"Then point that out to your father, said he, perceiving a chance of winning her to his views through a concrete object of her dislike, and cooling toward the woman who betrayed a vulgar characteristic of her s.e.x; who was merely woman, unable sternly to recognize the doing of a foul wrong because of her antipathy, until another antipathy enlightened her.
He wanted in fact a ready-made heroine, and did not give her credit for the absence of fire in her blood, as well as for the unexercised imagination which excludes young women from the power to realize unwonted circ.u.mstances. We men walking about the world have perhaps no more imagination of matters not domestic than they; but what we have is quick with experience: we see the thing we hear of: women come to it how they can.
Cecilia was recommended to weave a narrative for her father, and ultimately induce him, if she could, to give a gentleman"s opinion of the case to Mr. Romfrey.
Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she received. "Your father will say so and so: answer him with this and that." Beauchamp supplied her with phrases. She was to renew and renew the attack; hammer as he did. Yesterday she had followed him: to-day she was to march beside him--hardly as an equal. Patience! was the word she would have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his nature which this hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with unusual perspicacity. Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit that he had grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings.
He said: "I go to Dr. Shrapnel"s cottage, and don"t know how to hold up my head before Miss Denham. She confided him to me when she left for Switzerland!"
There was that to be thought of, certainly.
Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing together in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny.
"I"ve been calling you several times, my dear," he complained. "We start in seven minutes. Bustle, and bonnet at once. Nevil, I"m sorry for this business. Good-bye. Be a good boy, Nevil," he murmured kindheartedly, and shook Beauchamp"s hand with the cordiality of an extreme relief in leaving him behind.
The colonel and Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp were standing on the hall-steps when Rosamund beckoned the latter and whispered a request for that letter of Dr. Shrapnel"s. "It is for Miss Halkett, Nevil."
He plucked the famous epistle from his bulging pocketbook, and added a couple of others in the same handwriting.
"Tell her, a first reading--it"s difficult to read at first," he said, and burned to read it to Cecilia himself: to read it to her with his comments and explanations appeared imperative. It struck him in a flash that Cecilia"s counsel to him to quit Steynham for awhile was good. And if he went to Bevisham he would be a.s.sured of Dr. Shrapnel"s condition: notes and telegrams from the cottage were too much tempered to console and deceive him.
"Send my portmanteau and bag after me to Bevisham," he said Rosamund, and announced to the woefully astonish colonel that he would have the pleasure of journeying in his company as far as the town.
"Are you ready? No packing?" said the colonel.
"It"s better to have your impediments in the rear of you, and march!"
said Mr. Romfrey.
Colonel Halkett declined to wait for anybody. He shouted for his daughter. The lady"s maid appeared, and then Cecilia with Rosamund.
"We can"t entertain you, Nevil; we"re away to the island: I"m sorry,"
said the colonel; and observing Cecilia"s face in full crimson, he looked at her as if he had lost a battle by the turn of events at the final moment.
Mr. Romfrey handed Cecilia into the carriage. He exchanged a friendly squeeze with the colonel, and offered his hand to his nephew. Beauchamp pa.s.sed him with a nod and "Good-bye, sir."
"Have ready at Holdesbury for the middle of the month," said Mr.
Romfrey, unruffled, and bowed to Cecilia.
"If you think of bringing my cousin Baskelett, give me warning, sir,"
cried Beauchamp.
"Give me warning, if you want the house for Shrapnel," replied his uncle, and remarked to Rosamund, as the carriage wheeled round the mounded laurels to the avenue, "He mayn"t be quite cracked. The fellow seems to have a turn for catching his opportunity by the tail. He had better hold fast, for it"s his last."
CHAPTER x.x.xVII. CECILIA CONQUERED
The carriage rolled out of the avenue and through the park, for some time parallel with the wavy downs. Once away from Steynham Colonel Halkett breathed freely, as if he had dropped a load: he was free of his bond to Mr. Romfrey, and so great was the sense of relief in him that he resolved to do battle against his daughter, supposing her still lively blush to be the sign of the enemy"s flag run up on a surrendered citadel. His authority was now to be thought of: his paternal sanction was in his own keeping. Beautiful as she looked, it was hardly credible that a fellow in possession of his reason could have let slip his chance of such a prize; but whether he had or had not, the colonel felt that he occupied a position enabling him either to out-manoeuvre, or, if need were, interpose forcibly and punish him for his half-heartedness.
Cecilia looked the loveliest of women to Beauchamp"s eyes, with her blush, and the letters of Dr. Shrapnel in her custody, at her express desire. Certain terms in the letters here and there, unsweet to ladies, began to trouble his mind.
"By the way, colonel," he said, "you had a letter of Dr. Shrapnel"s read to you by Captain Baskelett."
"Iniquitous rubbish!"
"With his comments on it, I dare say you thought it so. I won"t speak of his right to make it public. He wanted to produce his impressions of it and me, and that is a matter between him and me. Dr. Shrapnel makes use of strong words now and then, but I undertake to produce a totally different impression on you by reading the letter myself--sparing you"
(he turned to Cecilia) "a word or two, common enough to men who write in black earnest and have humour." He cited his old favourite, the black and bright lecturer on Heroes. "You have read him, I know, Cecilia.
Well, Dr. Shrapnel is another, who writes in his own style, not the leading-article style or modern pulpit stuff. He writes to rouse."
"He does that to my temper," said the colonel.
"Perhaps here and there he might offend Cecilia"s taste," Beauchamp pursued for her behoof. "Everything depends on the mouthpiece. I should not like the letter to be read without my being by;--except by men: any just-minded man may read it: Seymour Austin, for example. Every line is a text to the mind of the writer. Let me call on you to-morrow."
