Beauchamp's Career Part 24

'And you say she dressed up to the Italian, to challenge her, rival her?'

'Only one night; simple accident. Everybody noticed it, for they stood for Night and Day,--both hung with gold; the brunette Etruscan, and the blonde Asiatic; and every Frenchman present was epigramizing up and down the rooms like mad.'

'Her husband 's Legitimist; he wouldn't be at the Tuileries?' Beauchamp spoke half to himself.

'What, then, what?' Palmet stared and chuckled. 'Her husband must have taken the Tuileries' bait, if we mean the same woman. My dear old Beauchamp, have I seen her, then? She's a darling! The Rastaglione was nothing to her. When you do light on a grand smoky pearl, the milky ones may go and decorate plaster. That's what I say of the loveliest brunettes. It must be the same: there can't be a couple of dark beauties in Paris without a noise about them. Marquise--? I shall recollect her name presently.'

'Here's one of the houses I stop at,' said Beauchamp, 'and drop that subject.'

A scared servant-girl brought out her wizened mistress to confront the candidate, and to this representative of the s.e.x he addressed his arts of persuasion, requesting her to repeat his words to her husband. The contrast between Beauchamp palpably canva.s.sing and the Beauchamp who was the lover of the Marquise of the forgotten name, struck too powerfully on Palmet for his gravity he retreated.

Beauchamp found him sauntering on the pavement, and would have dismissed him but for an agreeable diversion that occurred at that moment. A suavely smiling unctuous old gentleman advanced to them, bowing, and presuming thus far, he said, under the supposition that he was accosting the junior Liberal candidate for the borough. He announced his name and his principles Tomlinson, progressive Liberal.

'A true distinction from some Liberals I know,' said Beauchamp.

Mr. Tomlinson hoped so. Never, he said, did he leave it to the man of his choice at an election to knock at his door for the vote.

Beauchamp looked as if he had swallowed a cordial. Votes falling into his lap are heavenly gifts to the candidate sick of the knocker and the bell. Mr. Tomlinson eulogized the manly candour of the junior Liberal candidate's address, in which he professed to see ideas that distinguished it from the address of the sound but otherwise conventional Liberal, Mr. Cougham. He muttered of plumping for Beauchamp. 'Don't plump,' Beauchamp said; and a candidate, if he would be an honourable twin, must say it. Cougham had cautioned him against the heresy of plumping.

They discoursed of the poor and their beverages, of pothouses, of the anti-liquorites, and of the duties of parsons, and the value of a robust and right-minded body of the poor to the country. Palmet found himself following them into a tolerably s.p.a.cious house that he took to be the old gentleman's until some of the apparatus of an Inst.i.tute for literary and scientific instruction revealed itself to him, and he heard Mr.

Tomlinson exalt the memory of one Wingham for the blessing bequeathed by him to the town of Bevisham. 'For,' said Mr. Tomlinson, 'it is open to both s.e.xes, to all respectable cla.s.ses, from ten in the morning up to ten at night. Such a place affords us, I would venture to say, the advantages without the seductions of a Club. I rank it next--at a far remove, but next-the church.'

Lord Palmet brought his eyes down from the busts of certain worthies ranged along the top of the book-shelves to the cus.h.i.+oned chairs, and murmured, 'Capital place for an appointment with a woman.'

Mr. Tomlinson gazed up at him mildly, with a fallen countenance. He turned sadly agape in silence to the busts, the books, and the range of scientific instruments, and directed a gaze under his eyebrows at Beauchamp. 'Does your friend canva.s.s with you?' he inquired.

'I want him to taste it,' Beauchamp replied, and immediately introduced the affable young lord--a proceeding marked by some of the dexterity he had once been famous for, as was shown by a subsequent observation of Mr. Tomlinson's:

'Yes,' he said, on the question of cla.s.ses, 'yes, I fear we have cla.s.ses in this country whose habitual levity sharp experience will have to correct. I very much fear it.'

'But if you have cla.s.ses that are not to face realities cla.s.ses that look on them from the box-seats of a theatre,' said Beauchamp, 'how can you expect perfect seriousness, or any good service whatever?'

'Gently, sir, gently. No; we can, I feel confident, expand within the limits of our most excellent and approved Const.i.tution. I could wish that socially... that is all.'

'Socially and politically mean one thing in the end,' said Beauchamp.

'If you have a nation politically corrupt, you won't have a good state of morals in it, and the laws that keep society together bear upon the politics of a country.'

'True; yes,' Mr. Tomlinson hesitated a.s.sent. He dissociated Beauchamp from Lord Palmet, but felt keenly that the latter's presence desecrated Wingham's Inst.i.tute, and he informed the candidate that he thought he would no longer detain him from his labours.

'Just the sort of place wanted in every provincial town,' Palmet remarked by way of a parting compliment.

Mr. Tomlinson bowed a civil acknowledgement of his having again spoken.

No further mention was made of the miraculous vote which had risen responsive to the candidate's address of its own inspired motion; so Beauchamp said, 'I beg you to bear in mind that I request you not to plump.'

