THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOAT
Madame d’Auffray passed Renée, whispering on her way to take her seat
at the breakfast-table.
Renée did not condescend to whisper. “Roland will be glad,” she said
aloud.
Her low eyelids challenged Beauchamp for a look of indifference. There
was more for her to unbosom than Madame d’Auffray had revealed, but the
comparative innocence of her position in this new light prompted her to
meet him defiantly, if he chose to feel injured. He was attracted by a
happy contrast of colour between her dress and complexion, together
with a cavalierly charm in the sullen brows she lifted; and seeing the
reverse of a look of indifference on his face, after what he had heard
of her frivolousness, she had a fear that it existed.
“Are we not to have M. d’Henriel to-day? he amuses me,” the baronne
d’Orbec remarked.
“If he would learn that he was fashioned for that purpose!” exclaimed
little M. Livret.
“Do not ask young men for too much head, my friend; he would cease to
be amusing.”
“D’Henriel should have been up in the fields at ten this morning,” said
M. d’Orbec. “As to his head, I back him for a clever shot.”
“Or a duelling-sword,” said Renée. “It is a quality, count it for what
we will. Your favourite, Madame la Baronne, is interdicted from
presenting himself here so long as he persists in offending me.”
She was requested to explain, and, with the fair ingenuousness which
outshines innocence, she touched on the story of the glove.
Ah! what a delicate, what an exciting, how subtle a question!
Had M. d’Henriel the right to possess it? and, having that, had he the
right to wear it at his breast?
Beauchamp was dragged into the discussion of the case.
Renée waited curiously for his judgement.
Pleading an apology for the stormy weather, which had detained him, and
for his ignorance that so precious an article was at stake, he held,
that by the terms of the wager, the glove was lost; the claim to wear
it was a matter of taste.
“Matters of taste, monsieur, are not, I think, decided by weapons in
your country?” said M. d’Orbec.
“We have no duelling,” said Beauchamp.
The Frenchman imagined the confession to be somewhat humbling, and
generously added, “But you have your volunteers—a magnificent spectacle
of patriotism and national readiness for defence!”
A shrewd pang traversed Beauchamp’s heart, as he looked back on his
country from the outside and the inside, thinking what amount of
patriotic readiness the character of the volunteering signified, in the
face of all that England has to maintain. Like a politic islander, he
allowed the patriotic spectacle to be imagined; reflecting that it did
a sort of service abroad, and had only to be unmasked at home.
“But you surrendered the glove, marquise!” The baronne d’Orbec spoke
judicially.
“I flung it to the ground: that made it neutral,” said Renée.
“Hum. He wears it with the dust on it, certainly.”
“And for how long a time,” M. Livret wished to know, “does this amusing
young man proclaim his intention of wearing the glove?”
“Until he can see with us that his Order of Merit is utter kid,” said
Madame d’Auffray; and as she had spoken more or less neatly,
satisfaction was left residing in the ear of the assembly, and the
glove was permitted to be swept away on a fresh tide of dialogue.
The admirable candour of Renée in publicly alluding to M. d’Henriel’s
foolishness restored a peep of his holiday to Beauchamp. Madame
d’Auffray took note of the effect it produced, and quite excused her
sister-in-law for intending to produce it; but that speaking out the
half-truth that we may put on the mask of the whole, is no new trick;
and believing as she did that Renée was in danger with the handsome
Count Henri, the practice of such a kind of honesty on her part
appeared alarming.
Still it is imprudent to press for confidences when our friend’s heart
is manifestly trifling with sincerity. Who knows but that some foregone
reckless act or word may have superinduced the healthy shame which
cannot speak, which must disguise itself, and is honesty in that form,
but roughly troubled would resolve to rank dishonesty? So thought the
patient lady, wiser in that than in her perceptions.
Renée made a boast of not persuading her guest to stay, avowing that
she would not willingly have him go. Praising him equably, she listened
to praise of him with animation. She was dumb and statue-like when
Count Henri’s name was mentioned. Did not this betray liking for one,
subjection to the other? Indeed, there was an Asiatic splendour of
animal beauty about M. d’Henriel that would be serpent with most women,
Madame d’Auffray conceived; why not with the deserted Renée, who adored
beauty of shape and colour, and was compassionate toward a rashness of
character that her own unnatural solitariness and quick spirit made her
emulous of?
