The young gentleman to whom Everard Romfrey transferred his combative spirit despatched a letter from the Dardanelles, requesting his uncle not to ask him for a spark of enthusiasm. He despised our Moslem allies, he said, and thought with pity of the miserable herds of men in regiments marching across the steppes at the bidding of a despot that we were helping to popularize. He certainly wrote in the tone of a jejune politician; pardonable stuff to seniors entertaining similar opinions, but most exasperating when it runs counter to them: though one question put by Nevil was not easily answerable. He wished to know whether the English people would be so anxious to be at it if their man stood on the opposite shore and talked of trying conclusions on their green fields. And he suggested that they had become so ready for war because of their having grown rather ashamed of themselves, and for the special reason that they could have it at a distance.
'The rascal's liver's out of order,' Everard said.
Coming to the sentence: 'Who speaks out in this crisis? There is one, and I am with him'; Mr. Romfrey's compassionate sentiments veered round to irate amazement. For the person alluded to was indeed the infamous miauling cotton-spinner. Nevil admired him. He said so bluntly. He pointed to that traitorous George-Foxite as the one heroical Englishman of his day, declaring that he felt bound in honour to make known his admiration for the man; and he hoped his uncle would excuse him. 'If we differ, I am sorry, sir; but I should be a coward to withhold what I think of him when he has all England against him, and he is in the right, as England will discover. I maintain he speaks wisely—I don't mind saying, like a prophet; and he speaks on behalf of the poor as well as of the country. He appears to me the only public man who looks to the state of the poor—I mean, their interests. They pay for war, and if we are to have peace at home and strength for a really national war, the only war we can ever call necessary, the poor must be contented. He sees that. I shall not run the risk of angering you by writing to defend him, unless I hear of his being shamefully mishandled, and the bearer of an old name can be of service to him. I cannot say less, and will say no more.'
Everard apostrophized his absent nephew: 'You jackass!'
I am reminded by Mr. Romfrey's profound disappointment in the youth, that it will be repeatedly shared by many others: and I am bound to forewarn readers of this history that there is no plot in it. The hero is chargeable with the official disqualification of constantly offending prejudices, never seeking to please; and all the while it is upon him the narrative hangs. To be a public favourite is his last thought. Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing. For Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn its absence; melodious lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien to him. His faith is in working and fighting. With every inducement to offer himself for a romantic figure, he despises the pomades and curling-irons of modern romance, its shears and its labels: in fine, every one of those positive things by whose aid, and by some adroit flourishing of them, the nimbus known as a mysterious halo is produced about a gentleman's head. And a highly alluring adornment it is! We are all given to lose our solidity and fly at it; although the faithful mirror of fiction has been showing us latterly that a too superhuman beauty has disturbed popular belief in the bare beginnings of the existence of heroes: but this, very likely, is nothing more than a fit of Republicanism in the nursery, and a deposition of the leading doll for lack of variety in him. That conqueror of circumstances will, the dullest soul may begin predicting, return on his cockhorse to favour and authority. Meantime the exhibition of a hero whom circumstances overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear, who continually forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own fortunes, must run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum. Nursery Legitimists will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise, after a queer sniff at his pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I have so little command over him, that in spite of my nursery tastes, he drags me whither he lists. It is artless art and monstrous innovation to present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a striking fable for him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it would be only a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live in such an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved his country, and for another and a broader love, growing out of his first passion, fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant of the Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull, pummelled the obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic. His indifferent England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The greater power of the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of our hero's character in the domestic circle; perhaps a faintly-outlined circle or two beyond it. But this does not forbid him to be ranked as one of the most distinguishing of her children of the day he lived in. Blame the victrix if you think he should have been livelier.
Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war was actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what surrounded him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of stilts, gravely resigned the gift of motion. Our dauntless Lancastrian thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded. Our worthy people, consenting to the doctrine that war is a scourge, contracted the habit of thinking it, in this case, the dire necessity which is the sole excuse for giving way to an irritated pugnacity, and sucked the comforting caramel of an alliance with their troublesome next-door neighbour, profuse in comfits as in scorpions. Nevil detected that politic element of their promptitude for war. His recollections of dissatisfaction in former days assisted him to perceive the nature of it, but he was too young to hold his own against the hubbub of a noisy people, much too young to remain sceptical of a modern people's enthusiasm for war while journals were testifying to it down the length of their columns, and letters from home palpitated with it, and shipmates yawned wearily for the signal, and shiploads of red coats and blue, infantry, cavalry, artillery, were singing farewell to the girl at home, and hurrah for anything in foreign waters. He joined the stream with a cordial spirit. Since it must be so! The wind of that haughty proceeding of the Great Bear in putting a paw over the neutral brook brushed his cheek unpleasantly. He clapped hands for the fezzy defenders of the border fortress, and when the order came for the fleet to enter the old romantic sea of storms and fables, he wrote home a letter fit for his uncle Everard to read. Then there was the sailing and the landing, and the march up the heights, which Nevil was condemned to look at. To his joy he obtained an appointment on shore, and after that Everard heard of him from other channels. The two were of a mind when the savage winter advanced which froze the attack of the city, and might be imaged as the hoar god of hostile elements pointing a hand to the line reached, and menacing at one farther step. Both blamed the Government, but they divided as to the origin of governmental inefficiency; Nevil accusing the Lords guilty of foulest sloth, Everard the Quakers of dry-rotting the country. He passed with a shrug Nevil's puling outcry for the enemy as well as our own poor fellows: 'At his steppes again!' And he had to be forgiving when reports came of his nephew's turn for overdoing his duty: 'show-fighting,' as he termed it.
'Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it,' he wrote very rationally. 'Stick to your line. Don't go out of it till you are ordered out. Remember that we want soldiers and sailors, we don't want suicides.' He condescended to these italics, considering impressiveness to be urgent. In his heart, notwithstanding his implacably clear judgement, he was passably well pleased with the congratulations encompassing him on account of his nephew's gallantry at a period of dejection in Britain: for the winter was dreadful; every kind heart that went to bed with cold feet felt acutely for our soldiers on the frozen heights, and thoughts of heroes were as good as warming-pans. Heroes we would have. It happens in war as in wit, that all the birds of wonder fly to a flaring reputation. He that has done one wild thing must necessarily have done the other; so Nevil found himself standing in the thick of a fame that blew rank eulogies on him for acts he had not performed. The Earl of Romfrey forwarded hampers and a letter of praise. 'They tell me that while you were facing the enemy, temporarily attaching yourself to one of the regiments—I forget which, though I have heard it named—you sprang out under fire on an eagle clawing a hare. I like that. I hope you had the benefit of the hare. She is our property, and I have issued an injunction that she shall not go into the newspapers.' Everard was entirely of a contrary opinion concerning the episode of eagle and hare, though it was a case of a bird of prey interfering with an object of the chase. Nevil wrote home most entreatingly and imperatively, like one wincing, begging him to contradict that and certain other stories, and prescribing the form of a public renunciation of his proclaimed part in them. 'The hare,' he sent word, 'is the property of young Michell of the Rodney, and he is the humanest and the gallantest fellow in the service. I have written to my Lord. Pray help to rid me of burdens that make me feel like a robber and impostor.'
