was not difficult, alack! Letters of a lover in an extremity of
love, crying for help, are as curious to cool strong men as the
contortions of the proved heterodox tied to a stake must have been to
their chastening ecclesiastical judges. Why go to the fire when a
recantation will save you from it? Why not break the excruciating
faggot-bands, and escape, when you have only to decide to do it? We
naturally ask why. Those martyrs of love or religion are madmen.
Altogether, Nevil’s adjurations and supplications, his threats of wrath
and appeals to reason, were an odd mixture. “He won’t lose a chance
while there’s breath in his body,” Everard said, quite good-humouredly,
though he deplored that the chance for the fellow to make his
hero-parade in society, and haply catch an heiress, was waning. There
was an heiress at Steynham, on her way with her father to Italy, very
anxious to see her old friend Nevil—Cecilia Halkett—and very
inquisitive this young lady of sixteen was to know the cause of his
absence. She heard of it from Cecil.
“And one morning last week mademoiselle was running away with him, and
the next morning she was married to her marquis!”
Cecil was able to tell her that.
“I used to be so fond of him,” said the ingenuous young lady. She had
to thank Nevil for a Circassian dress and pearls, which he had sent to
her by the hands of Mrs. Culling—a pretty present to a girl in the
nursery, she thought, and in fact she chose to be a little wounded by
the cause of his absence.
“He’s a good creature-really,” Cecil spoke on his cousin’s behalf.
“Mad; he always will be mad. A dear old savage; always amuses me. He
does! I get half my entertainment from him.”
Captain Baskelett was gifted with the art, which is a fine and a
precious one, of priceless value in society, and not wanting a
benediction upon it in our elegant literature, namely, the art of
stripping his fellow-man and so posturing him as to make every movement
of the comical wretch puppet-like, constrained, stiff, and foolish. He
could present you heroical actions in that fashion; for example:
“A long-shanked trooper, bearing the name of John Thomas Drew, was
crawling along under fire of the batteries. Out pops old Nevil, tries
to get the man on his back. It won’t do. Nevil insists that it’s
exactly one of the cases that ought to be, and they remain arguing
about it like a pair of nine-pins while the Muscovites are at work with
the bowls. Very well. Let me tell you my story. It’s perfectly true, I
give you my word. So Nevil tries to horse Drew, and Drew proposes to
horse Nevil, as at school. Then Drew offers a compromise. He would much
rather have crawled on, you know, and allowed the shot to pass over his
head; but he’s a Briton, old Nevil the same; but old Nevil’s
peculiarity is that, as you are aware, he hates a compromise—won’t have
it—retro Sathanas! and Drew’s proposal to take his arm instead of being
carried pickaback disgusts old Nevil. Still it won’t do to stop where
they are, like the cocoa-nut and the pincushion of our friends, the
gipsies, on the downs: so they take arms and commence the journey home,
resembling the best of friends on the evening of a holiday in our
native clime—two steps to the right, half-a-dozen to the left,
etcætera.”
Thus, with scarce a variation from the facts, with but a flowery
chaplet cast on a truthful narrative, as it were, Captain Baskelett
could render ludicrous that which in other quarters had obtained
honourable mention. Nevil and Drew being knocked down by the wind of a
ball near the battery, “Confound it!” cries Nevil, jumping on his feet,
“it’s because I consented to a compromise!”—a transparent piece of
fiction this, but so in harmony with the character stripped naked for
us that it is accepted. Imagine Nevil’s love-affair in such hands!
Recovering from a fever, Nevil sees a pretty French girl in a gondola,
and immediately thinks, “By jingo, I’m marriageable.” He hears she is
engaged. “By jingo, she’s marriageable too.” He goes through a sum in
addition, and the total is a couple; so he determines on a marriage.
“You can’t get it out of his head; he must be married instantly, and to
her, because she is going to marry somebody else. Sticks to her,
follows her, will have her, in spite of her father, her marquis, her
brother, aunts, cousins, religion, country, and the young woman
herself. I assure you, a perfect model of male fidelity! She is
married. He is on her track. He knows his time will come; he has only
to be handy. You see, old Nevil believes in Providence, is perfectly
sure he will one day hear it cry out, ‘Where’s Beauchamp?’—‘Here I
am!’—‘And here’s your marquise!’—‘I knew I should have her at last,’
says Nevil, calm as Mont Blanc on a reduced scale.”
The secret of Captain Baskelett’s art would seem to be to show the
automatic human creature at loggerheads with a necessity that winks at
remarkable pretensions, while condemning it perpetually to doll-like
action. You look on men from your own elevation as upon a quantity of
our little wooden images, unto whom you affix puny characteristics,
under restrictions from which they shall not escape, though they
attempt it with the enterprising vigour of an extended leg, or a pair
of raised arms, or a head awry, or a trick of jumping; and some of them
are extraordinarily addicted to these feats; but for all they do the
end is the same, for necessity rules, that exactly so, under stress of
activity must the doll Nevil, the doll Everard, or the dolliest of
dolls, fair woman, behave. The automatic creature is subject to the
laws of its construction, you perceive. It can this, it can that, but
it cannot leap out of its mechanism. One definition of the art is,
humour made easy, and that may be why Cecil Baskelett indulged in it,
and why it is popular with those whose humour consists of a readiness
to laugh.
