Beauchamp's Career Part 15

Mr. Lydiard added, 'I have an appointment with him here for this evening.'

'You build a cathedral of sound in the organ,' said Dr. Shrapnel, casting out a league of leg as he sat beside his only half-persuaded fretful guest. 'You subject the winds to serve you; that's a gain. You do actually accomplish a resonant imitation of the various instruments; they sing out as your two hands command them--trumpet, flute, dulcimer, hautboy, drum, storm, earthquake, ethereal quire; you have them at your option. But tell me of an organ in the open air? The sublimity would vanish, ma'am, both from the notes and from the structure, because accessories and circ.u.mstances produce its chief effects. Say that an organ is a despotism, just as your piano is the Const.i.tutional bourgeois. Match them with the trained orchestral band of skilled individual performers, indoors or out, where each grasps his instrument, and each relies on his fellow with confidence, and an unrivalled concord comes of it. That is our republic each one to his work; all in union!

There's the motto for us! Then you have music, harmony, the highest, fullest, finest! Educate your men to form a band, you shame dexterous trickery and imitation sounds. Then for the difference of real instruments from clever shams! Oh, ay, one will set your organ going; that is, one in front, with his couple of panting air-pumpers behind--his ministers!' Dr. Shrapnel laughed at some undefined mental image, apparently careless of any laughing companionship. 'One will do it for you, especially if he's born to do it. Born!' A slap of the knee reported what seemed to be an immensely contemptuous sentiment. 'But free mouths blowing into bra.s.s and wood, ma'am, beat your bellows and your whifflers; your artificial choruses--crash, crash! your unanimous plebiscitums! Beat them? There's no contest: we're in another world; we're in the sun's world,--yonder!'

Miss Denham's opening notes on the despised piano put a curb on the doctor. She began a Ma.s.s of Mozart's, without the usual preliminary rattle of the keys, as of a crier announcing a performance, straight to her task, for which Rosamund thanked her, liking that kind of composed simplicity: she thanked her more for cutting short the doctor's fanatical nonsense. It was perceptible to her that a species of mad metaphor had been wriggling and tearing its pa.s.sage through a thorn-bush in his discourse, with the furious urgency of a sheep in a panic; but where the ostensible subject ended and the metaphor commenced, and which was which at the conclusion, she found it difficult to discern--much as the sheep would, be when he had left his fleece behind him. She could now have said, 'Silly old man!'

Dr. Shrapnel appeared most placable. He was gazing at his Authority in the heavens, tangled among gold clouds and purple; his head bent acutely on one side, and his eyes upturned in dim speculation. His great feet planted on their heels faced him, suggesting the stocks; his arms hung loose. Full many a hero of the alehouse, anciently amenable to leg-and-foot imprisonment in the grip of the parish, has presented as respectable an air. His forelock straggled as it willed.

Rosamund rose abruptly as soon as the terminating notes of the Ma.s.s had been struck.

Dr. Shrapnel seemed to be concluding his devotions before he followed her example.

'There, ma'am, you have a telegraphic system for the soul,' he said. 'It is harder work to travel from this place to this' (he pointed at ear and breast) 'than from here to yonder' (a similar indication traversed the distance between earth and sun). 'Man's aim has. .h.i.therto been to keep men from having a soul for this world: he takes it for something infernal. He?--I mean, they that hold power. They shudder to think the conservatism of the earth will be shaken by a change; they dread they won't get men with souls to fetch and carry, dig, root, mine, for them.

Right!--what then? Digging and mining will be done; so will harping and singing. But then we have a natural optimacy! Then, on the one hand, we whip the man-beast and the man-sloth; on the other, we seize that old fatted iniquity--that tyrant! that tempter! that legitimated swindler cursed of Christ! that palpable Satan whose name is Capital! by the neck, and have him disgorging within three gasps of his life. He is the villain! Let him live, for he too comes of blood and bone. He shall not grind the faces of the poor and helpless--that's all.'

