Beauchamp's Career. Complete

The earl smoothed her forehead. All her suspicions were rekindled. ‘Truth! truth! give me truth. Let me know what world I am in.’

‘My dear, a ship’s not lost because she’s caught in a squall; nor a man buffeting the waves for an hour. He’s all right: he keeps up.’

‘He is delirious? I ask you—I have fancied I heard him.’

Lord Romfrey puffed from his nostrils: but in affecting to blow to the winds her foolish woman’s wildness of fancy, his mind rested on Nevil, and he said: ‘Poor boy! It seems he’s chattering hundreds to the minute.’

His wife’s looks alarmed him after he had said it, and he was for toning it and modifying it, when she gasped to him to help her to her feet; and standing up, she exclaimed: ‘O heaven! now I hear you; now I know he lives. See how much better it is for me to know the real truth. It takes me to his bedside. Ignorance and suspense have been poison. I have been washed about like a dead body. Let me read all my letters now. Nothing will harm me now. You will do your best for me, my husband, will you not?’ She tore at her dress at her throat for coolness, panting and smiling. ‘For me—us—yours—ours! Give me my letters, lunch with me, and start for Bevisham. Now you see how good it is for me to hear the very truth, you will give me your own report, and I shall absolutely trust in it, and go down with it if it’s false! But you see I am perfectly strong for the truth. It must be you or I to go. I burn to go; but your going will satisfy me. If you look on him, I look. I feel as if I had been nailed down in a coffin, and have got fresh air. I pledge you my word, sir, my honour, my dear husband, that I will think first of my duty. I know it would be Nevil’s wish. He has not quite forgiven me—he thought me ambitious—ah! stop: he said that the birth of our child would give him greater happiness than he had known for years: he begged me to persuade you to call a boy Nevil Beauchamp, and a girl Renee. He has never believed in his own long living.’

Rosamund refreshed her lord’s heart by smiling archly as she said: ‘The boy to be educated to take the side of the people, of course! The girl is to learn a profession.’

‘Ha! bless the fellow!’ Lord Romfrey interjected. ‘Well, I might go there for an hour. Promise me, no fretting! You have hollows in your cheeks, and your underlip hangs: I don’t like it. I haven’t seen that before.’

‘We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive,’ said Rosamund. ‘My letters! my letters!’

Lord Romfrey went to fetch them. They were intact in his desk. His wife, then, had actually been reading the facts through a wall! For he was convinced of Mrs. Devereux’s fidelity, as well as of the colonel’s and Cecilia’s. He was not a man to be disobeyed: nor was his wife the woman to court or to acquiesce in trifling acts of disobedience to him. He received the impression, consequently, that this matter of the visit to Nevil was one in which the poor loving soul might be allowed to guide him, singular as the intensity of her love of Nevil Beauchamp was, considering that they were not of kindred blood.

He endeavoured to tone her mind for the sadder items in Miss Denham’s letters.

‘Oh!’ said Rosamund, ‘what if I shed the “screaming eyedrops,” as you call them? They will not hurt me, but relieve. I was sure I should someday envy that girl! If he dies she will have nursed him and had the last of him.’

‘He’s not going to die!’ said Everard powerfully.

‘We must be prepared. These letters will do that for me. I have written out the hours of your trains. Stanton will attend on you. I have directed him to telegraph to the Dolphin in Bevisham for rooms for the night: that is to-morrow night. To-night you sleep at your hotel in London, which will be ready to receive you, and is more comfortable than the empty house. Stanton takes wine, madeira and claret, and other small necessaries. If Nevil should be very unwell, you will not leave him immediately. I shall look to the supplies. You will telegraph to me twice a day, and write once. We lunch at half-past twelve, so that you may hit the twenty-minutes-to-two o’clock train. And now I go to see that the packing is done.’

She carried off her letters to her bedroom, where she fell upon the bed, shutting her eyelids hard before she could suffer her eyes to be the intermediaries of that fever-chamber in Bevisham and her bursting heart. But she had not positively deceived her husband in the reassurance she had given him by her collectedness and by the precise directions she had issued for his comforts, indicating a mind so much more at ease. She was firmer to meet the peril of her beloved: and being indeed, when thrown on her internal resources, one among the brave women of earth, though also one who required a lift from circumstances to take her stand calmly fronting a menace to her heart, she saw the evidence of her influence with Lord Romfrey: the level she could feel that they were on together so long as she was courageous, inspirited her sovereignly.

He departed at the hour settled for him. Rosamund sat at her boudoir window, watching the carriage that was conducting him to the railway station. Neither of them had touched on the necessity of his presenting himself at the door of Dr. Shrapnel’s house. That, and the disgust belonging to it, was a secondary consideration with Lord Romfrey, after he had once resolved on it as the right thing to do: and his wife admired and respected him for so supreme a loftiness. And fervently she prayed that it might not be her evil fate to disappoint his hopes. Never had she experienced so strong a sense of devotedness to him as when she saw the carriage winding past the middle oak-wood of the park, under a wet sky brightened from the West, and on out of sight.

