CHAPTER IV

It was an axiom with Mr. Beamish, our first, if not our only

philosophical beau and a gentleman of some thoughtfulness, that the

social English require tyrannical government as much as the political are

able to dispense with it: and this he explained by an exposition of the

character of a race possessed of the eminent virtue of individual

self-assertion, which causes them to insist on good elbowroom wherever

they gather together. Society, however, not being tolerable where the

smoothness of intercourse is disturbed by a perpetual punching of sides,

the merits of the free citizen in them become their demerits when a

fraternal circle is established, and they who have shown an example of

civilization too notable in one sphere to call for eulogy, are often to

be seen elbowing on the ragged edge of barbarism in the other. They must

therefore be reduced to accept laws not of their own making, and of an

extreme rigidity.

Here too is a further peril; for the gallant spirits distinguishing them

in the state of independence may (he foresaw the melancholy experience of

a later age) abandon them utterly in subjection, and the glorious

boisterousness befitting the village green forsake them even in their

haunts of liberal association, should they once be thoroughly tamed by

authority. Our 'merrie England' will then be long-faced England, an

England of fallen chaps, like a boar's head, bearing for speech a lemon

in the mouth: good to feast on, mayhap; not with!

Mr. Beamish would actually seem to have foreseen the danger of a

transition that he could watch over only in his time; and, as he said, 'I

go, as I came, on a flash'; he had neither ancestry nor descendants: he

was a genius, he knew himself a solitary, therefore, in spite of his

efforts to create his like. Within his district he did effect something,

enough to give him fame as one of the princely fathers of our domestic

civilization, though we now appear to have lost by it more than formerly

we gained. The chasing of the natural is ever fraught with dubious

hazards. If it gallops back, according to the proverb, it will do so at

the charge: commonly it gallops off, quite off; and then for any kind of

animation our precarious dependence is upon brains: we have to live on

our wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land, and cannot be

remitted in entail.

Rightly or wrongly (there are differences of opinion about it) Mr.

Beamish repressed the chthonic natural with a rod of iron beneath his

rule. The hoyden and the bumpkin had no peace until they had given public

imitations of the lady and the gentleman; nor were the lady and the

gentleman privileged to be what he called 'free flags.' He could be

charitable to the passion, but he bellowed the very word itself (hauled

up smoking from the brimstone lake) against them that pretended to be

shamelessly guilty of the peccadilloes of gallantry. His famous accost of

a lady threatening to sink, and already performing like a vessel in that

situation: 'So, madam, I hear you are preparing to enrol yourself in the

very ancient order?' . . . (he named it) was a piece of insolence that

involved him in some discord with the lady's husband and 'the rascal

steward,' as he chose to term the third party in these affairs: yet it is

reputed to have saved the lady.

Furthermore, he attacked the vulgarity of persons of quality, and he has

told a fashionable dame who was indulging herself in a marked sneer of

disdain, not improving to her features, 'that he would be pleased to have

her assurance it was her face she presented to mankind': a thing--thanks

perhaps to him chiefly--no longer possible of utterance. One of the sex

asking him why he addressed his persecutions particularly to women:

'Because I fight your battles,' says he, 'and I find you in the ranks of

the enemy.' He treated them as traitors.

He was nevertheless well supported by a sex that compensates for dislike

of its friend before a certain age by a cordial recognition of him when

it has touched the period. A phalanx of great dames gave him the terrors

of Olympus for all except the natively audacious, the truculent and the

insufferably obtuse; and from the midst of them he launched decree and

bolt to good effect: not, of course, without receiving return missiles,

and not without subsequent question whether the work of that man was

beneficial to the country, who indeed tamed the bumpkin squire and his

brood, but at the cost of their animal spirits and their gift of speech;

viz. by making petrifactions of them. In the surgical operation of

tracheotomy, a successful treatment of the patient hangs, we believe, on

the promptness and skill of the introduction of the artificial windpipe;

and it may be that our unhappy countrymen when cut off from the source of

their breath were not neatly handled; or else that there is a physical

opposition in them to anything artificial, and it must be nature or

nothing. The dispute shall be left where it stands.

