CHAPTER I., II., III., IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., IX., X., XI., XII., XIII., XIV., XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., XIX., XX., XXI., XXII.
A Novel.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“RECOMMENDED TO MERCY,”
ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18 CATHERINE ST. STRAND.
1868.
[The right of translation and reproduction is reserved.]
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
{1}
“If I hadn’t heard it from Mrs. Clay herself, I never would have believed it! To think that John Beacham, who’s a sensible man as men go, should be marrying an Irishwoman! If Honor Blake was English-born now, one wouldn’t blame him so much; but to choose a girl that comes of people who, as everyone knows, you can’t trust farther than you can see them, is what I call a sin and a shame.”
The speaker was a woman of low stature, elderly, and sharp of voice and feature. She was seated at a round old-fashioned mahogany table, on which a teapot of the material known as Britannia metal steamed with a pleasant warmth, while the odour of buttered toast, “hot and hot,” filled the{2} little room in which she and a chosen chum and gossip had met together to talk over the domestic affairs of their friends and neighbours.
The name and title of the first-mentioned lady was Mrs. Thwaytes, and she, being at the present time a widow, and highly respected, kept a small general shop in an old-fashioned village, to which I shall give the name of Switcham. This village, situated near the grandest and most imposing of England’s rivers, could be reached by express train in something a little under an hour and a half from London. It was, considering this proximity, rather a behindhand village. Progress had not hitherto made any gigantic strides in the old-world-looking place, where not a single house was less than a century old, and where the aged inhabitants of the quiet spot had not as yet ceased to speak of crinoline as an abomination, and the absence (on young women’s heads) of that decent article called a cap as a sign and symbol of a lost and abandoned soul.
The guest of the widow Thwaytes was qualified in many ways to be that highly-respected personage’s confidential friend and favourite gossip. A widow indeed she was, forlorn and desolate by her own account, but comfortable withal in outward circumstances, and possessed of a portly person, and a complexion indicative of good cheer and in{3}ward content. Mrs. Tamfrey, for that was the relict’s name, had been left (like the congenial friend above named) with an only daughter to solace her declining years; and, after duly casting that young woman upon her own resources as a domestic servant, she—the widow of the deceased Mr. Tamfrey, a journeyman carpenter in a comfortable way of business—had entered upon the attractive career of a monthly nurse. In this lucrative profession she had met with marked and flattering success. Endowed with a low voice, a caressing manner, and a universal fund of anecdote, as well as considerable powers of invention, “Mrs. Tam,” as she was habitually called, made her way very successfully among the matrons, young and middle-aged, of the district; and over a cup of a “woman’s best restorer, balmy tea,” the widow Tamfrey was very generally allowed to be—during the pauses between her professional engagements—very excellent company.
The room in which these well-suited friends had met for the purpose (not openly avowed, but nevertheless existent) to which I before alluded was a snug but not very spacious apartment running parallel with, and having easy access to, the shop. Miss Thwaytes, the widow’s only daughter, and a young person verging on forty, was occupied in the said shop—waiting upon customers and{4} keeping up the credit of the establishment by civil speeches and oft-repeated remarks on the beauty of the weather and other such banal topics of conversation. A wonderfully useful person in her way was Esther Thwaytes; a thorough woman of business, keen-eyed, calculating, and with only the very smallest of soft spots in the woman’s heart beating under her maidenly bosom. But there was yet another purpose besides that of business utility to which Miss Esther Thwaytes was daily put. With her the aged mother, who possessed but that one ewe lamb, was always indulging in, not sweet converse, gentle reader—not the interchange of soul with soul, nor the pleasant fellowship of congenial trencherwomen—but the inexhaustible enjoyment, the indescribable satisfaction of what we have heard described in five single letters as “words.” They were both—the daughter of forty and the parent of sixty-five—essentially “naggers.” The daily food of snip-snap, the eternal picking of bones, was as necessary to them as the air they breathed. Deprived of wholesome excitement, the lives of these two women would have been horribly flat and uninteresting; a vis inertiæ, despite the busy shop, the cheering tea-drinkings, and the friendly intercourse with that unfailing gossip Mrs. Tamfrey, the monthly nurse of Switcham.
That exemplary village functionary was pouring{5} out her third dish of tea when, with a wheezy sigh, she commenced a reply to her friend’s comment on the approaching marriage.
“As sure as I sits here, Jane Thwaytes,” she said oratorically, “if John Beacham marries that Irish gurl he’ll come to trouble. There’s that about Miss Blake as speaks a vollum. It isn’t that she’s, so to speak, aither bold or forrard; I couldn’t say that of her—no, not if I was to be put upon my Bible oath; but what I do say is, that she’s got a look with her eyes that I would have whipped my daughter out of before she was twelve years old, or I would have known the reason why.”
“It’s singular now, ain’t it,” suggested Mrs. Thwaytes, “that one can’t learn more about who she is, and where she comes from? A nussery governess too isn’t much to boast of neither, and I don’t wonder as the old lady is a bit put out. The Beachams have allers held their heads high, and John’s mother hasn’t been behindhand with ’em. She’s not the woman, I’m thinking, to like being mother-in-law to a gurl who may, for anything that’s known, be a gentleman’s love-child. And, pretty as she is—I must say that for her—and like a lady too, Miss Blake had to dress the children, and hem the pincloths, and all that sort of thing at Clay’s Farm.”