The comicality of her having such remarks addressed to her provoked a smile on Rosamund's lips.

'Don't go at him like Samson blind,' said Mr. Lydiard; and Miss Denham, who had returned, begged her guardian to entreat the guest to stay.

She said in an undertone, 'I am very anxious you should see Captain Beauchamp, madam.'

'I too; but he will write, and I really can wait no longer,' Rosamund replied, in extreme apprehension lest a certain degree of pressure should overbear her repugnance to the doctor's dinner-table. Miss Denham's look was fixed on her; but, whatever it might mean, Rosamund's endurance was at an end. She was invited to dine; she refused. She was exceedingly glad to find herself on the high-road again, with a prospect of reaching Steynham that night; for it was important that she should not have to confess a visit to Bevisham now when she had so little of favourable to tell Mr. Everard Romfrey of his chosen nephew. Whether she had acted quite wisely in not remaining to see Nevil, was an agitating question that had to be silenced by an appeal to her instincts of repulsion, and a further appeal for justification of them to her imaginary sisterhood of gossips. How could she sit and eat, how pa.s.s an evening in that house, in the society of that man? Her tuneful chorus cried, 'How indeed.' Besides, it would have offended Mr. Romfrey to hear that she had done so. Still she could not refuse to remember Miss Denham's marked intimations of there being a reason for Nevil's friend to seize the chance of an immediate interview with him; and in her distress at the thought, Rosamund reluctantly, but as if compelled by necessity, ascribed the young lady's conduct to a strong sense of personal interests.

'Evidently she has no desire he should run the risk of angering a rich uncle.'

This shameful suspicion was unavoidable: there was no other opiate for Rosamund's blame of herself after letting her instincts gain the ascendancy.

It will be found a common case, that when we have yielded to our instincts, and then have to soothe conscience, we must slaughter somebody, for a sacrificial offering to our sense of comfort.

CHAPTER XIII. A SUPERFINE CONSCIENCE

However much Mr. Everard Romfrey may have laughed at Nevil Beauchamp with his 'banana-wreath,' he liked the fellow for having volunteered for that African coast-service, and the news of his promotion by his admiral to the post of commander through a death vacancy, had given him an exalted satisfaction, for as he could always point to the cause of failures, he strongly appreciated success. The circ.u.mstance had offered an occasion for the new commander to hit him hard upon a matter of fact.

Beauchamp had sent word of his advance in rank, but requested his uncle not to imagine him wearing an additional epaulette; and he corrected the infallible gentleman's error (which had of course been reported to him when he was dreaming of Renee, by Mrs. Culling) concerning a lieutenant's shoulder decorations, most gravely; informing him of the anchor on the lieutenant's pair of epaulettes, and the anchor and star on a commander's, and the crown on a captain's, with a well-feigned solicitousness to save his uncle from blundering further. This was done in the dry neat manner which Mr. Romfrey could feel to be his own turned on him.

He began to conceive a vague respect for the fellow who had proved him wrong upon a matter of fact. Beauchamp came from Africa rather worn by the climate, and immediately obtained the command of the Ariadne corvette, which had been some time in commission in the Mediterranean, whither he departed, without visiting Steynham; allowing Rosamund to think him tenacious of his wrath as well as of love. Mr. Romfrey considered him to be insatiable for service. Beauchamp, during his absence, had shown himself awake to the affairs of his country once only, in an urgent supplication he had forwarded for all his uncle's influence to be used to get him appointed to the first vacancy in Robert Hall's naval brigade, then forming a part of our handful in insurgent India. The fate of that chivalrous Englishman, that born sailor-warrior, that truest of heroes, imperishable in the memory of those who knew him, and in our annals, young though he was when death took him, had wrung from Nevil Beauchamp such a letter of tears as to make Mr. Romfrey believe the naval crown of glory his highest ambition. Who on earth could have guessed him to be bothering his head about politics all the while! Or was the whole stupid business a freak of the moment?