Meanwhile Beauchamp’s day of adieu succeeded that of his holiday, and
no adieu was uttered. The hours at Tourdestelle had a singular turn for
slipping. Interlinked and all as one they swam by, brought evening,
brought morning, never varied. They might have varied with such a
division as when flame lights up the night or a tempest shades the day,
had Renée chosen; she had that power over him. She had no wish to use
it; perhaps she apprehended what it would cause her to forfeit. She
wished him to respect her; felt that she was under the shadow of the
glove, slight though it was while it was nothing but a tale of a lady
and a glove; and her desire, like his, was that they should meet daily
and dream on, without a variation. He noticed how seldom she led him
beyond the grounds of the château. They were to make excursions when
her brother came, she said. Roland de Croisnel’s colonel, Coïn de
Grandchamp, happened to be engaged in a duel, which great business
detained Roland. It supplied Beauchamp with an excuse for staying, that
he was angry with himself for being pleased to have; so he attacked the
practice of duelling, and next the shrug, wherewith M. Livret and M.
d’Orbec sought at first to defend the foul custom, or apologize for it,
or plead for it philosophically, or altogether cast it off their
shoulders; for the literal interpretation of the shrug in argument is
beyond human capacity; it is the point of speech beyond our treasury of
language. He attacked the shrug, as he thought, very temperately; but
in controlling his native vehemence he grew, perforce of repression,
and of incompetency to deliver himself copiously in French, sarcastic.
In fine, his contrast of the pretence of their noble country to head
civilization, and its encouragement of a custom so barbarous, offended
M. d’Orbec and irritated M. Livret.
The latter delivered a brief essay on Gallic blood; the former
maintained that Frenchmen were the best judges of their own ways and
deeds. Politeness reigned, but politeness is compelled to throw off
cloak and jacket when it steps into the arena to meet the encounter of
a bull. Beauchamp drew on their word “solidaire” to assist him in
declaring that no civilized nation could be thus independent. Imagining
himself in the France of brave ideas, he contrived to strike out sparks
of Legitimist ire around him, and found himself breathing the
atmosphere of the most primitive nursery of Toryism. Again he
encountered the shrug, and he would have it a verbal matter. M. d’Orbec
gravely recited the programme of the country party in France. M. Livret
carried the war across Channel. You English have retired from active
life, like the exhausted author, to turn critic—the critic that sneers:
unless we copy you abjectly we are execrable. And what is that sneer?
Materially it is an acrid saliva, withering where it drops; in the way
of fellowship it is a corpse-emanation. As to wit, the sneer is the
cloak of clumsiness; it is the Pharisee’s incense, the hypocrite’s
pity, the post of exaltation of the fat citizen, etc.; but, said M.
Livret, the people using it should have a care that they keep powerful:
they make no friends. He terminated with this warning to a nation not
devoid of superior merit. M. d’Orbec said less, and was less consoled
by his outburst.
In the opinion of Mr. Vivian Ducie, present at the discussion,
Beauchamp provoked the lash; for, in the first place, a beautiful
woman’s apparent favourite should be particularly discreet in all that
he says: and next, he should have known that the Gallic shrug over
matters political is volcanic—it is the heaving of the mountain, and,
like the proverbial Russ, leaps up Tartarly at a scratch. Our
newspapers also had been flea-biting M. Livret and his countrymen of
late; and, to conclude, over in old England you may fly out against
what you will, and there is little beyond a motherly smile, a nurse’s
rebuke, or a fool’s rudeness to answer you. In quick-blooded France you
have whip for whip, sneer, sarcasm, claw, fang, tussle, in a trice; and
if you choose to comport yourself according to your insular notion of
freedom, you are bound to march out to the measured ground at an
invitation. To begin by saying that your principles are opposed to it,
naturally excites a malicious propensity to try your temper.
