THE TWO PASSIONS
The foggy February night refreshed his head, and the business of
fetching the luggage from the hotel—a commission that necessitated the
delivery of his card and some very commanding language—kept his mind in
order. Subsequently he drove to his cousin Baskelett’s Club, where he
left a short note to say the house was engaged for the night and
perhaps a week further. Concise, but sufficient: and he stated a hope
to his cousin that he would not be inconvenienced. This was courteous.
He had taken a bed at Renée’s hotel, after wresting her boxes from the
vanquished hotel proprietor, and lay there, hearing the clear sound of
every little sentence of hers during the absence of Rosamund: her
“_Adieu_,” and the strange “_Do you think so?_” and “_I know where I
am; I scarcely know more_.” Her eyes and their darker lashes, and the
fitful little sensitive dimples of a smile without joy, came with her
voice, but hardened to an aspect unlike her. Not a word could he
recover of what she had spoken before Rosamund’s intervention. He
fancied she must have related details of her journey. Especially there
must have been mention, he thought, of her drive to the station from
Tourdestelle; and this flashed on him the scene of his ride to the
château, and the meeting her on the road, and the white light on the
branching river, and all that was Renée in the spirit of the place she
had abandoned for him, believing in him. She had proved that she
believed in him. What in the name of sanity had been the meaning of his
language? and what was it between them that arrested him and caused him
to mumble absurdly of “doing best,” when in fact he was her bondman,
rejoiced to be so, by his pledged word? and when she, for some reason
that he was sure she had stated, though he could recollect no more than
the formless hideousness of it, was debarred from returning to
Tourdestelle?
He tossed in his bed as over a furnace, in the extremity of perplexity
of one accustomed to think himself ever demonstrably in the right, and
now with his whole nature in insurrection against that legitimate
claim. It led him to accuse her of a want of passionate warmth, in her
not having supplicated and upbraided him—not behaving theatrically, in
fine, as the ranting pen has made us expect of emergent ladies that
they will naturally do. Concerning himself, he thought commendingly, a
tear would have overcome him. She had not wept. The kaleidoscope was
shaken in his fragmentary mind, and she appeared thrice adorable for
this noble composure, he brutish.
Conscience and reason had resolved to a dead weight in him, like an
inanimate force, governing his acts despite the man, while he was with
Renée. Now his wishes and waverings conjured up a semblance of a
conscience and much reason to assure him that he had done foolishly as
well as unkindly, most unkindly: that he was even the ghastly spectacle
of a creature attempting to be more than he can be. Are we never to
embrace our inclinations? Are the laws regulating an old dry man like
his teacher and guide to be the same for the young and vigorous?
Is a good gift to be refused? And this was his first love! The
brilliant Renée, many-hued as a tropic bird! his lady of shining grace,
with her sole fault of want of courage devotedly amended! his pupil, he
might say, of whom he had foretold that she must come to such a pass,
at the same time prefixing his fidelity. And he was handing her over
knowingly to one kind of wretchedness—“_son amour, mon ami_,” shot
through him, lighting up the gulfs of a mind in wreck;—and one kind of
happiness could certainly be promised her!
All these and innumerable other handsome pleadings of the simulacra of
the powers he had set up to rule, were crushed at daybreak by the
realities in a sense of weight that pushed him mechanically on. He
telegraphed to Roland, and mentally gave chase to the message to recall
it. The slumberer roused in darkness by the relentless insane-seeming
bell which hales him to duty, melts at the charms of sleep, and feels
that logic is with him in his preference of his pillow; but the
tireless revolving world outside, nature’s pitiless antagonist, has
hung one of its balances about him, and his actions are directed by the
state of the scales, wherein duty weighs deep and desireability swings
like a pendant doll: so he throws on his harness, astounded, till his
blood quickens with work, at the round of sacrifices demanded of
nature: which is indeed curious considering what we are taught here and
there as to the infallibility of our august mother. Well, the world of
humanity had done this for Beauchamp. His afflicted historian is
compelled to fling his net among prosaic similitudes for an
illustration of one thus degradedly in its grip. If he had been off
with his love like the rover! why, then the Muse would have loosened
her lap like May showering flower-buds, and we might have knocked great
nature up from her sleep to embellish his desperate proceedings with
hurricanes to be danced over, to say nothing of imitative spheres
dashing out into hurly-burly after his example.
Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the well-behaved AEneas
quitting the fair bosom of Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an
example to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his backbone and put
a crown upon his brows. It happened with him that his original training
rather imposed the idea that he was a figure to be derided. The
approval of him by the prudent was a disgust, and by the pious
tasteless. He had not any consolation in reverting to Dr. Shrapnel’s
heavy Puritanism. On the contrary, such a general proposition as that
of the sage of Bevisham could not for a moment stand against the
pathetic special case of Renée: and as far as Beauchamp’s active mind
went, he was for demanding that Society should take a new position in
morality, considerably broader, and adapted to very special cases.
Nevertheless he was hardly grieved in missing Renée at Rosamund’s
breakfast-table. Rosamund informed him that Madame de Rouaillout’s door
was locked. Her particular news for him was of a disgraceful alarum
raised by Captain Baskelett in the night, to obtain admission; and of
an interview she had with him in the early morning, when he subjected
her to great insolence. Beauchamp’s attention was drawn to her
repetition of the phrase “mistress of the house.” However, she did him
justice in regard to Renée, and thoroughly entered into the fiction of
Renée’s visit to her as her guest: he passed over everything else.
To stop the mouth of a scandal-monger, he drove full speed to Cecil’s
Club, where he heard that the captain had breakfasted and had just
departed for Romfrey Castle. He followed to the station. The train had
started. So mischief was rolling in that direction.
Late at night Rosamund was allowed to enter the chill unlighted
chamber, where the unhappy lady had been lying for hours in the gloom
of a London Winter’s daylight and gaslight.
“Madame de Rouaillout is indisposed with headache,” was her report to
Beauchamp.
The conventional phraseology appeased him, though he saw his grief
behind it.
Presently he asked if Renée had taken food.
“No: you know what a headache is,” Rosamund replied.
It is true that we do not care to eat when we are in pain.
He asked if she looked ill.
“She will not have lights in the room,” said Rosamund.
Piecemeal he gained the picture of Renée in an image of the death
within which welcomed a death without.
Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid. These men!
She remarked very honestly:
“Oh, no; doctors are not needed.”
“Has she mentioned me?”
“Not once.”
“Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma’am?” cried Beauchamp, bounding
off his chair.
He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it;
and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs—accompanied by
her, of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer
to a message was to satisfy him.
“Any message would trouble her: what message would you send?” Rosamund
asked him.
The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be
thought of.
“You are unused to real suffering—that is for women!—and want to be
doing instead of enduring,” said Rosamund.
She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally
sick lovers. Beauchamp’s outcries against himself gave her the shadows
of their story. He stood in tears—a thing to see to believe of Nevil
Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken
her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past
midnight. Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate
knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him
compassionately.
In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to
England. Rosamund tempered her report of Renée by saying of her, that
she was very quiet. He turned to the window.
“Look, what a climate ours is!” Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.
“Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe! This is what she has
come to! Has she spoken of me yet?”
“No.”
“Is she dead silent?”
“She answers, if I speak to her.”
“I believe, ma’am,” said Beauchamp, “that we are the coldest-hearted
people in Europe.”
Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog. Consequently nothing was left
for him to abuse but himself. In that she tried to moderate him, and
drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the
speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another
evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renée, would
for love’s sake be friendly to them.
“I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,”
said Rosamund.
“Her brother will be here to-day; he can’t be later than the evening,”
said Beauchamp. “Get her to eat, ma’am; you must. Command her to eat.
This terrible starvation!”
“You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.”