Everard replied:
'I have a letter from your captain, informing me that I am unlikely to see you home unless you learn to hold yourself in. I wish you were in another battery than Robert Hall's. He forgets the force of example, however much of a dab he may be at precept. But there you are, and please clap a hundredweight on your appetite for figuring, will you. Do you think there is any good in helping to Frenchify our army? I loathe a fellow who shoots at a medal. I wager he is easy enough to be caught by circumvention—put me in the open with him. Tom Biggot, the boxer, went over to Paris, and stood in the ring with one of their dancing pugilists, and the first round he got a crack on the chin from the rogue's foot; the second round he caught him by the lifted leg, and punished him till pec was all he could say of peccavi. Fight the straightforward fight. Hang flan! Battle is a game of give and take, and if our men get elanned, we shall see them refusing to come up to time. This new crossing and medalling is the devil's own notion for upsetting a solid British line, and tempting fellows to get invalided that they may blaze it before the shopkeepers and their wives in the city. Give us an army!—none of your caperers. Here are lots of circusy heroes coming home to rest after their fatigues. One was spouting at a public dinner yesterday night. He went into it upright, and he ran out of it upright—at the head of his men!—and here he is feasted by the citizens and making a speech upright, and my boy fronting the enemy!'
Everard's involuntary break-down from his veteran's roughness to a touch of feeling thrilled Nevil, who began to perceive what his uncle was driving at when he rebuked the coxcombry of the field, and spoke of the description of compliment your hero was paying Englishmen in affecting to give them examples of bravery and preternatural coolness. Nevil sent home humble confessions of guilt in this respect, with fresh praises of young Michell: for though Everard, as Nevil recognized it, was perfectly right in the abstract, and generally right, there are times when an example is needed by brave men—times when the fiery furnace of death's dragon-jaw is not inviting even to Englishmen receiving the word that duty bids them advance, and they require a leader of the way. A national coxcombry that pretends to an independence of human sensations, and makes a motto of our dandiacal courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that of a few heroes. It is this coxcombry which has too often caused disdain of the wise chief's maxim of calculation for winners, namely, to have always the odds on your side, and which has bled, shattered, and occasionally disgraced us. Young Michell's carrying powder-bags to the assault, and when ordered to retire, bearing them on his back, and helping a wounded soldier on the way, did surely well; nor did Mr. Beauchamp himself behave so badly on an occasion when the sailors of his battery caught him out of a fire of shell that raised jets of dust and smoke like a range of geysers over the open, and hugged him as loving women do at a meeting or a parting. He was penitent before his uncle, admitting, first, that the men were not in want of an example of the contempt of death, and secondly, that he doubted whether it was contempt of death on his part so much as pride—a hatred of being seen running.
'I don't like the fellow to be drawing it so fine,' said Everard. It sounded to him a trifle parsonical. But his heart was won by Nevil's determination to wear out the campaign rather than be invalided or entrusted with a holiday duty.
'I see with shame (admiration of them) old infantry captains and colonels of no position beyond their rank in the army, sticking to their post,' said Nevil, 'and a lord and a lord and a lord slipping off as though the stuff of the man in him had melted. I shall go through with it.' Everard approved him. Colonel Halkett wrote that the youth was a skeleton. Still Everard encouraged him to persevere, and said of him:
'I like him for holding to his work after the strain's over. That tells the man.'
He observed at his table, in reply to commendations of his nephew:
'Nevil's leak is his political craze, and that seems to be going: I hope it is. You can't rear a man on politics. When I was of his age I never looked at the newspapers, except to read the divorce cases. I came to politics with a ripe judgement. He shines in action, and he'll find that out, and leave others the palavering.'
It was upon the close of the war that Nevil drove his uncle to avow a downright undisguised indignation with him. He caught a fever in the French camp, where he was dispensing vivers and provends out of English hampers.
'Those French fellows are every man of them trained up to snapping-point,' said Everard. 'You're sure to have them if you hold out long against them. And greedy dogs too: they're for half our hampers, and all the glory. And there's Nevil down on his back in the thick of them! Will anybody tell me why the devil he must be poking into the French camp? They were ready enough to run to him and beg potatoes. It 's all for humanity he does it-mark that. Never was a word fitter for a quack's mouth than "humanity." Two syllables more, and the parsons would be riding it to sawdust. Humanity! Humanitomtity! It's the best word of the two for half the things done in the name of it.'
A tremendously bracing epistle, excellent for an access of fever, was despatched to humanity's curate, and Everard sat expecting a hot rejoinder, or else a black sealed letter, but neither one nor the other arrived.
Suddenly, to his disgust, came rumours of peace between the mighty belligerents.
The silver trumpets of peace were nowhere hearkened to with satisfaction by the bull-dogs, though triumph rang sonorously through the music, for they had been severely mangled, as usual at the outset, and they had at last got their grip, and were in high condition for fighting.
The most expansive panegyrists of our deeds did not dare affirm of the most famous of them, that England had embarked her costly cavalry to offer it for a mark of artillery-balls on three sides of a square: and the belief was universal that we could do more business-like deeds and play the great game of blunders with an ability refined by experience. Everard Romfrey was one of those who thought themselves justified in insisting upon the continuation of the war, in contempt of our allies. His favourite saying that constitution beats the world, was being splendidly manifested by our bearing. He was very uneasy; he would not hear of peace; and not only that, the imperial gentleman soberly committed the naivete of sending word to Nevil to let him know immediately the opinion of the camp concerning it, as perchance an old Roman knight may have written to some young aquilifer of the Praetorians.
Allies, however, are of the description of twins joined by a membrane, and supposing that one of them determines to sit down, the other will act wisely in bending his knees at once, and doing the same: he cannot but be extremely uncomfortable left standing. Besides, there was the Ottoman cleverly poised again; the Muscovite was battered; fresh guilt was added to the military glory of the Gaul. English grumblers might well be asked what they had fought for, if they were not contented.