A further cause, unknown to Mr. Ducie, of M. Livret’s irritation was,
that Beauchamp had vexed him on a subject peculiarly dear to him. The
celebrated Château Dianet was about to be visited by the guests at
Tourdestelle. In common with some French philosophers and English
matrons, he cherished a sentimental sad enthusiasm for royal
concubines; and when dilating upon one among them, the ruins of whose
family’s castle stood in the neighbourhood-Agrees, who was really a
kindly soul, though not virtuous—M. Livret had been traversed by
Beauchamp with questions as to the condition of the people, the
peasantry, that were sweated in taxes to support these lovely
frailties. They came oddly from a man in the fire of youth, and a
little old gentleman somewhat seduced by the melting image of his theme
might well blink at him to ask, of what flesh are you, then? His
historic harem was insulted. Personally too, the fair creature
picturesquely soiled, intrepid in her amorousness, and ultimately
absolved by repentance (a shuddering narrative of her sins under
showers of salt drops), cried to him to champion her. Excited by the
supposed cold critical mind in Beauchamp, M. Livret painted and painted
this lady, tricked her in casuistical niceties, scenes of pomp and
boudoir pathos, with many shifting sidelights and a risky word or two,
until Renée cried out, “Spare us the esprit Gaulois, M. Livret!” There
was much to make him angry with this Englishman.
“The esprit Gaulois is the sparkle of crystal common sense, madame, and
may we never abandon it for a Puritanism that hides its face to conceal
its filthiness, like a stagnant pond,” replied M. Livret, flashing.
“It seems, then, that there are two ways of being objectionable,” said
Renée.
“Ah! Madame la Marquise, your wit is French,” he breathed low; “keep
your heart so!”
Both M. Livret and M. d’Orbec had forgotten that when Count Henri
d’Henriel was received at Tourdestelle, the arrival of the Englishman
was pleasantly anticipated by them as an eclipse of the handsome boy;
but a foreign interloper is quickly dispossessed of all means of
pleasing save that one of taking his departure; and they now talked of
Count Henri’s disgrace and banishment in a very warm spirit of
sympathy, not at all seeing why it should be made to depend upon the
movements of this M. Beauchamp, as it appeared to be. Madame d’Auffray
heard some of their dialogue, and hurried with a mouth full of comedy
to Renée, who did not reproach them for silly beings, as would be done
elsewhere. On the contrary, she appreciated a scene of such absolute
comedy, recognizing it instantly as a situation plucked out of human
nature. She compared them to republicans that regretted the sovereign
they had deposed for a pretender to start up and govern them.
“Who hurries them round to the legitimate king again!” said Madame
d’Auffray.
Renée cast her chin up. “How, my dear?”
“Your husband.”
“What of him?”
“He is returning.”
“What brings him?”
“You should ask who, my Renée! I was sure he would not hear of M.
Beauchamp’s being here, without an effort to return and do the honours
of the château.”
Renée looked hard at her, saying, “How thoughtful of you! You must have
made use of the telegraph wires to inform him that M. Beauchamp was
with us.”
“More; I made use of them to inform him that M. Beauchamp was
expected.”
“And that was enough to bring him! He pays M. Beauchamp a wonderful
compliment.”
“Such as he would pay to no other man, my Renée. Virtually it is the
highest of compliments to you. I say that to M. Beauchamp’s credit; for
Raoul has met him, and, whatever his personal feeling may be, must know
your friend is a man of honour.”
“My friend is... yes, I have no reason to think otherwise,” Renée
replied. Her husband’s persistent and exclusive jealousy of Beauchamp
was the singular point in the character of one who appeared to have no
sentiment of the kind as regarded men that were much less than men of
honour. “So, then, my sister Agnès,” she said, “you suggested the
invitation of M. Beauchamp for the purpose of spurring my husband to
return! Apparently he and I are surrounded by plotters.”
“Am I so very guilty?” said Madame d’Auffray.
“If that mad boy, half idiot, half panther, were by chance to insult M.
Beauchamp, you would feel so.”
“You have taken precautions to prevent their meeting; and besides, M.
Beauchamp does not fight.”
Renée flushed crimson.
Madame d’Auffray added, “I do not say that he is other than a perfectly
brave and chivalrous gentleman.”
