LITMIR.BIZ

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suggested that he might stay late at Mount Laurels.

      ‘Then he will arrive here after nightfall,’ said the doctor. ‘A bed is at your service, ma’am.’

      The offer was declined. ‘I should like to have seen him to-day; but he will be home shortly.’

      ‘He will not quit Bevisham till this Election’s decided unless to hunt a stray borough vote, ma’am.’

      ‘He goes to Mount Laurels.

      ‘For that purpose.’

      ‘I do not think he will persuade Colonel Halkett to vote in the Radical interest.’

      ‘That is the probability with a landed proprietor, ma’am. We must knock, whether the door opens or not. Like,’ the doctor laughed to himself up aloft, ‘like a watchman in the night to say that he smells smoke on the premises.’

      ‘Surely we may expect Captain Beauchamp to consult his family about so serious a step as this he is taking,’ Rosamund said, with an effort to be civil.

      Why should he?’ asked the impending doctor.

      His head continued in the interrogative position when it had resumed its elevation. The challenge for a definite reply to so outrageous a question irritated Rosamund’s nerves, and, loth though she was to admit him to the subject, she could not forbear from saying, ‘Why? Surely his family have the first claim on him!’

      ‘Surely not, ma’am. There is no first claim. A man’s wife and children have a claim on him for bread. A man’s parents have a claim on him for obedience while he is a child. A man’s uncles, aunts, and cousins have no claim on him at all, except for help in necessity, which he can grant and they require. None—wife, children, parents, relatives—none has a claim to bar his judgement and his actions. Sound the conscience, and sink the family! With a clear conscience, it is best to leave the family to its own debates. No man ever did brave work who held counsel with his family. The family view of a man’s fit conduct is the weak point of the country. It is no other view than, “Better thy condition for our sakes.” Ha! In this way we breed sheep, fatten oxen: men are dying off. Resolution taken, consult the family means—waste your time! Those who go to it want an excuse for altering their minds. The family view is everlastingly the shopkeeper’s! Purse, pence, ease, increase of worldly goods, personal importance—the pound, the English pound! Dare do that, and you forfeit your share of Port wine in this world; you won’t be dubbed with a title; you’ll be fingered at! Lord, Lord! is it the region inside a man, or out, that gives him peace? Out, they say; for they have lost faith in the existence of an inner. They haven’t it. Air-sucker, blood-pump, cooking machinery, and a battery of trained instincts, aptitudes, fill up their vacuum. I repeat, ma’am, why should young Captain Beauchamp spend an hour consulting his family? They won’t approve him; he knows it. They may annoy him; and what is the gain of that? They can’t move him; on that I let my right hand burn. So it would be useless on both sides. He thinks so. So do I. He is one of the men to serve his country on the best field we can choose for him. In a ship’s cabin he is thrown away. Ay, ay, War, and he may go aboard. But now we must have him ashore. Too few of such as he!’

      ‘It is matter of opinion,’ said Rosamund, very tightly compressed; scarcely knowing what she said.

      How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken of by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess him! A stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas! A terribly strong inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have won such a mastery over Nevil?

      Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at the same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an enormous army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in advance. This very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in dialectics, heightened Rosamund’s disgust by causing her to suppose that Nevil had been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished, captured, ruined; and he dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two. She felt that among a sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice, and struck down the demagogue’s audacious sophisms: not that they affected her in the slightest degree for her own sake.

      Shrapnel might think what he liked, and say what he liked, as far as she was concerned, apart from the man she loved. Rosamund went through these emotions altogether on Nevil’s behalf, and longed for her affirmatizing inspiring sisterhood until the thought of them threw another shade on him.

      What champion was she to look to? To whom but to Mr. Everard Romfrey?

      It was with a spasm of delighted reflection that she hit on Mr. Romfrey. He was like a discovery to her. With his strength and skill, his robust common sense and rough shrewd wit, his prompt comparisons, his chivalry, his love of combat, his old knightly blood, was not he a match, and an overmatch, for the ramping Radical who had tangled Nevil in his rough snares? She ran her mind over Mr. Romfrey’s virtues, down even to his towering height and breadth. Could she but once draw these two giants into collision in Nevil’s presence, she was sure it would save him. The method of doing it she did not stop to consider: she enjoyed her triumph in the idea.

      Meantime she had passed from Dr. Shrapnel to Miss Denham, and carried on a conversation becomingly.

      Tea had been made in the garden, and she had politely sipped half a cup, which involved no step inside the guilty house, and therefore no distress to her antagonism. The sun descended. She heard the doctor reciting. Could it be poetry? In her imagination the sombre hues surrounding an incendiary opposed that bright spirit. She listened, smiling incredulously. Miss Denham could interpret looks, and said, ‘Dr. Shrapnel is very fond of those verses.’

      Rosamund’s astonishment caused her to say, ‘Are they his own?’—a piece of satiric innocency at which Miss Denham laughed softly as she answered, ‘No.’

      Rosamund pleaded that she had not heard them with any distinctness.

      ‘Are they written by the gentleman at his side?’

      ‘Mr. Lydiard? No. He writes, but the verses are not his.’

      ‘Does he know—has he met Captain Beauchamp?’

      ‘Yes, once. Captain Beauchamp has taken a great liking to his works.’

      Rosamund closed her eyes, feeling that she was in a nest that had determined to appropriate Nevil. But at any rate there was the hope and the probability that this Mr. Lydiard of the pen had taken a long start of Nevil in the heart of Miss Denham: and struggling to be candid, to ensure some meditative satisfaction, Rosamund admitted to herself that the girl did not appear to be one of the wanton giddy-pated pusses who play two gentlemen or more on their line. Appearances, however, could be deceptive: never pretend to know a girl by her face, was one of Rosamund’s maxims.

      She was next informed of Dr. Shrapnel’s partiality for music toward the hour of sunset. Miss Denham mentioned it, and the doctor, presently sauntering up, invited Rosamund to a seat on a bench near the open window of the drawing-room. He nodded to his ward to go in.

      ‘I am a fire-worshipper, ma’am,’ he said. ‘The God of day is the father of poetry, medicine, music: our best friend. See him there! My Jenny will spin a thread from us to him over the millions of miles, with one touch of the chords, as quick as he shoots a beam on us. Ay! on her wretched tinkler called a piano, which tries at the whole orchestra and murders every instrument in the attempt. But it’s convenient, like our modern civilization—a taming and a diminishing of individuals for an insipid harmony!’

      ‘You surely do not object to the organ?—I fear I cannot wait, though,’ said Rosamund.

      Miss Denham entreated her. ‘Oh! do, madam. Not to hear me—I am not so perfect a player that I should wish it—but to see him. Captain Beauchamp may now be coming at any instant.’

      Mr. Lydiard added, ‘I have an appointment with him here for this evening.’

      ‘You build a cathedral of sound in the organ,’ said Dr. Shrapnel, casting out a league of leg as he sat beside his only half-persuaded

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