Colonel Halkett mentioned a report that Nevil had received a slight thigh-wound of small importance. At any rate, something was the matter with him, and it was naturally imagined that he would have double cause to write home; and still more so for the reason, his uncle confessed, that he had foreseen the folly of a war conducted by milky cotton-spinners and their adjuncts, in partnership with a throned gambler, who had won his stake, and now snapped his fingers at them. Everard expected, he had prepared himself for, the young naval politician's crow, and he meant to admit frankly that he had been wrong in wishing to fight anybody without having first crushed the cotton faction. But Nevil continued silent.
'Dead in hospital or a Turk hotel!' sighed Everard; 'and no more to the scoundrels over there than a body to be shovelled into slack lime.'
Rosamund Culling was the only witness of his remarkable betrayal of grief.
At last, one morning, arrived a letter from a French gentleman signing himself Comte Cresnes de Croisnel, in which Everard was informed that his nephew had accompanied the son of the writer, Captain de Croisnel, on board an Austrian boat out of the East, and was lying in Venice under a return-attack of fever,—not, the count stated pointedly, in the hands of an Italian physician. He had brought his own with him to meet his son, who was likewise disabled.
Everard was assured by M. de Croisnel that every attention and affectionate care were being rendered to his gallant and adored nephew—'vrai type de tout ce qu'il y a de noble et de chevaleresque dans la vieille Angleterre'—from a family bound to him by the tenderest obligations, personal and national; one as dear to every member of it as the brother, the son, they welcomed with thankful hearts to the Divine interposition restoring him to them. In conclusion, the count proposed something like the embrace of a fraternal friendship should Everard think fit to act upon the spontaneous sentiments of a loving relative, and join them in Venice to watch over his nephew's recovery. Already M. Nevil was stronger. The gondola was a medicine in itself, the count said.
Everard knitted his mouth to intensify a peculiar subdued form of laughter through the nose, in hopeless ridicule of a Frenchman's notions of an Englishman's occupations—presumed across Channel to allow of his breaking loose from shooting engagements at a minute's notice, to rush off to a fetid foreign city notorious for mud and mosquitoes, and commence capering and grimacing, pouring forth a jugful of ready-made extravagances, with 'mon fils! mon cher neveu! Dieu!' and similar fiddlededee. These were matters for women to do, if they chose: women and Frenchmen were much of a pattern. Moreover, he knew the hotel this Comte de Croisnel was staying at. He gasped at the name of it: he had rather encounter a grisly bear than a mosquito any night of his life, for no stretch of cunning outwits a mosquito; and enlarging on the qualities of the terrific insect, he vowed it was damnation without trial or judgement.
Eventually, Mrs. Culling's departure was permitted. He argued, 'Why go? the fellow's comfortable, getting himself together, and you say the French are good nurses.' But her entreaties to go were vehement, though Venice had no happy place in her recollections, and he withheld his objections to her going. For him, the fields forbade it. He sent hearty messages to Nevil, and that was enough, considering that the young dog of 'humanity' had clearly been running out of his way to catch a jaundice, and was bereaving his houses of the matronly government, deprived of which they were all of them likely soon to be at sixes and sevens with disorderly lacqueys, peccant maids, and cooks in hysterics.
Now if the master of his fortunes had come to Venice!—Nevil started the supposition in his mind often after hope had sunk.—Everard would have seen a young sailor and a soldier the thinner for wear, reclining in a gondola half the day, fanned by a brunette of the fine lineaments of the good blood of France. She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers, she was like a delicate cup of crystal brimming with the beauty of the place, and making one of them drink in all his impressions through her. Her features had the soft irregularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly; thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed: her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French.
Her name was Renee. She was the only daughter of the Comte de Croisnel. Her brother Roland owed his life to Nevil, this Englishman proud of a French name—Nevil Beauchamp. If there was any warm feeling below the unruffled surface of the girl's deliberate eyes while gazing on him, it was that he who had saved her brother must be nearly brother himself, yet was not quite, yet must be loved, yet not approached. He was her brother's brother-in-arms, brother-in-heart, not hers, yet hers through her brother. His French name rescued him from foreignness. He spoke her language with a piquant accent, unlike the pitiable English. Unlike them, he was gracious, and could be soft and quick. The battle-scarlet, battle-black, Roland's tales of him threw round him in her imagination, made his gentleness a surprise. If, then, he was hers through her brother, what was she to him? The question did not spring clearly within her, though she was alive to every gradual change of manner toward the convalescent necessitated by the laws overawing her sex.
Venice was the French girl's dream. She was realizing it hungrily, revelling in it, anatomizing it, picking it to pieces, reviewing it, comparing her work with the original, and the original with her first conception, until beautiful sad Venice threatened to be no more her dream, and in dread of disenchantment she tried to take impressions humbly, really tasked herself not to analyze, not to dictate from a French footing, not to scorn. Not to be petulant with objects disappointing her, was an impossible task. She could not consent to a compromise with the people, the merchandize, the odours of the city. Gliding in the gondola through the narrow canals at low tide, she leaned back simulating stupor, with one word—'Venezia!' Her brother was commanded to smoke: 'Fumez, fumez, Roland!' As soon as the steel-crested prow had pushed into her Paradise of the Canal Grande, she quietly shrouded her hair from tobacco, and called upon rapture to recompense her for her sufferings. The black gondola was unendurable to her. She had accompanied her father to the Accademia, and mused on the golden Venetian streets of Carpaccio: she must have an open gondola to decorate in his manner, gaily, splendidly, and mock at her efforts—a warning to all that might hope to improve the prevailing gloom and squalor by levying contributions upon the Merceria! Her most constant admiration was for the English lord who used once to ride on the Lido sands and visit the Armenian convent—a lord and a poet. [Lord Byron D.W.]
This was to be infinitely more than a naval lieutenant. But Nevil claimed her as little personally as he allowed her to be claimed by another. The graces of her freaks of petulance and airy whims, her sprightly jets of wilfulness, fleeting frowns of contempt, imperious decisions, were all beautiful, like silver-shifting waves, in this lustrous planet of her pure freedom; and if you will seize the divine conception of Artemis, and own the goddess French, you will understand his feelings.