“Oh!” cried Renée, “do not say it, if ever you should imagine it. Bid
Roland speak of him. He is changed, oppressed: I did him a terrible
wrong ....” She checked herself. “But the chief thing to do is to keep
M. d’Henriel away from him. I suspect M. d’Orbec of a design to make
them clash: and you, my dear, will explain why, to flatter me. Believe
me, I thirst for flattery; I have had none since M. Beauchamp came: and
you, so acute, must have seen the want of it in my face. But you, so
skilful, Agnès, will manage these men. Do you know, Agnès, that the
pride of a woman so incredibly clever as you have shown me you are
should resent their intrigues and overthrow them. As for me, I thought
I could command M. d’Henriel, and I find he has neither reason in him
nor obedience. Singular to say, I knew him just as well a week back as
I do now, and then I liked him for his qualities—or the absence of any.
But how shall we avoid him on the road to Dianet? He is aware that we
are going.”
“Take M. Beauchamp by boat,” said Madame d’Auffray.
“The river winds to within a five minutes’ walk of Dianet; we could go
by boat,” Renée said musingly. “I thought of the boat. But does it not
give the man a triumph that we should seem to try to elude him? What
matter! Still, I do not like him to be the falcon, and Nevil Beauchamp
the... little bird. So it is, because we began badly, Agnès!”
“Was it my fault?”
“Mine. Tell me: the legitimate king returns when?”
“In two days or three.”
“And his rebel subjects are to address him—how?”
Madame d’Auffray smote the point of a finger softly on her cheek.
“Will they be pardoned?” said Renée.
“It is for _him_ to kneel, my dearest.”
“Legitimacy kneeling for forgiveness is a painful picture, Agnès.
Legitimacy jealous of a foreigner is an odd one. However, we are women,
born to our lot. If we could rise en masse!—but we cannot. Embrace me.”
Madame d’Auffray embraced her, without an idea that she assisted in
performing the farewell of their confidential intimacy.
When Renée trifled with Count Henri, it was playing with fire, and she
knew it; and once or twice she bemoaned to Agnès d’Auffray her
abandoned state, which condemned her, for the sake of the sensation of
living, to have recourse to perilous pastimes; but she was revolted, as
at a piece of treachery, that Agnès should have suggested the
invitation of Nevil Beauchamp with the secret design of winning home
her husband to protect her. This, for one reason, was because Beauchamp
gave her no notion of danger; none, therefore, of requiring protection;
and the presence of her husband could not but be hateful to him, an
undeserved infliction. To her it was intolerable that they should be
brought into contact. It seemed almost as hard that she should have to
dismiss Beauchamp to preclude their meeting. She remembered,
nevertheless, a certain desperation of mind, scarce imaginable in the
retrospect, by which, trembling, fever-smitten, scorning herself, she
had been reduced to hope for Nevil Beauchamp’s coming as for a rescue.
The night of the storm had roused her heart. Since then his perfect
friendliness had lulled, his air of thoughtfulness had interested it;
and the fancy that he, who neither reproached nor sentimentalized, was
to be infinitely compassionated, stirred up remorse. She could not tell
her friend Agnès of these feelings while her feelings were angered
against her friend. So she talked lightly of “the legitimate king,” and
they embraced: a situation of comedy quite as true as that presented by
the humble admirers of the brilliant chatelaine.
Beauchamp had the pleasure of rowing Madame la Marquise to the short
shaded walk separating the river from Château Dianet, whither M.
d’Orbec went on horseback, and Madame d’Auffray and M. Livret were
driven. The portrait of Diane of Dianet was praised for the beauty of
the dame, a soft-fleshed acutely featured person, a
fresh-of-the-toilette face, of the configuration of head of the cat,
relieved by a delicately aquiline nose; and it could only be the cat of
fairy metamorphosis which should stand for that illustration: brows and
chin made an acceptable triangle, and eyes and mouth could be what she
pleased for mice or monarchs. M. Livret did not gainsay the impeachment
of her by a great French historian, tender to women, to frailties in
particular—yes, she was cold, perhaps grasping: but dwell upon her in
her character of woman; conceive her existing, to estimate the charm of
her graciousness. Name the two countries which alone have produced THE
WOMAN, the ideal woman, the woman of art, whose beauty, grace, and wit
offer her to our contemplation in an atmosphere above the ordinary
conditions of the world: these two countries are France and Greece!
