“What would you say to my taking the veil, for I fancy I 've some vocation that way?” And then, turning to the Count, she said something in French, at which he laughed immoderately.
Whether vexed with himself or with her, or, more probably still, annoyed by not being able to understand what passed in a foreign language, Beecher took his hat and left the room. Without his ever suspecting it, a new pang was just added to his former griefs, and he was jealous! It is very rare that a man begins by confessing a sense of jealousy to his own heart; he usually ascribes the dislike he feels to a rival to some defect or some blemish in his nature. He is a coarse fellow; rude, vulgar, a coxcomb, or, worst of all, a bore. In some such disposition as this Beecher quitted the town, and strolled away into the country. He felt he hated the Count, and yet he could not perceive why; Lienstahl possessed a vast number of the qualities he was generally disposed to like. He was gay, lively, light-hearted, never out of humor, never even thoughtful; his was that easy temperament that seemed to adapt itself to every phase of life. What was it, then? What could it be that he disliked about him? It was somewhat “cool,” too, of Grog, to send this fellow over without even the courtesy of a line to himself. “Serve him right—serve them all right—if I were to cut my lucky;” and he ruminated long and anxiously over the thought. His present position was anything but pleasant or flattering to him. For aught he knew, the Count and Lizzy Davis passed their time laughing at his English ignorance of all things foreign. By dint of a good deal of such self-tormenting, he at last reached that point whereat the very slightest additional impulse would have determined him to decamp from his party, and set out all alone for Italy. The terror of a day of reckoning with Davis was, however, a dread that he could never shake off. Grog the unforgiving, the inexorable! Grog, whose greatest boast in his vainglorious moments was that, in the “long run,” no man ever got the better of him, would assuredly bring him to book one day or other; and he knew the man's nature well enough to be aware that no fear of personal consequences would ever balk him on the road to a vengeance.
Sometimes the thought occurred to him that he would make a frank and full confession to Lackington of all his delinquencies, even to that terrible “count” by which the fame and fortune of his house might be blasted forever. If he could but string up his courage to this pitch, Lackington might “pull him through,” Lackington would see that “there was nothing else for it,” and so on. It is marvellous what an apparent strength of argument lies in those slang expressions familiar to certain orders of men. These conventionalities seem to settle at once questions which, if treated in more befitting phraseology, would present the gravest difficulties.
He walked on and on, and at last gained a pine wood which skirted the base of a mountain, and soon lost himself in its dark recesses. Gloomier than the place itself was the tone of his reflections. All that he might have been, all that lay so easily within his reach, all that life once offered him, contrasted bitterly with what he now saw himself. Conscience, it is true, suggested few of his present pangs; he believed—ay, sincerely believed—that he had been more “sinned against than sinning.” Such a one had “let him in” here; such another “had sold him” there. In his reminiscences he saw himself trustful, generous, and confiding, while the world—the great globe that includes Tattersalls, Goodwood, Newmarket, and Ascot—was little better than a nest of knaves and vagabonds.
Why could n't Lackington get him something abroad,—in the Brazils or Lima, for instance? He was n't quite sure where they were; but they were far away, he thought,—places too remote for Grog Davis to hunt him out, and whence he could give the great Grog a haughty defiance. They—how it would have puzzled him to say who “they” were—they couldn't refuse Lackington if he asked. He was always voting and giving his proxies, and doing all manner of things for them; he made a speech, too, last year at Hoxton, and gave a lecture upon something that must have served them. Lackington would begin the old story about character; “but who had character nowadays?” “Take down the Court Guides,” cried he, aloud, “and let me give you the private life and adventures of each as you read out the names. Talk of me! why, what have I done equal to what Lockwood, Hepton, Bulkleigh, Frank Melton, and fifty more have done? No, no; for public life, now, they must do as a sergeant of the Ninety-fifth told me t' other day, 'We 're obliged to take 'em little, sir, and glad to get 'em too!'”
It might be that there was something grateful to his feelings, reassuring to his heart, in this reflection, for he walked along now more briskly, and his head higher than before. Without being aware, he had already gone some miles from the town, and now found himself in one of those long grassy alleys which traversed the dense wood in various directions. As he looked down the narrow road which seemed like the vast aisle of some Gothic cathedral, he felt a sort of tremulous motion beneath his feet; and then, the moment after, he could detect the measured tramp of a horse at speed. A slight bend of the alley had hitherto shut out the view; but, suddenly, a dark object came sweeping round the turn and advancing towards him.
Half to secure a position, and half with the thought of watching what this might portend, Beecher stepped aside into the dense brushwood at the side of the alley, and which effectually hid him from view. He had barely time to make his retreat when a horse swept past him at full stride, and with one glance he recognized him as “Klepper.” It was Rivers, too, who rode him, sitting high over the saddle and with his hands low, as if racing. Now, it was but that very morning Rivers had told him that the horse was not “quite right,”—a bit heavy or so about the eyes,—“out of sorts” he called it; and there he was now, flying along at the top of his speed in full health and condition. It needed but the fortieth part of this to suggest a suspicion to such a mind as his, and with the speed of lightning there flashed across him the notion of a “cross.” He, Annesley Beecher, was to be “put into the hole,” to be “squared,” and “nobbled,” and all the rest of it! It did not, indeed, occur to him how very unprofitably such an enterprise would reward its votaries, that it would be a most gratuitous iniquity to “push him to the wall,” that all the ingenious malevolence in the world could never make the venture “pay;” his self-conceit smothered these reasonings, and he determined to watch and to see how the scheme was to be developed. He had not to wait long in suspense; at the bend of the alley where the horse had disappeared, two horsemen were now seen slowly approaching him. As they drew nearer, Beecher could mark that they were in close, and what seemed confidential conversation. One he quickly recognized to be the Count; the other, to his amazement, was Spicer, of whose arrival at Aix he had not heard anything. They moved so slowly past the spot where he was standing that he could gather some of the words that escaped them, although being in French. The sound of his own name quickly caught his ear. It was the Count spoke as they came up,—
“He is a pauvre sire, this Beecher, and I don't yet see what use he can be to us.”