"To-morrow?" Colonel Halkett put on a thoughtful air. "To-morrow we"re off to the island for a couple of days; and there"s Lord Croyston"s garden party, and the Yacht Ball. Come this evening-dine with us. No reading of letters, please. I can"t stand it, Nevil."
The invitation was necessarily declined by a gentleman who could not expect to be followed by supplies of clothes and linen for evening wear that day.
"Ah, we shall see you some day or other," said the colonel.
Cecilia was less alive to Beauchamp"s endeavour to prepare her for the harsh words in the letter than to her father"s insincerity. She would have asked her friend to come in the morning next day, but for the dread of deepening her blush.
"Do you intend to start so early in the morning, papa?" she ventured to say; and he replied, "As early as possible."
"I don"t know what news I shall have in Bevisham, or I would engage to run over to the island," said Beauchamp, with a flattering persistency or singular obtuseness.
"You will dance," he subsequently observed to Cecilia, out of the heart of some reverie. He had been her admiring partner on the night before the drive from Itchincope into Bevisham, and perhaps thought of her graceful dancing at the Yacht Ball, and the contrast it would present to his watch beside a sick man-struck down by one of his own family.
She could have answered, "Not if you wish me not to"; while smiling at the quaint sorrowfulness of his tone.
"Dance!" quoth Colonel Halkett, whose present temper discerned a healthy antagonism to misanthropic Radicals in the performance, "all young people dance. Have you given over dancing?"
"Not entirely, colonel."
Cecilia danced with Mr. Tuckham at the Yacht Ball, and was vividly mindful of every slight incident leading to and succeeding her lover"s abrupt, "You will dance" which had all pa.s.sed by her dream-like up to that hour his attempt to forewarn her of the phrases she would deem objectionable in Dr. Shrapnel"s letter; his mild acceptation of her father"s hostility; his adieu to her, and his melancholy departure on foot from the station, as she drove away to Mount Laurels and gaiety.
Why do I dance? she asked herself. It was not in the spirit of happiness. Her heart was not with Dr. Shrapnel, but very near him, and heavy as a chamber of the sick. She was afraid of her father"s favourite, imagining, from the colonel"s unconcealed opposition to Beauchamp, that he had designs in the interests of Mr. Tuckham. But the hearty gentleman scattered her secret terrors by his bluffness and openness. He asked her to remember that she had recommended him to listen to Seymour Austin, and he had done so, he said. Undoubtedly he was much improved, much less overbearing.
He won her confidence by praising and loving her father, and when she alluded to the wonderful services he had rendered on the Welsh estate, he said simply that her father"s thanks repaid him. He recalled his former downrightness only in speaking of the case of Dr. Shrapnel, upon which, both with the colonel and with her, he was unreservedly condemnatory of Mr. Romfrey. Colonel Halkett"s defence of the true knight and guardian of the reputation of ladies, fell to pieces in the presence of Mr. Tuckham. He had seen Dr. Shrapnel, on a visit to Mr.
Lydiard, whom he described as hanging about Bevisham, philandering as a married man should not, though in truth he might soon expect to be released by the death of his crazy wife. The doctor, he said, had been severely shaken by the monstrous a.s.sault made on him, and had been most unrighteously handled. The doctor was an inoffensive man in his private life, detestable and dangerous though his teachings were. Outside politics Mr. Tuckham went altogether with Beauchamp. He promised also that old Mrs. Beauchamp should be accurately informed of the state of matters between Captain Beauchamp and Mr. Romfrey. He left Mount Laurels to go back in attendance on the venerable lady, without once afflicting Cecilia with a shiver of well-founded apprehension, and she was grateful to him almost to friendly affection in the vanishing of her unjust suspicion, until her father hinted that there was the man of his heart.
Then she closed all avenues to her own.
A period of maidenly distress not previously unknown to her ensued.
Proposals of marriage were addressed to her by two unt.i.tled gentlemen, and by the Earl of Lockrace: three within a fortnight. The recognition of the young heiress"s beauty at the Yacht Ball was accountable for the bursting out of these fires. Her father would not have deplored her acceptance of the t.i.tle of Countess of Lockrace. In the matter of rejections, however, her will was paramount, and he was on her side against relatives when the subject was debated among them. He called her attention to the fact impressively, telling her that she should not hear a syllable from him to persuade her to marry: the emphasis of which struck the unspoken warning on her intelligence: Bring no man to me of whom I do not approve!
"Worthier of you, as I hope to become," Beauchamp had said. Cecilia lit on that part of Dr. Shrapnel"s letter where "Fight this out within you,"
distinctly alluded to the unholy love. Could she think ill of the man who thus advised him? She shared Beauchamp"s painful feeling for him in a sudden tremour of her frame; as it were through his touch. To the rest of the letter her judgement stood opposed, save when a sentence here and there reminded her of Captain Baskelett"s insolent sing-song declamation of it: and that would have turned Sacred Writing to absurdity.
Beauchamp had mentioned Seymour Austin as one to whom he would willingly grant a perusal of the letter. Mr. Austin came to Mount Laurels about the close of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel Halkett had spent his customary days of September shooting at Steynham. Beauchamp"s folly was the colonel"s theme, for the fellow had dragged Lord Palmet there, and driven his uncle out of patience. Mr. Romfrey"s monumental patience had been exhausted by him. The colonel boiled over with accounts of Beauchamp"s behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet, and Baskelett, and Mrs. Culling: how he flew at and worried everybody who seemed to him to have had a hand in the proper chastis.e.m.e.nt of that man Shrapnel. That pestiferous letter of Shrapnel"s was animadverted on, of course; and, "I should like you to have heard it, Austin," the colonel said, "just for you to have a notion of the kind of universal blow-up those men are scheming, and would hoist us with, if they could get a little more blasting-powder than they mill in their lunatic heads."