HIS FRIEND AND FOE
Looking from her window very early on a Sunday morning, Miss Halkett
saw Beauchamp strolling across the grass of the park. She dressed
hurriedly and went out to greet him, smiling and thanking him for his
friendliness in coming.
He said he was delighted, and appeared so, but dashed the sweetness.
“You know I can’t canvass on Sundays!”
“I suppose not,” she replied. “Have you walked up from Bevisham? You
must be tired.”
“Nothing tires me,” said he.
With that they stepped on together.
Mount Laurels, a fair broad house backed by a wood of beeches and firs,
lay open to view on the higher grassed knoll of a series of descending
turfy mounds dotted with gorseclumps, and faced South-westerly along
the run of the Otley river to the gleaming broad water and its opposite
border of forest, beyond which the downs of the island threw long
interlapping curves. Great ships passed on the line of the water to and
fro; and a little mist of masts of the fishing and coasting craft by
Otley village, near the river’s mouth, was like a web in air. Cecilia
led him to her dusky wood of firs, where she had raised a bower for a
place of poetical contemplation and reading when the clear lapping salt
river beneath her was at high tide. She could hail the _Esperanza_ from
that cover; she could step from her drawing-room window, over the
flower-beds, down the gravel walk to the hard, and be on board her
yacht within seven minutes, out on her salt-water lake within twenty,
closing her wings in a French harbour by nightfall of a summer’s day,
whenever she had the whim to fly abroad. Of these enviable privileges
she boasted with some happy pride.
“It’s the finest yachting-station in England,” said Beauchamp.
She expressed herself very glad that he should like it so much.
Unfortunately she added, “I hope you will find it pleasanter to be here
than canvassing.”
“I have no pleasure in canvassing,” said he. “I canvass poor men
accustomed to be paid for their votes, and who get nothing from me but
what the baron would call a parsonical exhortation. I’m in the thick of
the most spiritless crew in the kingdom. Our southern men will not
compare with the men of the north. But still, even among these fellows,
I see danger for the country if our commerce were to fail, if distress
came on them. There’s always danger in disunion. That’s what the rich
won’t see. They see simply nothing out of their own circle; and they
won’t take a thought of the overpowering contrast between their luxury
and the way of living, that’s half-starving, of the poor. They
understand it when fever comes up from back alleys and cottages, and
then they join their efforts to sweep the poor out of the district. The
poor are to get to their work anyhow, after a long morning’s walk over
the proscribed space; for we must have poor, you know. The wife of a
parson I canvassed yesterday, said to me, ‘Who is to work for us, if
you do away with the poor, Captain Beauchamp?’”
Cecilia quitted her bower and traversed the wood silently.
“So you would blow up my poor Mount Laurels for a peace-offering to the
lower classes?”
“I should hope to put it on a stronger foundation, Cecilia.”
“By means of some convulsion?”
“By forestalling one.”
“That must be one of the new ironclads,” observed Cecilia, gazing at
the black smoke-pennon of a tower that slipped along the water-line.
“Yes? You were saying? Put us on a stronger——?”
“It’s, I think, the _Hastings:_ she broke down the other day on her
trial trip,” said Beauchamp, watching the ship’s progress animatedly.
“Peppel commands her—a capital officer. I suppose we must have these
costly big floating barracks. I don’t like to hear of everything being
done for the defensive. The defensive is perilous policy in war. It’s
true, the English don’t wake up to their work under half a year. But,
no: defending and looking to defences is bad for the fighting power;
and there’s half a million gone on that ship. _Half a million!_ Do you
know how many poor taxpayers it takes to make up that sum, Cecilia?”
“A great many,” she slurred over them; “but we must have big ships, and
the best that are to be had.”
“Powerful fast rams, sea-worthy and fit for running over shallows,
carrying one big gun; swarms of harryers and worriers known to be kept
ready for immediate service; readiness for the offensive in case of
war—there’s the best defence against a declaration of war by a foreign
State.”
“I like to hear you, Nevil,” said Cecilia, beaming: “Papa thinks we
have a miserable army—in numbers. He says, the wealthier we become the
more difficult it is to recruit able-bodied men on the volunteering
system. Yet the wealthier we are the more an army is wanted, both to
defend our wealth and to preserve order. I fancy he half inclines to
compulsory enlistment. Do speak to him on that subject.”
Cecilia must have been innocent of a design to awaken the fire-flash in
Nevil’s eyes. She had no design, but hostility was latent, and hence
perhaps the offending phrase.
He nodded and spoke coolly. “An army _to preserve order?_ So, then, an
army to threaten civil war!”
“To crush revolutionists.”
“Agitators, you mean. My dear good old colonel—I have always loved
him—must not have more troops at his command.”
“Do you object to the drilling of the whole of the people?”