None other give you the perfect woman, the woman who conquers time, as
she conquers men, by virtue of the divinity in her blood; and she, as
little as illustrious heroes, is to be judged by the laws and standards
of lesser creatures. In fashioning her, nature and art have worked
together: in her, poetry walks the earth. The question of good or bad
is entirely to be put aside: it is a rustic’s impertinence—a bourgeois’
vulgarity. She is preeminent, voilà tout. Has she grace and beauty?
Then you are answered: such possessions are an assurance that her
influence in the aggregate must be for good. Thunder, destructive to
insects, refreshes earth: so she. So sang the rhapsodist. Possibly a
scholarly little French gentleman, going down the grey slopes of sixty
to second childishness, recovers a second juvenility in these
enthusiasms; though what it is that inspires our matrons to take up
with them is unimaginable. M. Livret’s ardour was a contrast to the
young Englishman’s vacant gaze at Diane, and the symbols of her
goddesship running along the walls, the bed, the cabinets, everywhere
that the chaste device could find frontage and a corner.
M. d’Orbec remained outside the château inspecting the fish-ponds. When
they rejoined him he complimented Beauchamp semi-ironically on his
choice of the river’s quiet charms in preference to the dusty roads.
Madame de Rouaillout said, “Come, M. d’Orbec; what if you surrender
your horse to M. Beauchamp, and row me back?” He changed colour,
hesitated, and declined he had an engagement to call on M. d’Henriel.
“When did you see him?” said she.
He was confused. “It is not long since, madame.”
“On the road?”
“Coming along the road.”
“And our glove?”
“Madame la Marquise, if I may trust my memory, M. d’Henriel was not in
official costume.”
Renée allowed herself to be reassured.
A ceremonious visit that M. Livret insisted on was paid to the chapel
of Diane, where she had worshipped and laid her widowed ashes, which,
said M. Livret, the fiends of the Revolution would not let rest.
He raised his voice to denounce them.
It was Roland de Croisnel that answered: “The Revolution was our
grandmother, monsieur, and I cannot hear her abused.”
Renée caught her brother by the hand. He stepped out of the chapel with
Beauchamp to embrace him; then kissed Renée, and, remarking that she
was pale, fetched flooding colour to her cheeks. He was hearty air to
them after the sentimentalism they had been hearing. Beauchamp and he
walked like loving comrades at school, questioning, answering,
chattering, laughing,—a beautiful sight to Renée, and she looked at
Agnès d’Auffray to ask her whether “this Englishman” was not one of
them in his frankness and freshness.
Roland stopped to turn to Renée. “I met d’Henriel on my ride here,” he
said with a sharp inquisitive expression of eye that passed
immediately.
“You rode here from Tourdestelle, then,” said Renée.
“Has he been one of the company, marquise?”
“Did he ride by you without speaking, Roland?”
“Thus.” Roland described a Spanish caballero’s formallest salutation,
saying to Beauchamp, “Not the best sample of our young
Frenchman;—woman-spoiled! Not that the better kind of article need be
spoiled by them—heaven forbid that! Friend Nevil,” he spoke lower, “do
you know, you have something of the prophet in you? I remember: much
has come true. An old spoiler of women is worse than one spoiled by
them! Ah, well: and Madame Culling? and your seven-feet high uncle? And
have you a fleet to satisfy Nevil Beauchamp yet? You shall see a trial
of our new field-guns at Rouen.”
They were separated with difficulty.
Renée wished her brother to come in the boat; and he would have done
so, but for his objection to have his Arab bestridden by a man unknown
to him.
“My love is a four-foot, and here’s my love,” Roland said, going
outside the gilt gate-rails to the graceful little beast, that
acknowledged his ownership with an arch and swing of the neck round to
him.
He mounted and called, “Au revoir, M. le Capitaine.”
“Au revoir, M. le Commandant,” cried Beauchamp.
“Admiral and marshal, each of us in good season,” said Roland. “Thanks
to your promotion, I had a letter from my sister. Advance a grade, and
I may get another.”
