Their meeting was like the features of the day she set her brush to picture: characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone, though it breathed little cheer. Is there not a pleasure in contemplating that which is characteristic? Her unfinished sketch recalled him after he had gone: he lived in it, to startle her again, and bid her heart gallop and her cheeks burn. The question occurred to her: May not one love, not craving to be beloved? Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports it; increases rather than diminishes our n.o.ble self-esteem. To attain such a love the martyrs writhed up to the crown of saints. For a while Cecilia revelled in the thought that she could love in this most saint-like manner. How they fled, the sordid ideas of him which accused him of the world"s one pa.s.sion, and were transferred to her own bosom in reproach that she should have imagined them existing in his! He talked simply and sweetly of his defeat, of time wasted away from the canva.s.s, of loss of money: and he had little to spare, he said. The water-colour drawing interested him. He said he envied her that power of isolation, and the eye for beauty in every season. She opened a portfolio of Mr. Tuckham"s water-colour drawings in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and he was to be excused for not caring to look through them. His remark, that they seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust, she thought, smiling to think of the critic criticized. His wonderment that a young man like his Lancastrian cousin should be "an unmitigated Tory" was perhaps natural.
Cecilia said, "Yet I cannot discern in him a veneration for aristocracy." "That"s not wanted for modern Toryism," said Nevil. "One may venerate old families when they show the blood of the founder, and are not dead wood. I do. And I believe the blood of the founder, though the man may have been a savage and a robber, had in his day finer elements in it than were common. But let me say at a meeting that I respect true aristocracy, I hear a growl and a hiss beginning: why?
Don"t judge them hastily: because the people have seen the aristocracy opposed to the cause that was weak, and only submitting to it when it commanded them to resist at their peril; clinging to traditions, and not anywhere standing for humanity: much more a herd than the people themselves. Ah! well, we won"t talk of it now. I say that is no aristocracy, if it does not head the people in virtue--military, political, national: I mean the qualities required by the times for leadership. I won"t bother you with my ideas now. I love to see you paint-brush in hand."
Her brush trembled on the illumination of a scarlet maple. "In this country we were not originally made free and equal by decree, Nevil."
"No," said he, "and I cast no blame on our farthest ancestors."
It struck her that this might be an outline of a reply to Mr. Austin.
"So you have been thinking over it?" he asked.
"Not to conclusions," she said, trying to retain in her mind the evanescent suggestiveness of his previous remark, and vexed to find herself upon nothing but a devious phosph.o.r.escent trail there.
Her forehead betrayed the unwonted mental action. He cried out for pardon. "What right have I to bother you? I see it annoys you. The truth is, I came for peace. I think of you when they talk of English homes."
She felt then that he was comparing her home with another, a foreign home. After he had gone she felt that there had been a comparison of two persons. She remembered one of his observations: "Few women seem to have courage"; when his look at her was for an instant one of scrutiny or calculation. Under a look like that we perceive that we are being weighed. She had no clue to tell her what it signified.
Glorious and solely glorious love, that has risen above emotion, quite independent of craving! That is to be the bird of upper air, poised on his wings. It is a home in the sky. Cecilia took possession of it systematically, not questioning whether it would last; like one who is too enamoured of the habitation to object to be a tenant-at-will. If it was cold, it was in recompense immeasurably lofty, a star-girdled place; and dwelling in it she could avow to herself the secret which was now working self-deception, and still preserve her pride unwounded. Her womanly pride, she would have said in vindication of it: but Cecilia Halkett"s pride went far beyond the merely womanly.
Thus she was a.s.sisted to endure a journey down to Wales, where Nevil would surely not be. She pa.s.sed a Winter without seeing him. She returned to Mount Laurels from London at Easter, and went on a visit to Steynham, and back to London, having sight of him nowhere, still firm in the thought that she loved ethereally, to bless, forgive, direct, encourage, pray for him, impersonally. She read certain speeches delivered by Nevil at a.s.semblies of Liberals or Radicals, which were reported in papers in the easy irony of the style of here and there a sentence, here and there a summary: salient quotations interspersed with running abstracts: a style terrible to friends of the speaker so reported, overwhelming if they differ in opinion: yet her charity was a match for it. She was obliged to have recourse to charity, it should be observed. Her father drew her attention to the spectacle of R. C. S.
Nevil Beauchamp, Commander R.N., fighting those reporters with letters in the newspapers, and the dry editorial comment flanked by three stars on the left. He was shocked to see a gentleman writing such letters to the papers. "But one thing hangs on another," said he.
"But you seem angry with Nevil, papa," said she.
"I do hate a turbulent, restless fellow, my dear," the colonel burst out.
"Papa, he has really been unfairly reported."
Cecilia laid three privately-printed full reports of Commander Beauchamp"s speeches (very carefully corrected by him) before her father.
He suffered his eye to run down a page. "Is it possible you read this?--this trash!--dangerous folly, I call it."
Cecilia"s reply, "In the interests of justice, I do," was meant to express her pure impartiality. By a toleration of what is detested we expose ourselves to the keenness of an adverse mind.
"Does he write to you, too?" said the colonel.
She answered: "Oh, no; I am not a politician."
"He seems to have expected you to read those tracts of his, though."
"Yes, I think he would convert me if he could," said Cecilia.
"Though you"re not a politician."
"He relies on the views he delivers in public, rather than on writing to persuade; that was my meaning, papa."
"Very well," said the colonel, not caring to show his anxiety.