He surveyed the table. “You have your cook in town, I see. Here’s a
breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields. Where does
the mass of meat go? One excess feeds another. You’re overdone with
servants. Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of
unmanageable footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they’re idle
and immoral. If—I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel
Halkett, or any one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the
income-tax, or some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation,
they yell as if they were thumb-screwed: but five shillings in the
pound goes to the kitchen as a matter of course—to puff those pompous
idiots! and the parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer
waste of food and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public
sin, are maundering about schism. There’s another idle army! Then we
have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors—the honourable professions! all
hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour!
it’s incubus on incubus. In point of fact, the rider’s too heavy for
the horse in England.”
He began to nibble at bread.
Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of
her own invention, such as no house in the county of Sussex could
produce or imitate.
“What would you have the parsons do?” she said.
“Take the rich by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that
they’re swine running down to the sea with a devil in them.” She had
set him off again, but she had enticed him to eating. “Pooh! it has all
been said before. Stones are easier to move than your English. May I be
forgiven for saying it! an invasion is what they want to bring them to
their senses. I’m sick of the work. Why should I be denied—am I to kill
the woman I love that I may go on hammering at them? Their idea of
liberty is, an evasion of public duty. Dr. Shrapnel’s right—it’s a
money-logged Island! Men like the Earl of Romfrey, who have never done
work in their days except to kill bears and birds, I say they’re
stifled by wealth: and he at least would have made an Admiral of mark,
or a General: not of much value, but useful in case of need. But he,
like a pretty woman, was under no obligation to contribute more than an
ornamental person to the common good. As to that, we count him by tens
of thousands now, and his footmen and maids by hundreds of thousands.
The rich love the nation through their possessions; otherwise they have
no country. If they loved the country they would care for the people.
Their hearts are eaten up by property. I am bidden to hold my tongue
because I have no knowledge. When men who have this ‘knowledge’ will go
down to the people, speak to them, consult and argue with them, and
come into suitable relations with them—I don’t say of lords and
retainers, but of knowers and doers, leaders and followers—out of
consideration for public safety, if not for the common good, I shall
hang back gladly; though I won’t hear misstatements. My fault is, that
I am too moderate. I should respect myself more if I deserved their
hatred. This flood of luxury, which is, as Dr. Shrapnel says, the
body’s drunkenness and the soul’s death, cries for execration. I’m too
moderate. But I shall quit the country: I’ve no place here.”
Rosamund ahemed. “France, Nevil? I should hardly think that France
would please you, in the present state of things over there.”
Half cynically, with great satisfaction, she had watched him fretting
at the savoury morsels of her pie with a fork like a sparrow-beak
during the monologue that would have been so dreary to her but for her
appreciation of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and
her admiration of the fire of his eyes. After finishing his plate he
had less the look of a ship driving on to reef—some of his images of
the country. He called for claret and water, sighing as he munched
bread in vast portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unbuttered
bread was to abstain from luxury. He praised passingly the quality of
the bread. It came from Steynham, and so did the milk and cream, the
butter, chicken and eggs. He was good enough not to object to the
expenditure upon the transmission of the accustomed dainties.
Altogether the gradual act of nibbling had conduced to his eating
remarkably well—royally. Rosamund’s more than half-cynical ideas of
men, and her custom of wringing unanimous verdicts from a jury of
temporary impressions, inclined her to imagine him a lover that had not
to be so very much condoled with, and a politician less alarming in
practice than in theory:—somewhat a gentleman of domestic tirades on
politics: as it is observed of your generous young Radical of birth and
fortune, that he will become on the old high road to a round
Conservatism.
He pitched one of the morning papers to the floor in disorderly sheets,
muttering: “So they’re at me!”
“Is Dr. Shrapnel better?” she asked. “I hold to a good appetite as a
sign of a man’s recovery.”
Beauchamp was confronting the fog at the window. He swung round: “Dr.
Shrapnel is better. He has a particularly clever young female cook.”
“Ah! then...”
“Yes, then, naturally! He would naturally hasten to recover to partake
of the viands, ma’am.”