“All that sort of thing! I should think so, and{6} a precious deal more to that. Why from the first moment that Mrs. Clay was took in labour—and that’s been twice in the two years that Miss Blake’s been at the farm—the most of the head-work fell upon Honor. There was this to be thought of, and that to be done—the children to be kep from noise, and the master from being put out because the baking was spoiled. Everything, morning, noon, and night—and I used to think it was a bit too much for such a mere girl as she is—fell upon the nussery governess.”
“And that’s true, I believe, or the Clays, one and all, wouldn’t make so much of her as they do; and the old lady ought to think of that, proud as she is, for she’ll be a rare help, will Honor, at the Paddocks. A good headpiece of her own, and not above making herself useful; and add to that that John’s getting on for forty, and is particular in his ways—so he is. He means honourable, does Mr. Beacham, and stands high with rich and poor, and what’s more, he can take his wife to as good a home as any in the country.”
“Better, maybe, for his wife if it was a poorer one,” said Mrs. Tamfrey, who knew something of the world and of human nature. “When a young gurl that’s been used to work marries a man that can keep her without it, ten to one that she gets into mischief. I don’t say, if she gits a{7} family about her, which it’s a’most certain she will,” continued Mrs. Tam, speaking, as was only natural, in the interests of her profession, “that Mrs. John Beacham won’t settle down; but she’s but a giddy thing at present, always laughing—I declare it’s the prettiest thing to hear her, and makes one laugh, too, for company; but if she don’t have a family—and John Beacham’s nearly old enough to be her father—and if the young men get about her, why”—and Mrs. Tam, deeming, probably, that she had said enough to enlighten the feminine mind of her auditor, wound up her prognostications with a very suggestive sigh.
“I hope not. It would be a sad thing, indeed, if mischief came of this grand marriage of hers. I should be sorry for John Beacham if it was to,” mumbled the widow Thwaytes, whose mouth was fuller than was altogether becoming of well-salted buttered toast. “I should be sorry as sorry could be for John if trouble was to come upon him that way. Ah well! if the Squire had only lived! Such a gentleman as he was for advising and keeping things straight! There isn’t a day nor yet an hour that the parish doesn’t feel the want of him. If Squire Vavasour had been spared, things would have gone on, as we’ve all on us said a hundred times, in quite another guess sort of fashion. There would have been more living{8} at the Castle then, and a precious sight more money spent in the parish. The Castle then would have been a proper house for young people to live in, and be married out of; and now what is it? As Mrs. Shepherd says—and she ought to know that’s been housekeeper these twenty years at the great house—there’s as much skinflinting there as if milady hadn’t as many pounds as she has thousands. ‘I declare,’ says she to me, which it will be a week to-morrow, the day I was taking tea with her up at the Castle,—‘I declare,’ says she, ‘it’s a sin and a shame how little’s been spent this five years at Gillingham Castle. The Chace itself and the game and all has been let to go to rack and ruin. Next to no labourers employed, no parties given where there used to be a’most open house kep, and such a home made for the young gentlemen as it’s no wonder they should run a little wild when they was let out like.’”
“There’ll be a change now, I’m thinking,” suggested Mrs. Tamfrey after a pause; “the young ladies are getting on, you know, and Mr. Arthur coming of age next year will make something of a stir, in course.”
The widow shook her head with a dreary air of superior wisdom. “From what Mrs. Shepherd tells me”—and the words were said in one of those ominous whispers that are intended to imply even{9} more of knowledge than is expressed—“from what Mrs. Shepherd says, there’s no coming of age yet awhile for the air aperient of Gillingham. There’s something out of the common, it appears, though what it is Mrs. Shepherd couldn’t speak to exactly, in the last entail. Anyway, milady—which seems odd, don’t it? she having been the heiress—hasn’t got, after a certain day—that’s pos—anything to do with the estate and property. It’s that, folks say—them as knows something about the matter—as puts her out so. And it’s to be, some says, when Mr. Arthur is five-and-twenty that his mamma will have to walk out of her own house like a private person, after all the money and land that she was born to.”
“Let milady alone,” put in Mrs. Tam decidedly; “she’ll be rich enough, if all’s true, whatever happens. There’s a pretty long purse a-filling somewhere, I’ll be bound. It’s little besides her name that she gives to all them mad-houses and county ’ospittles that there’s such a talk about. No, no; Milady Millicent isn’t one to be short of cash, whoever else goes to the wall—but,” interrupting herself, “my gracious! Jane Thwaytes, if there ain’t two parties a-waiting in the shop, and no one in life to serve them but Esther!”