Now, to venture upon parading a beautiful young Duchess of Dewlap, with

an odour of the shepherdess about her notwithstanding her acquired art of

stepping conformably in a hoop, and to demand full homage of respect for

a lady bearing such a title, who had the intoxicating attractions of the

ruddy orchard apple on the tree next the roadside wall, when the owner is

absent, was bold in Mr. Beamish, passing temerity; nor would even he have

attempted it had he not been assured of the support of his phalanx of

great ladies. They indeed, after being taken into the secret, had

stipulated that first they must have an inspection of the transformed

dairymaid; and the review was not unfavourable. Duchess Susan came out of

it more scatheless than her duke. She was tongue-tied, and her tutored

walking and really admirable stature helped her to appease, the critics

of her sex; by whom her too readily blushful innocence was praised, with

a reserve, expressed in the remark, that she was a monstrous fine toy for

a duke's second childhood, and should never have been let fly from his

nursery. Her milliner was approved. The duke was a notorious connoisseur

of female charms, and would see, of course, to the decorous adornment of

her person by the best of modistes. Her smiling was pretty, her eyes were

soft; she might turn out good, if well guarded for a time; but these

merits of the woman are not those of the great lady, and her title was

too strong a beam on her character to give it a fair chance with her

critics. They one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks.

That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by no other means, they

declared. Her blushing was indecent.

Truly the critics of the foeman sex behaved in a way to cause the blushes

to swarm rosy as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her

sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they flutter like her

loosened zone, and breast the air thick as flower petals on the summer's

breath, weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might protest her

inability to keep her blushes down; that the wrong was done by the

insolent eyes, and not by her artless cheeks. Ay, but nature, if we are

to tame these men, must be swathed and concealed, partly stifled,

absolutely stifled upon occasion. The natural woman does not move a foot

without striking earth to conjure up the horrid apparition of the natural

man, who is not as she, but a cannibal savage. To be the light which

leads, it is her business to don the misty vesture of an idea, that she

may dwell as an idea in men's minds, very dim, very powerful, but

abstruse, unseizable. Much wisdom was imparted to her on the subject, and

she understood a little, and echoed hollow to the remainder, willing to

show entire docility as far as her intelligence consented to be awake.

She was in that stage of the dainty, faintly tinged innocence of the

amorousness of themselves when beautiful young women who have not been

caught for schooling in infancy deem it a defilement to be made to appear

other than the blessed nature has made them, which has made them

beautiful, and surely therefore deserves to be worshipped. The lectures

of the great ladies and Chloe's counsels failed to persuade her to use

the powder puff-ball. Perhaps too, as timidity quitted her, she enjoyed

her distinctiveness in their midst.

But the distinctiveness of a Duchess of Dewlap with the hair and cheeks

of our native fields, was fraught with troubles outrunning Mr. Beamish's

calculations. He had perceived that she would be attractive; he had not

reckoned on the homogeneousness of her particular English charms. A

beauty in red, white, and blue is our goddess Venus with the apple of

Paris in her hand; and after two visits to the Pump Room, and one

promenade in the walks about the Assembly House, she had as completely

divided the ordinary guests of the Wells into male and female in opinion

as her mother Nature had done in it sex. And the men would not be

silenced; they had gazed on their divinest, and it was for the women to

succumb to that unwholesome state, so full of thunder. Knights and

squires, military and rural, threw up their allegiance right and left to

devote themselves to this robust new vision, and in their peculiar

manner, with a general View-halloo, and Yoicks, Tally-ho, and away we go,

pelt ahead! Unexampled as it is in England for Beauty to kindle the

ardours of the scent of the fox, Duchess Susan did more--she turned all

her followers into hounds; they were madmen: within a very few days of

her entrance bets raged about her, and there were brawls, jolly flings at

her character in the form of lusty encomium, givings of the lie, and upon

one occasion a knock-down blow in public, as though the place had never

known the polishing touch of Mr. Beamish.

He was thrown into great perplexity by that blow. Discountenancing the

duel as much as he could, an affair of the sword was nevertheless more

tolerable than the brutal fist: and of all men to be guilty of it, who

would have anticipated the young Alonzo, Chloe's quiet, modest lover! He

it was. The case came before Mr. Beamish for his decision; he had to

pronounce an impartial judgement, and for some time, during the

examination of evidence, he suffered, as he assures us in his Memoirs, a

royal agony. To have to strike with the glaive of Justice them whom they

most esteem, is the greatest affliction known to kings. He would have

done it: he deserved to reign. Happily the evidence against the gentleman

who was tumbled, Mr. Ralph Shepster, excused Mr. Augustus Camwell,

otherwise Alonzo, for dealing with him promptly to shut his mouth.