Rosamund murmured of her gladness that he should be able to enjoy them.
“Oddly enough, he is not an eater of meat,” said Beauchamp.
“A vegetarian!”
“I beg you not to mention the fact to my lord. You see, you yourself
can scarcely pardon it. He does not exclude flesh from his table.
Blackburn Tuckham dined there once. ‘You are a thorough revolutionist,
Dr. Shrapnel,’ he observed. The doctor does not exclude wine, but he
does not drink it. Poor Tuckham went away entirely opposed to a Radical
he could not even meet as a boon-fellow. I begged him not to mention
the circumstances, as I have begged you. He pledged me his word to that
effect solemnly; he correctly felt that if the truth were known, there
would be further cause for the reprobation of the man who had been his
host.”
“And that poor girl, Nevil?”
“Miss Denham? She contracted the habit of eating meat at school, and
drinking wine in Paris, and continues it, occasionally. Now run
upstairs. Insist on food. Inform Madame de Rouaillout that her brother
M. le comte de Croisnel will soon be here, and should not find her ill.
Talk to her as you women can talk. Keep the blinds down in her room;
light a dozen wax-candles. Tell her I have no thought but of her. It’s
a lie: of no woman but of her: that you may say. But that you can’t
say. You can say I am devoted—ha, what stuff! I’ve only to open my
mouth!—say nothing of me: let her think the worst—unless it comes to a
question of her life: then be a merciful good woman...” He squeezed her
fingers, communicating his muscular tremble to her sensitive woman’s
frame, and electrically convincing her that he was a lover.
She went up-stairs. In ten minutes she descended, and found him pacing
up and down the hall. “Madame de Rouaillout is much the same,” she
said. He nodded, looked up the stairs, and about for his hat and
gloves, drew on the gloves, fixed the buttons, blinked at his watch,
and settled his hat as he was accustomed to wear it, all very
methodically, and talking rapidly, but except for certain precise
directions, which were not needed by so careful a housekeeper and nurse
as Rosamund was known to be, she could not catch a word of meaning. He
had some appointment, it seemed; perhaps he was off for a doctor—a
fresh instance of his masculine incapacity to understand patient
endurance. After opening the housedoor, and returning to the foot of
the stairs, listening and sighing, he disappeared.
It struck her that he was trying to be two men at once.
The litter of newspaper sheets in the morning-room brought his
exclamation to her mind: “They’re at me!” Her eyes ran down the
columns, and were seized by the print of his name in large type. A
leading article was devoted to Commander’s Beauchamp’s recent speech
delivered in the great manufacturing town of Gunningham, at a meeting
under the presidency of the mayor, and his replies to particular
questions addressed to him; one being, what right did he conceive
himself to have to wear the Sovereign’s uniform in professing
Republican opinions? Rosamund winced for her darling during her first
perusal of the article. It was of the sarcastically caressing kind,
masterly in ease of style, as the flourish of the executioner well may
be with poor Bare-back hung up to a leisurely administration of the
scourge. An allusion to “Jack on shore” almost persuaded her that his
uncle Everard had inspired the writer of the article. Beauchamp’s reply
to the question of his loyalty was not quoted: he was, however,
complimented on his frankness. At the same time he was assured that his
error lay in a too great proneness to make distinctions, and that there
was no distinction between sovereign and country in a loyal and
contented land, which could thank him for gallant services in war,
while taking him for the solitary example to be cited at the present
period of the evils of a comparatively long peace.
“Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of
the gallant commander,” etc., the termination of the article was
indulgent. Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and
though she loved Beauchamp, the test of her representative feminine
sentiment regarding his political career, when personal feeling on his
behalf had subsided, was, that the writer of the article must have
received an intimation to deal both smartly and forbearingly with the
offender: and from whom but her lord? Her notions of the conduct of the
Press were primitive. In a summary of the article Beauchamp was treated
as naughty boy, formerly brave boy, and likely by-and-by to be good
boy. Her secret heart would have spoken similarly, with more emphasis
on the flattering terms.
