Beauchamp's Career. Complete
- -
- 100%
- +
Altogether the day was a reanimation of external Venice. But there was a thunderbolt in it; for about an hour before sunset, when the ladies were superintending and trying not to criticize the ingenious efforts to produce a make-believe of comfort on board for them, word was brought down to the boat by the count’s valet that the Marquis de Rouaillout had arrived. Renee turned her face to her brother superciliously. Roland shrugged. ‘Note this, my sister,’ he said; ‘an anticipation of dates in paying visits precludes the ripeness of the sentiment of welcome. It is, however, true that the marquis has less time to spare than others.’
‘We have started; we are on the open sea. How can we put back?’ said Renee.
‘You hear, Francois; we are on the open sea,’ Roland addressed the valet.
‘Monsieur has cut loose his communications with land,’ Francois responded, and bowed from the landing.
Nevil hastened to make this a true report; but they had to wait for tide as well as breeze, and pilot through intricate mud-channels before they could see the outside of the Lido, and meanwhile the sun lay like a golden altarplatter on mud-banks made bare by the ebb, and curled in drowsy yellow links along the currents. All they could do was to push off and hang loose, bumping to right and left in the midst of volleys and countervolleys of fishy Venetian, Chioggian, and Dalmatian, quite as strong as anything ever heard down the Canalaggio. The representatives of these dialects trotted the decks and hung their bodies half over the sides of the vessels to deliver fire, flashed eyes and snapped fingers, not a whit less fierce than hostile crews in the old wars hurling an interchange of stink-pots, and then resumed the trot, apparently in search of fresh ammunition. An Austrian sentinel looked on passively, and a police inspector peeringly. They were used to it. Happily, the combustible import of the language was unknown to the ladies, and Nevil’s attempts to keep his crew quiet, contrasting with Roland’s phlegm, which a Frenchman can assume so philosophically when his tongue is tied, amused them. During the clamour, Renee saw her father beckoning from the riva. She signified that she was no longer in command of circumstances; the vessel was off. But the count stamped his foot, and nodded imperatively. Thereupon Roland repeated the eloquent demonstrations of Renee, and the count lost patience, and Roland shouted, ‘For the love of heaven, don’t join this babel; we’re nearly bursting.’ The rage of the babel was allayed by degrees, though not appeased, for the boat was behaving wantonly, as the police officer pointed out to the count.
Renee stood up to bend her head. It was in reply to a salute from the Marquis de Rouaillout, and Nevil beheld his rival.
‘M. le Marquis, seeing it is out of the question that we can come to you, will you come to us?’ cried Roland.
The marquis gesticulated ‘With alacrity’ in every limb.
‘We will bring you back on to-morrow midnight’s tide, safe, we promise you.’
The marquis advanced a foot, and withdrew it. Could he have heard correctly? They were to be out a whole night at sea! The count dejectedly confessed his incapability to restrain them: the young desperadoes were ready for anything. He had tried the voice of authority, and was laughed at. As to Renee, an English lady was with her.
‘The English lady must be as mad as the rest,’ said the marquis.
‘The English are mad,’ said the count; ‘but their women are strict upon the proprieties.’
‘Possibly, my dear count; but what room is there for the proprieties on board a fishing-boat?’
‘It is even as you say, my dear marquis.’
‘You allow it?’
‘Can I help myself? Look at them. They tell me they have given the boat the fittings of a yacht.’
‘And the young man?’
‘That is the M. Beauchamp of whom I have spoken to you, the very pick of his country, fresh, lively, original; and he can converse. You will like him.’
‘I hope so,’ said the marquis, and roused a doleful laugh. ‘It would seem that one does not arrive by hastening!’
‘Oh! but my dear marquis, you have paid the compliment; you are like Spring thrusting in a bunch of lilac while the winds of winter blow. If you were not expected, your expeditiousness is appreciated, be sure.’
