Chapter XXIII: A Remonstrance

Mr. Beresford was seated in his library, as usual, in the morning; he had breakfasted and glanced over his newspaper, and now had settled down to ‘work,’ that is, to what he called work. He would not have been much the worse had he idled, nor would his finances or anybody’s comfort have suffered; probably that was one reason why he was so industrious. His writing-table was arranged with the most perfect order: here his blotting-book, his pens, his paper of all sizes, from ponderous foolscap to the lightest accidental note; there his books of reference; in the centre, the volume he was studying. John, by long practice, had learned to know exactly where to place all his master’s paraphernalia. He sat in front of the fire, which crackled merrily and made light _pétillements_, in the sound of which alone there was genial company. The ruddy sunshine of the winter morning entered in a side-long gleam; everything was comfortable, warm, and luxurious round him; the room was lined almost as high as the ceiling with books, and the square table near the further window was covered with magazines and newspapers. He spared nothing in that way, though for himself he did not read half the literature that was placed there ready for him. He took his place at his table, opened his book, put down the letters which he had brought with him from the breakfast-table, and prepared to write--or rather to work--for his object was to write a review of the serious book he was reading; his letters were about this and other important matters--a meeting of the Imperial Society--the arrangements to be made for a series of lectures--the choice of a new member. He put down all these momentous epistles on his table, and turned over a page of the book in respect to which he was prepared to give to the world some new ideas of his own on the relations between mind and matter, or rather, upon some of those strange processes by which the human brain, which is as purely matter as the human leg, pranks itself up in the appearance of a spiritual entity. He was fond of philosophical questions. But when he had made all these preparations he stopped suddenly short and began to think. What process was it that brought across him, like a sudden breath of summer air with the scent of flowers in it, that sudden flood of recollections? In a moment, invading his breast and his mind with thoughts of the past, he felt as people do to whom an old friend appears suddenly, bringing with him a hundred forgotten associations. Had someone come into the warm and pleasant room and laid a hand upon his shoulder and looked him in the face? If James Beresford had been a superstitious man he would have thought so. His wife had been dead for more than five years--and long and weary and painful these years had been. Lately, however, his heart had been lulled to rest by sweet friendliness and sympathy and help; he had felt strong enough to take up his ordinary life again and return into the world--not unfaithful, but consoled and soothed. Nothing had happened to him to break this sensation of rest from trouble, and what happened now was not painful. It was only the sudden return of thoughts which had been in abeyance. She seemed to come and stand by him, as she used to do, looking over his shoulder, asking after his work. ‘What are you doing?’ he seemed to hear her say--leaning over him with that familiar proprietorship of him and all his works and ways which was so sweet. Why had this visitation come to him to-day? Of course it must have been some impression on his nerves which thus reflected itself through his being. Some chance contact had stirred one of those strings which move what we call feelings in the strange machinery of our puppet nature. He thought somehow that when he had said this it explained the mystery. All at once, like a gale of spring, like a sudden thaw--or like someone coming into the room; though the last metaphor was not so fine as the others, it was the most true. Few of our mental processes (he would have allowed) are pure thought--this was not thought at all; he felt as if she stood by him--she whom he had lost: as if their life came back as it used to be. His grief for her, he knew, had been lulled to rest, and it was not any revival of the sharpness and bitterness of that grief which moved him: it was a return for a few minutes of the life they had lived together, of the conditions which life had borne before.

Perhaps it was simply because his sister was there, and the sound of the two feminine voices, hers and Cara’s, at the breakfast-table, had brought back memories of the old times. He leant his elbows on his open book and his chin in the hollow of his hands. What a different life it had been! What were his societies now, his articles, all his ‘work,’ to the first spontaneous living of those days that were dead? How she would come in familiar, sure of her right to be wherever he was--not timid, like Cara, who never knew whether her father would be pleased or not pleased to see her, nor reverential, like good Cherry, who admired and wondered at his books and his writing. He knew how these two would look at any moment if need or business brought them knocking to his door. But he never could tell how _she_ would look, so various were her aspects, never the same--two women sometimes in one moment, turning to tears or to sunshine in the twinkling of an eye, cheering him, provoking him, stimulating him. Ah, what a change! life might have its soothings now, its consolations, little makings up and props, to give it the appearance of being the same life as before, but nothing could ever make it what it had been. He had not died of it, neither would he die of it--the grief that kills is rare; but whatever might happen to him in the world, so much was certain, that the delight of life was over, the glory gone out of it. And he did not wish it to be otherwise, he said to himself. There are things which a man can have but once. Some men are so happy as to retain those best things of life till old age--but he was not one of those blessed men----. And he was no longer wretched and a wanderer on the face of the earth. Time had brought him a softening quiet, a dim pleasantness of tranquillity and friends--good, tender, soothing, kindest friends.

