CECILIA CONQUERED
The carriage rolled out of the avenue and through the park, for some
time parallel with the wavy downs. Once away from Steynham Colonel
Halkett breathed freely, as if he had dropped a load: he was free of
his bond to Mr. Romfrey, and so great was the sense of relief in him
that he resolved to do battle against his daughter, supposing her still
lively blush to be the sign of the enemy’s flag run up on a surrendered
citadel. His authority was now to be thought of: his paternal sanction
was in his own keeping. Beautiful as she looked, it was hardly credible
that a fellow in possession of his reason could have let slip his
chance of such a prize; but whether he had or had not, the colonel felt
that he occupied a position enabling him either to out-manœuvre, or, if
need were, interpose forcibly and punish him for his half-heartedness.
Cecilia looked the loveliest of women to Beauchamp’s eyes, with her
blush, and the letters of Dr. Shrapnel in her custody, at her express
desire. Certain terms in the letters here and there, unsweet to ladies,
began to trouble his mind.
“By the way, colonel,” he said, “you had a letter of Dr. Shrapnel’s
read to you by Captain Baskelett.”
“Iniquitous rubbish!”
“With his comments on it, I dare say you thought it so. I won’t speak
of his right to make it public. He wanted to produce his impressions of
it and me, and that is a matter between him and me. Dr. Shrapnel makes
use of strong words now and then, but I undertake to produce a totally
different impression on you by reading the letter myself—sparing you”
(he turned to Cecilia) “a word or two, common enough to men who write
in black earnest and have humour.” He cited his old favourite, the
black and bright lecturer on Heroes. “You have read him, I know,
Cecilia. Well, Dr. Shrapnel is another, who writes in his own style,
not the leading-article style or modern pulpit stuff. He writes to
rouse.”
“He does that to my temper,” said the colonel.
“Perhaps here and there he might offend Cecilia’s taste,” Beauchamp
pursued for her behoof. “Everything depends on the mouthpiece. I should
not like the letter to be read without my being by;—except by men: any
just-minded man may read it: Seymour Austin, for example. Every line is
a text to the mind of the writer. Let me call on you to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?” Colonel Halkett put on a thoughtful air. “To-morrow we’re
off to the island for a couple of days; and there’s Lord Croyston’s
garden party, and the Yacht Ball. Come this evening-dine with us. No
reading of letters, please. I can’t stand it, Nevil.”
The invitation was necessarily declined by a gentleman who could not
expect to be followed by supplies of clothes and linen for evening wear
that day.
“Ah, we shall see you some day or other,” said the colonel.
Cecilia was less alive to Beauchamp’s endeavour to prepare her for the
harsh words in the letter than to her father’s insincerity. She would
have asked her friend to come in the morning next day, but for the
dread of deepening her blush.
“Do you intend to start so early in the morning, papa?” she ventured to
say; and he replied, “As early as possible.”
“I don’t know what news I shall have in Bevisham, or I would engage to
run over to the island,” said Beauchamp, with a flattering persistency
or singular obtuseness.
“You will dance,” he subsequently observed to Cecilia, out of the heart
of some reverie. He had been her admiring partner on the night before
the drive from Itchincope into Bevisham, and perhaps thought of her
graceful dancing at the Yacht Ball, and the contrast it would present
to his watch beside a sick man—struck down by one of his own family.
She could have answered, “Not if you wish me not to”; while smiling at
the quaint sorrowfulness of his tone.
“Dance!” quoth Colonel Halkett, whose present temper discerned a
healthy antagonism to misanthropic Radicals in the performance, “all
young people dance. Have you given over dancing?”
“Not entirely, colonel.”
Cecilia danced with Mr. Tuckham at the Yacht Ball, and was vividly
mindful of every slight incident leading to and succeeding her lover’s
abrupt, “You will dance”: which had all passed by her dream-like up to
that hour: his attempt to forewarn her of the phrases she would deem
objectionable in Dr. Shrapnel’s letter; his mild acceptation of her
father’s hostility; his adieu to her, and his melancholy departure on
foot from the station, as she drove away to Mount Laurels and gaiety.
Why do I dance? she asked herself. It was not in the spirit of
happiness. Her heart was not with Dr. Shrapnel, but very near him, and
heavy as a chamber of the sick. She was afraid of her father’s
favourite, imagining, from the colonel’s unconcealed opposition to
Beauchamp, that he had designs in the interests of Mr. Tuckham. But the
hearty gentleman scattered her secret terrors by his bluffness and
openness. He asked her to remember that she had recommended him to
listen to Seymour Austin, and he had done so, he said. Undoubtedly he
was much improved, much less overbearing.