A telegram arrived from her lord. She was bidden to have the house
clear for him by noon of the next day.
How could that be done?
But to write blankly to inform the Earl of Romfrey that he was excluded
from his own house was another impossibility.
“Hateful man!” she apostrophized Captain Baskelett, and sat down,
supporting her chin in a prolonged meditation.
The card of a French lady, bearing the name of Madame d’Auffray, was
handed to her.
Beauchamp had gone off to his friend Lydiard, to fortify himself in his
resolve to reply to that newspaper article by eliciting counsel to the
contrary. Phrase by phrase he fought through the first half of his
composition of the reply against Lydiard, yielding to him on a point or
two of literary judgement, only the more vehemently to maintain his
ideas of discretion, which were, that he would not take shelter behind
a single subterfuge; that he would try this question nakedly, though he
should stand alone; that he would stake his position on it, and
establish his right to speak his opinions: and as for unseasonable
times, he protested it was the cry of a gorged middle-class, frightened
of further action, and making snug with compromise. Would it be a
seasonable time when there was uproar? Then it would be a time to be
silent on such themes: they could be discussed calmly now, and without
danger; and whether he was hunted or not, he cared nothing. He declined
to consider the peculiar nature of Englishmen: they must hear truth or
perish.
Knowing the difficulty once afflicting Beauchamp in the art of speaking
on politics tersely, Lydiard was rather astonished at his
well-delivered cannonade; and he fancied that his modesty had been
displaced by the new acquirement; not knowing the nervous fever of his
friend’s condition, for which the rattle of speech was balm, and
contention a native element, and the assumption of truth a necessity.
Beauchamp hugged his politics like some who show their love of the
pleasures of life by taking to them angrily. It was all he had: he had
given up all for it. He forced Lydiard to lay down his pen and walk
back to the square with him, and went on arguing, interjecting,
sneering, thumping the old country, raising and oversetting her,
treating her alternately like a disrespected grandmother, and like a
woman anciently beloved; as a dead lump, and as a garden of seeds;
reviewing prominent political men, laughing at the dwarf-giants;
finally casting anchor on a Mechanics’ Institute that he had recently
heard of, where working men met weekly for the purpose of reading the
British poets.
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard of late,” he said, shaking Lydiard’s
hand on the door-steps.
“Ah! You’re Commander Beauchamp; I think I know you. I’ve seen you on a
platform,” cried a fresh-faced man in decent clothes, halting on his
way along the pavement; “and if you were in your uniform, you damned
Republican dog! I’d strip you with my own hands, for the disloyal
scoundrel you are, with your pimping Republicanism and capsizing
everything in a country like Old England. It’s the cat-o’-nine-tails
you want, and the bosen to lay on; and I’d do it myself. And mind me,
when next I catch sight of you in blue and gold lace, I’ll compel you
to show cause why you wear it, and prove your case, or else I’ll make a
Cupid of you, and no joke about it. I don’t pay money for a nincompoop
to outrage my feelings of respect and loyalty, when he’s in my pay, d’
ye hear? You’re in my pay: and you do your duty, or I’ll kick ye out of
it. It’s no empty threat. You look out for your next public speech, if
it’s anywhere within forty mile of London. Get along.”
With a scowl, and a very ugly “yah!” worthy of cannibal jaws, the man
passed off.
Beauchamp kept eye on him. “What class does a fellow like that come
of?”
“He’s a harmless enthusiast,” said Lydiard. “He has been reading the
article, and has got excited over it.”
“I wish I had the fellow’s address.” Beauchamp looked wistfully at
Lydiard, but he did not stimulate the generous offer to obtain it for
him. Perhaps it was as well to forget the fellow.
“You see the effect of those articles,” he said.
“You see what I mean by unseasonable times,” Lydiard retorted.
“He didn’t talk like a tradesman,” Beauchamp mused.