'You may be right, Captain Beauchamp. Good day, sir.'

Palmet strode after Beauchamp into the street.

'Why did you set me bowing to that old boy?' he asked.

'Why did you talk about women?' was the rejoinder.

'Oh, aha!' Palmet sang to himself. 'You're a Romfrey, Beauchamp. A blow for a blow! But I only said what would strike every fellow first off. It is the place; the very place. Pastry-cooks' shops won't stand comparison with it. Don't tell me you 're the man not to see how much a woman prefers to be under the wing of science and literature, in a good-sized, well-warmed room, with a book, instead of making believe, with a red face, over a tart.'

He received a smart lecture from Beauchamp, and began to think he had enough of canva.s.sing. But he was not suffered to escape. For his instruction, for his positive and extreme good, Beauchamp determined that the heir to an earldom should have a day's lesson. We will hope there was no intention to punish him for having frozen the genial current of Mr. Tomlinson's vote and interest; and it may be that he clung to one who had, as he imagined, seen Renee. Accompanied by a Mr.

Oggler, a tradesman of the town, on the Liberal committee, dressed in a pea-jacket and proudly nautical, they applied for the vote, and found it oftener than beauty. Palmet contrasted his repeated disappointments with the scoring of two, three, four and more in the candidate's list, and informed him that he would certainly get the Election. 'I think you're sure of it,' he said. 'There's not a pretty woman to be seen; not one.'

One came up to them, the sight of whom counselled Lord Palmet to reconsider his verdict. She was addressed by Beauchamp as Miss Denham, and soon pa.s.sed on.

Palmet was guilty of staring at her, and of lingering behind the others for a last look at her.

They were on the steps of a voter's house, calmly enduring a rebuff from him in person, when Palmet returned to them, exclaiming effusively, 'What luck you have, Beauchamp!' He stopped till the applicants descended the steps, with the voice of the voter ringing contempt as well as refusal in their ears; then continued: 'You introduced me neck and heels to that undertakerly old Tomlinson, of Wingham's Inst.i.tute; you might have given me a chance with that Miss--Miss Denham, was it?

She has a bit of a style!'

'She has a head,' said Beauchamp.

'A girl like that may have what she likes. I don't care what she has--there's woman in her. You might take her for a younger sister of Mrs. Wardour-Devereux. Who 's the uncle she speaks of? She ought not to be allowed to walk out by herself.'

'She can take care of herself,' said Beauchamp.

Palmet denied it. 'No woman can. Upon my honour, it's a shame that she should be out alone. What are her people? I'll run--from you, you know--and see her safe home. There's such an infernal lot of fellows about; and a girl simply bewitching and unprotected! I ought to be after her.'

Beauchamp held him firmly to the task of canva.s.sing.

'Then will you tell me where she lives?' Palmet stipulated. He reproached Beauchamp for a notorious Grand Turk exclusiveness and greediness in regard to women, as well as a disposition to run hard races for them out of a spirit of pure rivalry.

'It's no use contradicting, it's universally known of you,' reiterated Palmet. 'I could name a dozen women, and dozens of fellows you deliberately set yourself to cut out, for the honour of it. What's that story they tell of you in one of the American cities or watering-places, North or South? You would dance at a ball a dozen times with a girl engaged to a man--who drenched you with a tumbler at the hotel bar, and off you all marched to the sands and exchanged shots from revolvers; and both of you, they say, saw the body of a drowned sailor in the water, in the moonlight, heaving nearer and nearer, and you stretched your man just as the body was flung up by a wave between you. Picturesque, if you like!'

'Dramatic, certainly. And I ran away with the bride next morning?'

'No!' roared Palmet; 'you didn't. There's the cruelty of the whole affair.'

Beauchamp laughed. 'An old messmate of mine, Lieutenant Jack Wilmore, can give you a different version of the story. I never have fought a duel, and never will. Here we are at the shop of a tough voter, Mr.

Oggler. So it says in my note-book. Shall we put Lord Palmet to speak to him first?'

'If his lords.h.i.+p will put his heart into what he says,' Mr. Oggler bowed. 'Are you for giving the people recreation on a Sunday, my lord?'

'Trap-bat and ball, cricket, dancing, military bands, puppet-shows, theatres, merry-go-rounds, bosky dells--anything to make them happy,'

said Palmet.

'Oh, dear! then I 'm afraid we cannot ask you to speak to this Mr.

Carpendike.' Oggler shook his head.

'Does the fellow want the people to be miserable?'

'I'm afraid, my lord, he would rather see them miserable.'

They introduced themselves to Mr. Carpendike in his shop. He was a flat-chested, sallow young shoemaker, with a shelving forehead, who seeing three gentlemen enter to him recognized at once with a practised resignation that they had not come to order shoe-leather, though he would fain have shod them, being needy; but it was not the design of Providence that they should so come as he in his blindness would have had them. Admitting this he wished for nothing.