Someone coming in broke suddenly this strange revival of memory--and of all people in the world it was the doctor, Maxwell, whose name was so linked to the recollections of the old life, but who, Beresford felt, had never been the same to him since Annie died. His mind had been so preoccupied that he had never inquired what was the cause of this estrangement. What did it matter to him if all the world was estranged? He had felt vaguely; and if he thought upon the subject at all, supposed that in the anguish of his mind he had said something or done something to vex his old friend. But what did it matter? His life had been too much shipwrecked at first to leave his mind at liberty to care what might happen. And now the estrangement was a _fait accompli_. But his heart was touched and soft that morning. The thought of Annie had come back to him, and here was someone deeply associated with Annie. In the little start with which he got up from his chair at the sound of Maxwell’s name, a rush of resolution ran through his veins with a rapidity such as leaves words hopelessly behind. ‘I will get to the bottom of it whatever it is. I will know the cause, and make it up with Maxwell.’ These words would have taken some definite atom of time to think and say, but the thought rushed through his mind instantaneously as he rose holding out his hand. ‘Maxwell! you are an unusual visitor now-a-days. I am very glad to see you,’ he said. That he should have come just now of all times in the world!

‘Yes; I have ceased to be about the house as I used to be,’ the doctor said, with a slight confusion, grasping the hand offered to him. And then they sat down on two chairs opposite to each other, and there was a pause. They were both embarrassed a little. This kind of coolness between two friends is more difficult to get over than an actual quarrel. Maxwell was not at his ease. How many recollections this room brought back to him! That strange visitor who had stood by James Beresford’s side a minute before stood by his now. He seemed to see her standing against the light, shaking her finger at them in reproof. How often she had done so, the light catching her dress, making a kind of halo round her! Was it possible she was gone--gone, disappeared from before their eyes, making no sign? And yet how clearly she seemed to stand there, looking at the two whose talk she had so often interrupted, broken off, made an end of, with capricious sweet impertinences. Maxwell, like her husband, felt the reality of her so strong that his mind rejected with a strange vertigo the idea of her absolute severance from this house and this life. The vertigo grew still greater, and his head seemed to turn round and round when he remembered why he had come.

‘Why is it?’ said Beresford. ‘Something seems to have come between us--I can’t tell what. Is it accidental, or does it mean anything? I have had a distracted life, as you know, and I may have done something amiss---- ’

‘No, no,’ said the other, hurriedly; ‘let us say nothing about that. I meant nothing. Beresford, if you have this feeling now, what will you think when you hear that I have undertaken a disagreeable, intrusive mission?’

‘Intrusive?’ He smiled. ‘I don’t see what you could be intrusive about. You used to know all my affairs--and if you don’t know them now, it is not my fault.’

‘Good heavens!’ cried the doctor, involuntarily, ‘how am I to do it? Look here, Beresford; I said I would come, thinking that I, who knew you so well, would annoy you less than a stranger--but I don’t feel so sure about that now.’

‘What is this gunpowder plot?’ said Beresford, with a laugh. ‘Have I been guilty of high treason without knowing it, and must I fly for my life?’

The doctor cleared his throat; he grew red in the face; finally he jumped up from his chair and went to the big fireplace, where he stood with his back to the fire, and his face a little out of his friend’s sight.

‘Beresford, have you ever thought what a strange position Mrs. Meredith is in?’

‘Mrs. Meredith!’ He said this with such unfeigned surprise that his visitor felt more awkward than ever. ‘What can she have to do with any disunion between you and me?’

‘By Jove!’ cried the doctor, ‘we are all a pack of fools;’ and from the fire he walked to the window in the perturbation of his thoughts.

Beresford laughed. ‘One can never say anything civil to a speech like that--especially as, forgive me! I have not a notion what you are being fools about.’

Maxwell looked out into the square to pluck up courage. He coughed as men do when they are utterly at a loss--when it is worth while to gain even a moment. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he said, with sudden humility. ‘I should not have taken it in hand, especially as you have that feeling--but--look here, I _have_ taken it in hand, and I must speak. Beresford, old Sommerville came to me yesterday. He’s Meredith’s friend, with a general commission to look after the family.’

‘Has anything happened to Meredith?’ said Mr. Beresford, with concern. ‘This is the second time you have mentioned them. I scarcely know him--but if there is anything wrong, I shall be very sorry for _her_ sake.’

