CHAPTER IV

A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION

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.