He won her confidence by praising and loving her father, and when she
alluded to the wonderful services he had rendered on the Welsh estate,
he said simply that her father’s thanks repaid him. He recalled his
former downrightness only in speaking of the case of Dr. Shrapnel, upon
which, both with the colonel and with her, he was unreservedly
condemnatory of Mr. Romfrey. Colonel Halkett’s defence of the true
knight and guardian of the reputation of ladies, fell to pieces in the
presence of Mr. Tuckham. He had seen Dr. Shrapnel, on a visit to Mr.
Lydiard, whom he described as hanging about Bevisham, philandering as a
married man should not, though in truth he might soon expect to be
released by the death of his crazy wife. The doctor, he said, had been
severely shaken by the monstrous assault made on him, and had been most
unrighteously handled. The doctor was an inoffensive man in his private
life, detestable and dangerous though his teachings were. Outside
politics Mr. Tuckham went altogether with Beauchamp. He promised also
that old Mrs. Beauchamp should be accurately informed of the state of
matters between Captain Beauchamp and Mr. Romfrey. He left Mount
Laurels to go back in attendance on the venerable lady, without once
afflicting Cecilia with a shiver of well-founded apprehension, and she
was grateful to him almost to friendly affection in the vanishing of
her unjust suspicion, until her father hinted that there was the man of
his heart. Then she closed all avenues to her own.
A period of maidenly distress not previously unknown to her ensued.
Proposals of marriage were addressed to her by two untitled gentlemen,
and by the Earl of Lockrace: three within a fortnight. The recognition
of the young heiress’s beauty at the Yacht Ball was accountable for the
bursting out of these fires. Her father would not have deplored her
acceptance of the title of Countess of Lockrace. In the matter of
rejections, however, her will was paramount, and he was on her side
against relatives when the subject was debated among them. He called
her attention to the fact impressively, telling her that she should not
hear a syllable from him to persuade her to marry: the emphasis of
which struck the unspoken warning on her intelligence: Bring no man to
me of whom I do not approve!
“Worthier of you, _as I hope to become_,” Beauchamp had said. Cecilia
lit on that part of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter where “Fight this out within
you,” distinctly alluded to the unholy love. Could she think ill of the
man who thus advised him? She shared Beauchamp’s painful feeling for
him in a sudden tremour of her frame; as it were through his touch. To
the rest of the letter her judgement stood opposed, save when a
sentence here and there reminded her of Captain Baskelett’s insolent
sing-song declamation of it: and that would have turned Sacred Writing
to absurdity.
Beauchamp had mentioned Seymour Austin as one to whom he would
willingly grant a perusal of the letter. Mr. Austin came to Mount
Laurels about the close of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel
Halkett had spent his customary days of September shooting at Steynham.
Beauchamp’s folly was the colonel’s theme, for the fellow had dragged
Lord Palmet there, and driven his uncle out of patience. Mr. Romfrey’s
monumental patience had been exhausted by him. The colonel boiled over
with accounts of Beauchamp’s behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet,
and Baskelett, and Mrs. Culling: how he flew at and worried everybody
who seemed to him to have had a hand in the proper chastisement of that
man Shrapnel. That pestiferous letter of Shrapnel’s was animadverted
on, of course; and, “I should like you to have heard it, Austin,” the
colonel said, “just for you to have a notion of the kind of universal
blow-up those men are scheming, and would hoist us with, if they could
get a little more blasting-powder than they mill in their lunatic
heads.”
Now Cecilia wished for Mr. Austin’s opinion of Dr. Shrapnel; and as the
delicate state of her inclinations made her conscious that to give him
the letter covertly would be to betray them to him, who had once, not
knowing it, moved her to think of a possible great change in her life,
she mustered courage to say, “Captain Beauchamp at my request lent me
the letter to read; I have it, and others written by Dr. Shrapnel.”
Her father hummed to himself, and immediately begged Seymour Austin not
to waste his time on the stuff, though he had no idea that a perusal of
it could awaken other than the gravest reprehension in so rational a
Tory gentleman.
Mr. Austin read the letter through. He asked to see the other letters
mentioned by Cecilia, and read them calmly, without a frown or an
interjection. She sat sketching, her father devouring newspaper
columns.
“It’s the writing of a man who means well,” Mr. Austin delivered his
opinion.
“Why, the man’s an infidel!” Colonel Halkett exclaimed.
“There are numbers.”
“They have the grace not to confess, then.”