It became necessary for Mr. Romfrey to contemplate his eccentric nephew in the light of a mannikin once more. Consequently he called to mind, and bade Rosamund Culling remember, that he had foreseen and had predicted the mounting of Nevil Beauchamp on his political horse one day or another; and perhaps the earlier the better. And a donkey could have sworn that when he did mount he would come galloping in among the Radical rough-riders. Letters were pouring upon Steynham from men and women of Romfrey blood and relationship concerning the positive tone of Radicalism in the commander's address. Everard laughed at them. As a practical man, his objection lay against the poor fool's choice of the peccant borough of Bevisham. Still, in view of the needfulness of his learning wisdom, and rapidly, the disburs.e.m.e.nt of a lot of his money, certain to be required by Bevisham's electors, seemed to be the surest method for quickening his wits. Thus would he be acting as his own chirurgeon, gaily practising phlebotomy on his person to cure him of his fever. Too much money was not the origin of the fever in Nevil's case, but he had too small a sense of the value of what he possessed, and the diminishing stock would be likely to cry out shrilly.

To this effect, never complaining that Nevil Beauchamp had not come to him to take counsel with him, the high-minded old gentleman talked. At the same time, while indulging in so philosophical a picture of himself as was presented by a Romfrey mildly accounting for events and smoothing them under the infliction of an offence, he could not but feel that Nevil had challenged him: such was the reading of it; and he waited for some justifiable excitement to fetch him out of the magnanimous mood, rather in the image of an angler, it must be owned.

'Nevil understands that I am not going to pay a farthing of his expenses in Bevisham?' he said to Mrs. Culling.

She replied blandly and with innocence, 'I have not seen him, sir.'

He nodded. At the next mention of Nevil between them, he asked, 'Where is it he's lying perdu, ma'am?'

'I fancy in that town, in Bevisham.'

'At the Liberal, Radical, hotel?'

'I dare say; some place; I am not certain....'

'The rascal doctor's house there? Shrapnel's?'

'Really... I have not seen him.'

'Have you heard from him?'

'I have had a letter; a short one.'

'Where did he date his letter from?'

'From Bevisham.'

'From what house?'

Rosamund glanced about for a way of escaping the question. There was none but the door. She replied, 'From Dr. Shrapnel's.'

'That's the Anti-Game-Law agitator.'

'You do not imagine, sir, that Nevil subscribes to every thing the horrid man agitates for?'

'You don't like the man, ma'am?'

'I detest him.'

'Ha! So you have seen Shrapnel?'

'Only for a moment; a moment or two. I cannot endure him. I am sure I have reason.'

Rosamund flushed exceedingly red. The visit to Dr. Shrapnel's house was her secret, and the worming of it out made her feel guilty, and that feeling revived and heated her antipathy to the Radical doctor.

'What reason?' said Mr. Romfrey, freshening at her display of colour.

She would not expose Nevil to the accusation of childishness by confessing her positive reason, so she answered, 'The man is a kind of man... I was not there long; I was glad to escape. He...' she hesitated: for in truth it was difficult to shape the charge against him, and the effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative, now that he had been spoken of, as to the detested doctor, reduced her to some confusion. She was also fatally anxious to be in the extreme degree conscientious, and corrected and modified her remarks most suspiciously.

'Did he insult you, ma'am?' Mr. Romfrey inquired.

She replied hastily, 'Oh no. He may be a good man in his way. He is one of those men who do not seem to think a woman may have opinions. He does not scruple to outrage those we hold. I am afraid he is an infidel. His ideas of family duties and ties, and his manner of expressing himself, shocked me, that is all. He is absurd. I dare say there is no harm in him, except for those who are so unfortunate as to fall under his influence--and that, I feel sure, cannot be permanent. He could not injure me personally. He could not offend me, I mean. Indeed, I have nothing whatever to say against him, as far as I...'

'Did he fail to treat you as a lady, ma'am?'

Rosamund was getting frightened by the significant pertinacity of her lord.

'I am sure, sir, he meant no harm.'