‘There is nothing wrong, unless it is of your doing,’ said the doctor, with abrupt determination. ‘To tell the truth, Meredith has heard, or somebody has told him, or a gossiping has been got up--I don’t know what--about your visits. You go there too often, they say--every night----’

‘Maxwell!’ cried James Beresford, springing to his feet.

‘There! I told you,’ said the doctor. ‘I said you would be angry--as if it were my fault. I am only the mouthpiece. Old Sommerville would have come to you himself--but I was sure it could be nothing but inadvertence, and undertook the office, knowing you too well--much too well--to think for a moment----’

‘Inadvertence! Knowing me too well to think! In the name of heaven, what is there to think? What have I been inadvertent about? Angry! Of course I am angry. What have I done to be gossiped about? One of us must be out of his senses surely, either you or I----’

‘No, it isn’t that. Gossip does not spare anyone. And, pardon me,’ said the doctor, growing bolder now that the worst was over, ‘if you had ever thought on the subject, you must have seen that such frequent visits--to a woman who is married, whose husband is at the other end of the world----’

‘Stop--stop, I tell you! I will not have _her_ discussed or her name introduced.’

‘That is quite right, Beresford. I knew you would feel so. Is it right then that the tenderest heart on the face of the earth should be worried and bullied because of you?’

‘Good God!’ cried the bewildered man, ‘has she been worried and bullied? What do you mean? Who has presumed to find fault? She is---- I am not going to say what she is.’

‘It is not necessary. I know that as well as anyone.’

Beresford made a half-conscious pause, and looked at his reprover with a sudden involuntary raising of his eyebrows. Knew that as well as anyone! Did he? Vain boaster! Who but himself knew all the consoling sweetness, all the soft wealth of sympathy in this friend of friends? He felt more angry with Maxwell for this false pretension than for all his other sins. ‘I am at a loss to know,’ he said, coldly, ‘by what right anyone attempts to interfere with my liberty of action. I am not a man whose visits to any house can be considered suspicious. I should have thought that my character and my antecedents were enough to preserve me from injurious comment and the gossip you speak of.’

‘Beresford,’ said the other, hastily, ‘who thinks of you? No amount of gossip could do you any real harm. You must see that. The question is about _her_.’

It was Beresford’s turn now to be excited. He began to pace about the room in deep annoyance and agitation. Of course this was true. What was nothing to a man might be everything to a woman; and no man worthy the name would expose a woman to comment. He took refuge, first, in furious abuse of gossip. What had anyone to do with his proceedings? A man is always more shocked and angry to find himself the object of remark than a woman is. It seemed incredible to him that _he_, of all people in the world, _he_ should be the object of impertinent remark. The idea was intolerable to Beresford. The doctor wisely said nothing, but let him have his ravings out, withdrawing himself to a chair by the table, where he sat writing out imaginary prescriptions with the worn stump of a pen which he found there, and keeping as far out of the passionate stream of monologue as possible. This was wise treatment, the best he could have adopted, and after a while the subject of the operation calmed down. He flung himself at last into his chair, and there was a stormy pause.

‘I suppose,’ said Beresford, with a long-drawn breath of mingled pain and anger, ‘this was what Cherry meant. I could not make her out. She is in it too. Have you all laid your heads together and consulted what was the thing that would pain me most--the most susceptible point left?’

Maxwell made no direct reply. ‘If Miss Cherry has spoken to you, Beresford, you know your sister,’ he said. ‘She would not hurt a fly--much less you, whom she holds in such high respect; and she would not think evil readily--would she, now? If she has spoken, you must understand that there is something in it. Listen, my dear fellow. There are things that must be done and left undone in this world for the sake of the fools in it merely. You know that as well as I do. Say the fools ought to be defied and crushed if you like, but in reality we have all to consider them. The people of bad imaginations and low minds and mean views really make the laws for the rest of the world. We can’t help it. For ourselves it might not matter; but for those who are dear to us--for those who are less independent than we----’

Again there was a pause. Beresford sat with his elbows on the table and bit his nails savagely. In this painful amusement there seemed a certain relief. He stared straight before him, seeing nothing. At last he turned round sharply upon the doctor, who, with his head bent down, still sat scribbling without any ink with the old stump of the pen in his hand. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

‘Beresford, I did not come here to dictate to you. I came simply to call your attention----’

‘Oh, let us not quibble about words! Dictation! yes, and something more than dictation. Of course I am helpless before the plea you bring up. Of course I have nothing to do but submit, if there is any question of annoyance to---- Low minds and bad imaginations, indeed! That anyone should suggest the most distant possibility, the shadow of a reproach!’

‘We suggest nothing of the sort, Beresford. We suggest only a most simple precaution--a rule ordinarily observed.’