Startled by this appeal to her love of gain and order, the widow, after a hurried wipe of her lips{10} with the corner of her apron, bustled into the adjoining shop with a sharp rebuke already on her tongue. It was a tidy and very prosperous establishment that of which Esther Thwaytes was the prop and mainstay. In it you could obtain all that the heart of a reasonable woman of simple tastes and habits ought to desire. On one side, the counter was strewed with cheap ribbons, snowy cap-fronts, artificial flowers more gaudy than artistic, with occasionally a tempting novelty in the shape of the last new thing in bonnets. The other side of the widow’s flourishing “store” contained goods that were more useful than ornamental. Tea, coffee, tobacco, and snuff, together with other articles of home and colonial produce, were procurable at “the” shop in the main street of Switcham. As a matter of course, the widow, enjoying the benefit of a monopoly, drove a thriving trade; and, equally as a matter of course, incessant were her jeremiads on the disjointedness of the times, the dearness of provisions, the iniquity of subordinates, and the general decadence of all things since the days which she was pleased to call “her time.” And yet, at scarcely any hour of the day from the early hour of opening was the little shop devoid of customers; while towards the witching time of evening, and that more especially on a Saturday night (for the widow was no advo{11}cate for early closing), her house was one, it may be said, of “call”—a regular rendezvous for the busy and the idle, for the sweethearts and the gossips, of the village where the much-respected widow had been born and bred.{12}
The Lady Millicent Vavasour, whose proceedings were thus so freely commented upon by her inferiors, was the only child of the rich and potent Earl of Gillingham. That nobleman, who survived the Countess, his wife, but little more than a year, bequeathed at his decease, with restrictions and a good deal à contre cœur, all that he possessed, in land, mines, personalty, and otherwise, to his only child, the Lady Millicent aforesaid and in the last chapter duly commented upon.
The income produced by the above-mentioned properties—of all of which the heiress came into undisputed possession at the age of twenty-three—amounted at a moderate computation to thirty thousand pounds per annum. The Lady Millicent Vavasour therefore took her stand on the platform of public estimation with the prestige of being one of the richest heiresses in England.
As might naturally be expected, the eyes of the{13} world and eke the monster’s tongue had from her earliest womanhood a good deal to look and say on the subject of the Lady Millicent’s future disposition in marriage. That she would—like the Maiden Queen of mighty memory, or the banker’s heiress of nineteenth-century renown—be content to enjoy her power alone, no one appeared for a single moment to imagine. There exist, always have existed, and probably always will exist, a large proportion of the bolder sex of whom it is averred, and safely too, that they are not “marrying men;” but whoever in his or her experience—and I say it without prejudice—has heard of a “non-marrying woman”? Such a being, if it were discovered to exist, would be an anomaly, a lusus naturæ, a freak, so to speak, of the mighty mother who has done all things not only wondrously, but “decently and in order.”
But if there be a class of females likely to “go in,” as the saying is, for celibacy, that class is the genus heiress. There are causes too numerous to mention that may account for this established fact: the watchfulness alike of friends and foes; a natural as well as a cultivated suspicion that “men are not (always) what they seem;” the difficulties attendant on an embarras de choix; and last, but by no means least in importance, the fear of being reduced to a second-rate power,—may all be cited{14} as good and sufficient reasons for the delay which so frequently occurs in the “going off” of an heiress. As regarded the Lady Millicent Vavasour, the rich partie par excellence of this story, the last-mentioned cause was, far and away beyond the rest, the one to which might be attributed the important fact that she had reached the age of twenty-four while still a single woman.
There is much to be said in excuse for the almost proverbial arrogance and love of power which marks the woman who is born to greatness. She is so often taught—if not indeed by words, at least by the deference of those around her, by the inevitable yielding to her will, and by the kotooing of dependents—that she is, in her way, a Queen, that it would be rather surprising if any humbler ideas of her own position should find entrance into her mind. A great deal has been advanced and written on the importance of public schools as tending to the discovery of that imaginary line known as a young gentleman’s “level;” but whether this hoped-for good is ever attained, and if attained whether it be worth the high price often paid for its possession, must remain an open question; the distressing truth however cannot, I fear, be disputed, that the “level” of a young lady possessed of forty thousand pounds per annum is never likely to be found, save and except{15} in rare cases of matrimonial felicity—in those exceptional cases, I mean, where there is no struggle for power, where the Salic law as exemplified in the nineteenth-century wife is virtually set aside, and where (but this is a sine quâ non) the husband is in every way worthy of this heroic act of voluntary self-abnegation.
That the Lady Millicent Vavasour was very far from being the model woman whose price is far above rubies will very speedily be seen. She was a cold and unattractive child, and she grew up to be in many respects a cold and unattractive woman; but that she was so must in a great measure be attributed to the peculiarity of her “bringing up,” and, strange to say, to the regretable fact that she was not born to be a man. The Earl and Countess of Gillingham were both what I must be permitted to describe as “family-mad.” That the Vavasours were the most ancient, the noblest, and most exalted of all the races of men upon earth, this elderly and highly respectable couple religiously believed. Previously to her union with the last male of this ancient family, the Lady Caroline M‘Intyre (the respected mother of Lord Gillingham’s heiress) had entertained a foolish prepossession in favour of the old Scottish blood which ran in her own blue veins; but the engrafting of her northern race in the still nobler{16} stock of the Vavasours of Gillingham was sufficient to inoculate her with every prejudice entertained by Richard, eleventh earl of that most princely house.
They were not—barring this one folly—either a particularly silly or an especially objectionable pair. They were a little grand and distant to those who might be so daring as to claim equality with themselves, but to their clearly-marked inferiors and to the actual poor they were kind, generous, and “pleasant.”