This Shepster, a raw young squire, 'reeking,' Beau Beamish writes of him,

'one half of the soil, and t' other half of the town,' had involved Chloe

in his familiar remarks upon the Duchess of Dewlap; and the personal

respect entertained by Mr. Beamish for Chloe so strongly approved

Alonzo's championship of her, that in giving judgement he laid stress on

young Alonzo's passion for Chloe, to prove at once the disinterestedness

of the assailant, and the judicial nature of the sentence: which was,

that Mr. Ralph Shepster should undergo banishment, and had the right to

demand reparation. The latter part of this decree assisted in effecting

the execution of the former. Shepster declined cold steel, calling it

murder, and was effusive of nature's logic on the subject.

'Because a man comes and knocks me down, I'm to go up to him and ask him

to run me through!'

His shake of the head signified that he was not such a noodle. Voluble

and prolific of illustration, as is no one so much as a son of nature

inspired to speak her words of wisdom, he defied the mandate, and refused

himself satisfaction, until in the strangest manner possible flights of

white feathers beset him, and he became a mark for persecution too trying

for the friendship of his friends. He fled, repeating his tale, that he

had seen 'Beamish's Duchess,' and Chloe attending her, at an assignation

in the South Grove, where a gentleman, unknown to the Wells, presented

himself to the adventurous ladies, and they walked together--a tale

ending with nods.

Shepster's banishment was one of those victories of justice upon which

mankind might be congratulated if they left no commotion behind. But, as

when a boy has been horsed before his comrades, dread may visit them, yet

is there likewise devilry in the school; and everywhere over earth a

summary punishment that does not sweep the place clear is likely to

infect whom it leaves remaining. The great law-givers, Lycurgus, Draco,

Solon, Beamish, sorrowfully acknowledge that they have had recourse to

infernal agents, after they have thus purified their circle of an

offender. Doctors confess to the same of their physic. The expelling

agency has next to be expelled, and it is a subtle poison, affecting our

spirits. Duchess Susan had now the incense of a victim to heighten her

charms; like the treasure-laden Spanish galleon for whom, on her voyage

home from South American waters, our enterprising light-craft privateers

lay in wait, she had the double attraction of being desirable and an

enemy. To watch above her conscientiously was a harassing business.

Mr. Beamish sent for Chloe, and she came to him at once. Her look was

curious; he studied it while they conversed. So looks one who is watching

the sure flight of an arrow, or the happy combinations of an intrigue.

Saying, 'I am no inquisitor, child,' he ventured upon two or three modest

inquisitions with regard to her mistress. The title he had disguised

Duchess Susan in, he confessed to rueing as the principal cause of the

agitation of his principality. 'She is courted,' he said, 'less like a

citadel waving a flag than a hostelry where the demand is for sitting

room and a tankard! These be our manners. Yet, I must own, a Duchess of

Dewlap is a provocation, and my exclusive desire to protect the name of

my lord stands corrected by the perils environing his lady. She is other

than I supposed her; she is, we will hope, an excellent good creature,

but too attractive for most and drawbridge and the customary defences to

be neglected.

Chloe met his interrogatory with a ready report of the young duchess's

innocence and good nature that pacified Mr. Beamish.

'And you?' said he.

She smiled for answer.

That smile was not the common smile; it was one of an eager exultingness,

producing as he gazed the twitch of an inquisitive reflection of it on

his lips. Such a smile bids us guess and quickens us to guess, warns us

we burn and speeds our burning, and so, like an angel wafting us to some

heaven-feasting promontory, lifts us out of ourselves to see in the

universe of colour what the mouth has but pallid speech to tell. That is

the very heart's language; the years are in a look, as mount and vale of

the dark land spring up in lightning.

He checked himself: he scarce dared to say it.

She nodded.

'You have seen the man, Chloe?'

Her smiling broke up in the hard lines of an ecstasy neighbouring pain.

'He has come; he is here; he is faithful; he has not forgotten me. I was

right. I knew! I knew!'

'Caseldy has come?'

'He has come. Do not ask. To have him! to see him! Mr. Beamish, he is

here.'

'At last!'

'Cruel!'

'Well, Caseldy has come, then! But now, friend Chloe, you should be made

aware that the man--'

She stopped her ears. As she did so, Mr. Beamish observed a thick silken

skein dangling from one hand. Part of it was plaited, and at the upper

end there was a knot. It resembled the commencement of her manufactory of

a whip: she swayed it to and fro, allowing him to catch and lift the

threads on his fingers for the purpose of examining her work. There was

no special compliment to pay, so he dropped it without remark.

Their faces had expressed her wish to hear nothing from him of Caseldy

and his submission to say nothing. Her happiness was too big; she

appeared to beg to lie down with it on her bosom, in the manner of an

outworn, young mother who has now first received her infant in her arms

from the nurse.