"What!" he cried, "to draw breath day by day, and not to pay for it by striking daily at the rock Iniquity? Are you for that, Beauchamp? And in a land where these priests walk with hats curled like the water-lily"s leaf without the flower? How far will you push indolent unreason to gain the delusion of happiness? There is no such thing: but there"s trance.
That talk of happiness is a carrion clamour of the creatures of prey.
Take it--and you"re helping tear some poor wretch to pieces, whom you might be constructing, saving perchance: some one? some thousands! You, Beauchamp, when I met you first, you were for England, England! for a breadth of the palm of my hand comparatively--the round of a copper penny, no wider! And from that you jumped at a bound to the round of this earth: you were for humanity. Ay, we sailed our planet among the icy spheres, and were at blood-heat for its destiny, you and I! And now you hover for a wind to catch you. So it is for a soul rejecting prayer.
This wind and that has it: the well-springs within are shut down fast! I pardon my Jenny, my Harry Denham"s girl. She is a woman, and has a brain like a bell that rings all round to the tongue. It is her kingdom, of the interdicted untraversed frontiers. But what cares she, or any woman, that this Age of ours should lie like a carcase against the Sun? What cares any woman to help to hold up Life to him? He breeds divinely upon life, filthy upon stagnation. Sail you away, if you will, in your trance. I go. I go home by land alone, and I await you. Here in this land of moles upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of curses. Counter-anathema, you might call me."
"Oh! I feel the comparison so, for England shining spiritually bright,"
said Jenny, and cut her husband adrift with the exclamation, and saw him float away to Dr. Shrapnel.
"Spiritually bright!"
"By comparison, Nevil."
"There"s neither spiritual nor political brightness in England, but a common resolution to eat of good things and stick to them," said the doctor: "and we two out of England, there"s barely a voice to cry scare to the feeders. I"m back! I"m home!"
They lost him once in Cadiz, and discovered him on the quay, looking about for a vessel. In getting him to return to the Esperanza, they nearly all three fell into the hands of the police. Beauchamp gave him a great deal of his time, reading and discussing with him on deck and in the cabin, and projecting future enterprises, to pacify his restlessness. A translation of Plato had become Beauchamp"s intellectual world. This philosopher singularly antic.i.p.ated his ideas. Concerning himself he was beginning to think that he had many years ahead of him for work. He was with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and with Jenny as to the delay in recommencing it. Both the men laughed at the constant employment she gave them among the Greek islands in furnishing her severely accurate accounts of sea-fights and land-fights: and the scenes being before them they could neither of them protest that their task-work was an idle labour. Dr. Shrapnel a.s.sisted in fighting Marathon and Salamis over again cordially--to shield Great Britain from the rule of a satrapy.
Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife. On grave subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her n.o.bly poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and to elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard call her whimsically, "Portia disrobing."
Portia half in her doctor"s gown, half out of it. They met Lydiard and his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son. The thrilling mother did not perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast over the father of the child and Dr. Shrapnel. The youngster would insist on his right to be sprinkled by the parson, to get a legal name and please his mother. At all turns in the history of our healthy relations with women we are confronted by the parson! "And, upon my word, I believe,"
Beauchamp said to Lydiard, "those parsons--not bad creatures in private life: there was one in Madeira I took a personal liking to--but they"re utterly ignorant of what men feel to them--more ignorant than women!"
Mr. Tuckham and Mrs. Lydiard would not listen to his foolish objections; nor were they ever mentioned to Jenny. Apparently the commission of the act of marriage was to force Beauchamp from all his positions one by one.
"The education of that child?" Mrs. Lydiard said to her husband.
He considered that the mother would prevail.
Cecilia feared she would not.
"Depend upon it, he"ll make himself miserable if he can," said Tuckham.
That gentleman, however, was perpetually coming fuming from arguments with Beauchamp, and his opinion was a controversialist"s. His common sense was much afflicted. "I thought marriage would have stopped all those absurdities," he said, glaring angrily, laughing, and then frowning. "I "ve warned him I"ll go out of my way to come across him if he carries on his headlong folly. A man should accept his country for what it is when he"s born into it. Don"t tell me he"s a good fellow. I know he is, but there "s an a.s.s mounted on the good fellow. Talks of the parsons! Why, they"re men of education."
"They couldn"t steer a ship in a gale, though."
"Oh! he"s a good sailor. And let him go to sea," said Tuckham. "His wife"s a prize. He"s hardly worthy of her. If she manages him she"ll deserve a monument for doing a public service."
How fortunate it is for us that here and there we do not succeed in wresting our temporary treasure from the grasp of the Fates!