Mr. Tuckham dined with them frequently in London. This gentleman betrayed his accomplishments one by one. He sketched, and was no artist; he planted, and was no gardener; he touched the piano neatly, and was no musician; he sang, and he had no voice. Apparently he tried his hand at anything, for the privilege of speaking decisively upon all things. He accompanied the colonel and his daughter on a day"s expedition to Mrs.
Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames, and they agreed that he shone to great advantage in her society. Mrs. Beauchamp said she had seen her great-nephew Nevil, but without a comment on his conduct or his person; grave silence. Reflecting on it, Cecilia grew indignant at the thought that Mr. Tuckham might have been acting a sinister part. Mrs. Beauchamp alluded to a newspaper article of her favourite great-nephew Blackburn, written, Cecilia knew through her father, to controvert some tremendous proposition of Nevil"s. That was writing, Mrs. Beauchamp said. "I am not in the habit of fearing a conflict, so long as we have stout defenders.
I rather like it," she said.
The colonel entertained Mrs. Beauchamp, while Mr. Tuckham led Miss Halkett over the garden. Cecilia considered that his remarks upon Nevil were insolent.
"Seriously, Miss Halkett, to take him at his best, he is a very good fellow, I don"t doubt; I am told so; and a capital fellow among men, a good friend and not a bad boon-fellow, and for that matter, the smoking-room is a better test than the drawing-room; all he wants is emphatically school--school--school. I have recommended the simple iteration of that one word in answer to him at his meetings, and the printing of it as a foot-note to his letters."
Cecilia"s combative spirit precipitated her to say, "I hear the mob in it shouting Captain Beauchamp down."
"Ay," said Mr. Tuckham, "it would be setting the mob to shout wisely at last."
"The mob is a wild beast."
"Then we should hear wisdom coming out of the mouth of the wild beast."
"Men have the phrase, "fair play.""
"Fair play, I say, is not applicable to a man who deliberately goes about to stir the wild beast. He is laughed at, plucked, hustled, and robbed, by those who deafen him with their "plaudits"--their roars.
Did you see his advertis.e.m.e.nt of a great-coat, lost at some rapscallion gathering down in the North, near my part of the country? A great-coat and a packet of letters. He offers a reward of L10. But that"s honest robbery compared with the bleeding he"ll get."
"Do you know Mr. Seymour Austin?" Miss Halkett asked him.
"I met him once at your father"s table. Why?"
"I think you would like to listen to him."
"Yes, my fault is not listening enough," said Mr. Tuckham.
He was capable of receiving correction.
Her father told her he was indebted to Mr. Tuckham past payment in coin, for services rendered by him on a trying occasion among the miners in Wales during the first spring month. "I dare say he can speak effectively to miners," Cecilia said, outvying the contemptuous young man in superciliousness, but with effort and not with satisfaction.
She left London in July, two days before her father could be induced to return to Mount Laurels. Feverish, and strangely subject to caprices now, she chose the longer way round by Suss.e.x, and alighted at the station near Steynham to call on Mrs. Culling, whom she knew to be at the Hall, preparing it for Mr. Romfrey"s occupation. In imitation of her father she was Rosamund"s fast friend, though she had never quite realized her position, and did not thoroughly understand her. Would it not please her father to hear that she had chosen the tedious route for the purpose of visiting this lady, whose champion he was?
So she went to Steynham, and for hours she heard talk of no one, of nothing, but her friend Nevil. Cecilia was on her guard against Rosamund"s defence of his conduct in France. The declaration that there had been no misbehaviour at all could not be accepted; but the news of Mr. Romfrey"s having installed Nevil in Holdesbury to manage that property, and of his having mooted to her father the question of an alliance between her and Nevil, was wonderful. Rosamund could not say what answer her father had made: hardly favourable, Cecilia supposed, since he had not spoken of the circ.u.mstance to her. But Mr. Romfrey"s influence with him would certainly be powerful.
It was to be a.s.sumed, also, that Nevil had been consulted by his uncle.
Rosamund said full-heartedly that this alliance had for years been her life"s desire, and then she let the matter pa.s.s, nor did she once loop at Cecilia searchingly, or seem to wish to probe her. Cecilia disagreed with Rosamund on an insignificant point in relation to something Mr. Romfrey and Captain Baskelett had done, and, as far as she could recollect subsequently, there was a packet of letters, or a pocket-book containing letters of Nevil"s which he had lost, and which had been forwarded to Mr. Romfrey; for the pocket-book was originally his, and his address was printed inside. But among these letters was one from Dr. Shrapnel to Nevil: a letter so horrible that Rosamund frowned at the reminiscence of it, holding it to be too horrible for the quotation of a sentence. She owned she had forgotten any three consecutive words. Her known dislike of Captain Baskelett, however, was insufficient to make her see that it was unjustifiable in him to run about London reading it, with comments of the cruellest. Rosamund"s greater detestation of Dr.
Shrapnel blinded her to the offence committed by the man she would otherwise have been very ready to scorn. So small did the circ.u.mstance appear to Cecilia, notwithstanding her gentle opposition at the time she listened to it, that she never thought of mentioning it to her father, and only remembered it when Captain Baskelett, with Lord Palmet in his company, presented himself at Mount Laurels, and proposed to the colonel to read to him "a letter from that scoundrelly old Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp, upon women, wives, thrones, republics, British loyalty, et caetera,"--an et caetera that rolled a series of tremendous reverberations down the list of all things held precious by freeborn Englishmen.
She would have prevented the reading. But the colonel would have it.
"Read on," said he. "Mr. Romfrey saw no harm."
Captain Baskelett held up Dr. Shrapnel"s letter to Commander Beauchamp, at about half a yard"s distance on the level of his chin, as a big-chested singer in a concert-room holds his music-scroll.