Roland fortunately did not hear the marquis compared to Spring. He was saying: ‘I wonder what those two elderly gentlemen are talking about’; and Nevil confused his senses by trying to realize that one of them was destined to be the husband of his now speechless Renee. The marquis was clad in a white silken suit, and a dash of red round the neck set off his black beard; but when he lifted his broad straw hat, a baldness of sconce shone. There was elegance in his gestures; he looked a gentleman, though an ultra-Gallican one, that is, too scrupulously finished for our taste, smelling of the valet. He had the habit of balancing his body on the hips, as if to emphasize a juvenile vigour, and his general attitude suggested an idea that he had an oration for you. Seen from a distance, his baldness and strong nasal projection were not winning features; the youthful standard he had evidently prescribed to himself in his dress and his ready jerks of acquiescence and delivery might lead a forlorn rival to conceive him something of an ogre straining at an Adonis. It could not be disputed that he bore his disappointment remarkably well; the more laudably, because his position was within a step of the ridiculous, for he had shot himself to the mark, despising sleep, heat, dust, dirt, diet, and lo, that charming object was deliberately slipping out of reach, proving his headlong journey an absurdity.
As he stood declining to participate in the lunatic voyage, and bidding them perforce good speed off the tips of his fingers, Renee turned her eyes on him, and away. She felt a little smart of pity, arising partly from her antagonism to Roland’s covert laughter: but it was the colder kind of feminine pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness. She sat still, placid outwardly, in fear of herself, so strange she found it to be borne out to sea by her sailor lover under the eyes of her betrothed. She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations, none of them of a very healthy kind, coming as it were from an unlocked chamber of her bosom, hitherto of unimagined contents; and the marquis being now on the spot to defend his own, she no longer blamed Nevil: it was otherwise utterly. All the sweeter side of pity was for him.
He was at first amazed by the sudden exquisite transition. Tenderness breathed from her, in voice, in look, in touch; for she accepted his help that he might lead her to the stern of the vessel, to gaze well on setting Venice, and sent lightnings up his veins; she leaned beside him over the vessel’s rails, not separated from him by the breadth of a fluttering riband. Like him, she scarcely heard her brother when for an instant he intervened, and with Nevil she said adieu to Venice, where the faint red Doge’s palace was like the fading of another sunset north-westward of the glory along the hills. Venice dropped lower and lower, breasting the waters, until it was a thin line in air. The line was broken, and ran in dots, with here and there a pillar standing on opal sky. At last the topmost campanile sank.
Renee looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged city.
‘It is gone!’ she said, as though a marvel had been worked; and swiftly: ‘we have one night!’
She breathed it half like a question, like a petition, catching her breath. The adieu to Venice was her assurance of liberty, but Venice hidden rolled on her the sense of the return and plucked shrewdly at her tether of bondage.
They set their eyes toward the dark gulf ahead. The night was growing starry. The softly ruffled Adriatic tossed no foam.
‘One night?’ said Nevil; ‘one? Why only one?’
Renee shuddered. ‘Oh! do not speak.’
‘Then, give me your hand.’
‘There, my friend.’
He pressed a hand that was like a quivering chord. She gave it as though it had been his own to claim. But that it meant no more than a hand he knew by the very frankness of her compliance, in the manner natural to her; and this was the charm, it filled him with her peculiar image and spirit, and while he held it he was subdued.
Lying on the deck at midnight, wrapt in his cloak and a coil of rope for a pillow, considerably apart from jesting Roland, the recollection of that little sanguine spot of time when Renee’s life-blood ran with his, began to heave under him like a swelling sea. For Nevil the starred black night was Renee. Half his heart was in it: but the combative division flew to the morning and the deadly iniquity of the marriage, from which he resolved to save her; in pure devotedness, he believed. And so he closed his eyes. She, a girl, with a heart fluttering open and fearing, felt only that she had lost herself somewhere, and she had neither sleep nor symbols, nothing but a sense of infinite strangeness, as though she were borne superhumanly through space.
CHAPTER IX. MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS
The breeze blew steadily, enough to swell the sails and sweep the vessel on smoothly. The night air dropped no moisture on deck.
Nevil Beauchamp dozed for an hour. He was awakened by light on his eyelids, and starting up beheld the many pinnacles of grey and red rocks and shadowy high white regions at the head of the gulf waiting for the sun; and the sun struck them. One by one they came out in crimson flame, till the vivid host appeared to have stepped forward. The shadows on the snow-fields deepened to purple below an irradiation of rose and pink and dazzling silver. There of all the world you might imagine Gods to sit. A crowd of mountains endless in range, erect, or flowing, shattered and arid, or leaning in smooth lustre, hangs above the gulf. The mountains are sovereign Alps, and the sea is beneath them. The whole gigantic body keeps the sea, as with a hand, to right and left.
