"Time goes forward, ma"am, and you go round. Speak to the point. Do you mean that you toss up the reins of my household?"
"I do. You trace it to Nevil immediately?"
"I do. The fellow wants to upset the country, and he begins with me."
"You are wrong, my lord. What I have done places me at Captain Baskelett"s mercy. It is too loathsome to think of: worse than the whip; worse than your displeasure. It might never be known; but the thought that it might gives me courage. You have said that to protect a woman everything is permissible. It is your creed, my lord, and because the world, I have heard you say, is unjust and implacable to women. In some cases, I think so too. In reality I followed your instructions; I mean, your example. Cheap chivalry on my part! But it pained me not a little.
I beg to urge that in my defence."
"Well, ma"am, you have tied the knot tight enough; perhaps now you"ll cut it," said the earl.
Rosamund gasped softly. "M. le Marquis is a gentleman who, after a life of dissipation, has been reminded by bad health that he has a young and beautiful wife."
"He dug his pit to fall into it:--he"s jealous?"
She shook her head to indicate the immeasurable.
"Senile jealousy is anxious to be deceived. He could hardly be deceived so far as to imagine that Madame la Marquise would visit me, such as I am, as my guest. Knowingly or not, his very clever sister, a good woman, and a friend to husband and wife--a Frenchwoman of the purest type--gave me the t.i.tle. She insisted on it, and I presumed to guess that she deemed it necessary for the sake of peace in that home."
Lord Romfrey appeared merely inquisitive; his eyebrows were lifted in permanence; his eyes were mild.
She continued: "They leave England in a few hours. They are not likely to return. I permitted him to address me with the t.i.tle of countess."
"Of Romfrey?" said the earl.
Rosamund bowed.
His mouth contracted. She did not expect thunder to issue from it, but she did fear to hear a sarcasm, or that she would have to endure a deadly silence: and she was gathering her own lips in imitation of his, to nerve herself for some stroke to come, when he laughed in his peculiar close-mouthed manner.
"I"m afraid you"ve dished yourself."
"You cannot forgive me, my lord?"
He indulged in more of his laughter, and abruptly summoning gravity, bade her talk to him of affairs. He himself talked of the condition of the Castle, and with a certain off-hand contempt of the ladies of the family, and Cecil"s father, Sir John. "What are they to me?" said he, and he complained of having been called Last Earl of Romfrey.
"The line ends undegenerate," said Rosamund fervidly, though she knew not where she stood.
"Ends!" quoth the earl.
"I must see Stukely," he added briskly, and stooped to her: "I beg you to drive me to my Club, countess."
"Oh! sir."
"Once a countess, always a countess!"
"But once an impostor, my lord?"
"Not always, we"ll hope."
He enjoyed this little variation in the language of comedy; letting it drop, to say: "Be here to-morrow early. Don"t chase that family away from the house. Do as you will, but not a word of Nevil to me: he"s a bad mess in any man"s porringer; it"s time for me to claim exemption of him from mine."
She dared not let her thoughts flow, for to think was to triumph, and possibly to be deluded. They came in copious volumes when Lord Romfrey, alighting at his Club, called to the coachman: "Drive the countess home."
They were not thoughts of triumph absolutely. In her cooler mind she felt that it was a bad finish of a gallant battle. Few women had risen against a tattling and pelting world so stedfastly; and would it not have been better to keep her own ground, which she had won with tears and some natural strength, and therewith her liberty, which she prized?
The hateful Cecil, a reminder of whom set her cheeks burning and turned her heart to serpent, had forced her to it. So she honestly conceived, owing to the circ.u.mstance of her honestly disliking the pomps of life and not desiring to occupy any position of brilliancy. She thought a.s.suredly of her h.o.a.rd of animosity toward the scandalmongers, and of the quiet glance she would cast behind on them, and below. That thought came as a fruit, not as a reflection.
But if ever two offending young gentlemen, nephews of a long-suffering uncle, were circ.u.mvented, undermined, and struck to earth, with one blow, here was the instance. This was accomplished by Lord Romfrey"s resolution to make the lady he had learnt to esteem his countess: and more, it fixed to him for life one whom he could not bear to think of losing: and still more, it might be; but what more was unwritten on his tablets.
Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.
