PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF Mr. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
The contest, which was an alternation of hard hitting and close
wrestling, had recommenced when Colonel Halkett stepped into the
drawing-room.
“Colonel, I find they’ve been galloping to Bevisham and back,” said Mr.
Romfrey.
“I’ve heard of it,” the colonel replied. Not perceiving a sign of
dissatisfaction on his friend’s face, he continued: “To that man
Shrapnel.”
“Cecilia did not dismount,” said Beauchamp.
“You took her to that man’s gate. It was not with my sanction. You know
my ideas of the man.”
“If you were to see him now, colonel, I don’t think you would speak
harshly of him.”
“We’re not obliged to go and look on men who have had their measure
dealt them.”
“Barbarously,” said Beauchamp.
Mr. Romfrey in the most placid manner took a chair. “Windy talk, that!”
he said.
Colonel Halkett seated himself. Stukely Culbrett turned a sheet of
manuscript he was reading.
Beauchamp began a caged lion’s walk on the rug under the mantelpiece.
“I shall not spare you from hearing what I think of it, sir.”
“We’ve had what you think of it twice over,” said Mr. Romfrey. “I
suppose it was the first time for information, the second time for
emphasis, and the rest counts to keep it alive in your recollection.”
“This is what you have to take to heart, sir; that Dr. Shrapnel is now
seriously ill.”
“I’m sorry for it, and I’ll pay the doctor’s bill.”
“You make it hard for me to treat you with respect.”
“Fire away. Those Radical friends of yours have to learn a lesson, and
it’s worth a purse to teach them that a lady, however feeble she may
seem to them, is exactly of the strength of the best man of her
acquaintance.”
“That’s well said!” came from Colonel Halkett.
Beauchamp stared at him, amazed by the commendation of empty language.
“You acted in error; barbarously, but in error,” he addressed his
uncle.
“And you have got a fine topic for mouthing,” Mr. Romfrey rejoined.
“You mean to sit still under Dr. Shrapnel’s forgiveness?”
“He’s taken to copy the Christian religion, has he?”
“You know you were deluded when you struck him.”
“Not a whit.”
“Yes, you know it now: Mrs. Culling—”
“Drag in no woman, Nevil Beauchamp!”
“She has confessed to you that Dr. Shrapnel neither insulted her nor
meant to ruffle her.”
“She has done no such nonsense.”
“If she has not!—but I trust her to have done it.”
“You play the trumpeter, you terrorize her.”
“Into opening her lips wider; nothing else. I’ll have the truth from
her, and no mincing: and from Cecil Baskelett and Palmet.”
“Give Cecil a second licking, if you can, and have him off to
Shrapnel.”
“You!” cried Beauchamp.
At this juncture Stukely Culbrett closed the manuscript in his hands,
and holding it out to Beauchamp, said:
“Here’s your letter, Nevil. It’s tolerably hard to decipher. It’s mild
enough; it’s middling good pulpit. I like it.”
“What have you got there?” Colonel Halkett asked him.
“A letter of his friend Dr. Shrapnel on the Country. Read a bit,
colonel.”
“I? That letter! Mild, do you call it?” The colonel started back his
chair in declining to touch the letter.
“Try it,” said Stukely. “It’s the letter they have been making the
noise about. It ought to be printed. There’s a hit or two at the
middle-class that I should like to see in print. It’s really not bad
pulpit; and I suspect that what you object to, colonel, is only the
dust of a well-thumped cushion. Shrapnel thumps with his fist. He
doesn’t say much that’s new. If the parsons were men they’d be saying
it every Sunday. If they did, colonel, I should hear you saying, amen.”
“Wait till they do say it.”
“That’s a long stretch. They’re turn-cocks of one Water-company—to wash
the greasy citizens!”
“You’re keeping Nevil on the gape;” said Mr. Romfrey, with a whimsical
shrewd cast of the eye at Beauchamp, who stood alert not to be foiled,
arrow-like in look and readiness to repeat his home-shot. Mr. Romfrey
wanted to hear more of that unintelligible “You!” of Beauchamp’s. But
Stukely Culbrett intended that the latter should be foiled, and he
continued his diversion from the angry subject.
“We’ll drop the sacerdotals,” he said. “They’re behind a veil for us,
and so are we for them. I’m with you, colonel; I wouldn’t have them
persecuted; they sting fearfully when whipped. No one listens to them
now except the class that goes to sleep under them, to ‘set an example’
to the class that can’t understand them. Shrapnel is like the breeze
shaking the turf-grass outside the church-doors; a trifle fresher. He
knocks nothing down.”