Nevil’s personal rapture craved for Renee with the second long breath he drew; and now the curtain of her tent-cabin parted, and greeting him with a half smile, she looked out. The Adriatic was dark, the Alps had heaven to themselves. Crescents and hollows, rosy mounds, white shelves, shining ledges, domes and peaks, all the towering heights were in illumination from Friuli into farthest Tyrol; beyond earth to the stricken senses of the gazers. Colour was stedfast on the massive front ranks: it wavered in the remoteness, and was quick and dim as though it fell on beating wings; but there too divine colour seized and shaped forth solid forms, and thence away to others in uttermost distances where the incredible flickering gleam of new heights arose, that soared, or stretched their white uncertain curves in sky like wings traversing infinity.
It seemed unlike morning to the lovers, but as if night had broken with a revelation of the kingdom in the heart of night. While the broad smooth waters rolled unlighted beneath that transfigured upper sphere, it was possible to think the scene might vanish like a view caught out of darkness by lightning. Alp over burning Alp, and around them a hueless dawn! The two exulted they threw off the load of wonderment, and in looking they had the delicious sensation of flight in their veins.
Renee stole toward Nevil. She was mystically shaken and at his mercy; and had he said then, ‘Over to the other land, away from Venice!’ she would have bent her head.
She asked his permission to rouse her brother and madame, so that they should not miss the scene.
Roland lay in the folds of his military greatcoat, too completely happy to be disturbed, Nevil Beauchamp chose to think; and Rosamund Culling, he told Renee, had been separated from her husband last on these waters.
‘Ah! to be unhappy here,’ sighed Renee. ‘I fancied it when I begged her to join us. It was in her voice.’
The impressionable girl trembled. He knew he was dear to her, and for that reason, judging of her by himself, he forbore to urge his advantage, conceiving it base to fear that loving him she could yield her hand to another; and it was the critical instant. She was almost in his grasp. A word of sharp entreaty would have swung her round to see her situation with his eyes, and detest and shrink from it. He committed the capital fault of treating her as his equal in passion and courage, not as metal ready to run into the mould under temporary stress of fire.
Even later in the morning, when she was cooler and he had come to speak, more than her own strength was needed to resist him. The struggle was hard. The boat’s head had been put about for Venice, and they were among the dusky-red Chioggian sails in fishing quarters, expecting momently a campanile to signal the sea-city over the level. Renee waited for it in suspense. To her it stood for the implacable key of a close and stifling chamber, so different from this brilliant boundless region of air, that she sickened with the apprehension; but she knew it must appear, and soon, and therewith the contraction and the gloom it indicated to her mind. He talked of the beauty. She fretted at it, and was her petulant self again in an epigrammatic note of discord.
He let that pass.
‘Last night you said “one night,”’ he whispered. ‘We will have another sail before we leave Venice.’
‘One night, and in a little time one hour! and next one minute! and there’s the end,’ said Renee.
Her tone alarmed him. ‘Have you forgotten that you gave me your hand?’
‘I gave my hand to my friend.’
‘You gave it to me for good.’
‘No; I dared not; it is not mine.’
‘It is mine,’ said Beauchamp.
Renee pointed to the dots and severed lines and isolated columns of the rising city, black over bright sea.
‘Mine there as well as here,’ said Beauchamp, and looked at her with the fiery zeal of eyes intent on minutest signs for a confirmation, to shake that sad negation of her face.
‘Renee, you cannot break the pledge of the hand you gave me last night.’
‘You tell me how weak a creature I am.’
‘You are me, myself; more, better than me. And say, would you not rather coast here and keep the city under water?’
She could not refrain from confessing that she would be glad never to land there.
‘So, when you land, go straight to your father,’ said Beauchamp, to whose conception it was a simple act resulting from the avowal.
‘Oh! you torture me,’ she cried. Her eyelashes were heavy with tears. ‘I cannot do it. Think what you will of me! And, my friend, help me. Should you not help me? I have not once actually disobeyed my father, and he has indulged me, but he has been sure of me as a dutiful girl. That is my source of self-respect. My friend can always be my friend.’
‘Yes, while it’s not too late,’ said Beauchamp.