“It’s as well to know what the world’s made of, colonel. The clergy
shut their eyes. There’s no treating a disease without reading it; and
if we are to acknowledge a ‘vice,’ as Dr. Shrapnel would say of the
so-called middle-class, it is the smirking over what they think, or
their not caring to think at all. Too many time-servers rot the State.
I can understand the effect of such writing on a mind like Captain
Beauchamp’s. It would do no harm to our young men to have those letters
read publicly and lectured on—by competent persons. Half the thinking
world may think pretty much the same on some points as Dr. Shrapnel;
they are too wise or too indolent to say it: and of the other half,
about a dozen members would be competent to reply to him. He is the
earnest man, and flies at politics as uneasy young brains fly to
literature, fancying they can write because they can write with a pen.
He perceives a bad adjustment of things: which is correct. He is
honest, and takes his honesty for a virtue: and that entitles him to
believe in himself: and that belief causes him to see in all opposition
to him the wrong he has perceived in existing circumstances: and so in
a dream of power he invokes the people: and as they do not stir, he
takes to prophecy. This is the round of the politics of impatience. The
study of politics should be guided by some light of statesmanship,
otherwise it comes to this wild preaching.
These men are theory-tailors, not politicians. They are the men who
make the ‘strait-waistcoat for humanity.’ They would fix us to first
principles like tethered sheep or hobbled horses. I should enjoy
replying to him, if I had time. The whole letter is composed of
variations upon one idea. Still I must say the man interests me; I
should like to talk to him.”
Mr. Austin paid no heed to the colonel’s “Dear me! dear me!” of
amazement. He said of the style of the letters, that it was the puffing
of a giant: a strong wind rather than speech: and begged Cecilia to
note that men who labour to force their dreams on mankind and turn
vapour into fact, usually adopt such a style. Hearing that this private
letter had been deliberately read through by Mr. Romfrey, and handed by
him to Captain Baskelett, who had read it out in various places, Mr.
Austin said:
“A strange couple!” He appeared perplexed by his old friend’s approval
of them. “There we decidedly differ,” said he, when the case of Dr.
Shrapnel was related by the colonel, with a refusal to condemn Mr.
Romfrey. He pronounced Mr. Romfrey’s charges against Dr. Shrapnel,
taken in conjunction with his conduct, to be baseless, childish, and
wanton. The colonel would not see the case in that light; but Cecilia
did. It was a justification of Beauchamp; and how could she ever have
been blind to it?—scarcely blind, she remembered, but sensitively
blinking her eyelids to distract her sight in contemplating it, and to
preserve her repose. As to Beauchamp’s demand of the apology, Mr.
Austin considered that it might be an instance of his want of knowledge
of men, yet could not be called silly, and to call it insane was the
rhetoric of an adversary.
“I do call it insane,” said the colonel.
He separated himself from his daughter by a sharp division.
Had Beauchamp appeared at Mount Laurels, Cecilia would have been ready
to support and encourage him, boldly. Backed by Mr. Austin, she saw
some good in Dr. Shrapnel’s writing, much in Beauchamp’s devotedness.
He shone clear to her reason, at last: partly because her father in his
opposition to him did not, but was on the contrary unreasonable, cased
in mail, mentally clouded. She sat with Mr. Austin and her father,
trying repeatedly, in obedience to Beauchamp’s commands, to bring the
latter to a just contemplation of the unhappy case; behaviour on her
part which rendered the colonel inveterate.
Beauchamp at this moment was occupied in doing secretary’s work for Dr.
Shrapnel. So Cecilia learnt from Mr. Lydiard, who came to pay his
respects to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux at Mount Laurels. The pursuit of the
apology was continued in letters to his uncle and occasional interviews
with him, which were by no means instigated by the doctor, Mr. Lydiard
informed the ladies. He described Beauchamp as acting in the spirit of
a man who has sworn an oath to abandon every pleasure in life, that he
may, as far as it lies in his power, indemnify his friend for the wrong
done to him.
“Such men are too terrible for me,” said Mrs. Devereux.
Cecilia thought the reverse: Not for me! But she felt a strain upon her
nature, and she was miserable in her alienation from her father.
Kissing him one night, she laid her head on his breast, and begged his
forgiveness. He embraced her tenderly. “Wait, only wait; you will see I
am right,” he said, and prudently said no more, and did not ask her to
speak.
She was glad that she had sought the reconciliation from her heart’s
natural warmth, on hearing some time later that M. de Croisnel was
dead, and that Beauchamp meditated starting for France to console his
Renée. Her continual agitations made her doubtful of her human
feelings: she clung to that instance of her filial stedfastness.
