it out: she has no courage. I feel that I could carry the day with my uncle, but I can’t subject her to the risks, since she dreads them; I see it. Yes, I see that! I should have done well, I believe; I should have saved her.’
‘Run to England, get your uncle’s consent, and then try.’
‘No; I shall go to her father.’
‘My dear Nevil, and supposing you have Renee to back you—supposing it, I say—won’t you be falling on exactly the same bayonet-point?’
‘If I leave her!’ Beauchamp interjected. He perceived the quality of Renee’s unformed character which he could not express.
‘But we are to suppose that she loves you?’
‘She is a girl.’
‘You return, my friend, to the place you started from, as you did on the canal without knowing it. In my opinion, frankly, she is best married. And I think so all the more after this morning’s lesson. You understand plainly that if you leave her she will soon be pliant to the legitimate authorities; and why not?’
‘Listen to me, Roland. I tell you she loves me. I am bound to her, and when—if ever I see her unhappy, I will not stand by and look on quietly.’
Roland shrugged. ‘The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it. For me, less privileged than my fellows, I have never seen the future. Consequently I am not in love with it, and to declare myself candidly I do not care for it one snap of the fingers. Let us follow our usages, and attend to the future at the hour of its delivery. I prefer the sage-femme to the prophet. From my heart, Nevil, I wish I could help you. We have charged great guns together, but a family arrangement is something different from a hostile battery. There’s Venice! and, as soon as you land, my responsibility’s ended. Reflect, I pray you, on what I have said about girls. Upon my word, I discover myself talking wisdom to you. Girls are precious fragilities. Marriage is the mould for them; they get shape, substance, solidity: that is to say, sense, passion, a will of their own: and grace and tenderness, delicacy; all out of the rude, raw, quaking creatures we call girls. Paris! my dear Nevil. Paris! It’s the book of women.’
The grandeur of the decayed sea-city, where folly had danced Parisianly of old, spread brooding along the waters in morning light; beautiful; but with that inner light of history seen through the beauty Venice was like a lowered banner. The great white dome and the campanili watching above her were still brave emblems. Would Paris leave signs of an ancient vigour standing to vindicate dignity when her fall came? Nevil thought of Renee in Paris.
She avoided him. She had retired behind her tent-curtains, and reappeared only when her father’s voice hailed the boat from a gondola. The count and the marquis were sitting together, and there was a spare gondola for the voyagers, so that they should not have to encounter another babel of the riva. Salutes were performed with lifted hats, nods, and bows.
‘Well, my dear child, it has all been very wonderful and uncomfortable?’ said the count.
‘Wonderful, papa; splendid.’
‘No qualms of any kind?’
‘None, I assure you.’ And madame?’
‘Madame will confirm it, if you find a seat for her.’
Rosamund Culling was received in the count’s gondola, cordially thanked, and placed beside the marquis.
‘I stay on board and pay these fellows,’ said Roland.
Renee was told by her father to follow madame. He had jumped into the spare gondola and offered a seat to Beauchamp.
‘No,’ cried Renee, arresting Beauchamp, ‘it is I who mean to sit with papa.’
Up sprang the marquis with an entreating, ‘Mademoiselle!’
‘M. Beauchamp will entertain you, M. le Marquis.’
‘I want him here,’ said the count; and Beauchamp showed that his wish was to enter the count’s gondola, but Renee had recovered her aplomb, and decisively said ‘No,’ and Beauchamp had to yield.
That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a formal asking of leave. She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.
Renee took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father’s arms, murmuring:
‘Do nothing—nothing! until you hear from me.’
CHAPTER XI. CAPTAIN BASKELETT
Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of course, the first to come home had the cream of the praises. She hugged them in a manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must be brought to bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty, too, when it accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should not protest overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were such as reached the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did cordially reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most naturally, that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck to their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and rewarded none save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort seems to betray the sense of poverty in the article. Our England does nothing like it. All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want of them. Besides, she has to please the taxpayer. You may track a shadowy line or crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her domestic history: either it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up an impulse, or else dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought: policy becomes evident somehow, clumsily very possibly. How can she manage an enormous middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily? The managing of it at all is the wonder. And not only has she to stupefy the taxpayer by a timely display of feastings and fireworks, she has to stop all that nonsense (to quote a satiated man lightened in his purse) at the right moment, about the hour when the old standfasts, who have simply been doing duty, return, poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto or two is the utmost she can present to them. On the other hand, it is true she gives her first loves, those early birds, fully to understand that a change has come in their island mother’s mind. If there is a balance to be righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be the season for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less; and if no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally toss a leaf of laurel on a name or two: thus in the exercise of grumbling doing good.
With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp’s heroes received the motto instead of the sweetmeat. England expected them to do their duty; they did it, and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be. Beauchamp, at a distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning the unjust measure dealt to his favourites: Captain Hardist, of the Diomed, twenty years a captain, still a captain! Young Michell denied the cross! Colonel Evans Cuff, on the heights from first to last, and not advanced a step! But Prancer, and Plunger, and Lammakin were thoroughly well taken care of, this critic of the war wrote savagely, reviving an echo of a queer small circumstance occurring in the midst of the high dolour and anxiety of the whole nation, and which a politic country preferred to forget, as we will do, for it was but an instance of strong family feeling in high quarters; and is not the unity of the country founded on the integrity of the family sentiment? Is it not certain, which the master tells us, that a line is but a continuation of a number of dots? Nevil Beauchamp was for insisting that great Government officers had paid more attention to a dot or two than to the line. He appeared to