“He can’t!” ejaculated the colonel.
“He sermonizes to shake, that’s all. I know the kind of man.”
“Thank heaven, it’s not a common species in England!”
“Common enough to be classed.”
Beauchamp struck through the conversation of the pair: “Can I see you
alone to-night, sir, or to-morrow morning?”
“You may catch me where you can,” was Mr. Romfrey’s answer.
“Where’s that? It’s for your sake and mine, not for Dr. Shrapnel’s. I
have to speak to you, and must. You have done your worst with him; you
can’t undo it. You have to think of your honour as a gentleman. I
intend to treat you with respect, but wolf is the title now, whether I
say it or not.”
“Shrapnel’s a rather long-legged sheep?”
“He asks for nothing from you.”
“He would have got nothing, at a cry of peccavi!”
“He was innocent, perfectly blameless; he would not lie to save
himself. You mistook that for—but you were an engine shot along a line
of rails. He does you the justice to say you acted in error.”
“And you’re his parrot.”
“He pardons you.”
“Ha! t’ other cheek!”
“You went on that brute’s errand in ignorance. Will you keep to the
character now you know the truth? Hesitation about it doubles the
infamy. An old man! the best of men! the kindest and truest! the most
unselfish!”
“He tops me by half a head, and he’s my junior.”
Beauchamp suffered himself to give out a groan of sick derision: “Ah!”
“And it was no joke holding him tight,” said Mr. Romfrey, “I’d as lief
snap an ash. The fellow (he leaned round to Colonel Halkett) must be a
fellow of a fine constitution. And he took his punishment like a man.
I’ve known worse: and far worse: gentlemen by birth. There’s the choice
of taking it upright or fighting like a rabbit with a weasel in his
hole. Leave him to think it over, he’ll come right. I think no harm of
him, I’ve no animus. A man must have his lesson at some time of life. I
did what I had to do.”
“Look here, Nevil,” Stukely Culbrett checked Beauchamp in season: “I
beg to inquire what Dr. Shrapnel means by ‘the people.’ We have in our
country the nobles and the squires, and after them, as I understand it,
the people: that’s to say, the middle-class and the working-class—fat
and lean. I’m quite with Shrapnel when he lashes the fleshpots. They
want it, and they don’t get it from ‘their organ,’ the Press. I fancy
you and I agree about their organ; the dismallest organ that ever
ground a hackneyed set of songs and hymns to madden the thoroughfares.”
“The Press of our country!” interjected Colonel Halkett in moaning
parenthesis.
“It’s the week-day Parson of the middle-class, colonel. They have their
thinking done for them as the Chinese have their dancing. But, Nevil,
your Dr. Shrapnel seems to treat the traders as identical with the
aristocracy in opposition to his ‘people.’ The traders are the cursed
middlemen, bad friends of the ‘people,’ and infernally treacherous to
the nobles till money hoists them. It’s they who pull down the country.
They hold up the nobles to the hatred of the democracy, and the
democracy to scare the nobles. One’s when they want to swallow a
privilege, and the other’s when they want to ring-fence their gains.
How is it Shrapnel doesn’t expose the trick? He must see through it. I
like that letter of his. People is one of your Radical big words that
burst at a query. He can’t mean Quince, and Bottom, and Starveling,
Christopher Sly, Jack Cade, Caliban, and poor old Hodge? No, no, Nevil.
Our clowns are the stupidest in Europe. They can’t cook their meals.
They can’t spell; they can scarcely speak. They haven’t a jig in their
legs. And I believe they’re losing their grin! They’re nasty when their
blood’s up. Shakespeare’s Cade tells you what he thought of
Radicalizing the people. ‘And as for your mother, I’ll make her a
duke’; that’s one of their songs. The word people, in England, is a
dyspeptic agitator’s dream when he falls nodding over the red chapter
of French history. Who won the great liberties for England? My book
says, the nobles. And who made the great stand later?—the squires. What
have the middlemen done but bid for the people they despise and fear,
dishonour us abroad and make a hash of us at home? Shrapnel sees that.
Only he has got the word people in his mouth. The people of England, my
dear fellow, want _heading_. Since the traders obtained power we have
been a country on all fours. Of course Shrapnel sees it: I say so. But
talk to him and teach him where to look for the rescue.”
Colonel Halkett said to Stukely: “If you have had a clear idea in what
you have just spoken, my head’s no place for it!”