But though he admired fervently, and danced obediently to her tunes, Nevil could not hear injustice done to a people or historic poetic city without trying hard to right the mind guilty of it. A newspaper correspondent, a Mr. John Holles, lingering on his road home from the army, put him on the track of an Englishman's books—touching the spirit as well as the stones of Venice, and Nevil thanked him when he had turned some of the leaves.
The study of the books to school Renee was pursued, like the Bianchina's sleep, in gondoletta, and was not unlike it at intervals. A translated sentence was the key to a reverie. Renee leaned back, meditating; he forward, the book on his knee: Roland left them to themselves, and spied for the Bianchina behind the window-bars. The count was in the churches or the Galleries. Renee thought she began to comprehend the spirit of Venice, and chided her rebelliousness.
'But our Venice was the Venice of the decadence, then!' she said, complaining. Nevil read on, distrustful of the perspicuity of his own ideas.
'Ah, but,' said she, 'when these Venetians were rough men, chanting like our Huguenots, how cold it must have been here!'
She hoped she was not very wrong in preferring the times of the great Venetian painters and martial doges to that period of faith and stone-cutting. What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre, insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the Rii to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the times of Venice in full flower. She reasoned against the hard eloquent Englishman of the books. 'But we are known by our fruits, are we not? and the Venice I admire was surely the fruit of these stonecutters chanting hymns of faith; it could not but be: and if it deserved, as he says, to die disgraced, I think we should go back to them and ask them whether their minds were as pure and holy as he supposes.' Her French wits would not be subdued. Nevil pointed to the palaces. 'Pride,' said she. He argued that the original Venetians were not responsible for their offspring. 'You say it?' she cried, 'you, of an old race? Oh, no; you do not feel it!' and the trembling fervour of her voice convinced him that he did not, could not.
Renee said: 'I know my ancestors are bound up in me, by my sentiments to them; and so do you, M. Nevil. We shame them if we fail in courage and honour. Is it not so? If we break a single pledged word we cast shame on them. Why, that makes us what we are; that is our distinction: we dare not be weak if we would. And therefore when Venice is reproached with avarice and luxury, I choose to say—what do we hear of the children of misers? and I say I am certain that those old cold Huguenot stonecutters were proud and grasping. I am sure they were, and they shall share the blame.'
Nevil plunged into his volume.
He called on Roland for an opinion.
'Friend,' said Roland, 'opinions may differ: mine is, considering the defences of the windows, that the only way into these houses or out of them bodily was the doorway.'
Roland complimented his sister and friend on the prosecution of their studies: he could not understand a word of the subject, and yawning, he begged permission to be allowed to land and join the gondola at a distant quarter. The gallant officer was in haste to go.
Renee stared at her brother. He saw nothing; he said a word to the gondoliers, and quitted the boat. Mars was in pursuit. She resigned herself, and ceased then to be a girl.
The air flashed like heaven descending for Nevil alone with Renee. They had never been alone before. Such happiness belonged to the avenue of wishes leading to golden mists beyond imagination, and seemed, coming on him suddenly, miraculous. He leaned toward her like one who has broken a current of speech, and waits to resume it. She was all unsuspecting indolence, with gravely shadowed eyes.
'I throw the book down,' he said.
She objected. 'No; continue: I like it.'
Both of them divined that the book was there to do duty for Roland.
He closed it, keeping a finger among the leaves; a kind of anchorage in case of indiscretion.
'Permit me to tell you, M. Nevil, you are inclined to play truant to-day.'
'I am.'
'Now is the very time to read; for my poor Roland is at sea when we discuss our questions, and the book has driven him away.'
'But we have plenty of time to read. We miss the scenes.'
'The scenes are green shutters, wet steps, barcaroli, brown women, striped posts, a scarlet night-cap, a sick fig-tree, an old shawl, faded spots of colour, peeling walls. They might be figured by a trodden melon. They all resemble one another, and so do the days here.'
'That's the charm. I wish I could look on you and think the same. You, as you are, for ever.'
'Would you not let me live my life?'
'I would not have you alter.'
'Please to be pathetic on that subject after I am wrinkled, monsieur.'
'You want commanding, mademoiselle.'
Renee nestled her chin, and gazed forward through her eyelashes.
'Venice is like a melancholy face of a former beauty who has ceased to rouge, or wipe away traces of her old arts,' she said, straining for common talk, and showing the strain.
'Wait; now we are rounding,' said he; 'now you have three of what you call your theatre-bridges in sight. The people mount and drop, mount and drop; I see them laugh. They are full of fun and good-temper. Look on living Venice!
'Provided that my papa is not crossing when we go under!
'Would he not trust you to me?'
'Yes.'
'He would? And you?'
'I do believe they are improvizing an operetta on the second bridge.'
'You trust yourself willingly?'
'As to my second brother. You hear them? How delightfully quick and spontaneous they are! Ah, silly creatures! they have stopped. They might have held it on for us while we were passing.'
'Where would the naturalness have been then?'
'Perhaps, M. Nevil, I do want commanding. I am wilful. Half my days will be spent in fits of remorse, I begin to think.'
'Come to me to be forgiven.'
'Shall I? I should be forgiven too readily.'
'I am not so sure of that.'
'Can you be harsh? No, not even with enemies. Least of all with . . . with us.'
Oh for the black gondola!—the little gliding dusky chamber for two; instead of this open, flaunting, gold and crimson cotton-work, which exacted discretion on his part and that of the mannerly gondoliers, and exposed him to window, balcony, bridge, and borderway.
They slipped on beneath a red balcony where a girl leaned on her folded arms, and eyed them coming and going by with Egyptian gravity.
'How strange a power of looking these people have,' said Renee, whose vivacity was fascinated to a steady sparkle by the girl. 'Tell me, is she glancing round at us?'
Nevil turned and reported that she was not. She had exhausted them while they were in transit; she had no minor curiosity.
'Let us fancy she is looking for her lover,' he said.
Renee added: 'Let us hope she will not escape being seen.'
'I give her my benediction,' said Nevil.
'And I,' said Renee; 'and adieu to her, if you please. Look for Roland.'
'You remind me; I have but a few instants.'
'M. Nevil, you are a preux of the times of my brother's patronymic. And there is my Roland awaiting us. Is he not handsome?'
'How glad you are to have him to relieve guard!'
Renee bent on Nevil one of her singular looks of raillery. She had hitherto been fencing at a serious disadvantage.
'Not so very glad,' she said, 'if that deprived me of the presence of his friend.'
Roland was her tower. But Roland was not yet on board. She had peeped from her citadel too rashly. Nevil had time to spring the flood of crimson in her cheeks, bright as the awning she reclined under.