Beauchamp thought of the strange gulf now between him and the time when
he pined to be a commodore, and an admiral. The gulf was bridged as he
looked at Renée petting Roland’s horse.
“Is there in the world so lovely a creature?” she said, and appealed
fondlingly to the beauty that brings out beauty, and, bidding it
disdain rivalry, rivalled it insomuch that in a moment of trance
Beauchamp with his bodily vision beheld her, not there, but on the Lido
of Venice, shining out of the years gone.
Old love reviving may be love of a phantom after all. We can, if it
must revive, keep it to the limits of a ghostly love. The ship in the
Arabian tale coming within the zone of the magnetic mountain, flies all
its bolts and bars, and becomes sheer timbers, but that is the
carelessness of the ship’s captain; and hitherto Beauchamp could
applaud himself for steering with prudence, while Renée’s attractions
warned more than they beckoned. She was magnetic to him as no other
woman was. Then whither his course but homeward?
After they had taken leave of their host and hostess of Château Dianet,
walking across a meadow to a line of charmilles that led to the
river-side, he said, “Now I have seen Roland I shall have to decide
upon going.”
“Wantonly won is deservedly lost,” said Renée. “But do not disappoint
my Roland much because of his foolish sister. Is he not looking
handsome? And he is young to be a commandant, for we have no interest
at this Court. They kept him out of the last war! My father expects to
find you at Tourdestelle, and how account to him for your hurried
flight? save with the story of that which brought you to us!”
“The glove? I shall beg for the fellow to it before I depart,
marquise.”
“You perceived my disposition to light-headedness, monsieur, when I was
a girl.”
“I said that I—But the past is dust. Shall I ever see you in England?”
“That country seems to frown on me. But if I do not go there, nor you
come here, except to imperious mysterious invitations, which will not
be repeated, the future is dust as well as the past: for me, at least.
Dust here, dust there!—if one could be like a silk-worm, and live lying
on the leaf one feeds on, it would be a sort of answer to the
riddle—living out of the dust, and in the present. I find none in my
religion. No doubt, Madame de Brézé did: why did you call Diane so to
M. Livret?”
She looked at him smiling as they came out of the shadow of the clipped
trees. He was glancing about for the boat.
“The boat is across the river,” Renée said, in a voice that made him
seek her eyes for an explanation of the dead sound. She was very pale.
“You have perfect command of yourself? For my sake!” she said.
He looked round.
Standing up in the boat, against the opposite bank, and leaning with
crossed legs on one of the sculls planted in the gravel of the river,
Count Henri d’Henriel’s handsome figure presented itself to Beauchamp’s
gaze.
With a dryness that smacked of his uncle Everard Romfrey, Beauchamp
said of the fantastical posture of the young man, “One can do that on
fresh water.”
Renée did not comprehend the sailor-sarcasm of the remark; but she also
commented on the statuesque appearance of Count Henri: “Is the pose for
photography or for sculpture?”
Neither of them showed a sign of surprise or of impatience.
M. d’Henriel could not maintain the attitude. He uncrossed his legs
deliberately, drooped hat in hand, and came paddling over; apologized
indolently, and said, “I am not, I believe, trespassing on the grounds
of Tourdestelle, Madame la Marquise!”
“You happen to be in my boat, M. le Comte,” said Renée.
“Permit me, madame.” He had set one foot on shore, with his back to
Beauchamp, and reached a hand to assist her step into the boat.
Beauchamp caught fast hold of the bows while Renée laid a finger on
Count Henri’s shoulder to steady herself.
The instant she had taken her seat, Count Henri dashed the scull’s
blade at the bank to push off with her, but the boat was fast. His
manœuvre had been foreseen. Beauchamp swung on board like the last
seaman of a launch, and crouched as the boat rocked away to the stream;
and still Count Henri leaned on the scull, not in a chosen attitude,
but for positive support. He had thrown his force into the blow, to
push off triumphantly, and leave his rival standing. It occurred that
the boat’s brief resistance and rocking away agitated his artificial
equipoise, and, by the operation of inexorable laws, the longer he
leaned across an extending surface the more was he dependent; so that
when the measure of the water exceeded the length of his failing
support on land, there was no help for it: he pitched in. His grimace
of chagrin at the sight of Beauchamp securely established, had scarcely
yielded to the grimness of feature of the man who feels he must go, as
he took the plunge; and these two emotions combined to make an
extraordinary countenance.
