Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid. These men!
She remarked very honestly:
"Oh, no; doctors are not needed."
"Has she mentioned me?"
"Not once."
"Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma"am?" cried Beauchamp, bounding off his chair.
He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it; and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs-accompanied by her, of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer to a message was to satisfy him.
"Any message would trouble her: what message would you send?" Rosamund asked him.
The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be thought of.
"You are unused to real suffering--that is for women!--and want to be doing instead of enduring," said Rosamund.
She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally sick lovers. Beauchamp"s outcries against himself gave her the shadows of their story. He stood in tears--a thing to see to believe of Nevil Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past midnight. Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him compa.s.sionately.
In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to England. Rosamund tempered her report of Renee by saying of her, that she was very quiet. He turned to the window.
"Look, what a climate ours is!" Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.
"Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe! This is what she has come to! Has she spoken of me yet?"
"No."
"Is she dead silent?"
"She answers, if I speak to her."
"I believe, ma"am," said Beauchamp, "that we are the coldest-hearted people in Europe."
Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog. Consequently nothing was left for him to abuse but himself. In that she tried to moderate him, and drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renee, would for love"s sake be friendly to them.
"I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead," said Rosamund.
"Her brother will be here to-day; he can"t be later than the evening,"
said Beauchamp. "Get her to eat, ma"am; you must. Command her to eat.
This terrible starvation!"
"You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday."
He surveyed the table. "You have your cook in town, I see. Here"s a breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields. Where does the ma.s.s of meat go? One excess feeds another. You"re overdone with servants. Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of unmanageable footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they"re idle and immoral. If--I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel Halkett, or any one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the income-tax, or some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation, they yell as if they were thumb-screwed: but five shillings in the pound goes to the kitchen as a matter of course--to puff those pompous idiots!
and the parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer waste of food and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public sin, are maundering about schism. There"s another idle army! Then we have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors--the honourable professions! all hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour!
it"s incubus on incubus. In point of fact, the rider"s too heavy for the horse in England."
He began to nibble at bread.
Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of her own invention, such as no douse in the county of Suss.e.x could produce or imitate.
"What would you have the parsons do?" she said.
"Take the rich by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that they"re swine running down to the sea with a devil in them." She had set him off again, but she had enticed him to eating. "Pooh! it has all been said before. Stones are easier to move than your English. May I be forgiven for saying it! an invasion is what they want to bring them to their senses. I"m sick of the work. Why should I be denied--am I to kill the woman I love that I may go on hammering at them? Their idea of liberty is, an evasion of public duty. Dr. Shrapnel"s right--it"s a money-logged Island! Men like the Earl of Romfrey, who have never done work in their days except to kill bears and birds, I say they"re stifled by wealth: and he at least would have made an Admiral of mark, or a General: not of much value, but useful in case of need. But he, like a pretty woman, was under no obligation to contribute more than an ornamental person to the common good. As to that, we count him by tens of thousands now, and his footmen and maids by hundreds of thousands.
The rich love the nation through their possessions; otherwise they have no country. If they loved the country they would care for the people.
Their hearts are eaten up by property. I am bidden to hold my tongue because I have no knowledge. When men who have this "knowledge" will go down to the people, speak to them, consult and argue with them, and come into suitable relations with them--I don"t say of lords and retainers, but of knowers and doers, leaders and followers--out of consideration for public safety, if not for the common good, I shall hang back gladly; though I won"t hear misstatements. My fault is, that I am too moderate.
I should respect myself more if I deserved their hatred. This flood of luxury, which is, as Dr. Shrapnel says, the body"s drunkenness and the soul"s death, cries for execration. I"m too moderate. But I shall quit the country: I"ve no place here."
Rosamund ahemed. "France, Nevil? I should hardly think that France would please you, in the present state of things over there."
Half cynically, with great satisfaction, she had watched him fretting at the savoury morsels of her pie with a fork like a sparrow-beak during the monologue that would have been so dreary to her but for her appreciation of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and her admiration of the fire of his eyes. After finishing his plate he had less the look of a ship driving on to reef--some of his images of the country. He called for claret and water, sighing as he munched bread in vast portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unb.u.t.tered bread was to abstain from luxury. He praised pa.s.singly the quality of the bread. It came from Steynham, and so did the milk and cream, the b.u.t.ter, chicken and eggs. He was good enough not to object to the expenditure upon the transmission of the accustomed dainties. Altogether the gradual act of nibbling had conduced to his eating remarkably well-royally. Rosamund"s more than half-cynical ideas of men, and her custom of wringing unanimous verdicts from a jury of temporary impressions, inclined her to imagine him a lover that had not to be so very much condoled with, and a politician less alarming in practice than in theory:--somewhat a gentleman of domestic tirades on politics: as it is observed of your generous young Radical of birth and fortune, that he will become on the old high road to a round Conservatism.