The day before Cecilia and her father left Mount Laurels for their
season in Wales, Mr. Tuckham and Beauchamp came together to the house,
and were closeted an hour with her father. Cecilia sat in the
drawing-room, thinking that she did indeed wait, and had great
patience. Beauchamp entered the room alone. He looked worn and thin, of
a leaden colour, like the cloud that bears the bolt. News had reached
him of the death of Lord Avonley in the hunting-field, and he was going
on to Steynham to persuade his uncle to accompany him to Bevisham and
wash the guilt of his wrong-doing off him before applying for the
title. “You would advise me not to go?” he said. “I must. I should be
dishonoured myself if I let a chance pass. I run the risk of being a
beggar: I’m all but one now.”
Cecilia faltered: “Do you see a chance?”
“Hardly more than an excuse for trying it,” he replied.
She gave him back Dr. Shrapnel’s letters. “I have read them,” was all
she said. For he might have just returned from France, with the breath
of Renée about him, and her pride would not suffer her to melt him in
rivalry by saying what she had been led to think of the letters.
Hearing nothing from her, he silently put them in his pocket. The
struggle with his uncle seemed to be souring him or deadening him.
They were not alone for long. Mr. Tuckham presented himself to take his
leave of her. Old Mrs. Beauchamp was dying, and he had only come to
Mount Laurels on special business. Beauchamp was just as anxious to
hurry away.
Her father found her sitting in the solitude of a drawing-room at
midday, pale-faced, with unoccupied fingers, not even a book in her
lap.
He walked up and down the room until Cecilia, to say something, said:
“Mr. Tuckham could not stay.”
“No,” said her father; “he could not. He has to be back as quick as he
can to cut his legacy in halves!”
Cecilia looked perplexed.
“I’ll speak plainly,” said the colonel. “He sees that Nevil has ruined
himself with his uncle. The old lady won’t allow Nevil to visit her; in
her condition it would be an excitement beyond her strength to bear.
She sent Blackburn to bring Nevil here, and give him the option of
stating before me whether those reports about his misconduct in France
were true or not. He demurred at first: however, he says they are not
true. He would have run away with the Frenchwoman, and he would have
fought the duel: but he did neither. Her brother ran ahead of him and
fought for him: so he declares and she wouldn’t run. So the reports are
false. We shall know what Blackburn makes of the story when we hear of
the legacy. I have been obliged to write word to Mrs. Beauchamp that I
believe Nevil to have made a true statement of the facts. But I
distinctly say, and so I told Blackburn, I don’t think money will do
Nevil Beauchamp a farthing’s worth of good. Blackburn follows his own
counsel. He induced the old lady to send him; so I suppose he intends
to let her share the money between them. I thought better of him; I
thought him a wiser man.”
Gratitude to Mr. Tuckham on Beauchamp’s behalf caused Cecilia to praise
him, in the tone of compliments. The difficulty of seriously admiring
two gentlemen at once is a feminine dilemma, with the maidenly among
women.
“He has disappointed me,” said Colonel Halkett.
“Would you have had him allow a falsehood to enrich him and ruin Nevil,
papa?”
“My dear child, I’m sick to death of romantic fellows. I took Blackburn
for one of our solid young men. Why should he share his aunt’s
fortune?”
“You mean, why should Nevil have money?”
“Well, I do mean that. Besides, the story was not false as far as his
intentions went: he confessed it, and I ought to have put it in a
postscript. If Nevil wants money, let him learn to behave himself like
a gentleman at Steynham.”
“He has not failed.”
“I’ll say, then, behave himself, simply. He considers it a point of
honour to get his uncle Everard to go down on his knees to Shrapnel.
But he has no moral sense where I should like to see it: none: he
confessed it.”
“What were his words, papa?”
“I don’t remember words. He runs over to France, whenever it suits him,
to carry on there...” The colonel ended in a hum and buzz.
“Has he been to France lately?” asked Cecilia.
Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.
“The woman’s father is dead, I hear,” Colonel Halkett remarked.
“But he has not been there?”
“How can I tell? He’s anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.”
“No!”
“I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and
scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally,
infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.”
“Oh no!” exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast
her eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly
sure now that her idea of Nevil’s having gone over to France was
groundless; and feeling that she had been unworthy of him who strove to
be “worthier of her, as he hoped to become.”
Colonel Halkett scoffed at her “Oh no,” and called it woman’s logic.
She could not restrain herself. “Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa?
It is Nevil’s perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you
than men who are timeservers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr.
Austin said. Nevil is not one of them. I am not able to judge or
speculate whether he has a great brain or is likely to distinguish
himself out of his profession: I would rather he did not abandon it:
but Mr. Austin said to me in talking of him...”