“Does not the colonel, Cecilia? I am sure he does in his heart, and,
for different reasons, I do. He won’t trust the working-classes, nor I
the middle.”
“Does Dr. Shrapnel hate the middle-class?”
“Dr. Shrapnel cannot hate. He and I are of opinion, that as the
middle-class are the party in power, they would not, if they knew the
use of arms, move an inch farther in Reform, for they would no longer
be in fear of the class below them.”
“But what horrible notions of your country have you, Nevil! It is
dreadful to hear. Oh! do let us avoid politics for ever. Fear!”
“All concessions to the people have been won from fear.”
“I have not heard so.”
“I will read it to you in the History of England.”
“You paint us in a condition of Revolution.”
“Happily it’s not a condition unnatural to us. The danger would be in
not letting it be progressive, and there’s a little danger too at times
in our slowness. We change our blood or we perish.”
“Dr. Shrapnel?”
“Yes, I _have_ heard Dr. Shrapnel say that. And, by-the-way,
Cecilia—will you? can you?—take me for the witness to his character. He
is the most guileless of men, and he’s the most unguarded. My good
Rosamund saw him. She is easily prejudiced when she is a trifle
jealous, and you may hear from her that he rambles, talks wildly. It
may seem so. I maintain there is wisdom in him when conventional minds
would think him at his wildest. Believe me, he is the humanest, the
best of men, tenderhearted as a child: the most benevolent,
simple-minded, admirable old man—the man I am proudest to think of as
an Englishman and a man living in my time, of all men existing. I can’t
overpraise him.”
“He has a bad reputation.”
“Only with the class that will not meet him and answer him.”
“Must we invite him to our houses?”
“It would be difficult to get him to come, if you did. I mean, meet him
in debate and answer his arguments. Try the question by brains.”
“Before mobs?”
“_Not_ before mobs. I punish you by answering you seriously.”
“I am sensible of the flattery.”
“Before mobs!” Nevil ejaculated. “It’s the Tories that mob together and
cry down every man who appears to them to threaten their privileges.
Can you guess what Dr. Shrapnel compares them to?”
“Indeed, Nevil, I have not an idea. I only wish your patriotism were
large enough to embrace them.”
“He compares them to geese claiming possession of the whole common, and
hissing at every foot of ground they have to yield. They’re always
having to retire and always hissing. ‘Retreat and menace,’ that’s the
motto for them.”
“Very well, Nevil, I am a goose upon a common.”
So saying, Cecilia swam forward like a swan on water to give the
morning kiss to her papa, by the open window of the breakfast-room.
Never did bird of Michaelmas fling off water from her feathers more
thoroughly than this fair young lady the false title she pretended to
assume.
“I hear you’re of the dinner party at Grancey Lespel’s on Wednesday,”
the colonel said to Beauchamp. “You’ll have to stand fire.”
“_They_ will, papa,” murmured Cecilia. “Will Mr. Austin be there?”
“I particularly wish to meet Mr. Austin,” said Beauchamp.
“Listen to him, if you do meet him,” she replied.
His look was rather grave.
“Lespel’s a Whig,” he said.
The colonel answered. “Lespel _was_ a Whig. Once a Tory always a
Tory,—but court the people and you’re on quicksands, and that’s where
the Whigs are. What he is now I don’t think he knows himself. You won’t
get a vote.”
Cecilia watched her friend Nevil recovering from his short fit of
gloom. He dismissed politics at breakfast and grew companionable, with
the charm of his earlier day. He was willing to accompany her to church
too.
“You will hear a long sermon,” she warned him.
“Forty minutes.” Colonel Halkett smothered a yawn that was both retro
and prospective.
“It has been fifty, papa.”
“It has been an hour, my dear.”
It was good discipline nevertheless, the colonel affirmed, and Cecilia
praised the Rev. Mr. Brisk of Urplesdon vicarage as one of our few
remaining Protestant clergymen.
“Then he ought to be supported,” said Beauchamp. “In the dissensions of
religious bodies it is wise to pat the weaker party on the back—I quote
Stukely Culbrett.”
“I’ve heard him,” sighed the colonel. “He calls the Protestant clergy
the social police of the English middle-class. Those are the things he
lets fly. I have heard that man say that the Church stands to show the
passion of the human race for the drama. He said it in my presence. And
there’s a man who calls himself a Tory!
“You have rather too much of that playing at grudges and dislikes at
Steynham, with squibs, nicknames, and jests at things that—well, that
our stability is bound up in. I hate squibs.”
“And I,” said Beauchamp. Some shadow of a frown crossed him; but
Stukely Culbrett’s humour seemed to be a refuge. “Protestant
_parson_—not clergy,” he corrected the colonel. “Can’t you hear Mr.
