THE FACE OF RENÉE
Shortly before the ringing of the dinner-bell Rosamund knocked at
Beauchamp’s dressing-room door, the bearer of a telegram from Bevisham.
He read it in one swift run of the eyes, and said: “Come in, ma’am, I
have something for you. Madame de Rouaillout sends you this.”
Rosamund saw her name written in a French hand on the back of the card.
“You stay with us, Nevil?”
“To-night and to-morrow, perhaps. The danger seems to be over.”
“Has Dr. Shrapnel been in danger?”
“He has. If it’s quite over now!”
“I declare to you, Nevil...”
“Listen to me, ma’am; I’m in the dark about this murderous business:—an
old man, defenceless, harmless as a child!—but I know this, that you
are somewhere in it.”
“Nevil, do you not guess at some one else?”
“He! yes, he! But Cecil Baskelett led no blind man to Dr. Shrapnel’s
gate.”
“Nevil, as I live, I knew nothing of it!”
“No, but you set fire to the train. You hated the old man, and you
taught Mr. Romfrey to think that you had been insulted. I see it all.
Now you must have the courage to tell him of your error. There’s no
other course for you. I mean to take Mr. Romfrey to Dr. Shrapnel, to
save the honour of our family, as far as it can be saved.”
“What? Nevil!” exclaimed Rosamund, gaping.
“It seems little enough, ma’am. But he must go. I will have the apology
spoken, and man to man.”
“But you would never tell your uncle that?”
He laughed in his uncle’s manner.
“But, Nevil, my dearest, forgive me, I think of you—why are the
Halketts here? It is not entirely with Colonel Halkett’s consent. It is
your uncle’s influence with him that gives you your chance. Do you not
care to avail yourself of it? Ever since he heard Dr. Shrapnel’s letter
to you, Colonel Halkett has, I am sure, been tempted to confound you
with him in his mind: ah! Nevil, but recollect that it is _only_ Mr.
Romfrey who can help to give you your Cecilia. There is no dispensing
with him. Postpone your attempt to humiliate—I mean, that is, Oh!
Nevil, whatever you intend to do to overcome your uncle, trust to time,
be friends with him; be a little worldly! for her sake! to ensure her
happiness!”
Beauchamp obtained the information that his cousin Cecil had read out
the letter of Dr. Shrapnel at Mount Laurels.
The bell rang.
“Do you imagine I should sit at my uncle’s table if I did not intend to
force him to repair the wrong he has done to himself and to us?” he
said.
“Oh! Nevil, do you not see Captain Baskelett at work here?”
“What amends can Cecil Baskelett make? My uncle is a man of honour: it
is in his power. There, I leave you to speak to him; you will do it
to-night, after we break up in the drawing-room.”
Rosamund groaned: “An apology to Dr. Shrapnel from Mr. Romfrey! It is
an impossibility, Nevil! utter!”
“So you say to sit idle: but do as I tell you.”
He went downstairs.
He had barely reproached her. She wondered at that; and then remembered
his alien sad half-smile in quitting the room.
Rosamund would not present herself at her lord’s dinner-table when
there were any guests at Steynham. She prepared to receive Miss Halkett
in the drawing-room, as the guests of the house this evening chanced to
be her friends.
Madame de Rouaillout’s present to her was a photograph of M. de
Croisnel, his daughter and son in a group. Rosamund could not bear to
look at the face of Renée, and she put it out of sight. But she had
looked. She was reduced to look again.
Roland stood beside his father’s chair; Renée sat at his feet, clasping
his right hand. M. de Croisnel’s fallen eyelids and unshorn white chin
told the story of the family reunion. He was dying: his two children
were nursing him to the end.
Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman than Renée: but on which
does the eye linger longest—which draws the heart? a radiant landscape,
where the tall ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the
stately march of Summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark
water?
Dark-eyed Renée was not beauty but attraction; she touched the double
chords within us which are we know not whether harmony or discord, but
a divine discord if an uncertified harmony, memorable beyond plain
sweetness or majesty. There are touches of bliss in anguish that
superhumanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of the eternal
in the variable. These two chords of poignant antiphony she struck
throughout the range of the hearts of men, and strangely intervolved
them in vibrating unison. Only to look at her face, without hearing her
voice, without the charm of her speech, was to feel it. On Cecilia’s
entering the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret,
Rosamund handed her the card of the photographic artist of Tours,
mentioning no names.
“I should say the portrait is correct. A want of spirituality,”
Rosamund said critically, using one of the insular commonplaces, after
that manner of fastening upon what there is _not_ in a piece of Art or
nature.
Cecilia’s avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher
mark.
She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was. She
sat over the portrait blushing burningly: “And that is a brother?” she
said.
“That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,”
said Rosamund.
Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features. Renée
enchained her. Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French
face came out surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew
from the tremulous mouth. The eyes? were they quivering with internal
light, or were they set to seem so in the sensitive strange curves of
the eyelids whose awakened lashes appeared to tremble on some
borderland between lustreful significance and the mists? She caught at
the nerves like certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of a
stringed instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable. Yet she
sat there at her father’s feet gazing out into the world indifferent to
spectators, indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness.
Her left hand clasped his right, and she supported herself on the floor
with the other hand leaning away from him, to the destruction of
conventional symmetry in the picture. None but a woman of consummate
breeding dared have done as she did. It was not Southern suppleness
that saved her from the charge of harsh audacity, but something of the
kind of genius in her mood which has hurried the greater poets of sound
and speech to impose their naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the
laws to have been our meagre limitations.