“That notion of Austin’s of screwing women’s minds up to the pitch of
men’s!” interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.
“He said, papa, that honestly active men in a country, who decline to
practise hypocrisy, show that the blood runs, and are a sign of
health.”
“You misunderstood him, my dear.”
“I think I thoroughly understood him. He did not call them wise. He
said they might be dangerous if they were not met in debate. But he
said, and I presume to think truly, that the reason why they are
decried is, that it is too great a trouble for a lazy world to meet
them. And, he said, the reason why the honest factions agitate is
because they encounter sneers until they appear in force. If they were
met earlier, and fairly—I am only quoting him—they would not, I think
he said, or would hardly, or would not generally, fall into
professional agitation.”
“Austin’s a speculative Tory, I know; and that’s his weakness,”
observed the colonel. “But I’m certain you misunderstood him. He never
would have called us a lazy people.”
“Not in matters of business: in matters of thought.”
“My dear Cecilia! You’ve got hold of a language!... a way of speaking!
.... Who set you thinking on these things?”
“That I owe to Nevil Beauchamp!”
Colonel Halkett indulged in a turn or two up and down the room. He
threw open a window, sniffed the moist air, and went to his daughter to
speak to her resolutely.
“Between a Radical and a Tory, I don’t know where your head has been
whirled to, my dear. Your heart seems to be gone: more sorrow for us!
And for Nevil Beauchamp to be pretending to love you while carrying on
with this Frenchwoman!”
“He has never said that he loved me.”
The splendour of her beauty in humility flashed on her father, and he
cried out: “You are too good for any man on earth! We won’t talk in the
dark, my darling. You tell me he has never, as they say, made love to
you?”
“Never, papa.”
“Well, that proves the French story. At any rate, he’s a man of honour.
But you love him?”
“The French story is untrue, papa.”
Cecilia stood in a blush like the burning cloud of the sunset.
“Tell me frankly: I’m your father, your old dada, your friend, my dear
girl! do you think the man cares for you, loves you?”
She replied: “I know, papa, the French story is untrue.”
“But when I tell you, silly woman, he confessed it to me out of his own
mouth!”
“It is not true now.”
“It’s not going on, you mean? How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Has he been swearing it?”
“He has not spoken of it to me.”
“Here I am in a woman’s web!” cried the colonel. “Is it your instinct
tells you it’s not true? or what? what? You have not denied that you
love the man.”
“I know he is not immoral.”
“There you shoot again! Haven’t you a yes or a no for your father?”
Cecilia cast her arms round his neck, and sobbed.
She could not bring it to her lips to say (she would have shunned the
hearing) that her defence of Beauchamp, which was a shadowed avowal of
the state of her heart, was based on his desire to read to her the
conclusion of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter touching a passion to be overcome;
necessarily therefore a passion that was vanquished, and the fullest
and bravest explanation of his shifting treatment of her: nor would she
condescend to urge that her lover would have said he loved her when
they were at Steynham, but for the misery and despair of a soul too
noble to be diverted from his grief and sense of duty, and, as she
believed, unwilling to speak to win her while his material fortune was
in jeopardy.
The colonel cherished her on his breast, with one hand regularly
patting her shoulder: a form of consolation that cures the disposition
to sob as quickly as would the drip of water.
Cecilia looked up into his eyes, and said, “We will not be parted,
papa, ever.”
The colonel said absently: “No”; and, surprised at himself, added: “No,
certainly not. How can we be parted? You won’t run away from me? No,
you know too well I can’t resist you. I appeal to your judgement, and I
must accept what you decide. But he is immoral. I repeat that. He has
no roots. We shall discover it before it’s too late, I hope.”
Cecilia gazed away, breathing through tremulous dilating nostrils.
“One night after dinner at Steynham,” pursued the colonel, “Nevil was
rattling against the Press, with Stukely Culbrett to prime him: and he
said editors of papers were growing to be like priests, and as timid as
priests, and arrogant: and for one thing, it was because they supposed
themselves to be guardians of the national morality. I forget exactly
what the matter was: but he sneered at priests and morality.”
A smile wove round Cecilia’s lips, and in her towering superiority to
one who talked nonsense, she slipped out of maiden shame and said:
“Attack Nevil for his political heresies and his wrath with the Press
for not printing him. The rest concerns his honour, where he is quite
safe, and all are who trust him.”
“If you find out you’re wrong?”
She shook her head.
“But if you find out you’re wrong about him,” her father reiterated
piteously, “you won’t tear me to strips to have him in spite of it?”
“No, papa, not I. I will not.”
“Well, that’s something for me to hold fast to,” said Colonel Halkett,
sighing.