This good old commonplace reflection came to Beauchamp while clasping his wife"s hand on the deck of the Esperanza, and looking up at the mountains over the Gulf of Venice. The impression of that marvellous dawn when he and Renee looked up hand-in-hand was ineffaceable, and pity for the tender hand lost to him wrought in his blood, but Jenny was a peerless wife; and though not in the music of her tongue, or in subtlety of delicate meaning did she excel Renee, as a sober adviser she did, and as a firm speaker; and she had homelier deep eyes, thoughtfuller brows.
The father could speculate with good hope of Jenny"s child. Cecilia"s wealth, too, had gone over to the Tory party, with her incomprehensible espousal of Tuckham. Let it go; let all go for dowerless Jenny!
It was (she dared to recollect it in her anguish) Jenny"s choice to go home in the yacht that decided her husband not to make the journey by land in company with the Lydiards.
The voyage was favourable. Beauchamp had a pa.s.sing wish to land on the Norman coast, and take Jenny for a day to Tourdestelle. He deferred to her desire to land baby speedily, now they were so near home. They ran past Otley river, having sight of Mount Laurels, and on to Bevisham, with swelling sails. There they parted. Beauchamp made it one of his "points of honour" to deliver the vessel where he had taken her, at her moorings in the Otley. One of the piermen stood before Beauchamp, and saluting him, said he had been directed to inform him that the Earl of Romfrey was with Colonel Halkett, expecting him at Mount Laurels.
Beauchamp wanted his wife to return in the yacht. She turned her eyes to Dr. Shrapnel. It was out of the question that the doctor should think of going. Husband and wife parted. She saw him no more.
This is no time to tell of weeping. The dry chronicle is fittest. Hard on nine o"clock in the December darkness, the night being still and clear, Jenny"s babe was at her breast, and her ears were awake for the return of her husband. A man rang at the door of the house, and asked to see Dr. Shrapnel. This man was Killick, the Radical Sam of politics.
He said to the doctor: "I "m going to hit you sharp, sir; I"ve had it myself: please put on your hat and come out with me; and close the door.
They mustn"t hear inside. And here"s a fly. I knew you"d be off for the finding of the body. Commander Beauchamp"s drowned."
Dr. Shrapnel drove round by the sh.o.r.e of the broad water past a great hospital and ruined abbey to Otley village. Killick had lifted him into the conveyance, and he lifted him out. Dr. Shrapnel had not spoken a word. Lights were flaring on the river, illuminating the small craft sombrely. Men, women, and children crowded the hard and landing-places, the marshy banks and the decks of colliers and trawlers. Neither Killick nor Dr. Shrapnel questioned them. The lights were torches and lanterns; the occupation of the boats moving in couples was the dragging for the dead.
"O G.o.d, let"s find his body," a woman called out.
"Just a word; is it Commander Beauchamp?" Killick said to her.
She was scarcely aware of a question. "Here, this one," she said, and plucked a little boy of eight by the hand close against her side, and shook him roughly and kissed him.
An old man volunteered information. "That"s the boy. That boy was in his father"s boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and he and another older than him fell overboard; and just then Commander Beauchamp was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood, jump up and dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him in safe: that boy: and he dived again after the other, and was down a long time.
Either he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he"d been rowing himself from the schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and must have been hot when he jumped in: either way, he fetched the second up, and sank with him. Down he went."
A fisherman said to Killick: "Do you hear that voice thundering? That"s the great Lord Romfrey. He"s been directing the dragging since five o"
the evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body."
"O G.o.d, let"s find the body!" the woman with the little boy called out.
A torch lit up Lord Romfrey"s face as he stepped ash.o.r.e. "The flood has played us a trick," he said. "We want more drags, or with the next ebb the body may be lost for days in this infernal water."
The mother of the rescued boy sobbed, "Oh, my lord, my lord!"
The earl caught sight of Dr. Shrapnel, and went to him.
"My wife has gone down to Mrs. Beauchamp," he said. "She will bring her and the baby to Mount Laurels. The child will have to be hand-fed. I take you with me. You must not be alone."
He put his arm within the arm of the heavily-breathing man whom he had once flung to the ground, to support him.
"My lord! my lord!" sobbed the woman, and dropped on her knees.
"What "s this?" the earl said, drawing his hand away from the woman"s clutch at it.
"She"s the mother, my lord," several explained to him.
"Mother of what?"
"My boy," the woman cried, and dragged the urchin to Lord Romfrey"s feet, cleaning her boy"s face with her ap.r.o.n.
"It"s the boy Commander Beauchamp drowned to save," said a man.
All the lights of the ring were turned on the head of the boy. Dr.
Shrapnel"s eyes and Lord Romfrey"s fell on the abashed little creature.
The boy struck out both arms to get his fists against his eyelids.
This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp!
It was not uttered, but it was visible in the blank stare at one another of the two men who loved Beauchamp, after they had examined the insignificant bit of mudbank life remaining in this world in the place of him.