He pitched one of the morning papers to the floor in disorderly sheets, muttering: "So they"re at me!"
"Is Dr. Shrapnel better?" she asked. "I hold to a good appet.i.te as a sign of a man"s recovery."
Beauchamp was confronting the fog at the window. He swung round: "Dr.
Shrapnel is better. He has a particularly clever young female cook."
"Ah! then..."
"Yes, then, naturally! He would naturally hasten to recover to partake of the viands, ma"am."
Rosamund murmured of her gladness that he should be able to enjoy them.
"Oddly enough, he is not an eater of meat," said Beauchamp.
"A vegetarian!"
"I beg you not to mention the fact to my lord. You see, you yourself can scarcely pardon it. He does not exclude flesh from his table. Blackburn Tuckham dined there once. "You are a thorough revolutionist, Dr.
Shrapnel," he observed. The doctor does not exclude wine, but he does not drink it. Poor Tuckham went away entirely opposed to a Radical he could not even meet as a boon-fellow. I begged him not to mention the circ.u.mstances, as I have begged you. He pledged me his word to that effect solemnly; he correctly felt that if the truth were known, there would be further cause for the reprobation of the man who had been his host."
"And that poor girl, Nevil?"
"Miss Denham? She contracted the habit of eating meat at school, and drinking wine in Paris, and continues it, occasionally. Now run upstairs. Insist on food. Inform Madame de Rouaillout that her brother M. le comte de Croisnel will soon be here, and should not find her ill.
Talk to her as you women can talk. Keep the blinds down in her room; light a dozen wax-candles. Tell her I have no thought but of her. It"s a lie: of no woman but of her: that you may say. But that you can"t say. You can say I am devoted--ha, what stuff! I"ve only to open my mouth!--say nothing of me: let her think the worst--unless it comes to a question of her life: then be a merciful good woman..." He squeezed her fingers, communicating his muscular tremble to her sensitive woman"s frame, and electrically convincing her that he was a lover.
She went up-stairs. In ten minutes she descended, and found him pacing up and down the hall. "Madame de Rouaillout is much the same," she said.
He nodded, looked up the stairs, and about for his hat and gloves, drew on the gloves, fixed the b.u.t.tons, blinked at his watch, and settled his hat as he was accustomed to wear it, all very methodically, and talking rapidly, but except for certain precise directions, which were not needed by so careful a housekeeper and nurse as Rosamund was known to be, she could not catch a word of meaning. He had some appointment, it seemed; perhaps he was off for a doctor--a fresh instance of his masculine incapacity to understand patient endurance. After opening the housedoor, and returning to the foot of the stairs, listening and sighing, he disappeared.
It struck her that he was trying to be two men at once.
The litter of newspaper sheets in the morning-room brought his exclamation to her mind: "They"re at me!" Her eyes ran down the columns, and were seized by the print of his name in large type. A leading article was devoted to Commander"s Beauchamp"s recent speech delivered in the great manufacturing town of Gunningham, at a meeting under the presidency of the mayor, and his replies to particular questions addressed to him; one being, what right did he conceive himself to have to wear the Sovereign"s uniform in professing Republican opinions?
Rosamund winced for her darling during her first perusal of the article.
It was of the sarcastically caressing kind, masterly in ease of style, as the flourish of the executioner well may be with poor Bare-back hung up to a leisurely administration of the scourge. An allusion to "Jack on sh.o.r.e" almost persuaded her that his uncle Everard had inspired the writer of the article. Beauchamp"s reply to the question of his loyalty was not quoted: he was, however, complimented on his frankness. At the same time he was a.s.sured that his error lay in a too great p.r.o.neness to make distinctions, and that there was no distinction between sovereign and country in a loyal and contented land, which could thank him for gallant services in war, while taking him for the solitary example to be cited at the present period of the evils of a comparatively long peace.
"Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of the gallant commander," etc., the termination of the article was indulgent.
Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and though she loved Beauchamp, the test of her representative feminine sentiment regarding his political career, when personal feeling on his behalf had subsided, was, that the writer of the article must have received an intimation to deal both smartly and forbearingly with the offender: and from whom but her lord? Her notions of the conduct of the Press were primitive. In a summary of the article Beauchamp was treated as naughty boy, formerly brave boy, and likely by-and-by to be good boy. Her secret heart would have spoken similarly, with more emphasis on the flattering terms.