Beauchamp's Career. Complete

In the place of the carriage stood a man, who growled ‘Where’s your horsewhip, butcher?’

He dogged the earl some steps across the common. Everard returned to his hotel and slept soundly during the remainder of the dark hours.

CHAPTER LII. QUESTION OF A PILGRIMAGE AND AN ACT OF PENANCE

Then came a glorious morning for sportsmen. One sniffed the dews, and could fancy fresh smells of stubble earth and dank woodland grass in the very streets of dirty Bevisham. Sound sleep, like hearty dining, endows men with a sense of rectitude, and sunlight following the former, as a pleasant spell of conversational ease or sweet music the latter, smiles a celestial approval of the performance: Lord Romfrey dismissed his anxieties. His lady slightly ruffled him at breakfast in a letter saying that she wished to join him. He was annoyed at noon by a message, wherein the wish was put as a request. And later arrived another message, bearing the character of an urgent petition. True, it might be laid to the account of telegraphic brevity.

He saw Dr. Shrapnel, and spoke to him, as before, to thank him for the permission to visit his nephew. Nevil he contemplated for the space of five minutes. He cordially saluted Miss Denham. He kissed Cecilia’s hand.

‘All here is going on so well that I am with you for a day or two to-morrow,’ he despatched the message to his wife.

Her case was now the gravest. He could not understand why she desired to be in Bevisham. She must have had execrable dreams!—rank poison to mothers.

However, her constitutional strength was great, and his pride in the restoration of his House by her agency flourished anew, what with fair weather and a favourable report from Dr. Gannet: The weather was most propitious to the hopes of any soul bent on dispersing the shadows of death, and to sportsmen. From the windows of his railway carriage he beheld the happy sportsmen stalking afield. The birds whirred and dropped just where he counted on their dropping. The smoke of the guns threaded to dazzling silver in the sunshine. Say what poor old Nevil will, or did say, previous to the sobering of his blood, where is there a land like England? Everard rejoiced in his country temperately. Having Nevil as well,—of which fact the report he was framing in his mind to deliver to his wife assured him—he was rich. And you that put yourselves forward for republicans and democrats, do you deny the aristocracy of an oaklike man who is young upon the verge of eighty?

These were poetic flights, but he knew them not by name, and had not to be ashamed of them.

Rosamund met him in the hall of the castle. ‘You have not deceived me, my dear lord,’ she said, embracing him. ‘You have done what you could for me. The rest is for me to do.’

He reciprocated her embrace warmly, in commendation of her fresher good looks.

She asked him, ‘You have spoken to Dr. Shrapnel?’

He answered her, ‘Twice.’

The word seemed quaint. She recollected that he was quaint.

He repeated, ‘I spoke to him the first day I saw him, and the second.’

‘We are so much indebted to him,’ said Rosamund. ‘His love of Nevil surpasses ours. Poor man! poor man! At least we may now hope the blow will be spared him which would have carried off his life with Nevil’s. I have later news of Nevil than you.’

‘Good, of course?’

‘Ah me! the pleasure of the absence of pain. He is not gone.’

Lord Romfrey liked her calm resignation.

‘There’s a Mr. Lydiard,’ he said, ‘a friend of Nevil’s, and a friend of Louise Devereux’s.’

‘Yes; we hear from him every four hours,’ Rosamund rejoined. ‘Mention him to her before me.’

‘That’s exactly what I was going to tell you to do before me,’ said her husband, smiling.

‘Because, Everard, is it not so?—widows… and she loves this gentleman!’

‘Certainly, my dear; I think with you about widows. The world asks them to practise its own hypocrisy. Louise Devereux was married to a pipe; she’s the widow of tobacco ash. We’ll make daylight round her.’

‘How good, how kind you are, my lord! I did not think so shrewd! But benevolence is almost all-seeing: You said you spoke to Dr. Shrapnel twice. Was he… polite?’

‘Thoroughly upset, you know.’

‘What did he say?’

‘What was it? “Beauchamp! Beauchamp!” the first time; and the second time he said he thought it had left off raining.’

‘Ah!’ Rosamund drooped her head.

She looked up. ‘Here is Louise. My lord has had a long conversation with Mr. Lydiard.’