Stukely’s unusually lengthy observations had somewhat heated him, and
he protested with earnestness: “It was pure Tory, my dear colonel.”
But the habitually and professedly cynical should not deliver
themselves at length: for as soon as they miss their customary incision
of speech they are apt to aim to recover it in loquacity, and thus it
may be that the survey of their ideas becomes disordered.
Mr. Culbrett endangered his reputation for epigram in a good cause, it
shall be said.
These interruptions were torture to Beauchamp. Nevertheless the end was
gained. He sank into a chair silent.
Mr. Romfrey wished to have it out with his nephew, of whose comic
appearance as a man full of thunder, and occasionally rattling, yet all
the while trying to be decorous and politic, he was getting tired. He
foresaw that a tussle between them in private would possibly be too hot
for his temper, admirably under control though it was.
“Why not drag Cecil to Shrapnel?” he said, for a provocation.
Beauchamp would not be goaded.
Colonel Halkett remarked that he would have to leave Steynham the next
day. His host remonstrated with him. The colonel said: “Early.” He had
very particular business at home. He was positive, and declined every
inducement to stay. Mr. Romfrey glanced at Nevil, thinking, You poor
fool! And then he determined to let the fellow have five minutes alone
with him.
This occurred at midnight, in that half-armoury, half-library, which
was his private room.
Rosamund heard their voices below. She cried out to herself that it was
her doing, and blamed her beloved, and her master, and Dr. Shrapnel, in
the breath of her self-recrimination. The demagogue, the
over-punctilious gentleman, the faint lover, surely it must be reason
wanting in the three for each of them in turn to lead the other, by an
excess of some sort of the quality constituting their men’s natures, to
wreck a calm life and stand in contention! Had Shrapnel been commonly
reasonable he would have apologized to Mr. Romfrey, or had Mr. Romfrey,
he would not have resorted to force to punish the supposed offender, or
had Nevil, he would have held his peace until he had gained his bride.
As it was; the folly of the three knocked at her heart, uniting to
bring the heavy accusation against one poor woman, quite in the old
way: the Who is she? of the mocking Spaniard at mention of a social
catastrophe. Rosamund had a great deal of the pride of her sex, and she
resented any slur on it. She felt almost superciliously toward Mr.
Romfrey and Nevil for their not taking hands to denounce the plotter,
Cecil Baskelett. They seemed a pair of victims to him, nearly as much
so as the wretched man Shrapnel. It was their senselessness which made
her guilty! And simply because she had uttered two or three
exclamations of dislike of a revolutionary and infidel she was
compelled to groan under her present oppression! Is there anything to
be hoped of men? Rosamund thought bitterly of Nevil’s idea of their
progress. Heaven help them! But the unhappy creatures have ceased to
look to a heaven for help.
We see the consequence of it in this Shrapnel complication.
Three men: and one struck down; the other defeated in his benevolent
intentions; the third sacrificing fortune and happiness: all three
owing their mischance to one or other of the vague ideas disturbing
men’s heads! Where shall we look for mother wit?—or say, common
suckling’s instinct? Not to men, thought Rosamund.
She was listening to the voices of Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp in a
fever. Ordinarily the lord of Steynham was not out of his bed later
than twelve o’clock at night. His door opened at half-past one. Not a
syllable was exchanged by the couple in the hall. They had fought it
out. Mr. Romfrey came upstairs alone, and on the closing of his
chamber-door she slipped down to Beauchamp and had a dreadful hour with
him that subdued her disposition to sit in judgement upon men. The
unavailing attempt to move his uncle had wrought him to the state in
which passionate thoughts pass into speech like heat to flame. Rosamund
strained her mental sight to gain a conception of his prodigious horror
of the treatment of Dr. Shrapnel that she might think him sane: and to
retain a vestige of comfort in her bosom she tried to moderate and make
light of as much as she could conceive. Between the two efforts she had
no sense but that of helplessness. Once more she was reduced to promise
that she would speak the whole truth to Mr. Romfrey, even to the fact
that she had experienced a common woman’s jealousy of Dr. Shrapnel’s
influence, and had alluded to him jealously, spitefully, and falsely.
There was no mercy in Beauchamp. He was for action at any cost, with
all the forces he could gather, and without delays. He talked of
Cecilia as his uncle’s bride to him. Rosamund could hardly trust her
ears when he informed her he had told his uncle of his determination to
compel him to accomplish the act of penitence. “Was it prudent to say
it, Nevil?” she asked. But, as in his politics, he disdained prudence.