Perhaps the person who suffered the most from the “madness” which may be said to be inherent in the Vavasour blood was their only child—the Lady Millicent, whose career will form one of the subjects of these pages. To her, without intending to be otherwise than affectionate and kind, the behaviour of both father and mother was invariably cold and distant. She was never forgiven for the “sin” of her birth—never pardoned, poor unconscious child, for the guilt of being a girl! As the last male descendant of the Vavasours, Lord Gillingham would willingly have given ten years at least of his vast rent-roll, for a son in whose person the grand old title might be perpetuated; and the Countess his wife fully shared in what she deemed his very natural discontent. To bear without murmuring this crumpled rose{17}-leaf on their luxurious couch was not in the nature of either; so instead of making the best of the only child with which Providence had blessed them, they did precisely the contrary; and the little Lady Millicent, deprived of the caresses and the softening influence of a gentle mother’s love, grew up as I have described her to be—cold, arrogant, and unamiable.
The young lady herself was fully capable of appreciating the wrong that had been done, not only to her family but to society at large, by the deplorable accident of her birth. As one of the richest heiresses in England, and as the bearer of a name so noble and so honoured, she was of course a “personage;” and as one of the uppermost (that could not be denied) of the upper ten thousand she would take her place, and an exalted place too, among the great ones of the land; but—there was the rub!—there “pinched the shoe,” and “galled the withers”—she was not and would not be, in the course of nature, a peeress! Power—the power that wealth would give—was hers, but precedence—that honour so dearly valued by her sex—was sadly and, unless it were obtained by marriage, for ever wanting.
When, after her parents’ decease, which occurred soon after she had completed her twenty-third year, the orphaned heiress pondered regret{18}fully upon these things, the idea of purchasing with her valued thousands one of the highest of England’s titles could scarcely fail to occur to one whose love of rank—the well-imbibed prejudice of a dull and unsympathised-with childhood—was only outdone by her passionate attachment to power. Well did the Lady Millicent know—for her girlhood had not all been spent in the seclusion of Gillingham, and at London balls and routs and dinner-parties she had learned something of the level of gold—well did the heiress know that, were she willing to barter her rent-roll for rank, the negotiation would have been only too easily effected. But, all things considered, this young woman was not so willing. Any superiority enjoyed by a husband, any benefit conferred upon her through him, would—so singularly was she constituted—have been as gall and wormwood to her taste. She was overweeningly proud, besides, even as her parents had been before her, of the name she bore; and, singular as it may at first seem, it was to that very pride in, and attachment to the name of Vavasour that the tardy marriage of this proud and impracticable lady was owing.
Late in the summer of the year following on her accession to wealth and power, the Lady Millicent set forth in great state on a continental{19} tour. As companions on the way she had chosen Lord and Lady Merioneth: a good simple-minded pair, ready and able to be amused, and withal tolerably slow to comprehend (from the circumstance of their own entire want of foolish family pride) the besetting sin of their young companion.
The delicate health of Lady Millicent Vavasour was, to the surprise of the world in general, the alleged motive for her spending the winter abroad. It had been suddenly discovered that the lungs of the heiress were delicate; and although her breadth of chest and generally healthy appearance tended to correct the assertion, public interest—no unusual occurrence when the malade imaginaire, or otherwise, happens to be a millionaire—was immediately enlisted in “poor dear” Lady Millicent’s behalf. “So young!” “so gifted!” “so attractive!” It would, indeed, be hard (and a “liberty” was implied, if not actually spoken) if Death should venture to approach within hailing-distance the august person of the Lady of Gillingham. Happily, however, as it soon became manifest, there was no immediate danger that the wealth of the heiress would be turned into some obscure and probably (to the public) uninteresting channel. Long before the money-scattering English party had reached Flor{20}ence the Lady Millicent had thrown off every appearance of invalidness, and was ready for any amusement suitable to her exalted position which chance might throw in her way. And ready, too, for something more than amusement—ready to be softened into as much love as her nature was capable of feeling, by one worthy of the best affections of a far worthier woman than was the Lady Millicent Vavasour. Cecil Vavasour was a cousin, many times removed, of that autocratic lady—the descendant of a junior branch of the noble family whose name he bore; and, moreover, in his branch of the family there existed the title of baron—a title which there was every probability would eventually be borne by this poor and comparatively obscure relation. Comparatively obscure, for in a world of his own—a world that was not that of the Lady Millicent Vavasour—the intellectual but retiring Cecil was known and honoured. She for that reason, among others too insignificant to mention, had never till on the occasion of this her first continental trip chanced to fall in with her kinsman; and when at last she did make his acquaintance, the effect of even a first meeting was marked and decisive. Not that there was much in Cecil Vavasour’s outward man calculated to touch a woman’s fancy