The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the
excellent body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our
ranks flapping their leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments
in imagery, will best be satisfied, by the statement that she was
indescribable: a term that exacts no labour of mind from him or from
them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it fills a vacuum.
That posture of Renée displeased Cecilia and fascinated her. In an
exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure
displeasure: but here was Nevil’s first love, the woman who loved him;
and she was French. After a continued study of her Cecilia’s growing
jealousy betrayed itself in a conscious rivalry of race, coming to the
admission that Englishwomen cannot fling themselves about on the floor
without agonizing the graces: possibly, too, they cannot look
singularly without risks in the direction of slyness and brazen
archness; or talk animatedly without dipping in slang. Conventional
situations preserve them and interchange dignity with them; still life
befits them; pre-eminently that judicial seat from which in briefest
speech they deliver their judgements upon their foreign sisters.
Jealousy it was that plucked Cecilia from her majestic place and caused
her to envy in Renée things she would otherwise have disapproved.
At last she had seen the French lady’s likeness! The effect of it was a
horrid trouble in Cecilia’s cool blood, abasement, a sense of eclipse,
hardly any sense of deserving worthiness: “What am I but an heiress!”
Nevil had once called her beautiful; his praise had given her beauty.
But what is beauty when it is outshone! Ask the owners of gems. You
think them rich; they are pining.
Then, too, this Renée, who looked electrical in repose, might really
love Nevil with a love that sent her heart out to him in his
enterprises, justifying and adoring him, piercing to the hero in his
very thoughts. Would she not see that his championship of the
unfortunate man Dr. Shrapnel was heroic?
Cecilia surrendered the card to Rosamund, and it was out of sight when
Beauchamp stepped in the drawing-room. His cheeks were flushed; he had
been one against three for the better part of an hour.
“Are you going to show me the downs to-morrow morning?” Cecilia said to
him; and he replied, “You will have to be up early.”
“What’s that?” asked the colonel, at Beauchamp’s heels.
He was volunteering to join the party of two for the early morning’s
ride to the downs. Mr. Romfrey pressed his shoulder, saying, “There’s
no third horse can do it in my stables.”
Colonel Halkett turned to him.
“I had your promise to come over the kennels with me and see how I
treat a cry of mad dog, which is ninety-nine times out of a hundred mad
fool man,” Mr. Romfrey added.
By that the colonel knew he meant to stand by Nevil still and offer him
his chance of winning Cecilia.
Having pledged his word not to interfere, Colonel Halkett submitted,
and muttered, “Ah! the kennels.” Considering however what he had been
witnessing of Nevil’s behaviour to his uncle, the colonel was amazed at
Mr. Romfrey’s magnanimity in not cutting him off and disowning him.
“Why the downs?” he said.
“Why the deuce, colonel?” A question quite as reasonable, and Mr.
Romfrey laughed under his breath. To relieve an uncertainty in
Cecilia’s face, that might soon have become confusion, he described the
downs fronting the paleness of earliest dawn, and then their arch and
curve and dip against the pearly grey of the half-glow; and then, among
their hollows, lo, the illumination of the East all around, and up and
away, and a gallop for miles along the turfy thymy rolling billows,
land to left, sea to right, below you. “It’s the nearest hit to wings
we can make, Cecilia.” He surprised her with her Christian name, which
kindled in her the secret of something he expected from that ride on
the downs. Compare you the Alps with them? If you could jump on the
back of an eagle, you might. The Alps have height. But the downs have
swiftness. Those long stretching lines of the downs are greyhounds in
full career. To look at them is to set the blood racing! Speed is on
the downs, glorious motion, odorous air of sea and herb, exquisite as
in the isles of Greece. And the Continental travelling ninnies leave
England for health!—run off and forth from the downs to the steamboat,
the railway, the steaming hotel, the tourist’s shivering mountain-top,
in search of sensations! There on the downs the finest and liveliest
are at their bidding ready to fly through them like hosts of angels.
He spoke somewhat in that strain, either to relieve Cecilia or prepare
the road for Nevil, not in his ordinary style; on the contrary, with a
swing of enthusiasm that seemed to spring of ancient heartfelt
fervours. And indeed soon afterward he was telling her that there on
those downs, in full view of Steynham, he and his wife had first joined
hands.
Beauchamp sat silent. Mr. Romfrey despatched orders to the stables, and
Rosamund to the kitchen. Cecilia was rather dismayed by the formal
preparations for the ride. She declined the early cup of coffee. Mr.
Romfrey begged her to take it. “Who knows the hour when you’ll be
back?” he said. Beauchamp said nothing.
The room grew insufferable to Cecilia. She would have liked to be
wafted to her chamber in a veil, so shamefully unveiled did she seem to
be. But the French lady would have been happy in her place! Her father
kissed her as fathers do when they hand the bride into the
travelling-carriage. His “Good-night, my darling!” was in the voice of
a soldier on duty. For a concluding sign that her dim apprehensions
pointed correctly, Mr. Romfrey kissed her on the forehead. She could
not understand how it had come to pass that she found herself suddenly
on this incline, precipitated whither she would fain be going, only
less hurriedly, less openly, and with her secret merely peeping, like a
dove in the breast.