A monstrous crime had been committed, involving the honour of the
family. No subtlety of insinuation, no suggestion, could wean him from
the fixed idea that the apology to Dr. Shrapnel must be spoken by his
uncle in person.
“If one could only imagine Mr. Romfrey doing it!” Rosamund groaned.
“He shall: and you will help him,” said Beauchamp.
“If you loved a woman half as much as you do that man!”
“If I knew a woman as good, as wise, as noble as he!”
“You are losing her.”
“You expect me to go through ceremonies of courtship at a time like
this! If she cares for me she will feel with me. Simple compassion—but
let Miss Halkett be. I’m afraid I overtasked her in taking her to
Bevisham. She remained outside the garden. Ma’am, she is unsullied by
contact with a single shrub of Dr. Shrapnel’s territory.”
“Do not be so bitterly ironical, Nevil. You have not seen her as I
have.”
Rosamund essayed a tender sketch of the fair young lady, and fancied
that she drew forth a sigh; she would have coloured the sketch, but he
commanded her to hurry off to bed, and think of her morning’s work.
A commission of which we feel we can accurately forecast the
unsuccessful end is not likely to be undertaken with an ardour that
might perhaps astound the presageing mind with unexpected issues.
Rosamund fulfilled hers in the style of one who has learnt a lesson,
and, exactly as she had anticipated, Mr. Romfrey accused her of coming
to him from a conversation with that fellow Nevil overnight. He
shrugged and left the house for his morning’s walk across the fields.
Colonel Halkett and Cecilia beheld him from the breakfast-room
returning with Beauchamp, who had waylaid him and was hammering his
part in the now endless altercation. It could be descried at any
distance; and how fine was Mr. Romfrey’s bearing!—truly noble by
contrast, as of a grave big dog worried by a small barking dog. There
is to an unsympathetic observer an intense vexatiousness in the
exhibition of such pertinacity. To a soldier accustomed at a glance to
estimate powers of attack and defence, this repeated puny assailing of
a fortress that required years of siege was in addition ridiculous. Mr.
Romfrey appeared impregnable, and Beauchamp mad. “He’s foaming again!”
said the colonel, and was only ultra-pictorial. “Before breakfast!” was
a further slur on Beauchamp.
Mr. Romfrey was elevated by the extraordinary comicality of the notion
of the proposed apology to heights of humour beyond laughter, whence we
see the unbounded capacity of the general man for folly, and rather
commiserate than deride him. He was quite untroubled. It demanded a
steady view of the other side of the case to suppose of one whose
control of his temper was perfect, that he could be in the wrong. He at
least did not think so, and Colonel Halkett relied on his common sense.
Beauchamp’s brows were smouldering heavily, except when he had to talk.
He looked paleish and worn, and said he had been up early. Cecilia
guessed that he had not been to bed.
It was dexterously contrived by her host, in spite of the colonel’s
manifest anxiety to keep them asunder, that she should have some
minutes with Beauchamp out in the gardens. Mr. Romfrey led them out,
and then led the colonel away to offer him a choice of pups of rare
breed.
“Nevil,” said Cecilia, “you will not think it presumption in me to give
you advice?”
Her counsel to him was, that he should leave Steynham immediately, and
trust to time for his uncle to reconsider his conduct.
Beauchamp urged the counter-argument of the stain on the family honour.
She hinted at expediency; he frankly repudiated it.
The downs faced them, where the heavenly vast “might have been” of
yesterday wandered thinner than a shadow of to-day; weaving a story
without beginning, crisis, or conclusion, flowerless and fruitless, but
with something of infinite in it sweeter to brood on than the future of
her life to Cecilia.
“If meanwhile Dr. Shrapnel should die, and repentance comes too late!”
said Beauchamp.
She had no clear answer to that, save the hope of its being an
unfounded apprehension. “As far as it is in my power, Nevil, I will
avoid injustice to him in my thoughts.”
He gazed at her thankfully. “Well,” said he, “that’s like sighting the
cliffs. But I don’t feel home round me while the colonel is so
strangely prepossessed. For a high-spirited gentleman like your father
to approve, or at least accept, an act so barbarous is
incomprehensible. Speak to him, Cecilia, will you? Let him know your
ideas.”
She assented. He said instantly, “Persuade him to speak to my uncle
Everard.”
She was tempted to smile.
“I must do only what I think wise, if I am to be of service, Nevil.”