or to win her heart. He was some years past{21} thirty, and in person neither handsome nor the reverse; but there was a something undefinably attractive even in the reserve of manner, that spoke of latent power, and of an intelligence above that of ordinary and unreflecting mortals. He was tall, too, and of a stately presence; one of those men, in short, to whom, both physically and mentally, a woman, be she ever so highly placed in her own estimation, would hardly have refused to pay the tribute of tacitly acknowledging to her own self that he was her master. Cecil’s father, a practical though not exactly a discerning man, had intended his only son for the Bar; but circumstances, to say nothing of the young man’s own individual tastes, decided against the realisation of the old gentleman’s plans. A short sojourn in Italy, whither he had gone to protect and comfort an invalid sister, whose days when she left the shores of England were already well-nigh numbered, had completed the dislike to his profession which before had been little more than a surmised distaste. Cecilia Vavasour died a tranquil death in the soft climate of Tuscany; and her brother, throwing law study to the winds, and leaving Blackstone to grow dusty on its shelves, remained to make the best of his three hundred a year in the sunny land that he had learned so soon to love.{22}
Cecil Vavasour had been three years in Italy—a busy idler, devoted, almost to idolatry, to the Beautiful that has survived the touch of Time; as well as to the memories, the associations, and the soft sadness that cling around the decaying ruins of the past. He had roved from place to place, mixing little in society, but yet not actually shunning communion with his fellows, when Lady Millicent arrived at Florence. It would have been impossible, even had he felt the wish (which he did not) to avoid his cousin, for the quondam barrister not to become intimate with the heiress of Gillingham. At first he was very shy—as shy as a proud poor man was almost certain to be under the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed. Compared to the cousin, who called him Cecil, and treated him from the first with marked kindness and consideration, he might well be termed an impecunious relation. Had Lady Millicent’s conduct towards him been different—had she behaved to him with anything approaching to her usual rigid arrogance—his poverty would have troubled Cecil Vavasour but little. It was his young kinswoman’s gentleness, her unwonted amiability, her actual deference towards himself, that, while it rendered him ill at ease in her society, both puzzled and touched him. He little guessed, while gradually falling under the spell of{23} a woman who in youth was not destitute of personal attractions, and who could be agreeable when she chose, what was the true mainspring of her conduct regarding him. He could form no idea of the hidden demon of Pride lurking beneath that still exterior. To his thinking, Lady Millicent Vavasour—young, courted, with tens of thousands yearly at her command, with power to effect so vast an amount of good to others, and (which we fear was almost equally enviable in Mr. Vavasour’s sight) with wealth to indulge to the utmost every æsthetic taste—was scarcely likely to ambition any extra or unpossessed advantage. And then he was himself so utterly unassuming, so entirely unaware that he in his own person owned, or was likely ever to own, gifts that the rich heiress of Gillingham could covet, that, as I said before, he was at the beginning almost more puzzled than gratified by her notice.
That this state of things should have occasioned at first a something of distance in the relations between the cousins is not surprising, nor need it afford subject for wonder that that very distance lent a piquancy to their intercourse which was not, to the petted heiress at least, without its charm. Lady Millicent had been so beset by flatterers, and so cloyed by adulation, that the silence, the fits of absence, and the{24} almost brusqueries of her cousin Cecil were greeted by her as a very agreeable variety. She was sick to death of oversweet confections, of butter and honey she had been positively surfeited, so that the honest brown-bread diet, dry and husky though it was, which was all that she appeared likely to obtain from Cecil Vavasour, tasted fresh and wholesome to her fevered palate.
But there was, as I before said, another cause—the cause, in fact—for Lady Millicent’s obvious appreciation of her cousin, and that motive power was her cousin’s future rank; for Mr. Vavasour, simple as he stood before her, quiet, unpretending, noticeable for his carelessness of outward advantages, his simple manners, and his unfashionable dress, could nevertheless, failing some very abnormal event, be the means of obtaining for her in a mitigated degree the fulfilment of her long-cherished desire—the hope of her heart, the insatiable craving, known only to herself, to wear, while retaining the noble name of Vavasour, the coronet of a British peeress on her brow.
The courtship, if courtship it could be called, between Lady Millicent and the future Baron de Vavasour was somewhat singular and out of rule; and if any distinct offer of marriage were made between the parties—not a common occurrence, by the way, in set and deliberate phrase, be{25}tween acknowledged lovers—that offer was believed by those best acquainted with the contracting parties to have emanated from the lady. That Cecil believed—free from personal vanity though he was—in her attachment to himself there could be no doubt; nothing, therefore, remained for the man whose own nature was too noble for him to fear for himself the imputation of mercenary motives, but to put his pride, and his scruples, if such he had, into his comparatively empty pockets, and to accept the goods which his millionaire kinswoman had provided for him.
