Beauchamp's Career. Complete

Strangely chilled, she tried to recover some fallen load. The birds of the dawn twittered, chirped, dived aslant her window, fluttered back. Instead of a fallen load, she fancied presently that it was an expectation she was desiring to realize: but what? What could be expected at that hour? She quitted her bed, and paced up and down the room beneath a gold-starred ceiling. Her expectation, she resolved to think, was of a splendid day of the young Spring at Mount Laurels—a day to praise to Nevil.

She raised her window-blind at a window letting in sweet air, to gather indications of promising weather. Her lover stood on the grass-plot among the flower-beds below, looking up, as though it had been his expectation to see her which had drawn her to gaze out with an idea of some expectation of her own. So visionary was his figure in the grey solitariness of the moveless morning that she stared at the apparition, scarce putting faith in him as man, until he kissed his hand to her, and had softly called her name.

Impulsively she waved a hand from her lips.

Now there was no retreat for either of them!

She awoke to this conviction after a flight of blushes that burnt her thoughts to ashes as they sprang. Thoughts born blushing, all of the crimson colour, a rose-garden, succeeded, and corresponding with their speed her feet paced the room, both slender hands crossed at her throat under an uplifted chin, and the curves of her dark eyelashes dropped as in a swoon.

‘He loves me!’ The attestation of it had been visible. ‘No one but me!’ Was that so evident?

Her father picked up silly stories of him—a man who made enemies recklessly!

Cecilia was petrified by a gentle tapping at her door. Her father called to her, and she threw on her dressing-gown, and opened the door.

The colonel was in his riding-suit.

‘I haven’t slept a wink, and I find it’s the same with you,’ he said, paining her with his distressed kind eyes. ‘I ought not to have hinted anything last night without proofs. Austin’s as unhappy as I am.’

‘At what, my dear papa, at what?’ cried Cecilia.

‘I ride over to Steynham this morning, and I shall bring you proofs, my poor child, proofs. That foreign tangle of his…’

‘You speak of Nevil, papa?’

‘It’s a common scandal over London. That Frenchwoman was found at Lord Romfrey’s house; Lady Romfrey cloaked it. I believe the woman would swear black’s white to make Nevil Beauchamp appear an angel; and he’s a desperately cunning hand with women. You doubt that.’

She had shuddered slightly.

‘You won’t doubt if I bring you proofs. Till I come back from Steynham, I ask you not to see him alone: not to go out to him.’

The colonel glanced at her windows.

Cecilia submitted to the request, out of breath, consenting to feel like a tutored girl, that she might conceal her guilty knowledge of what was to be seen through the windows.

‘Now I’m off,’ said he, and kissed her.

‘If you would accept Nevil’s word!’ she murmured.

‘Not where women are concerned!’

He left her with this remark, which found no jealous response in her heart, yet ranged over certain dispersed inflammable grains, like a match applied to damp powder; again and again running in little leaps of harmless firm keeping her alive to its existence, and surprising her that it should not have been extinguished.

Beauchamp presented himself rather late in the afternoon, when Mr. Austin and Blackburn Tuckham were sipping tea in Cecilia’s boudoir with that lady, and a cousin of her sex, by whom she was led to notice a faint discoloration over one of his eyes, that was, considering whence it came, repulsive to compassion. A blow at a Radical meeting! He spoke of Dr. Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the latter was unsympathetic in regard to the old man’s health, though when he said, ‘Poor old man! he fears he will die!’ Tuckham rejoined: ‘He had better make his peace.’

‘He fears he will die, because of his leaving Miss Denham unprotected,’ said Beauchamp.

‘Well, she’s a good-looking girl: he’ll be able to leave her something, and he might easily get her married, I should think,’ said Tuckham.

‘He’s not satisfied with handing her to any kind of man.’

‘If the choice is to be among Radicals and infidels, I don’t wonder. He has come to one of the tests.’

Cecilia heard Beauchamp speaking of a newspaper. A great Radical Journal, unmatched in sincerity, superior in ability, soon to be equal in power, to the leader and exemplar of the lucre-Press, would some day see the light.

‘You’ll want money for that,’ said Tuckham.

‘I know,’ said Beauchamp.

‘Are you prepared to stand forty or fifty thousand a year?’

‘It need not be half so much.’

‘Counting the libels, I rate the outlay rather low.’

‘Yes, lawyers, judges, and juries of tradesmen, dealing justice to a Radical print!’

Tuckham brushed his hand over his mouth and ahemed. ‘It’s to be a penny journal?’

‘Yes, a penny. I’d make it a farthing—’

‘Pay to have it read?’

‘Willingly.’

Tuckham did some mental arithmetic, quaintly, with rapidly blinking eyelids and open mouth. ‘You may count it at the cost of two paying mines,’ he said firmly. ‘That is, if it’s to be a consistently Radical Journal, at law with everybody all round the year. And by the time it has won a reputation, it will be undermined by a radicaller Radical Journal. That’s how we’ve lowered the country to this level. That’s an Inferno of Circles, down to the ultimate mire. And what on earth are you contending for?’

‘Freedom of thought, for one thing.’

‘We have quite enough free-thinking.’

‘There’s not enough if there’s not perfect freedom.’

‘Dangerous!’ quoth Mr. Austin.

‘But it’s that danger which makes men, sir; and it’s fear of the danger that makes our modern Englishman.’

‘Oh! Oh!’ cried Tuckham in the voice of a Parliamentary Opposition. ‘Well, you start your paper, we’ll assume it: what class of men will you get to write?’

‘I shall get good men for the hire.’

‘You won’t get the best men; you may catch a clever youngster or two, and an old rogue of talent; you won’t get men of weight. They’re prejudiced, I dare say. The Journals which are commercial speculations give us a guarantee that they mean to be respectable; they must, if they wouldn’t collapse. That’s why the best men consent to write for them.’

‘Money will do it,’ said Beauchamp.

Mr. Austin disagreed with that observation.

‘Some patriotic spirit, I may hope, sir.’