CHAPTER L. AT THE COTTAGE ON THE COMMON

Rain went with Lord Romfrey in a pursuing cloud all the way to Bevisham, and across the common to the long garden and plain little green-shuttered, neat white cottage of Dr. Shrapnel. Carriages were driving from the door; idle men with hands deep in their pockets hung near it, some women pointing their shoulders under wet shawls, and boys. The earl was on foot. With no sign of discomposure, he stood at the half-open door and sent in his card, bearing the request for permission to visit his nephew. The reply failing to come to him immediately, he began striding to and fro. That garden gate where he had flourished the righteous whip was wide. Foot-farers over the sodden common were attracted to the gateway, and lingered in it, looking at the long, green-extended windows, apparently listening, before they broke away to exchange undertone speech here and there. Boys had pushed up through the garden to the kitchen area. From time to time a woman in a dripping bonnet whimpered aloud.

An air of a country churchyard on a Sunday morning when the curate has commenced the service prevailed. The boys were subdued by the moisture, as they are when they sit in the church aisle or organ-loft, before their members have been much cramped.

The whole scene, and especially the behaviour of the boys, betokened to Lord Romfrey that an event had come to pass.

In the chronicle of a sickness the event is death.

He bethought him of various means of stopping the telegraph and smothering the tale, if matters should have touched the worst here. He calculated abstrusely the practicable shortness of the two routes from Bevisham to Romfrey, by post-horses on the straightest line of road, or by express train on the triangle of railway, in case of an extreme need requiring him to hasten back to his wife and renew his paternal-despotic system with her. She had but persuaded him of the policy of a liberal openness and confidence for the moment’s occasion: she could not turn his nature, which ran to strokes of craft and blunt decision whenever the emergency smote him and he felt himself hailed to show generalship.

While thus occupied in thoughtfulness he became aware of the monotony of a tuneless chant, as if, it struck him, an insane young chorister or canon were galloping straight on end hippomaniacally through the Psalms. There was a creak at intervals, leading him to think it a machine that might have run away with the winder’s arm.

The earl’s humour proposed the notion to him that this perhaps was one of the forms of Radical lamentation, ululation, possibly practised by a veteran impietist like Dr. Shrapnel for the loss of his youngster, his political cub—poor lad!

Deriding any such paganry, and aught that could be set howling, Lord Romfrey was presently moved to ask of the small crowd at the gate what that sound was.

‘It’s the poor commander, sir,’ said a wet-shawled woman, shivering.

‘He’s been at it twenty hours already, sir,’ said one of the boys.

‘Twenty-foor hour he ‘ve been at it,’ said another.

A short dispute grew over the exact number of hours. One boy declared that thirty hours had been reached. ‘Father heerd’n yesterday morning as he was aff to ‘s work in the town afore six: that brings ‘t nigh thirty and he ha’n’t stopped yet.’

The earl was invited to step inside the gate, a little way up to the house, and under the commander’s window, that he might obtain a better hearing.

He swung round, walked away, walked back, and listened.

If it was indeed a voice, the voice, he would have said, was travelling high in air along the sky.

Yesterday he had described to his wife Nevil’s chattering of hundreds to the minute. He had not realized the description, which had been only his manner of painting delirium: there had been no warrant for it. He heard the wild scudding voice imperfectly: it reminded him of a string of winter geese changeing waters. Shower gusts, and the wail and hiss of the rows of fir-trees bordering the garden, came between, and allowed him a moment’s incredulity as to its being a human voice. Such a cry will often haunt the moors and wolds from above at nightfall. The voice hied on, sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a hush of wind and trees. The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice drowned; once more to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a high-pitched key, thin, shrill, weird, interminable, like winds through a crazy chamber-door at midnight.

The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and stranger: Lord Romfrey had some such thought.

Dr. Gannet was the bearer of Miss Denham’s excuses to Lord Romfrey for the delay in begging him to enter the house: in the confusion of the household his lordship’s card had been laid on the table below, and she was in the sick-room.

‘Is my nephew a dead man?’ said the earl.

The doctor weighed his reply. ‘He lives. Whether he will, after the exhaustion of this prolonged fit of raving, I don’t dare to predict. In the course of my experience I have never known anything like it. He lives: there’s the miracle, but he lives.’

‘On brandy?’

‘That would soon have sped him.’

‘Ha. You have everything here that you want?’

‘Everything.’

‘He’s in your hands, Gannet.’

The earl was conducted to a sitting-room, where Dr. Gannet left him for a while.

Mindful that he was under the roof of his enemy, he remained standing, observing nothing.

The voice overheard was off at a prodigious rate, like the far sound of a yell ringing on and on.

The earl unconsciously sought a refuge from it by turning the leaves of a book upon the table, which was a complete edition of Harry Denham’s Poems, with a preface by a man named Lydiard; and really, to read the preface one would suppose that these poets were the princes of the earth. Lord Romfrey closed the volume. It was exquisitely bound, and presented to Miss Denham by the Mr. Lydiard. ‘The works of your illustrious father,’ was written on the title-page. These writers deal queerly with their words of praise of one another. There is no law to restrain them. Perhaps it is the consolation they take for the poor devil’s life they lead!

A lady addressing him familiarly, invited him to go upstairs.

He thanked her. At the foot of the stairs he turned; he had recognized Cecilia Halkett.

Seeing her there was more strange to him than being there himself; but he bowed to facts.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

She did not answer intelligibly.