Beauchamp's Career. Complete

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.

CHAPTER LIV. THE FRUITS OF THE APOLOGY

This clear heart had cause for tears. Her just indignation with Lord Romfrey had sustained her artificially hitherto now that it was erased, she sank down to weep. Her sentiments toward Lydiard had been very like Cecilia Halkett’s in favour of Mr. Austin; with something more to warm them on the part of the gentleman. He first had led her mind in the direction of balanced thought, when, despite her affection for Dr. Shrapnel, her timorous maiden wits, unable to contend with the copious exclamatory old politician, opposed him silently. Lydiard had helped her tongue to speak, as well as her mind to rational views; and there had been a bond of union in common for them in his admiration of her father’s writings. She had known that he was miserably yoked, and had respected him when he seemed inclined for compassion without wooing her for tenderness. He had not trifled with her, hardly flattered; he had done no more than kindle a young girl’s imaginative liking. The pale flower of imagination, fed by dews, not by sunshine, was born drooping, and hung secret in her bosom, shy as a bell of the frail wood-sorrel. Yet there was pain for her in the perishing of a thing so poor and lowly. She had not observed the change in Lydiard after Beauchamp came on the scene: and that may tell us how passionlessly pure the little maidenly sentiment was. For do but look on the dewy wood-sorrel flower; it is not violet or rose inviting hands to pluck it: still it is there, happy in the woods. And Jenny’s feeling was that a foot had crushed it.

She wept, thinking confusedly of Lord Romfrey; trying to think he had made his amends tardily, and that Beauchamp prized him too highly for the act. She had no longer anything to resent: she was obliged to weep. In truth, as the earl had noticed, she was physically depressed by the strain of her protracted watch over Beauchamp, as well as rather heartsick.

But she had been of aid and use in saving him! She was not quite a valueless person; sweet, too, was the thought that he consulted her, listened to her, weighed her ideas. He had evidently taken to study her, as if dispersing some wonderment that one of her sex should have ideas. He had repeated certain of her own which had been forgotten by her. His eyes were often on her with this that she thought humorous intentness. She smiled. She had assisted in raising him from his bed of sickness, whereof the memory affrighted her and melted her. The difficulty now was to keep him indoors, and why he would not go even temporarily to a large house like Mount Laurels, whither Colonel Halkett was daily requesting him to go, she was unable to comprehend. His love of Dr. Shrapnel might account for it.

‘Own, Jenny,’ said Beauchamp, springing up to meet her as she entered the room where he and Dr. Shrapnel sat discussing Lord Romfrey’s bearing at his visit, ‘own that my uncle Everard is a true nobleman. He has to make the round to the right mark, but he comes to it. I could not move him—and I like him the better for that. He worked round to it himself. I ought to have been sure he would. You’re right: I break my head with impatience.’

‘No; you sowed seed,’ said Dr. Shrapnel. ‘Heed not that girl, my Beauchamp. The old woman’s in the Tory, and the Tory leads the young maid. Here’s a fable I draw from a Naturalist’s book, and we’ll set it against the dicta of Jenny Do-nothing, Jenny Discretion, Jenny Wait-for-the-Gods: Once upon a time in a tropical island a man lay sick; so ill that he could not rise to trouble his neighbours for help; so weak that it was lifting a mountain to get up from his bed; so hopeless of succour that the last spark of distraught wisdom perching on his brains advised him to lie where he was and trouble not himself, since peace at least he could command, before he passed upon the black highroad men call our kingdom of peace: ay, he lay there. Now it chanced that this man had a mess to cook for his nourishment. And life said, Do it, and death said, To what end? He wrestled with the stark limbs of death, and cooked the mess; and that done he had no strength remaining to him to consume it, but crept to his bed like the toad into winter. Now, meanwhile a steam arose from the mess, and he lay stretched. So it befel that the birds of prey of the region scented the mess, and they descended and thronged at that man’s windows. And the man’s neighbours looked up at them, for it was the sign of one who is fit for the beaks of birds, lying unburied. Fail to spread the pall one hour where suns are decisive, and the pall comes down out of heaven! They said, The man is dead within. And they went to his room, and saw him and succoured him. They lifted him out of death by the last uncut thread.

‘Now, my Jenny Weigh-words, Jenny Halt-there! was it they who saved the man, or he that saved himself? The man taxed his expiring breath to sow seed of life. Lydiard shall put it into verse for a fable in song for our people. I say it is a good fable, and sung spiritedly may serve for nourishment, and faith in work, to many of our poor fainting fellows! Now you?’

Jenny said: ‘I think it is a good fable of self-help. Does it quite illustrate the case? I mean, the virtue of impatience. But I like the fable and the moral; and I think it would do good if it were made popular, though it would be hard to condense it to a song.’

‘It would be hard! ay, then we do it forthwith. And you shall compose the music. As for the “case of impatience,” my dear, you tether the soaring universal to your pet-lamb’s post, the special. I spoke of seed sown. I spoke of the fruits of energy and resolution. Cared I for an apology? I took the blows as I take hail from the clouds—which apologize to you the moment you are in shelter, if you laugh at them. So, good night to that matter! Are we to have rain this evening? I must away into Bevisham to the Workmen’s Hall, and pay the men.’

‘There will not be rain; there will be frost, and you must be well wrapped if you must go,’ said Jenny. ‘And tell them not to think of deputations to Captain Beauchamp yet.’

‘No, no deputations; let them send Killick, if they want to say anything,’ said Beauchamp.