‘I trust he will come here before you leave us,’ added the earl.

Rosamund took her hand. ‘My lord has been more acute than I, or else your friend is less guarded than you.’

‘What have you seen?’ said the blushing lady.

‘Stay. I have an idea you are one of the women I promised to Cecil Baskelett,’ said the earl. ‘Now may I tell him there’s no chance?’

‘Oh! do.’

They spent so very pleasant an evening that the earl settled down into a comfortable expectation of the renewal of his old habits in the September and October season. Nevil’s frightful cry played on his ear-drum at whiles, but not too affectingly. He conducted Rosamund to her room, kissed her, hoped she would sleep well, and retired to his good hard bachelor’s bed, where he confidently supposed he would sleep. The sleep of a dyspeptic, with a wilder than the monstrous Bevisham dream, befell him, causing him to rise at three in the morning and proceed to his lady’s chamber, to assure himself that at least she slept well. She was awake.

‘I thought you might come,’ she said.

He reproached her gently for indulging foolish nervous fears.

She replied, ‘No, I do not; I am easier about Nevil. I begin to think he will live. I have something at my heart that prevents me from sleeping. It concerns me. Whether he is to live or die, I should like him to know he has not striven in vain—not in everything: not where my conscience tells me he was right, and we, I, wrong—utterly wrong, wickedly wrong.’

‘My dear girl, you are exciting yourself.’

‘No; feel my pulse. The dead of night brings out Nevil to me like the Writing on the Wall. It shall not be said he failed in everything. Shame to us if it could be said! He tried to make me see what my duty was, and my honour.’

‘He was at every man Jack of us.’

‘I speak of one thing. I thought I might not have to go. Now I feel I must. I remember him at Steynham, when Colonel Halkett and Cecilia were there. But for me, Cecilia would now be his wife. Of that there is no doubt; that is not the point; regrets are fruitless. I see how the struggle it cost him to break with his old love—that endearing Madame de Rouaillout, his Renee—broke his heart; and then his loss of Cecilia Halkett. But I do believe, true as that I am lying here, and you hold my hand, my dear husband, those losses were not so fatal to him as his sufferings he went through on account of his friend Dr. Shrapnel. I will not keep you here.

Go and have some rest. What I shall beg of you tomorrow will not injure my health in the slightest: the reverse: it will raise me from a bitter depression. It shall not be said that those who loved him were unmoved by him. Before he comes back to life, or is carried to his grave, he shall know that I was not false to my love of him.’

‘My dear, your pulse is at ninety,’ said the earl.

‘Look lenient, be kind, be just, my husband. Oh! let us cleanse our hearts. This great wrong was my doing. I am not only quite strong enough to travel to Bevisham, I shall be happy in going: and when I have done it—said: “The wrong was all mine,” I shall rejoice like the pure in spirit. Forgiveness does not matter, though I now believe that poor loving old man who waits outside his door weeping, is wrong-headed only in his political views. We women can read men by their power to love. Where love exists there is goodness. But it is not for the sake of the poor old man himself that I would go: it is for Nevil’s; it is for ours, chiefly for me, for my child’s, if ever…!’ Rosamund turned her head on her pillow.

The earl patted her cheek. ‘We ‘ll talk it over in the morning,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’

He could not say more, for he did not dare to attempt cajolery with her. Shading his lamp he stepped softly away to wrestle with a worse nightmare than sleep’s. Her meaning was clear: and she was a woman to insist on doing it. She was nevertheless a woman not impervious to reason, if only he could shape her understanding to perceive that the state of her nerves, incident to her delicate situation and the shock of that fellow Nevil’s illness—poor lad!—was acting on her mind, rendering her a victim of exaggerated ideas of duty, and so forth.

Naturally, apart from allowing her to undertake the journey by rail, he could not sanction his lady’s humbling of herself so egregiously and unnecessarily. Shrapnel had behaved unbecomingly, and had been punished for it. He had spoken to Shrapnel, and the affair was virtually at an end. With his assistance she would see that, when less excited. Her eternal brooding over Nevil was the cause of these mental vagaries.

Lord Romfrey was for postponing the appointed discussion in the morning after breakfast. He pleaded business engagements.