'Would you have me with you always?'
'Assuredly,' said she, feeling the hawk in him, and trying to baffle him by fluttering.
'Always? forever? and—listen-give me a title?'
Renee sang out to Roland like a bird in distress, and had some trouble not to appear too providentially rescued. Roland on board, she resumed the attack.
'M. Nevil vows he is a better brother to me than you, who dart away on an impulse and leave us threading all Venice till we do not know where we are, naughty brother!'
'My little sister, the spot where you are,' rejoined Roland, 'is precisely the spot where I left you, and I defy you to say you have gone on without me. This is the identical riva I stepped out on to buy you a packet of Venetian ballads.'
They recognized the spot, and for a confirmation of the surprising statement, Roland unrolled several sheets of printed blotting-paper, and rapidly read part of a Canzonetta concerning Una Giovine who reproved her lover for his extreme addiction to wine:
'Ma se, ma se,Cotanto beve,Mi no, mi no,No ve sposero.'
'This astounding vagabond preferred Nostrani to his heart's mistress. I tasted some of their Nostrani to see if it could be possible for a Frenchman to exonerate him.'
Roland's wry face at the mention of Nostrani brought out the chief gondolier, who delivered himself:
'Signore, there be hereditary qualifications. One must be born Italian to appreciate the merits of Nostrani!'
Roland laughed. He had covered his delinquency in leaving his sister, and was full of an adventure to relate to Nevil, a story promising well for him.
Renee was downcast. Had she not coquetted? The dear young Englishman had reduced her to defend herself, the which fair ladies, like besieged garrisons, cannot always do successfully without an attack at times, which, when the pursuer is ardent, is followed by a retreat, which is a provocation; and these things are coquettry. Her still fresh convent-conscience accused her of it pitilessly. She could not forgive her brother, and yet she dared not reproach him, for that would have inculpated Nevil. She stepped on to the Piazzetta thoughtfully. Her father was at Florian's, perusing letters from France. 'We are to have the marquis here in a week, my child,' he said. Renee nodded. Involuntarily she looked at Nevil. He caught the look, with a lover's quick sense of misfortune in it.
She heard her brother reply to him: 'Who? the Marquis de Rouaillout? It is a jolly gaillard of fifty who spoils no fun.'
'You mistake his age, Roland,' she said.
'Forty-nine, then, my sister.'
'He is not that.'
'He looks it.'
'You have been absent.'
'Probably, my arithmetical sister, he has employed the interval to grow younger. They say it is the way with green gentlemen of a certain age. They advance and they retire. They perform the first steps of a quadrille ceremoniously, and we admire them.'
'What's that?' exclaimed the Comte de Croisnel. 'You talk nonsense,Roland. M. le marquis is hardly past forty. He is in his prime.'
'Without question, mon pere. For me, I was merely offering proof that he can preserve his prime unlimitedly.'
'He is not a subject for mockery, Roland.'
'Quite the contrary; for reverence!'
'Another than you, my boy, and he would march you out.'
'I am to imagine, then, that his hand continues firm?'
'Imagine to the extent of your capacity; but remember that respect is always owing to your own family, and deliberate before you draw on yourself such a chastisement as mercy from an accepted member of it.'
Roland bowed and drummed on his knee.
The conversation had been originated by Renee for the enlightenment of Nevil and as a future protection to herself. Now that it had disclosed its burden she could look at him no more, and when her father addressed her significantly: 'Marquise, you did me the honour to consent to accompany me to the Church of the Frari this afternoon?' she felt her self-accusation of coquettry biting under her bosom like a thing alive.
Roland explained the situation to Nevil.
'It is the mania with us, my dear Nevil, to marry our girls young to established men. Your established man carries usually all the signs, visible to the multitude or not, of the stages leading to that eminence. We cannot, I believe, unless we have the good fortune to boast the paternity of Hercules, disconnect ourselves from the steps we have mounted; not even, the priests inform us, if we are ascending to heaven; we carry them beyond the grave. However, it seems that our excellent marquis contrives to keep them concealed, and he is ready to face marriage—the Grandest Inquisitor, next to Death. Two furious matchmakers—our country, beautiful France, abounds in them—met one day; they were a comtesse and a baronne, and they settled the alliance. The bell was rung, and Renee came out of school. There is this to be said: she has no mother; the sooner a girl without a mother has a husband the better. That we are all agreed upon. I have no personal objection to the marquis; he has never been in any great scandals. He is Norman, and has estates in Normandy, Dauphiny, Touraine; he is hospitable, luxurious. Renee will have a fine hotel in Paris. But I am eccentric: I have read in our old Fabliaux of December and May. Say the marquis is November, say October; he is still some distance removed from the plump Spring month. And we in our family have wits and passions. In fine, a bud of a rose in an old gentleman's button-hole! it is a challenge to the whole world of youth; and if the bud should leap? Enough of this matter, friend Nevil; but sometimes a friend must allow himself to be bothered. I have perfect confidence in my sister, you see; I simply protest against her being exposed to . . . You know men. I protest, that is, in the privacy of my cigar-case, for I have no chance elsewhere. The affair is on wheels. The very respectable matchmakers have kindled the marquis on the one hand, and my father on the other, and Renee passes obediently from the latter to the former. In India they sacrifice the widows, in France the virgins.'
Roland proceeded to relate his adventure. Nevil's inattention piqued him to salt and salt it wonderfully, until the old story of He and She had an exciting savour in its introductory chapter; but his friend was flying through the circles of the Inferno, and the babble of an ephemeral upper world simply affected him by its contrast with the overpowering horrors, repugnances, despairs, pities, rushing at him, surcharging his senses. Those that live much by the heart in their youth have sharp foretastes of the issues imaged for the soul. St. Mark's was in a minute struck black for him. He neither felt the sunlight nor understood why column and campanile rose, nor why the islands basked, and boats and people moved. All were as remote little bits of mechanism.
Nevil escaped, and walked in the direction of the Frari down calle and campiello. Only to see her—to compare her with the Renee of the past hour! But that Renee had been all the while a feast of delusion; she could never be resuscitated in the shape he had known, not even clearly visioned. Not a day of her, not an hour, not a single look had been his own. She had been sold when he first beheld her, and should, he muttered austerely, have been ticketed the property of a middle-aged man, a worn-out French marquis, whom she had agreed to marry, unwooed, without love—the creature of a transaction. But she was innocent, she was unaware of the sin residing in a loveless marriage; and this restored her to him somewhat as a drowned body is given back to mourners.