The fun between Cecil Baskelett and Mr. Romfrey over the doll Nevil
threatened an intimacy and community of sentiment that alarmed Rosamund
on behalf of her darling’s material prospects. She wrote to him,
entreating him to come to Steynham. Nevil Beauchamp replied to her both
frankly and shrewdly: “I shall not pretend that I forgive my uncle
Everard, and therefore it is best for me to keep away. Have no fear.
The baron likes a man of his own tastes: they may laugh together, if it
suits them; he never could be guilty of treachery, and to disinherit me
would be that. If I were to become his open enemy to-morrow, I should
look on the estates as mine—unless I did anything to make him
disrespect me. You will not suppose it likely. I foresee I shall want
money. As for Cecil, I give him as much rope as he cares to have. I
know very well Everard Romfrey will see where the point of likeness
between them stops. I apply for a ship the moment I land.”
To test Nevil’s judgement of his uncle, Rosamund ventured on showing
this letter to Mr. Romfrey. He read it, and said nothing, but
subsequently asked, from time to time, “Has he got his ship yet?” It
assured her that Nevil was not wrong, and dispelled her notion of the
vulgar imbroglio of a rich uncle and two thirsty nephews. She was
hardly less relieved in reflecting that he could read men so soberly
and accurately. The desperation of the youth in love had rendered her
one little bit doubtful of the orderliness of his wits. After this she
smiled on Cecil’s assiduities. Nevil obtained his appointment to a ship
bound for the coast of Africa to spy for slavers. He called on his
uncle in London, and spent the greater part of the hour’s visit with
Rosamund; seemed cured of his passion, devoid of rancour, glad of the
prospect of a run among the slaving hulls. He and his uncle shook hands
manfully, at the full outstretch of their arms, in a way so like them,
to Rosamund’s thinking—that is, in a way so unlike any other possible
couple of men so situated—that the humour of the sight eclipsed all the
pleasantries of Captain Baskelett. “Good-bye, sir,” Nevil said
heartily; and Everard Romfrey was not behind-hand with the cordial ring
of his “Good-bye, Nevil”; and upon that they separated. Rosamund would
have been willing to speak to her beloved of his false Renée—the
Frenchwoman, she termed her, _i.e._ generically false, needless to
name; and one question quivered on her tongue’s tip: “How, when she had
promised to fly with you, _how could she_ the very next day step to the
altar with him now her husband?” And, if she had spoken it, she would
have added, “Your uncle could not have set his face against you, had
you brought her to England.” She felt strongly the mastery Nevil
Beauchamp could exercise even over his uncle Everard. But when he was
gone, unquestioned, merely caressed, it came to her mind that he had
all through insisted on his possession of this particular power, and
she accused herself of having wantonly helped to ruin his hope—a matter
to be rejoiced at in the abstract; but what suffering she had inflicted
on him! To quiet her heart, she persuaded herself that for the future
she would never fail to believe in him and second him blindly, as true
love should; and contemplating one so brave, far-sighted, and
self-assured, her determination seemed to impose the lightest of tasks.
Practically humane though he was, and especially toward cattle and all
kinds of beasts, Mr. Romfrey entertained no profound fellow-feeling for
the negro, and, except as the representative of a certain amount of
working power commonly requiring the whip to wind it up, he inclined to
despise that black spot in the creation, with which our civilization
should never have had anything to do. So he pronounced his mind, and
the long habit of listening to oracles might grow us ears to hear and
discover a meaning in it. Nevil’s captures and releases of the grinning
freights amused him for awhile. He compared them to strings of bananas,
and presently put the vision of the whole business aside by talking of
Nevil’s banana-wreath. He desired to have Nevil out of it. He and Cecil
handed Nevil in his banana-wreath about to their friends. Nevil, in his
banana-wreath, was set preaching “humanitomtity.” At any rate, they
contrived to keep the remembrance of Nevil Beauchamp alive during the
period of his disappearance from the world, and in so doing they did
him a service.
There is a pause between the descent of a diver and his return to the
surface, when those who would not have him forgotten by the better
world above him do rightly to relate anecdotes of him, if they can, and
to provoke laughter at him. The encouragement of the humane sense of
superiority over an object of interest, which laughter gives, is good
for the object; and besides, if you begin to tell sly stories of one in
the deeps who is holding his breath to fetch a pearl or two for you
all, you divert a particular sympathetic oppression of the chest, that
the extremely sensitive are apt to suffer from, and you dispose the
larger number to keep in mind a person they no longer see. Otherwise it
is likely that he will, very shortly after he has made his plunge,
fatigue the contemplative brains above, and be shuffled off them, even
as great ocean smoothes away the dear vanished man’s immediate circle
of foam, and rapidly confounds the rippling memory of him with its
other agitations. And in such a case the apparition of his head upon
our common level once more will almost certainly cause a disagreeable
shock; nor is it improbable that his first natural snorts in his native
element, though they be simply to obtain his share of the breath of
life, will draw down on him condemnation for eccentric behaviour and
unmannerly; and this in spite of the jewel he brings, unless it be an
exceedingly splendid one. The reason is, that our brave world cannot
pardon a breach of continuity for any petty bribe.