He went like a gallant gentleman; he threw up his heels to clear the
boat, dropping into about four feet of water, and his first remark on
rising was, “I trust, madame, I have not had the misfortune to splash
you.”
Then he waded to the bank, scrambled to his feet, and drew out his
moustachios to their curving ends. Renée nodded sharply to Beauchamp to
bid him row. He, with less of wisdom, having seized the floating scull
abandoned by Count Henri, and got it ready for the stroke, said a word
of condolence to the dripping man.
Count Henri’s shoulders and neck expressed a kind of negative that,
like a wet dog’s shake of the head, ended in an involuntary whole
length shudder, dog-like and deplorable to behold. He must have been
conscious of this miserable exhibition of himself; he turned to
Beauchamp: “You are, I am informed, a sailor, monsieur. I compliment
you on your naval tactics: our next meeting will be on land. Au revoir,
monsieur. Madame la Marquise, I have the honour to salute you.”
With these words he retreated.
“Row quickly, I beg of you,” Renée said to Beauchamp. Her desire was to
see Roland, and open her heart to her brother; for now it had to be
opened. Not a minute must be lost to prevent further mischief. And who
was guilty? she. Her heart clamoured of her guilt to waken a cry of
innocence. A disdainful pity for the superb young savage just made
ludicrous, relieved him of blame, implacable though he was. He was
nothing; an accident—a fool. But he might become a terrible instrument
of punishment. The thought of that possibility gave it an aspect of
retribution, under which her cry of innocence was insufferable in its
feebleness. It would have been different with her if Beauchamp had
taken advantage of her fever of anxiety, suddenly appeased by the sight
of him on the evening of his arrival at Tourdestelle after the storm,
to attempt a renewal of their old broken love-bonds. Then she would
have seen only a conflict between two men, neither of whom could claim
a more secret right than the other to be called her lover, and of whom
both were on a common footing, and partly despicable. But Nevil
Beauchamp had behaved as her perfect true friend, in the character she
had hoped for when she summoned him. The sense of her guilt lay in the
recognition that he had saved her. From what? From the consequences of
delirium rather than from love—surely delirium, founded on delusion;
love had not existed. She had said to Count Henri, “You speak to me of
love. I was beloved when I was a girl, before my marriage, and for
years I have not seen or corresponded with the man who loved me, and I
have only to lift my finger now and he will come to me, and not once
will he speak to me of love.” Those were the words originating the
wager of the glove. But what of her, if Nevil Beauchamp had not come?
Her heart jumped, and she blushed ungovernably in his face,—as if he
were seeing her withdraw her foot from the rock’s edge, and had that
instant rescued her. But how came it she had been so helpless? She
could ask; she could not answer.
Thinking, talking to her heart, was useless. The deceiver simply
feigned utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable. She
burned to do some act of extreme self-abasement that should bring an
unwonted degree of wrath on her externally, and so re-entitle her to
consideration in her own eyes. She burned to be interrogated, to have
to weep, to be scorned, abused, and forgiven, that she might say she
did not deserve pardon. Beauchamp was too English, evidently too blind,
for the description of judge-accuser she required; one who would worry
her without mercy, until—disgraced by the excess of torture
inflicted—he should reinstate her by as much as he had overcharged his
accusation, and a little more. Reasonably enough, instinctively in
fact, she shunned the hollow of an English ear. A surprise was in
reserve for her.
Beauchamp gave up rowing. As he rested on the sculls, his head was bent
and turned toward the bank. Renée perceived an over-swollen monster
gourd that had strayed from a garden adjoining the river, and hung
sliding heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in
prolonged contemplation of its image in the mirror below. Apparently
this obese Narcissus enchained his attention.
She tapped her foot. “Are you tired of rowing, monsieur?”
“It was exactly here,” said he, “that you told me you expected your
husband’s return.”
She glanced at the gourd, bit her lip, and, colouring, said, “At what
point of the river did I request you to congratulate me on it?”
She would not have said that, if she had known the thoughts at work
within him.