After aimless walking he found himself on the Zattere, where the lonely Giudecca lies in front, covering mud and marsh and lagune-flames of later afternoon, and you have sight of the high mainland hills which seem to fling forth one over other to a golden sea-cape.
Midway on this unadorned Zattere, with its young trees and spots of shade, he was met by Renee and her father. Their gondola was below, close to the riva, and the count said, 'She is tired of standing gazing at pictures. There is a Veronese in one of the churches of the Giudecca opposite. Will you, M. Nevil, act as parade-escort to her here for half an hour, while I go over? Renee complains that she loses the vulgar art of walking in her complaisant attention to the fine Arts. I weary my poor child.'
Renee protested in a rapid chatter.
'Must I avow it?' said the count; 'she damps my enthusiasm a little.'
Nevil mutely accepted the office.
Twice that day was she surrendered to him: once in his ignorance, when time appeared an expanse of many sunny fields. On this occasion it puffed steam; yet, after seeing the count embark, he commenced the parade in silence.
'This is a nice walk,' said Renee; 'we have not the steps of the Riva dei Schiavoni. It is rather melancholy though. How did you discover it? I persuaded my papa to send the gondola round, and walk till we came to the water. Tell me about the Giudecca.'
'The Giudecca was a place kept apart for the Jews, I believe. You have seen their burial-ground on the Lido. Those are, I think, the Euganean hills. You are fond of Petrarch.'
'M. Nevil, omitting the allusion to the poet, you have, permit me to remark, the brevity without the precision of an accredited guide to notabilities.'
'I tell you what I know,' said Nevil, brooding on the finished tone and womanly aplomb of her language. It made him forget that she was a girl entrusted to his guardianship. His heart came out.
'Renee, if you loved him, I, on my honour, would not utter a word for myself. Your heart's inclinations are sacred for me. I would stand by, and be your friend and his. If he were young, that I might see a chance of it!'
She murmured, 'You should not have listened to Roland.'
'Roland should have warned me. How could I be near you and not . . . But I am nothing. Forget me; do not think I speak interestedly, except to save the dearest I have ever known from certain wretchedness. To yield yourself hand and foot for life! I warn you that it must end miserably. Your countrywomen . . . You have the habit in France; but like what are you treated? You! none like you in the whole world! You consent to be extinguished. And I have to look on! Listen to me now.'
Renee glanced at the gondola conveying her father. And he has not yet landed! she thought, and said, 'Do you pretend to judge of my welfare better than my papa?'
'Yes; in this. He follows a fashion. You submit to it. His anxiety is to provide for you. But I know the system is cursed by nature, and that means by heaven.'
'Because it is not English?'
'O Renee, my beloved for ever! Well, then, tell me, tell me you can say with pride and happiness that the Marquis de Rouaillout is to be your—there's the word—husband!'
Renee looked across the water.
'Friend, if my father knew you were asking me!'
'I will speak to him.'
'Useless.'
'He is generous, he loves you.'
'He cannot break an engagement binding his honour.'
'Would you, Renee, would you—it must be said—consent to have it known to him—I beg for more than life—that your are not averse . . . that you support me?'
His failing breath softened the bluntness.
She replied, 'I would not have him ever break an engagement binding his honour.'
'You stretch the point of honour.'
'It is our way. Dear friend, we are French. And I presume to think that our French system is not always wrong, for if my father had not broken it by treating you as one of us and leaving me with you, should I have heard . . . ?'
'I have displeased you.'
'Do not suppose that. But, I mean, a mother would not have left me.'
'You wished to avoid it.'
'Do not blame me. I had some instinct; you were very pale.'
'You knew I loved you.'
'No.'
'Yes; for this morning . . .'
This morning it seemed to me, and I regretted my fancy, that you were inclined to trifle, as, they say, young men do.'
'With Renee?'
'With your friend Renee. And those are the hills of Petrarch's tomb? They are mountains.'
They were purple beneath a large brooding cloud that hung against the sun, waiting for him to enfold him, and Nevil thought that a tomb there would be a welcome end, if he might lift Renee in one wild flight over the chasm gaping for her. He had no language for thoughts of such a kind, only tumultuous feeling.
She was immoveable, in perfect armour.
He said despairingly, 'Can you have realized what you are consenting to?'
She answered, 'It is my duty.'
'Your duty! it's like taking up a dice-box, and flinging once, to certain ruin!'
'I must oppose my father to you, friend. Do you not understand duty to parents? They say the English are full of the idea of duty.'
'Duty to country, duty to oaths and obligations; but with us the heart is free to choose.'
'Free to choose, and when it is most ignorant?'
'The heart? ask it. Nothing is surer.'
'That is not what we are taught. We are taught that the heart deceives itself. The heart throws your dicebox; not prudent parents.'
She talked like a woman, to plead the cause of her obedience as a girl, and now silenced in the same manner that she had previously excited him.
'Then you are lost to me,' he said.
They saw the gondola returning.
'How swiftly it comes home; it loitered when it went,' said Renee. 'There sits my father, brimming with his picture; he has seen one more! We will congratulate him. This little boulevard is not much to speak of. The hills are lovely. Friend,' she dropped her voice on the gondola's approach, 'we have conversed on common subjects.'
Nevil had her hand in his, to place her in the gondola.
She seemed thankful that he should prefer to go round on foot. At least, she did not join in her father's invitation to him. She leaned back, nestling her chin and half closing her eyes, suffering herself to be divided from him, borne away by forces she acquiesced in.
Roland was not visible till near midnight on the Piazza. The promenaders, chiefly military of the garrison, were few at that period of social protestation, and he could declare his disappointment aloud, ringingly, as he strolled up to Nevil, looking as if the cigar in his mouth and the fists entrenched in his wide trowsers-pockets were mortally at feud. His adventure had not pursued its course luminously. He had expected romance, and had met merchandize, and his vanity was offended. To pacify him, Nevil related how he had heard that since the Venetian rising of '49, Venetian ladies had issued from the ordeal of fire and famine of another pattern than the famous old Benzon one, in which they touched earthiest earth. He praised Republicanism for that. The spirit of the new and short-lived Republic wrought that change in Venice.
'Oh, if they're republican as well as utterly decayed,' said Roland, 'I give them up; let them die virtuous.'