CHAPTER XLIV. THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO Pa.s.sIONS IN BEAUCHAMP
It was now the season when London is as a lighted tower to her provinces, and, among other gentlemen hurried thither by attraction, Captain Baskelett arrived. Although not a personage in the House of Commons, he was a vote; and if he never committed himself to the perils of a speech, he made himself heard. His was the part of chorus, which he performed with a fairly close imitation of the original cries of periods before parliaments were inst.i.tuted, thus representing a stage in the human development besides the borough of Bevisham. He arrived in the best of moods for the emission of high-pitched vowel-sounds; otherwise in the worst of tempers. His uncle had notified an addition of his income to him at Romfrey, together with commands that he should quit the castle instantly: and there did that woman, Mistress Culling, do the honours to Nevil Beauchamp"s French party. He a.s.sured Lord Palmet of his positive knowledge of the fact, incredible as the sanction of such immoral proceedings by the Earl of Romfrey must appear to that young n.o.bleman. Additions to income are of course acceptable, but in the form of a palpable stipulation for silence, they neither awaken grat.i.tude nor effect their purpose. Quite the contrary; they p.r.i.c.k the moral mind to sit in judgement on the donor. It means, she fears me! Cecil confidently thought and said of the intriguing woman who managed his patron.
The town-house was open to him. Lord Romfrey was at Steynham. Cecil could not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it. He happened to be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for his haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English n.o.bility, and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people.
She raised lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against him that awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go down to him herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling"s orders. The old woman lowered her voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted the French gentleman and ladies to call her countess. This she knew for a certainty, though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who came second brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the very words--the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling for the Countess of Romfrey. What was more, my lord"s coachman caught it up, and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had seen a ghost. "She have such power," Cecil"s admirer concluded.
"I wager I match her," Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands and letting his lower teeth shine out. The means of matching her were not so palpable as the resolution. First he took men into his confidence. Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the question, "What ought I to do?" In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey he ought not to pa.s.s it over, he suggested. The ladies of the family urged him to go to Steynham and boldly confront the woman. He was not prepared for that. Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and make it the topic of the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it.
Cecil had the ear of the town for a month. He was in the act of slicing the air with his right hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady Elsea"s, to protest how vast was the dishonour done to the family by Mistress Culling, when Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, "The lady you speak of is the Countess of Romfrey. I was present at the marriage."
Cecil received the shock in the att.i.tude of those martial figures we see wielding two wooden swords in provincial gardens to tell the disposition of the wind: abruptly abandoned by it, they stand transfixed, one sword aloft, the other at their heels. The resemblance extended to his astonished countenance. His big chest heaved. Like many another wounded giant before him, he experienced the insufficiency of interjections to solace pain. For them, however, the rocks were handy to fling, the trees to uproot; heaven"s concave resounded companionably to their bellowings.
Relief of so concrete a kind is not to be obtained in crowded London a.s.semblies.
"You are jesting?--you are a jester," he contrived to say.
"It was a private marriage, and I was a witness," replied Stukely.
"Lord Romfrey has made an honest woman of her, has he?"
"A peeress, you mean."
Cecil bowed. "Exactly. I am corrected. I mean a peeress."
He got out of the room with as high an air as he could command, feeling as if a bar of iron had flattened his head.
Next day it was intimated to him by one of the Steynham servants that apartments were ready for him at the residence of the late earl: Lord Romfrey"s house was about to be occupied by the Countess of Romfrey.
Cecil had to quit, and he chose to be enamoured of that dignity of sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man.
Rosamund, Countess of Romfrey, had worse to endure from Beauchamp.
He indeed came to the house, and he went through the formalities of congratulation, but his opinion of her step was unconcealed, that she had taken it for the t.i.tle. He distressed her by reviving the case of Dr. Shrapnel, as though it were a matter of yesterday, telling her she had married a man with a stain on him; she should have exacted the Apology as a nuptial present; ay, and she would have done it if she had cared for the earl"s honour or her own. So little did he understand men!
so tenacious was he of his ideas! She had almost forgotten the case of Dr. Shrapnel, and to see it shooting up again in the new path of her life was really irritating.
Rosamund did not defend herself.
"I am very glad you have come, Nevil," she said; "your uncle holds to the ceremony. I may be of real use to you now; I wish to be."