“He may be one, for all that. It’s better to class him as an
enthusiast.”
“An enthusiast!” Beauchamp stamped: “for what?”
“For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles
he is accustomed to read in the papers. You don’t study your
countrymen.”
“I’d study that fellow, if I had the chance.”
“You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse
temper than most of them.”
Beauchamp shook Lydiard’s hand, saying, “The widow?”
“There’s no woman like her!”
“Well, now you’re free—why not? I think I put one man out of the
field.”
“Too early! Besides—”
“Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.”
“When shall you go down to Bevisham?”
“When? I can’t tell: when I’ve gone through fire. There never was a
home for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good
girl—the best of girls! if you hadn’t a little spoilt her with your
philosophy of the two sides of the case.”
“I’ve not given her the brains.”
“She’s always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action: she has no will.
So she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her
submitting, as if she must submit to me, because I’m overbearing,
instead of accepting the fact.”
“She feels your influence.”
“She’s against the publication of THE DAWN—for the present. It’s an
‘unseasonable time.’ I argue with her: I don’t get hold of her mind a
bit; but at last she says, ‘very well.’ She has your head.”
And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.
They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other’s task of
endurance.
As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore
walking past.
“Jack!” he called.
Wilmore glanced round. “How do you do, Beauchamp?”
“Where are you off to, Jack?”
“Down to the Admiralty. I’m rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.”
“Can’t you stop just a minute?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. Good morning.”
It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive,
retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.
“That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,” Beauchamp
said to Lydiard, who answered:
“The article did not put the idea of you into men’s minds, but gave
tongue to it: you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the
Press.”
“You wouldn’t take that man and me to have been messmates for years!
Old Jack Wilmore! Don’t go, Lydiard.”
Lydiard declared that he was bound to go: he was engaged to read
Italian for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.
“Then go, by all means,” Beauchamp dismissed him.
He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the
door-step, and found them of one colour. If it was an accident
befalling him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an
hour, what of the sentiments of universal England? Lady Barbara’s
elopement with Lord Alfred last year did not rouse much execration;
hardly worse than gossip and compassion. Beauchamp drank a great deal
of bitterness from his reflections.
They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over
themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts
from their mischances and from most occurrences. So does the world they
combat win on them.
“For,” says Dr. Shrapnel, “the world and nature, which are opposed in
relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect
victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the
victory over the world, as over nature, is over self: and this victory
lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature:
for the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.”
The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp.
He had never before said to himself, “I have done my best, and I am
beaten!” Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but
here, within the walls where Renée lay silently breathing, barely
breathing, it might be dying, he was overcome, and left it to
circumstance to carry him to a conclusion. He went up-stairs to the
drawing-room, where he beheld Madame d’Auffray in conversation with
Rosamund.
“I was assured by Madame la Comtesse that I should see you to-day,” the
French lady said as she swam to meet him; “it is a real pleasure”: and
pressing his hand she continued, “but I fear you will be disappointed
of seeing my sister. She would rashly try your climate at its worst
period. Believe me, I do not join in decrying it, except on her
account: I could have forewarned her of an English Winter and early
Spring. You know her impetuosity; suddenly she decided on accepting the
invitation of Madame la Comtesse; and though I have no fears of her
health, she is at present a victim of the inclement weather.”
“You have seen her, madame?” said Beauchamp. So well had the clever
lady played the dupe that he forgot there was a part for him to play.
Even the acquiescence of Rosamund in the title of countess bewildered
him.
“Madame d’Auffray has been sitting for an hour with Madame de
Rouaillout,” said Rosamund.
He spoke of Roland’s coming.
“Ah?” said Madame d’Auffray, and turned to Rosamund: “you have
determined to surprise us: then you will have a gathering of the whole
family in your hospitable house, Madame la Comtesse.”
“If M. la Marquis will do it that honour, madame.”
“My brother is in London,” Madame d’Auffray said to Beauchamp.
The shattering blow was merited by one who could not rejoice that he
had acted rightly.