“True, but paint that scene to him. An old man, utterly defenceless,
making no defence! a cruel error. The colonel can’t, or he doesn’t,
clearly get it inside him, otherwise I’m certain it would revolt him:
just as I am certain my uncle Everard is at this moment a stone-blind
man. If he has done a thing, he can’t question it, won’t examine it.
The thing becomes a part of him, as much as his hand or his head. He’s
a man of the twelfth century. Your father might be helped to understand
him first.”
“Yes,” she said, not very warmly, though sadly.
“Tell the colonel how it must have been brought about. For Cecil
Baskelett called on Dr. Shrapnel two days before Mr. Romfrey stood at
his gate.”
The name of Cecil caused her to draw in her shoulders in a
half-shudder. “It may indeed be Captain Baskelett who set this cruel
thing in motion!”
“Then point that out to your father, said he, perceiving a chance of
winning her to his views through a concrete object of her dislike, and
cooling toward the woman who betrayed a vulgar characteristic of her
sex; who was merely woman, unable sternly to recognize the doing of a
foul wrong because of her antipathy, until another antipathy
enlightened her.
He wanted in fact a ready-made heroine, and did not give her credit for
the absence of fire in her blood, as well as for the unexercised
imagination which excludes young women from the power to realize
unwonted circumstances. We men walking about the world have perhaps no
more imagination of matters not domestic than they; but what we have is
quick with experience: we see the thing we hear of: women come to it
how they can.
Cecilia was recommended to weave a narrative for her father, and
ultimately induce him, if she could, to give a gentleman’s opinion of
the case to Mr. Romfrey.
Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she
received. “Your father will say so and so: answer him with this and
that.” Beauchamp supplied her with phrases. She was to renew and renew
the attack; hammer as he did. Yesterday she had followed him: to-day
she was to march beside him—hardly as an equal. Patience! was the word
she would have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his
nature which this hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with
unusual perspicacity. Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit
that he had grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings.
He said: “I go to Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage, and don’t know how to hold up
my head before Miss Denham. She confided him to me when she left for
Switzerland!”
There was that to be thought of, certainly.
Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing
together in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny.
“I’ve been calling you several times, my dear,” he complained. “We
start in seven minutes. Bustle, and bonnet at once. Nevil, I’m sorry
for this business. Good-bye. Be a good boy, Nevil,” he murmured
kindheartedly, and shook Beauchamp’s hand with the cordiality of an
extreme relief in leaving him behind.
The colonel and Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp were standing on the
hall-steps when Rosamund beckoned the latter and whispered a request
for _that letter_ of Dr. Shrapnel’s. “It is for Miss Halkett, Nevil.”
He plucked the famous epistle from his bulging pocketbook, and added a
couple of others in the same handwriting.
“Tell her, a first reading—it’s difficult to read at first,” he said,
and burned to read it to Cecilia himself: to read it to her with his
comments and explanations appeared imperative. It struck him in a flash
that Cecilia’s counsel to him to quit Steynham for awhile was good. And
if he went to Bevisham he would be assured of Dr. Shrapnel’s condition:
notes and telegrams from the cottage were too much tempered to console
and deceive him.
“Send my portmanteau and bag after me to Bevisham,” he said to
Rosamund, and announced to the woefully astonished colonel that he
would have the pleasure of journeying in his company as far as the
town.
“Are you ready? No packing?” said the colonel.
“It’s better to have your impediments in the rear of you, and march!”
said Mr. Romfrey.
Colonel Halkett declined to wait for anybody. He shouted for his
daughter. The lady’s maid appeared, and then Cecilia with Rosamund.
“We can’t entertain you, Nevil; we’re away to the island: I’m sorry,”
said the colonel; and observing Cecilia’s face in full crimson, he
looked at her as if he had lost a battle by the turn of events at the
final moment.
Mr. Romfrey handed Cecilia into the carriage. He exchanged a friendly
squeeze with the colonel, and offered his hand to his nephew. Beauchamp
passed him with a nod and “Good-bye, sir.”
“Have ready at Holdesbury for the middle of the month,” said Mr.
Romfrey, unruffled, and bowed to Cecilia.
“If you think of bringing my cousin Baskelett, give me warning, sir,”
cried Beauchamp.
“Give me warning, if you want the house for Shrapnel,” replied his
uncle, and remarked to Rosamund, as the carriage wheeled round the
mounded laurels to the avenue, “He mayn’t be quite cracked. The fellow
seems to have a turn for catching his opportunity by the tail. He had
better hold fast, for it’s his last.”