Culbrett, Cecilia? The Protestant parson is the policeman set to watch
over the respectability of the middle-class. He has sharp eyes for the
sins of the poor. As for the rich, they support his church; they listen
to his sermon—to set an example: _discipline_, colonel. You discipline
the tradesman, who’s afraid of losing your custom, and the labourer,
who might be deprived of his bread. But the people? It’s put down to
the wickedness of human nature that the parson has not got hold of the
people. The parsons have lost them by senseless Conservatism, because
they look to the Tories for the support of their Church, and let the
religion run down the gutters. And how many thousands have you at work
in the pulpit every Sunday? I’m told the Dissenting ministers have some
vitality.”
Colonel Halkett shrugged with disgust at the mention of Dissenters.
“And those thirty or forty thousand, colonel, call the men that do the
work they ought to be doing demagogues. The parsonry are a power
absolutely to be counted for waste, as to progress.”
Cecilia perceived that her father was beginning to be fretted.
She said, with a tact that effected its object: “I am one who hear Mr.
Culbrett without admiring his wit.”
“No, and I see no good in this kind of Steynham talk,” Colonel Halkett
said, rising. “We’re none of us perfect. Heaven save us from political
parsons!”
Beauchamp was heard to utter, “Humanity.”
The colonel left the room with Cecilia, muttering the Steynham tail to
that word: “tomtity,” for the solace of an aside repartee.
She was on her way to dress for church. He drew her into the library,
and there threw open a vast placard lying on the table. It was printed
in blue characters and red. “This is what I got by the post this
morning. I suppose Nevil knows about it. He wants tickling, but I don’t
like this kind of thing. It’s not fair war. It’s as bad as using
explosive bullets in my old game.”
“_Can_ he expect his adversaries to be tender with him?” Cecilia
simulated vehemence in an underbreath. She glanced down the page:
“FRENCH MARQUEES” caught her eye.
It was a page of verse. And, oh! could it have issued from a Tory
Committee?
“The Liberals are as bad, and worse,” her father said.
She became more and more distressed. “It seems so very mean, papa; so
base. Ungenerous is no word for it. And how vulgar! Now I remember,
Nevil said he wished to see Mr. Austin.”
“Seymour Austin would not sanction it.”
“No, but Nevil might hold him responsible for it.”
“I suspect Mr. Stukely Culbrett, whom he quotes, and that smoking-room
lot at Lespel’s. I distinctly discountenance it. So I shall tell them
on Wednesday night. Can you keep a secret?”
“And after all Nevil Beauchamp is very young, papa!—of course I can
keep a secret.”
The colonel exacted no word of honour, feeling quite sure of her.
He whispered the secret in six words, and her cheeks glowed vermilion.
“But they will meet on Wednesday after _this_,” she said, and her sight
went dancing down the column of verse, of which the following trotting
couplet is a specimen:—
“O did you ever, hot in love, a little British middy see,
Like Orpheus asking what the deuce to do without Eurydice?”
The middy is jilted by his FRENCH MARQUEES, whom he “did adore,” and in
his wrath he recommends himself to the wealthy widow Bevisham,
concerning whose choice of her suitors there is a doubt: but the middy
is encouraged to persevere:
“Up, up, my pretty middy; take a draught of foaming Sillery;
Go in and win the uriddy with your Radical artillery.”
And if Sillery will not do, he is advised, he being for superlatives,
to try the sparkling _Silliery_ of the Radical vintage, selected
grapes.
This was but impudent nonsense. But the reiterated apostrophe to “MY
FRENCH MARQUEES” was considered by Cecilia to be a brutal offence.
She was shocked that her party should have been guilty of it. Nevil
certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard
might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of
teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid
squib did appear to her a debasing weapon to use.
“I cannot congratulate you on your choice of a second candidate, papa,”
she said scornfully.
“I don’t much congratulate myself,” said the colonel.
“Here’s a letter from Mrs. Beauchamp informing me that her boy
Blackburn will be home in a month. There would have been plenty of time
for him. However, we must make up our minds to it. Those two’ll be
meeting on Wednesday, so keep your secret. It will be out tomorrow
week.”
“But Nevil will be accusing Mr. Austin.”
“Austin won’t be at Lespel’s. And he must bear it, for the sake of
peace.”
“Is Nevil ruined with his uncle, papa?”
“Not a bit, I should imagine. It’s Romfrey’s fun.”
“And this disgraceful squib is a part of the fun?”
“That I know nothing about, my dear. I’m sorry, but there’s pitch and
tar in politics as well as on shipboard.”
“I do not see that there should be,” said Cecilia resolutely.
“We can’t hope to have what should be.”
“Why not? I would have it: I would do my utmost to have it,” she flamed
out.
“Your _utmost?_” Her father was glancing at her foregone mimicry of
Beauchamp’s occasional strokes of emphasis. “Do your utmost to have
your bonnet on in time for us to walk to church. I can’t bear driving
there.”