He set the boat swaying from side to side, and at once the hugeous
reflection of that conceivably self-enamoured bulk quavered and
distended, and was shattered in a thousand dancing fragments, to
re-unite and recompose its maudlin air of imaged satisfaction.
She began to have a vague idea that he was indulging grotesque fancies.
Very strangely, the ridiculous thing, in the shape of an over-stretched
likeness, that she never would have seen had he indicated it directly,
became transfused from his mind to hers by his abstract, half-amused
observation of the great dancing gourd—that capering antiquity,
lumbering volatility, wandering, self-adored, gross bald Cupid, elatest
of nondescripts! Her senses imagined the impressions agitating
Beauchamp’s, and exaggerated them beyond limit; and when he amazed her
with a straight look into her eyes, and the words, “Better let it be a
youth—and live, than fall back to that!” she understood him
immediately; and, together with her old fear of his impetuosity and
downrightness, came the vivid recollection, like a bright finger
pointing upon darkness, of what foul destiny, magnified by her present
abhorrence of it, he would have saved her from in the days of Venice
and Touraine, and unto what loathly example of the hideous grotesque
she, in spite of her lover’s foresight on her behalf, had become
allied.
Face to face as they sat, she had no defence for her scarlet cheeks;
her eyes wavered.
“We will land here; the cottagers shall row the boat up,” she said.
“Somewhere—anywhere,” said Beauchamp. “But I must speak. I will tell
you now. I do not think you to blame—barely; not in my sight; though no
man living would have suffered as I should. Probably some days more and
you would have been lost. You looked for me! Trust your instinct now
I’m with you as well as when I’m absent. Have you courage? that’s the
question. You have years to live. Can you live them in this place—with
honour? and alive really?”
Renée’s eyes grew wide; she tried to frown, and her brows merely
twitched; to speak, and she was inarticulate. His madness, miraculous
penetration, and the super-masculine charity in him, unknown to the
world of young men in their treatment of women, excited, awed, and
melted her. He had seen the whole truth of her relations with M.
d’Henriel!—the wickedness of them in one light, the innocence in
another; and without prompting a confession he forgave her. Could she
believe it? This was love, and manly love.
She yearned to be on her feet, to feel the possibility of an escape
from him.
She pointed to a landing. He sprang to the bank. “It could end in
nothing else,” he said, “unless you beat cold to me. And now I have
your hand, Renée! It’s the hand of a living woman, you have no need to
tell me that; but faithful to her comrade! I can swear it for
her—faithful to a _true_ alliance! You are not married, you are simply
chained: and you are terrorized. What a perversion of you it is! It
wrecks you. But with me? Am I not your lover? You and I are one life.
What have we suffered for but to find this out and act on it? Do I not
know that a woman lives, and is not the rooted piece of vegetation
hypocrites and tyrants expect her to be? Act on it, I say; own me,
break the chains, come to me; say, Nevil Beauchamp or death! And death
for you? But you are poisoned and thwart-eddying, as you live now:
worse, shaming the Renée I knew. Ah—Venice! But now we are both of us
wiser and stronger: we have gone through fire. Who foretold it? This
day, and this misery and perversion that we can turn to joy, if we
will—if you will! No heart to dare is no heart to love!—answer that!
Shall I see you cower away from me again? Not this time!”
He swept on in a flood, uttered mad things, foolish things, and things
of an insight electrifying to her. Through the cottager’s garden,
across a field, and within the park gates of Tourdestelle it continued
unceasingly; and deeply was she won by the rebellious note in all that
he said, deeply too by his disregard of the vulgar arts of wooers: she
detected none. He did not speak so much to win as to help her to see
with her own orbs. Nor was it roughly or chidingly, though it was
absolutely, that he stripped her of the veil a wavering woman will keep
to herself from her heart’s lord if she can.
They arrived long after the boat at Tourdestelle, and Beauchamp might
believe he had prevailed with her, but for her forlorn repetition of
the question he had put to her idly and as a new idea, instead of
significantly, with a recollection and a doubt “Have I courage, Nevil?”
The grain of common sense in cowardice caused her to repeat it when her
reason was bedimmed, and passion assumed the right to show the way of
right and wrong.