THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
“You and Nevil are so alike,” Lady Romfrey said to her lord, at some
secret resemblance she detected and dwelt on fondly, when the earl was
on the point of starting a second time for Bevisham to perform what she
had prompted him to conceive his honourable duty, without a single
intimation that he loathed the task, neither shrug nor grimace.
“Two ends of a stick are pretty much alike: they’re all that length
apart,” said he, very little in the humour for compliments, however
well braced for his work.
His wife’s admiring love was pleasant enough. He preferred to have it
unspoken. Few of us care to be eulogized in the act of taking a
nauseous medical mixture.
For him the thing was as good as done, on his deciding to think it both
adviseable and right: so he shouldered his load and marched off with
it. He could have postponed the right proceeding, even after the
partial recognition of his error:—one drops a word or two by hazard,
one expresses an anxiety to afford reparation, one sends a message, and
so forth, for the satisfaction of one’s conventionally gentlemanly
feeling: but the adviseable proceeding under stress of peculiar
circumstances, his clearly-awakened recognition of that, impelled him
unhesitatingly. His wife had said it was the portion she brought him.
Tears would not have persuaded him so powerfully, that he might prove
to her he was glad of her whatever the portion she brought. She was a
good wife, a brave woman, likely to be an incomparable mother. At
present her very virtues excited her to fancifulness nevertheless she
was in his charge, and he was bound to break the neck of his will, to
give her perfect peace of wind. The child suffers from the mother’s
mental agitation. It might be a question of a nervous or an idiot
future Earl of Romfrey. Better death to the House than such a mockery
of his line! These reflections reminded him of the heartiness of his
whipping of that poor old tumbled signpost Shrapnel, in the name of
outraged womankind. If there was no outrage?
Assuredly if there was no outrage, consideration for the state of his
wife would urge him to speak the apology in the most natural manner
possible. She vowed there was none.
He never thought of blaming her for formerly deceiving him, nor of
blaming her for now expediting him.
In the presence of Colonel Halkett, Mr. Tuckham, and Mr. Lydiard, on a
fine November afternoon, standing bareheaded in the fir-bordered garden
of the cottage on the common, Lord Romfrey delivered his apology to Dr.
Shrapnel, and he said:
“I call you to witness, gentlemen, I offer Dr. Shrapnel the fullest
reparation he may think fit to demand of me for an unprovoked assault
on him, that I find was quite unjustified, and for which I am here to
ask his forgiveness.”
Speech of man could not have been more nobly uttered.
Dr. Shrapnel replied:
“To the half of that, sir—“tis over! What remains is done with the
hand.”
He stretched his hand out.
Lord Romfrey closed his own on it.
The antagonists, between whom was no pretence of their being other
after the performance of a creditable ceremony, bowed and exchanged
civil remarks: and then Lord Romfrey was invited to go into the house
and see Beauchamp, who happened to be sitting with Cecilia Halkett and
Jenny Denham. Beauchamp was thin, pale, and quiet; but the sight of him
standing and conversing after that scene of the skinny creature
struggling with bareribbed obstruction on the bed, was an example of
constitutional vigour and a compliment to the family very gratifying to
Lord Romfrey. Excepting by Cecilia, the earl was coldly received. He
had to leave early by special express for London to catch the last
train to Romfrey. Beauchamp declined to fix a day for his visit to the
castle with Lydiard, but proposed that Lydiard should accompany the
earl on his return. Lydiard was called in, and at once accepted the
earl’s invitation, and quitted the room to pack his portmanteau.
A faint sign of firm-shutting shadowed the corners of Jenny’s lips.
“You have brought my nephew to life,” Lord Romfrey said to her.
“My share in it was very small, my lord.”
“Gannet says that your share in it was very great.”
“And I say so, with the authority of a witness,” added Cecilia.
“And I, from my experience,” came from Beauchamp.
His voice had a hollow sound, unlike his natural voice.
The earl looked at him remembering the bright laughing lad he had once
been, and said: “Why not try a month of Madeira? You have only to step
on board the boat.”
“I don’t want to lose a month of my friend,” said Beauchamp.
“Take your friend with you. After these fevers our Winters are bad.”
“I’ve been idle too long.”
“But, Captain Beauchamp,” said Jenny, “you proposed to do nothing but
read for a couple of years.”
“Ay, there’s the voyage!” sighed he, with a sailor-invalid’s vision of
sunny seas dancing in the far sky.
“You must persuade Dr. Shrapnel to come; and he will not come unless
you come too, and you won’t go anywhere but to the Alps!” She bent her
eyes on the floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from
the Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia:
granite, as he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of
despair seemed to tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had
made in life, and cry failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not
been created for failure.
He touched his uncle’s hand indifferently: “My love to the countess:
let me hear of her, sir, if you please.”
“You shall,” said the earl. “But, off to Madeira, and up Teneriffe:
sail the Azores. I’ll hire you a good-sized schooner.”
“There is the _Esperanza_,” said Cecilia. “And the vessel is lying
_idle_, Nevil! Can you allow it?”
He consented to laugh at himself, and fell to coughing.
Jenny Denham saw a real human expression of anxiety cross the features
of the earl at the sound of the cough.
Lord Romfrey said “Adieu,” to her.
He offered her his hand, which she contrived to avoid taking by
dropping a formal half-reverence.
“Think of the _Esperanza;_ she will be coasting her nominal native
land! and adieu for to-day,” Cecilia said to Beauchamp.
Jenny Denham and he stood at the window to watch the leave-taking in
the garden, for a distraction. They interchanged no remark of surprise
at seeing the earl and Dr. Shrapnel hand-locked: but Jenny’s heart
reproached her uncle for being actually servile, and Beauchamp accused
the earl of aristocratic impudence.
Both were overcome with remorse when Colonel Halkett, putting his head
into the room to say good-bye to Beauchamp and place the _Esperanza_ at
his disposal for a Winter cruise, chanced to mention in two or three
half words the purpose of the earl’s visit, and what had occurred. He
took it for known already.
To Miss Denham he remarked: “Lord Romfrey is very much concerned about
your health; he fears you have overdone it in nursing Captain
Beauchamp.”
“I must be off after him,” said Beauchamp, and began trembling so that
he could not stir.
The colonel knew the pain and shame of that condition of weakness to a
man who has been strong and swift, and said: “Seven-league boots are
not to be caught. You’ll see him soon. Why, I thought some letter of
yours had fetched him here! I gave you all the credit of it.”
“No, he deserves it all himself—all,” said Beauchamp and with a dubious
eye on Jenny Denham: “You see, we were unfair.”
The “we” meant “you” to her sensitiveness; and probably he did mean it
for “you”: for as he would have felt, so he supposed that his uncle
must have felt, Jenny’s coldness was much the crueller. Her features,
which in animation were summer light playing upon smooth water, could
be exceedingly cold in repose: the icier to those who knew her, because
they never expressed disdain. No expression of the baser sort belonged
to them. Beauchamp was intimate with these delicately-cut features; he
would have shuddered had they chilled on him. He had fallen in love
with his uncle; he fancied she ought to have done so too; and from his
excess of sympathy he found her deficient in it.
He sat himself down to write a hearty letter to his “dear old uncle
Everard.”
Jenny left him, to go to her chamber and cry.