Cecilia went to her room with the curious reflection, awakened by what
her father had chanced to suggest to her mind, that she likewise could
be fervid, positive, uncompromising—who knows? Radicalish, perhaps,
when she looked eye to eye on an evil. For a moment or so she espied
within herself a gulf of possibilities, wherein black night-birds,
known as queries, roused by shot of light, do flap their wings.—Her
utmost to have be what should be! And why not?
But the intemperate feeling subsided while she was doing duty before
her mirror, and the visionary gulf closed immediately.
She had merely been very angry on Nevil Beauchamp’s behalf, and had
dimly seen that a woman can feel insurgent, almost revolutionary, for a
personal cause, Tory though her instinct of safety and love of
smoothness make her.
No reflection upon this casual piece of self or sex revelation troubled
her head. She did, however, think of her position as the friend of
Nevil in utter antagonism to him. It beset her with contradictions that
blew rough on her cherished serenity; for she was of the order of
ladies who, by virtue of their pride and spirit, their port and their
beauty, decree unto themselves the rank of princesses among women,
before our world has tried their claim to it. She had lived hitherto in
upper air, high above the clouds of earth. Her ideal of a man was of
one similarly disengaged and lofty—loftier. Nevil, she could honestly
say, was not her ideal; he was only her old friend, and she was opposed
to him in his present adventure. The striking at him to cure him of his
mental errors and excesses was an obligation; she could descend upon
him calmly with the chastening rod, pointing to the better way; but the
shielding of him was a different thing; it dragged her down so low,
that in her condemnation of the Tory squib she found herself asking
herself whether haply Nevil had flung off the yoke of the French lady;
with the foolish excuse for the question, that if he had not, he must
be bitterly sensitive to the slightest public allusion to her. Had he?
And if not, how desperately faithful he was! or else how marvellously
seductive she!
Perhaps it was a lover’s despair that had precipitated him into the
mire of politics. She conceived the impression that it must be so, and
throughout the day she had an inexplicable unsweet pleasure in inciting
him to argumentation and combating him, though she was compelled to
admit that he had been colloquially charming antecedent to her naughty
provocation; and though she was indebted to him for his patient decorum
under the weary wave of the Reverend Mr. Brisk. Now what does it matter
what a woman thinks in politics? But he deemed it of great moment.
Politically, he deemed that women have souls, a certain fire of life
for exercise on earth. He appealed to reason in them; he would not hear
of convictions. He quoted the Bevisham doctor: “Convictions are
generally first impressions that are sealed with later prejudices,” and
insisted there was wisdom in it. Nothing tired him, as he had said, and
addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of hopeless effort
daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of judgement in
politics—_his_ notion of an error. The value he put upon speaking,
urging his views, was really fanatical. It appeared that he canvassed
the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing would
persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched Tory
like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the
reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.
Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the
sturdy beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without
shame that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal;
penetrating malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to
exhort bedraggled mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed
to rebuffs from impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied,
shouting speeches to roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of
the mob!...
Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind’s picture of him. But the
blinding curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could
not but be the desperation of a lover abandoned. She feared it was, she
feared it was not. Nevil Beauchamp’s foe persisted in fearing that it
was not; his friend feared that it was. Yet why? For if it was, then he
could not be quite in earnest, and might be cured. Nay, but earnestness
works out its own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be
preferable to think him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken.
Cecilia could not decide upon what she dared wish for his health’s
good. Friend and foe were not further separable within her bosom than
one tick from another of a clock; they changed places, and next his
friend was fearing what his foe had feared: they were inextricable.
Why had he not sprung up on a radiant aquiline ambition, whither one
might have followed him, with eyes and prayers for him, if it was not
possible to do so companionably? At present, in the shape of a
canvassing candidate, it was hardly honourable to let imagination dwell
on him, save compassionately.
When he rose to take his leave, Cecilia said, “_Must_ you go to
Itchincope on Wednesday, Nevil?”
Colonel Halkett added: “I don’t think I would go to Lespel’s if I were
you. I rather suspect Seymour Austin will be coming on Wednesday, and
that’ll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for
an evening.”
“I have particular reasons for going to Lespel’s; I hear he wavers
toward a Tory conspiracy of some sort,” said Beauchamp.
The colonel held his tongue.
The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven
o’clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass
of the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a
conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of
consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not
but approve.
Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young
fellow so misguided.
The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said
whimsically, “He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in
it!”
Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him
footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather
surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be
losing his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his
in Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking
as well as ever.
“He dresses just as he used to dress,” she observed.
The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see
neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness, like
the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil
Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a
cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the
thought, like something flashing black, crossed her—how attractive such
a style must be to a Frenchwoman!
“He may look a little worn,” she acquiesced.