Perhaps, had the autocratic mistress of Gillingham and its dependencies been better acquainted with the character of Cecil Vavasour, she might have hesitated longer ere she selected him as the partner of her life. With all her ambition, she yet required a husband who would understand her character and enter into her views; and of this Mr. Vavasour soon showed himself to be incapable. Misled by the natural faith which we all are apt to place in our own individual judgment, Lady Millicent had discovered imaginary qualities in the man whom she had honoured with her choice. Deceived by the extreme composure of manner and the gentle reserve which were among her kinsman’s outward characteristics, she had given him credit for an indolence of disposi{26}tion which she rather approved of than regretted, and for an inborn pride of race calculated to assimilate satisfactorily with her own. They were married, and the Lady Millicent was not long in discovering to her annoyance—for hers was not a character to take a disappointment to heart—that she had made a fatal mistake. A better man, nor one possessed of a more conscientious spirit than that which dwelt in Cecil Vavasour, never walked the earth. That this was so, no one who boasted the slightest knowledge of character would long doubt. It might be, though that fact had yet to be decided, that the lawyer manqué was not likely to be a distinguished man; but the most casual observer would have decided at once upon the impossibility of his being otherwise than an upright and a straightforward one. But for all this, and though Mr. Vavasour proved to be, in the broad and usual acceptation of the term, an excellent husband, Lady Millicent was, and withal showed herself to be, bitterly and hopelessly disappointed. It was terrible to find that, instead of sympathising in her ambitious desires, Cecil was content to devote himself to the cultivation of his understanding, the care of his wife’s extensive property, the amelioration of the condition of the poor, and later, as the—to him—exceeding blessing of children was granted to his hopes, to the educa{27}tion and moral training of his sons and daughters. At every time and season, and to all the occupations and interests of her husband, Lady Millicent took marked exception. She had expected to find him an amiable nonentity, and instead, there was ever at her side an earnest and highly intelligent companion; one too who, although he was no rival power ready to edge her off the throne she so dearly prized, was nevertheless a man who, entertaining both stern and exalted notions of the responsibilities of the rich, was not easily to be diverted from the line of duty—often narrow and difficult—which he had marked out for himself to follow. Under the vexatiousness of this tardy discovery, Lady Millicent daily fumed and fretted—fumed and fretted till her temper, never one of the best, grew peevish and easy of irritation, and till the chafing of the crumpled rose-leaf against the sensitive skin of the proud woman’s self-esteem grew to be a painful, and in process of time a never-to-be-cicatrised sore.
Nor was Cecil Vavasour long behindhand in awaking from the one delusion that had so effectually changed for him the cherished habits of a life. The conviction that the love in which he had believed had been but a passing fancy, and the certainty that he was solely valued by her as a stepping-stone on which to rise to rank, were not{28} subjects for agreeable reflection. But though Vavasour was capable of feeling keenly the wrong—for wrong it was—that had been done him, he was the last man in the world either to complain of, or to grow silently morbid under, its infliction; only by his deeds could it be surmised that he was an unwilling sharer in the good things procurable by the Lady Millicent’s gold; and as, previously to his marriage, he had steadfastly resisted the making of any settlement by which he could in his own person benefit, so did he, after becoming convinced of his wife’s indifference, keep with rigid economy his private expenses within the scope of his own limited means to defray, while he abstained as much as lay in his power from indulgence in luxuries which those means would, unassisted, have been inadequate to procure for him.
Setting aside this glaring instance (which it clearly was) of eccentricity, Cecil Vavasour, as was universally allowed, acted well up to the obligations imposed upon the rich and powerful. There was no lordly house throughout the length and breadth of the land in which the rights of hospitality were exercised with a more liberal hand than at the various residences owned and occupied by the Vavasour family. At Gillingham Castle especially, where the establishment was on an almost princely scale, the grand old house was{29} twice a year brimming over with guests, and far and wide spread the reputation for “good entertaining” of the Lady Millicent and her consort. But for all that this was so, and although Cecil Vavasour was loved and appreciated by the poor, whose invaluable friend and adviser he ever proved himself to be, he was not generally popular either with his equals or his superiors in social position. To anyone accustomed to look inquiringly into human motives, and to those who have gained knowledge of mankind by enlarged association with their fellows, the fact that Cecil Vavasour, with all his excellence, his gentleness and his hospitality, was not generally a favourite, will excite but little surprise. As a rule, the silent and apparently self-conceited man rarely meets with favour, for silence is too often taken for a diagnostic of pride, and pride is of all human qualities the one which both men and women find the most difficult to pardon. But there was yet another quality, and it was the one to which his taciturnity was mainly to be attributed, that interfered greatly with the comfort of Cecil Vavasour’s existence—he was constitutionally, and therefore incurably, shy. Now the shyness of a middle-aged gentleman who has lived much in society, and whose intellect is above the average, is one of those “facts” to believe in which it is necessary that the{30} individual called upon to exhibit this credulity should be either a physiologist, or himself the victim of mauvaise honte. It is probable that Mr. Vavasour met with few or none who were capable either of understanding or making allowances for his infirmity; and thus it chanced that, though no man living was more formed by nature to enjoy the blessings of friendship, he passed through life without meeting (of his own degree) a single congenial soul into whose breast he could pour out his sorrows, or ask for sympathy with his joys.
What wonder is it if under these circumstances, and with his large warm heart dependent solely upon them for tenderness and love, he should have fairly doated on his children? There were four of them. The eldest, Arthur, a handsome dark-eyed lad, was destined by the provisions of his grandfather’s will to enter into possession, at the age of twenty-five, of by far the greater portion of the Gillingham property, provided that on his—the said eldest son of Lady Millicent Vavasour—arriving at the above-named age, his mother should not be in legal phrase a femme couverte. This singular disposition of property occasioned at the time of the Earl’s decease no little surprise, but owing probably to the circumstance that there was at that period no “heir male of Lady Millicent’s body” in existence, only a very{31} limited amount of discontent was mingled with the universal astonishment of all who thought themselves qualified to give an opinion on the subject.