He made a gesture of impatience, stopping further explanation, and again for two minutes, which looked like an hour, the two men sat silent together, not, it may be supposed, with any increase of friendliness towards each other in their thoughts. Perhaps, however, it was only on the side of the reproved that this feeling was really strong. The reprover was compunctious and eager to do anything he could to conciliate. He kept a furtive watch upon his victim as he scribbled. Beresford had retreated within that most invulnerable of all fortresses--silence, and sat, still biting his nails, staring into the vacant air, neither by word nor look making any communication of his thoughts. Nothing is more difficult than to maintain a silence like this; the least absorbed of the two engaged in the passage of arms comes to feel after a time that he must speak or die--and what to say? More upon the same subject might lessen the impression already made, and to introduce another subject would be impossible. When the pause had lasted as long as possibility permitted, Maxwell got up, put the pen slowly back in the tray from which it had strayed, tossed the piece of paper he had been scribbling upon into the waste-basket, gathered up his gloves, his stick, his hat. Nothing could be more slow and hesitating than all these preparations for departure, which were somewhat ostentatious at the same time, by way of calling the attention of Beresford, and perhaps drawing forth something more. ‘I must be going,’ he said at last, holding out his hand. ‘I hope you won’t think me--unfriendly, Beresford, in anything I have said.’

‘Good morning,’ said the other, sullenly; then he made a visible effort to command himself and rose up, but slowly, putting out his hand. ‘Very likely not,’ he said. ‘I don’t say it was unfriendly. You would not have taken such a disagreeable office on yourself if you had meant unkindness, No; I suppose I should thank you, but it is rather hard to do it. Good-by.’

There was no more said. Maxwell went away, not feeling very victorious or proud of himself. Was not he a fool to have undertaken it in order to prevent scandal, he said to himself, in order to save a woman from annoyance, in order to help James Beresford out of trouble--a man whom he had liked, and from whom he had been estranged? What business had he to meddle with other people’s business? This, I fear, was his reflection, as it has been the reflection of so many who have strained a point to aid a friend, and whose self-denial has not been appreciated. ‘Catch me doing such a foolish thing again,’ he said to himself.

As for Beresford, he resumed his seat and his thoughts when the other was gone. Those thoughts were hot within him, and full of pain. He who, even when this messenger of evil arrived, had been thinking with faithful love of his wife; he whose life had been made a desert by her dying, whose whole existence was changed, who had not cared for years what became of him, because of that loss--to be met by this unjust and insane reproval as soon as he had screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and resumed his natural position in his own house. It had been a hard thing to do; at every corner he had expected to meet her--in the silence he had fancied he heard her calling him--the whole house was full of her, echoing with her steps and her voice. Yet he had schooled himself to come back, to resume so much as remained to him of life under his own roof--so much as remained, not thinking of years, but of value and merit. He was not of very much use to anyone, nor had he been much missed, perhaps, except in the working of the societies, and there were so many people who could do that. But he had been patient and come back, and established himself ‘at home,’ because it was his duty. He had not shrunk from his duty. And this was his reward. His one source of soft consolation--the one gentle friend on whose constant sympathy he could reckon--who made this life of endurance supportable to him, and kept him up by kind words, by understanding his wants and troubles--she was to be taken from him. He got up, and walked up and down his room, and then went to the window and looked blankly out. Almost without knowing what it was, he saw a brougham come to the next door, and old Mr. Sommerville step out of it, and enter Mrs. Meredith’s house. He had gone to warn her, to disturb the sweet composure of her mind, to embitter all her thoughts. Beresford turned round, and began to walk up and down more and more hotly. Could anything in the world be more innocent? He asked, nay, he wanted, nothing more of her. To go and sit by her now and then (this was how he characterized his long and daily visits), what was there in that to justify this insulting demand upon him? He lashed himself up into a fury when he thought of it. He, the truest of mourners, and she, the least frivolous of women. If ever there was a true friendship, full of support and mutual comfort, this was the one. And now, at the pleasure of a set of wretched gossips, ill-minded men, disagreeable women, was this gentle makeshift and substitute for domestic happiness to be torn from him? And how--good heavens, how?

That was the question. It was easy to talk, and say that such a thing must cease; but how was it to be done? Was he supposed capable of telling her that he must resign her friendship? Was Sommerville, perhaps, making the communication at this very moment--telling her that it must not be; suggesting thoughts that would distress her mind, and disturb the whole tenor of her life? For to give pain would be worse than misfortune to her, and she could not so cast him off without giving pain and feeling it. He thought--it was an imagination--that he heard voices high in discussion on the other side of the wall that separated the two houses. Was that old meddler taking it upon him to lecture _her_ now?