Nevil told Roland that he had spoken to Renee. He won sympathy, but Roland could not give him encouragement. They crossed and recrossed the shadow of the great campanile, on the warm-white stones of the square, Nevil admitting the weight of whatsoever Roland pointed to him in favour of the arrangement according to French notions, and indeed, of aristocratic notions everywhere, saving that it was imperative for Renee to be disposed of in marriage early. Why rob her of her young springtime!
'French girls,' replied Roland, confused by the nature of the explication in his head—'well, they're not English; they want a hand to shape them, otherwise they grow all awry. My father will not have one of her aunts to live with him, so there she is. But, my dear Nevil, I owe my life to you, and I was no party to this affair. I would do anything to help you. What says Renee?'
'She obeys.'
'Exactly. You see! Our girls are chess-pieces until they 're married.Then they have life and character sometimes too much.'
'She is not like them, Roland; she is like none. When I spoke to her first, she affected no astonishment; never was there a creature so nobly sincere. She's a girl in heart, not in mind. Think of her sacrificed to this man thrice her age!'
'She differs from other girls only on the surface, Nevil. As for the man, I wish she were going to marry a younger. I wish, yes, my friend,' Roland squeezed Nevil's hand, 'I wish! I'm afraid it's hopeless. She did not tell you to hope?'
'Not by one single sign,' said Nevil.
'You see, my friend!'
'For that reason,' Nevil rejoined, with the calm fanaticism of the passion of love, 'I hope all the more . . . because I will not believe that she, so pure and good, can be sacrificed. Put me aside—I am nothing. I hope to save her from that.'
'We have now,' said Roland, 'struck the current of duplicity. You are really in love, my poor fellow.'
Lover and friend came to no conclusion, except that so lovely a night was not given for slumber. A small round brilliant moon hung almost globed in the depths of heaven, and the image of it fell deep between San Giorgio and the Dogana.
Renee had the scene from her window, like a dream given out of sleep. She lay with both arms thrown up beneath her head on the pillow, her eyelids wide open, and her visage set and stern. Her bosom rose and sank regularly but heavily. The fluctuations of a night stormy for her, hitherto unknown, had sunk her to this trance, in which she lay like a creature flung on shore by the waves. She heard her brother's voice and Nevil's, and the pacing of their feet. She saw the long shaft of moonlight broken to zigzags of mellow lightning, and wavering back to steadiness; dark San Giorgio, and the sheen of the Dogana's front. But the visible beauty belonged to a night that had shivered repose, humiliated and wounded her, destroyed her confident happy half-infancy of heart, and she had flown for a refuge to hard feelings. Her predominant sentiment was anger; an anger that touched all and enveloped none, for it was quite fictitious, though she felt it, and suffered from it. She turned it on Nevil, as against an enemy, and became the victim in his place. Tears for him filled in her eyes, and ran over; she disdained to notice them, and blinked offendedly to have her sight clear of the weakness; but these interceding tears would flow; it was dangerous to blame him, harshly. She let them roll down, figuring to herself with quiet simplicity of mind that her spirit was independent of them as long as she restrained her hands from being accomplices by brushing them away, as weeping girls do that cry for comfort. Nevil had saved her brother's life, and had succoured her countrymen; he loved her, and was a hero. He should not have said he loved her; that was wrong; and it was shameful that he should have urged her to disobey her father. But this hero's love of her might plead excuses she did not know of; and if he was to be excused, he, unhappy that he was, had a claim on her for more than tears. She wept resentfully. Forces above her own swayed and hurried her like a lifeless body dragged by flying wheels: they could not unnerve her will, or rather, what it really was, her sense of submission to a destiny. Looked at from the height of the palm-waving cherubs over the fallen martyr in the picture, she seemed as nerveless as a dreamy girl. The raised arms and bent elbows were an illusion of indifference. Her shape was rigid from hands to feet, as if to keep in a knot the resolution of her mind; for the second and in that young season the stronger nature grafted by her education fixed her to the religious duty of obeying and pleasing her father, in contempt, almost in abhorrence, of personal inclinations tending to thwart him and imperil his pledged word. She knew she had inclinations to be tender. Her hands released, how promptly might she not have been confiding her innumerable perplexities of sentiment and emotion to paper, undermining self-governance; self-respect, perhaps! Further than that, she did not understand the feelings she struggled with; nor had she any impulse to gaze on him, the cause of her trouble, who walked beside her brother below, talking betweenwhiles in the night's grave undertones. Her trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her too mysteriously, coming on her solitariness without warning in the first watch of the night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to sudden flame. A thought of Nevil and a regret had done it.
The lovers met after Roland had spoken to his sister—not exactly to advocate the cause of Nevil, though he was under the influence of that grave night's walk with him, but to sound her and see whether she at all shared Nevil's view of her situation. Roland felt the awfulness of a French family arrangement of a marriage, and the impertinence of a foreign Cupid's intrusion, too keenly to plead for his friend: at the same time he loved his friend and his sister, and would have been very ready to smile blessings on them if favourable circumstances had raised a signal; if, for example, apoplexy or any other cordial ex machina intervention had removed the middle-aged marquis; and, perhaps, if Renee had shown the repugnance to her engagement which Nevil declared she must have in her heart, he would have done more than smile; he would have laid the case deferentially before his father. His own opinion was that young unmarried women were incapable of the passion of love, being, as it were, but half-feathered in that state, and unable to fly; and Renee confirmed it. The suspicion of an advocacy on Nevil's behalf steeled her. His tentative observations were checked at the outset.
'Can such things be spoken of to me, Roland? I am plighted. You know it.'
He shrugged, said a word of pity for Nevil, and went forth to let his friend know that it was as he had predicted: Renee was obedience in person, like a rightly educated French girl. He strongly advised his friend to banish all hope of her from his mind. But the mind he addressed was of a curious order; far-shooting, tough, persistent, and when acted on by the spell of devotion, indomitable. Nevil put hope aside, or rather, he clad it in other garments, in which it was hardly to be recognized by himself, and said to Roland: 'You must bear this from me; you must let me follow you to the end, and if she wavers she will find me near.'
Roland could not avoid asking the use of it, considering that Renee, however much she admired and liked, was not in love with him.
Nevil resigned himself to admit that she was not: and therefore,' said he, 'you won't object to my remaining.'
Renee greeted Nevil with as clear a conventional air as a woman could assume.
She was going, she said, to attend High Mass in the church of S. Moise, and she waved her devoutest Roman Catholicism to show the breadth of the division between them. He proposed to go likewise. She was mute. After some discourse she contrived to say inoffensively that people who strolled into her churches for the music, or out of curiosity, played the barbarian.