Thus it chanced, owing to the prolonged efforts of Mr. Romfrey and
Cecil Baskelett to get fun out of him, at the cost of considerable
inventiveness, that the electoral Address of the candidate, signing
himself “R. C. S. Nevil Beauchamp,” to the borough of Bevisham, did not
issue from an altogether unremembered man.
He had been cruising in the Mediterranean, commanding the _Ariadne_,
the smartest corvette in the service. He had, it was widely made known,
met his marquise in Palermo. It was presumed that he was dancing the
round with her still, when this amazing Address appeared on Bevisham’s
walls, in anticipation of the general Election. The Address, moreover,
was ultra-Radical: museums to be opened on Sundays; ominous references
to the Land question, etc.; no smooth passing mention of Reform, such
as the Liberal, become stately, adopts in speaking of that property of
his, but swinging blows on the heads of many a denounced iniquity.
Cecil forwarded the Address to Everard Romfrey without comment.
Next day the following letter, dated from Itchincope, the house of Mr.
Grancey Lespel, on the borders of Bevisham, arrived at Steynham:
“I have despatched you the proclamation, folded neatly. The electors of
Bevisham are summoned, like a town at the sword’s point, to yield him
their votes. Proclamation is the word. I am your born representative! I
have completed my political education on salt water, and I tackle you
on the Land question. I am the heir of your votes, gentlemen!—I forgot,
and I apologize; he calls them fellow-men. Fraternal, and not so risky.
Here at Lespel’s we read the thing with shouts. It hangs in the
smoking-room. We throw open the curacoa to the intelligence and
industry of the assembled guests; we carry the right of the multitude
to our host’s cigars by a majority. C’est un farceur que notre bon
petit cousin. Lespel says it is sailorlike to do something of this sort
after a cruise. Nevil’s Radicalism would have been clever anywhere out
of Bevisham. Of all boroughs! Grancey Lespel knows it. He and his
family were Bevisham’s Whig M.P.“s before the day of Manchester. In
Bevisham an election is an arrangement made by Providence to square the
accounts of the voters, and settle arrears. They reckon up the health
of their two members and the chances of an appeal to the country when
they fix the rents and leases. You have them pointed out to you in the
street, with their figures attached to them like titles. Mr. Tomkins,
the twenty-pound man; an elector of uncommon purity. I saw the ruffian
yesterday. He has an extra breadth to his hat. He has never been known
to listen to a member under £20, and is respected enormously—like the
lady of the Mythology, who was an intolerable Tartar of virtue, because
her price was nothing less than a god, and money down. Nevil will have
to come down on Bevisham in the Jupiter style. Bevisham is downright
the dearest of boroughs—‘vaulting-boards,’ as Stukely Culbrett calls
them—in the kingdom. I assume we still say ‘kingdom.’
“He dashed into the Radical trap exactly two hours after landing. I
believe he was on his way to the Halketts at Mount Laurels. A notorious
old rascal revolutionist retired from his licenced business of
slaughterer—one of your _gratis_ doctors—met him on the high-road, and
told him he was the man. Up went Nevil’s enthusiasm like a bottle rid
of the cork. You will see a great deal about faith in the proclamation;
‘faith in the future,’ and ‘my faith in you.’ When you become a Radical
you have faith in any quantity, just as an alderman gets turtle soup.
It is your badge, like a livery-servant’s cockade or a corporal’s
sleeve stripes—your badge and your bellyful. Calculations were gone
through at the Liberal newspaper-office, old Nevil adding up hard, and
he was informed that he was elected by something like a topping eight
or nine hundred and some fractions. I am sure that a fellow who can let
himself be gulled by a pile of figures trumped up in a Radical
newspaper-office must have great faith in the fractions. Out came
Nevil’s proclamation.
“I have not met him, and I would rather not. I shall not pretend to
offer you advice, for I have the habit of thinking your judgement can
stand by itself. We shall all find this affair a nuisance. Nevil will
pay through the nose. We shall have the ridicule spattered on the
family. It would be a safer thing for him to invest his money on the
Turf, and I shall advise his doing it if I come across him.
“Perhaps the best course would be to telegraph for the marquise!”
This was from Cecil Baskelett. He added a postscript:
“Seriously, the ‘mad commander’ has not an ace of a chance. Grancey and
I saw some Working Men (you have to write them in capitals, king and
queen small); they were reading the Address on a board carried by a
red-nosed man, and shrugging. They are not such fools.
“By the way, I am informed Shrapnel has a young female relative living
with him, said to be a sparkler. I bet you, sir, she is not a Radical.
Do you take me?”
Rosamund Culling drove to the railway station on her way to Bevisham
within an hour after Mr. Romfrey’s eyebrows had made acute play over
this communication.