The child next in age to this fortune-favoured individual was also a son; he was little more than a year his brother’s junior, and inherited more of his father’s disposition than had been engrafted on his elder brother. The two boys offered (both in person and character) marked contrasts to each other. The heir was, as I before said, a handsome fellow, tall, dark-eyed, and well formed. From his cradle he had been a child of whose outward comeliness any parent might be proud, and Lady Millicent was proud of him accordingly—proud, but not fond; it was not in her nature to attach herself to any living being, save and except the heiress of Gillingham: and the effects of this monopoly of sentiment very soon became apparent in the young family growing up around her.
Of Horace, her second son, the Lady Millicent was neither proud nor fond. He was born delicate, and his infancy being a sickly and a troublesome one, his lady mother took a disgust to the child who was associated in her mind with doctors’ visits (this great personage, being very robust herself, had no patience with illness), occasional visits to a nursery smelling of drugs, and the irritating wailing of a suffering infant. As little{32} Horace advanced in years, everyone, with the exception of his mamma, pronounced him to be, though a plain mite of a child enough, a very engaging and intelligent specimen of humanity. He was very sweet-tempered too, and docile, “getting” his baby lessons, as the head nurse expressed herself, twice as quick as Master Vavasour. But then it must be remembered that Arthur was an elder son; and when a child is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, anything above the average amount of brains is, as all the world will allow, a superfluous possession. Two daughters, Rhoda and Katherine—of whom more hereafter—completed the family, to the care and education of which Cecil Vavasour, both from a high sense of duty and following the dictates of his own heart, greatly devoted himself. Perfectly alive to the injury done to the children by the absence on their mother’s part of either the appearance or the reality of maternal tenderness, he did all that lay in his power to remedy the evil; but with the best intentions, a man cannot in such a case, to any effectual purpose, play a woman’s part. A father’s caresses to his child lack ever the softness of a woman’s touch; and moreover Cecil Vavasour’s nature was not, as we know, a demonstrative one: his constitutional infirmity of shyness, even when alone with the children in whose{33} well-being his own happiness was bound up, shackled and oppressed him, proving a sad hindrance to that perfect confidence between parent and child which is so valuable an element in education. But although in some respects Cecil Vavasour might fall short in his exalted aims, though the young people at the Castle might and probably did miss the invaluable advantage of which they were deprived by Lady Millicent’s natural hardness of character, they were nevertheless, in one respect at least, highly favoured. On their father’s unchangeable justice they could ever and always implicitly rely, as well as on that entire absence of caprice which is one of the most precious negative gifts with which those in power, whether great or limited, can be endowed.
Perhaps the main error in Mr. Vavasour’s system of education—for he had in his deep and absorbing conscientiousness formed a plan for the bringing-up of his children, from which he never deviated—was, that they were over-educated, and kept too strictly within the narrow bounds of standard and routine. He may have forgotten, and it is probable that his lady wife had never known, that the natural fermentation of human passions within the breast, if too closely confined therein, is liable to become a dangerous element. Tie the vessel in which inflammable matter is{34} kept too tightly and too early down, and when the hot season of the year arrives, and the working goes on with furious heat within, then bursts the ligature and out flies the cork, while careful parents, terrified at the explosion, marvel how, after all their precautions, and the mighty pains they took, there should be a crash so fearful, and so melancholy a waste of good materials.
There are some men, and of these was Cecil Vavasour, into whose inner life other, and apparently unauthorised, people entertain a morbid desire to pry. The question of who really ruled at the Castle was often mooted, not only in the village of Switcham itself, but throughout the whole of the adjacent country. That Mr. Vavasour was a very “superior” man, the world had been from the first quite ready to acknowledge. If any confirmation of this received fact were wanting, it was to be found, so said the initiated, in the great and manifest improvement in Lady Millicent’s property since the epoch of her marriage. This improvement had been brought about so quietly, and Mr. Vavasour took so little apparent part in the management of the estates, that it was hard to say at whose instigation, or by whose superior judgment, so many salutary reforms had been carried out. There had been no sudden or startling changes. There had not{35} even been an unjust steward dismissed, or a series of hitherto unsuspected frauds unearthed and punished. How and when this silent, unboastful man worked so effectually for the good, not only of his rich wife’s estates, but for the welfare of each individual amongst the many whom he religiously believed were, in a manner, intrusted to his charge, was a mystery to all. Nor was this the only mystery talked over amongst the inquisitive—and they were many—regarding Cecil Vavasour and his belongings. Was he, asked the curious, a happy and a contented man? Had the acquisition of wealth opened to him new sources of enjoyment? Had Lady Millicent’s husband, during the years of his married life, suffered in mind from domestic disappointment, from the coldness of his wife’s unsympathising nature, or from her besetting sin—a mean jealousy of power? It is very probable that he did so suffer, for those men frequently undergo the most whose exterior is undemonstrative, and who are to all appearance insensible to the touch of Sorrow’s wand; but whether Cecil Vavasour were or were not, in these respects, a fitting object for sympathy, the public never was quite able to make up its mind; for before such a desirable end could be attained, death, to the regret of all who knew him, cut short{36} the earthly career of one who might truly have been called the “poor man’s friend.”