She observed a sudden stringing of his features. He called to the chief boatman, made his command intelligible to that portly capitano, and went on to Roland, who was puffing his after-breakfast cigarette in conversation with the tolerant English lady.
‘You condescend to notice us, Signor Beauchamp,’ said Roland. ‘The vessel is up to some manoeuvre?’
‘We have decided not to land,’ replied Beauchamp. ‘And Roland,’ he checked the Frenchman’s shout of laughter, ‘I think of making for Trieste. Let me speak to you, to both. Renee is in misery. She must not go back.’
Roland sprang to his feet, stared, and walked over to Renee.
‘Nevil,’ said Rosamund Culling, ‘do you know what you are doing?’
‘Perfectly,’ said he. ‘Come to her. She is a girl, and I must think and act for her.’
Roland met them.
‘My dear Nevil, are you in a state of delusion? Renee denies…’
‘There’s no delusion, Roland. I am determined to stop a catastrophe. I see it as plainly as those Alps. There is only one way, and that’s the one I have chosen.’
‘Chosen! my friend’. But allow me to remind you that you have others to consult. And Renee herself…’
‘She is a girl. She loves me, and I speak for her.’
‘She has said it?’
‘She has more than said it.’
‘You strike me to the deck, Nevil. Either you are downright mad—which seems the likeliest, or we are all in a nightmare. Can you suppose I will let my sister be carried away the deuce knows where, while her father is expecting her, and to fulfil an engagement affecting his pledged word?’
Beauchamp simply replied:
‘Come to her.’
CHAPTER X. A SINGULAR COUNCIL
The four sat together under the shadow of the helmsman, by whom they were regarded as voyagers in debate upon the question of some hours further on salt water. ‘No bora,’ he threw in at intervals, to assure them that the obnoxious wind of the Adriatic need not disturb their calculations.
It was an extraordinary sitting, but none of the parties to it thought of it so when Nevil Beauchamp had plunged them into it. He compelled them, even Renee—and she would have flown had there been wings on her shoulders—to feel something of the life and death issues present to his soul, and submit to the discussion, in plain language of the market-place, of the most delicate of human subjects for her, for him, and hardly less for the other two. An overmastering fervour can do this. It upsets the vessel we float in, and we have to swim our way out of deep waters by the directest use of the natural faculties, without much reflection on the change in our habits. To others not under such an influence the position seems impossible. This discussion occurred. Beauchamp opened the case in a couple of sentences, and when the turn came for Renee to speak, and she shrank from the task in manifest pain, he spoke for her, and no one heard her contradiction. She would have wished the fearful impetuous youth to succeed if she could have slept through the storm he was rousing.
Roland appealed to her. ‘You! my sister! it is you that consent to this wild freak, enough to break your father’s heart?’
He had really forgotten his knowledge of her character—what much he knew—in the dust of the desperation flung about her by Nevil Beauchamp.
She shook her head; she had not consented.
‘The man she loves is her voice and her will,’ said Beauchamp. ‘She gives me her hand and I lead her.’
Roland questioned her. It could not be denied that she had given her hand, and her bewildered senses made her think that it had been with an entire abandonment; and in the heat of her conflict of feelings, the deliciousness of yielding to him curled round and enclosed her, as in a cool humming sea-shell.
‘Renee!’ said Roland.
‘Brother!’ she cried.
‘You see that I cannot suffer you to be borne away.’
‘No; do not!’
But the boat was flying fast from Venice, and she could have fallen at his feet and kissed them for not countermanding it.
‘You are in my charge, my sister.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now, Nevil, between us two,’ said Roland.
Beauchamp required no challenge. He seemed, to Rosamund Culling, twice older than he was, strangely adept, yet more strangely wise of worldly matters, and eloquent too. But it was the eloquence of frenzy, madness, in Roland’s ear. The arrogation of a terrible foresight that harped on present and future to persuade him of the righteousness of this headlong proceeding advocated by his friend, vexed his natural equanimity. The argument was out of the domain of logic. He could hardly sit to listen, and tore at his moustache at each end. Nevertheless his sister listened. The mad Englishman accomplished the miracle of making her listen, and appear to consent.
Roland laughed scornfully. ‘Why Trieste? I ask you, why Trieste? You can’t have a Catholic priest at your bidding, without her father’s sanction.’