'Well, I will not go,' said Nevil.
'But I do not wish to number you among them,' she said.
'Then,' said Nevil, 'I will go, for it cannot be barbarous to try to be with you.'
'No, that is wickedness,' said Renee.
She was sensible that conversation betrayed her, and Nevil's apparently deliberate pursuit signified to her that he must be aware of his mastery, and she resented it, and stumbled into pitfalls whenever she opened her lips. It seemed to be denied to them to utter what she meant, if indeed she had a meaning in speaking, save to hurt herself cruelly by wounding the man who had caught her in the toils: and so long as she could imagine that she was the only one hurt, she was the braver and the harsher for it; but at the sight of Nevil in pain her heart relented and shifted, and discovering it to be so weak as to be almost at his mercy, she defended it with an aggressive unkindness, for which, in charity to her sweeter nature, she had to ask his pardon, and then had to fib to give reasons for her conduct, and then to pretend to herself that her pride was humbled by him; a most humiliating round, constantly recurring; the worse for the reflection that she created it. She attempted silence. Nevil spoke, and was like the magical piper: she was compelled to follow him and dance the round again, with the wretched thought that it must resemble coquettry. Nevil did not think so, but a very attentive observer now upon the scene, and possessed of his half of the secret, did, and warned him. Rosamund Culling added that the French girl might be only an unconscious coquette, for she was young. The critic would not undertake to pronounce on her suggestion, whether the candour apparent in merely coquettish instincts was not more dangerous than a battery of the arts of the sex. She had heard Nevil's frank confession, and seen Renee twice, when she tried in his service, though not greatly wishing for success, to stir the sensitive girl for an answer to his attachment. Probably she went to work transparently, after the insular fashion of opening a spiritual mystery with the lancet. Renee suffered herself to be probed here and there, and revealed nothing of the pain of the operation. She said to Nevil, in Rosamund's hearing:
'Have you the sense of honour acute in your country?' Nevil inquired for the apropos.
'None,' said she.
Such pointed insolence disposed Rosamund to an irritable antagonism, without reminding her that she had given some cause for it.
Renee said to her presently: 'He saved my brother's life'; the apropos being as little perceptible as before.
Her voice dropped to her sweetest deep tones, and there was a supplicating beam in her eyes, unintelligible to the direct Englishwoman, except under the heading of a power of witchery fearful to think of in one so young, and loved by Nevil.
The look was turned upon her, not upon her hero, and Rosamund thought,'Does she want to entangle me as well?'
It was, in truth, a look of entreaty from woman to woman, signifying need of womanly help. Renee would have made a confidante of her, if she had not known her to be Nevil's, and devoted to him. 'I would speak to you, but that I feel you would betray me,' her eyes had said. The strong sincerity dwelling amid multiform complexities might have made itself comprehensible to the English lady for a moment or so, had Renee spoken words to her ears; but belief in it would hardly have survived the girl's next convolutions. 'She is intensely French,' Rosamund said to Nevil—a volume of insular criticism in a sentence.
'You do not know her, ma'am,' said Nevil. 'You think her older than she is, and that is the error I fell into. She is a child.'
'A serpent in the egg is none the less a serpent, Nevil. Forgive me; but when she tells you the case is hopeless!'
'No case is hopeless till a man consents to think it is; and I shall stay.'
'But then again, Nevil, you have not consulted your uncle.'
'Let him see her! let him only see her!'
Rosamund Culling reserved her opinion compassionately. His uncle would soon be calling to have him home: society panted for him to make much of him and here he was, cursed by one of his notions of duty, in attendance on a captious 'young French beauty, who was the less to be excused for not dismissing him peremptorily, if she cared for him at all. His career, which promised to be so brilliant, was spoiling at the outset. Rosamund thought of Renee almost with detestation, as a species of sorceress that had dug a trench in her hero's road, and unhorsed and fast fettered him.
The marquis was expected immediately. Renee sent up a little note to Mrs. Calling's chamber early in the morning, and it was with an air of one-day-more-to-ourselves, that, meeting her, she entreated the English lady to join the expedition mentioned in her note. Roland had hired a big Chioggian fishing-boat to sail into the gulf at night, and return at dawn, and have sight of Venice rising from the sea. Her father had declined; but M. Nevil wished to be one of the party, and in that case. . . . Renee threw herself beseechingly into the mute interrogation, keeping both of Rosamund's hands. They could slip away only by deciding to, and this rare Englishwoman had no taste for the petty overt hostilities. 'If I can be of use to you,' she said.
'If you can bear sea-pitching and tossing for the sake of the loveliest sight in the whole world,' said Renee.
'I know it well,' Rosamund replied.
Renee rippled her eyebrows. She divined a something behind that remark, and as she was aware of the grief of Rosamund's life, her quick intuition whispered that it might be connected with the gallant officer dead on the battle-field.
'Madame, if you know it too well . . .' she said.
'No; it is always worth seeing,' said Rosamund, 'and I think, mademoiselle, with your permission, I should accompany you.'
'It is only a whim of mine, madame. I can stay on shore.'
'Not when it is unnecessary to forego a pleasure.'
'Say, my last day of freedom.'
Renee kissed her hand.
She is terribly winning, Rosamund avowed. Renee was in debate whether the woman devoted to Nevil would hear her and help.
Just then Roland and Nevil returned from their boat, where they had left carpenters and upholsterers at work, and the delicate chance for an understanding between the ladies passed by.
The young men were like waves of ocean overwhelming it, they were so full of their boat, and the scouring and cleaning out of it, and provisioning, and making it worthy of its freight. Nevil was surprised that Mrs. Culling should have consented to come, and asked her if she really wished it—really; and 'Really,' said Rosamund; 'certainly.'
'Without dubitation,' cried Roland. 'And now my little Renee has no more shore-qualms; she is smoothly chaperoned, and madame will present us tea on board. All the etcaeteras of life are there, and a mariner's eye in me spies a breeze at sunset to waft us out of Malamocco.'
The count listened to the recital of their preparations with his usual absent interest in everything not turning upon Art, politics, or social intrigue. He said, 'Yes, good, good,' at the proper intervals, and walked down the riva to look at the busy boat, said to Nevil, 'You are a sailor; I confide my family to you,' and prudently counselled Renee to put on the dresses she could toss to the deep without regrets. Mrs. Culling he thanked fervently for a wonderful stretch of generosity in lending her presence to the madcaps.
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?' saidRenee.
'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 theMarquis 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.