‘We leave Renee at Trieste, under the care of madame,’ said Beauchamp, ‘and we return to Venice, and I go to your father. This method protects Renee from annoyance.’
‘It strikes me that if she arrives at any determination she must take the consequences.’
‘She does. She is brave enough for that. But she is a girl; she has to fight the battle of her life in a day, and I am her lover, and she leaves it to me.’
‘Is my sister such a coward?’ said Roland.
Renee could only call out his name.
‘It will never do, my dear Nevil; Roland tried to deal with his unreasonable friend affectionately. ‘I am responsible for her. It’s your own fault—if you had not saved my life I should not have been in your way. Here I am, and your proposal can’t be heard of. Do as you will, both of you, when you step ashore in Venice.’
‘If she goes back she is lost,’ said Beauchamp, and he attacked Roland on the side of his love for Renee, and for him.
Roland was inflexible. Seeing which, Renee said, ‘To Venice, quickly, my brother!’ and now she almost sighed with relief to think that she was escaping from this hurricane of a youth, who swept her off her feet and wrapt her whole being in a delirium.
‘We were in sight of the city just now!’ cried Roland, staring and frowning. ‘What’s this?’
Beauchamp answered him calmly, ‘The boat’s under my orders.’
‘Talk madness, but don’t act it,’ said Roland. ‘Round with the boat at once. Hundred devils! you haven’t your wits.’
To his amazement, Beauchamp refused to alter the boat’s present course.
‘You heard my sister?’ said Roland.
‘You frighten her,’ said Beauchamp.
‘You heard her wish to return to Venice, I say.’
‘She has no wish that is not mine.’
It came to Roland’s shouting his command to the men, while Beauchamp pointed the course on for them.
‘You will make this a ghastly pleasantry,’ said Roland.
‘I do what I know to be right,’ said Beauchamp.
‘You want an altercation before these fellows?’
‘There won’t be one; they obey me.’
Roland blinked rapidly in wrath and doubt of mind.
‘Madame,’ he stooped to Rosamund Culling, with a happy inspiration, ‘convince him; you have known him longer than I, and I desire not to lose my friend. And tell me, madame—I can trust you to be truth itself, and you can see it is actually the time for truth to be spoken—is he justified in taking my sister’s hand? You perceive that I am obliged to appeal to you. Is he not dependent on his uncle? And is he not, therefore, in your opinion, bound in reason as well as in honour to wait for his uncle’s approbation before he undertakes to speak for my sister? And, since the occasion is urgent, let me ask you one thing more: whether, by your knowledge of his position, you think him entitled to presume to decide upon my sister’s destiny? She, you are aware, is not so young but that she can speak for herself…’
‘There you are wrong, Roland,’ said Beauchamp; ‘she can neither speak nor think for herself: you lead her blindfolded.’
‘And you, my friend, suppose that you are wiser than any of us. It is understood. I venture to appeal to madame on the point in question.’
The poor lady’s heart beat dismally. She was constrained to answer, and said, ‘His uncle is one who must be consulted.’
‘You hear that, Nevil,’ said Roland.
Beauchamp looked at her sharply; angrily, Rosamund feared. She had struck his hot brain with the vision of Everard Romfrey as with a bar of iron. If Rosamund had inclined to the view that he was sure of his uncle’s support, it would have seemed to him a simple confirmation of his sentiments, but he was not of the same temper now as when he exclaimed, ‘Let him see her!’ and could imagine, give him only Renee’s love, the world of men subservient to his wishes.
Then he was dreaming; he was now in fiery earnest, for that reason accessible to facts presented to him; and Rosamund’s reluctantly spoken words brought his stubborn uncle before his eyes, inflicting a sense of helplessness of the bitterest kind.
They were all silent. Beauchamp stared at the lines of the deck-planks.
His scheme to rescue Renee was right and good; but was he the man that should do it? And was she, moreover, he thought—speculating on her bent head—the woman to be forced to brave the world with him, and poverty? She gave him no sign. He was assuredly not the man to pretend to powers he did not feel himself to possess, and though from a personal, and still more from a lover’s, inability to see all round him at one time and accurately to weigh the forces at his disposal, he had gone far, he was not a wilful dreamer nor so very selfish a lover. The instant his consciousness of a superior strength failed him he acknowledged it.