Arthur Vavasour had just completed his fifteenth year—he being then in the fifth form at Eton—when he received the direful intelligence of a loss which, to him, was truly an irreparable one. The casualty which rendered him an orphan had from the first been pronounced by the medical men to be a serious case. It was occasioned by the accidental going-off of a gun in the hand of a careless under-keeper, one bright May morning, when Mr. Vavasour and his younger son, who was the private pupil of a neighbouring clergyman, were rook-shooting in a distant part of Gillingham Chace. For several days Cecil Vavasour continued to suffer much and patiently; then on a sudden all pain left him, and he knew that his doom was sealed. The report of Mr. Vavasour’s danger spread rapidly through the country, and people flocked in crowds to the lodge-gates of Gillingham to learn the truth, and to inquire, with hushed voices and with saddened looks, whether there were any hope that the good man whose days were numbered might yet be spared to them. For, if they had never known the value of Cecil Vavasour before, they recognised it now. When he was about to be removed from amongst them, there was scarcely one amongst the poor,{37} the sorrowful, and the troubled but remembered some act of generosity, some sympathising word, some excellent advice bestowed in time of need. It seemed difficult to realise the truth that such a man—one too in the full vigour of his life and strength—was so early destined to go the way of all flesh. To be sure he was but enduring the lot appointed for everyone that is born of a woman, and why men should show longer faces, and talk with more whispering voices of the accidents and losses of the great and wealthy than they are given to do of the self-same misfortunes when they befall those who are formed of more common clay, it may at first sight be difficult to understand; but the fact that so it is remains the same. And thus it chanced that the Lady Millicent, self-absorbed and phlegmatic though she was, elicited in her threatened widowhood far more of general sympathy and interest than would have been awarded to a hundred bereaved and penniless women sobbing out their hearts’ grief in an atmosphere of poverty and dirt, and surrounded by ragged orphans howling for the bread-winner who would return to them no more for ever.
It was well for Cecil Vavasour that he had not left to “the last” the duty of preparing for the end; for the time allowed him for such pre{38}paration was short indeed. On his bed of death he found courage to speak very frankly to the wife who stood shocked, miserably disappointed, and perhaps at that supreme moment remorseful, by his side. In few but solemn words he committed his children to her care. They would, under God, who is the Father of the fatherless, be hers only now, hers to guide, to counsel, and to instruct. On her and on her only would rest, so the dying man in his feverish anxiety declared to her, their well-being both in this transitory life and in that to which he was hastening; and as she should do her duty by his treasures, so, prayed the feeble voice with touching fervour, might He who judgeth all men have mercy upon her in the world that is to come! They were his last words. After a faintly-whispered farewell to the old servants, who were weeping near the door, there remained but the silent pressure of the death-cold hand, a quiver of the pale lips, as one by one his children bent their young fresh faces to receive the parting kiss, and the spirit of Cecil Vavasour entered into its rest.
There was a grand funeral, at which Lady Millicent, in the longest and crapiest of robes, and utterly devoid of crinoline, assisted, leading her eldest son by the hand, and looking the bereaved and grieving widow to perfection. There were{39} many true mourners in the crowd that followed Cecil Vavasour to the grave, and not a few of these were of opinion that true sorrow shuns a multitude, and that the newly-made widow who can follow her husband’s ashes to their last resting-place has not very dearly loved him in his lifetime. Be this as it may—and it is after all as hard to judge the feelings of others as it is to estimate their powers of self-control—the Lady Millicent, surrounded by her children, did conduct herself at her dead husband’s funeral with a very praiseworthy amount of dignified self-command. Among those who had been Cecil Vavasour’s friends and acquaintances there were grave faces and regretful hearts; but the poor wept for him; and the time soon came, after he had departed from among them, when folk of all degrees began to see clearly what manner of man he had been of whom during his unobtrusive life they had known so little.{40}
The approaching marriage of Mr. John Beacham, whose family had been time out of mind one of the most respected and respectable in the entire parish of Switcham, within the boundaries of which the Beachams had held land to a large extent under many a successive lord of the manor of Gillingham, was a very important event in that quiet locality. In his way, John Beacham might almost be styled a public character. Far and near, whenever a certain highly interesting subject—namely, that of horses—was upon the tapis, honest John’s name was pretty certain to be brought prominently forward. It was surprising—in a country and on a matter in which almost every young gentleman, probably, held a first-rate opinion of his own merits as a judge of “cattle”—what weight the fiat of John Beacham, farmer and horse-breeder, was wont to carry with it. The latter vocation—and a highly lucrative one it was—had not been{41} exercised for more than a dozen years or so by the lessees of Shotover Farm, by which name, by the way, the hundreds of broad acres rented by the Beacham family had, for generations past, been known. Some six years before the death of John’s father, the estate called Updown Paddocks, and which consisted of many a broad and fertile meadow, admirably adapted for breeding purposes, was announced to be for sale. It lay in tempting proximity to Mr. Beacham’s farm; the price in that prudent individual’s opinion was a reasonable one; he and his trusted son John were agreed in the matter; so, in due course of time, the tenants of Shotover progressed to the dignity of landowners. Meanwhile, and pending the final arrangements for the purchase, John’s mother, the “old lady” of whom honourable mention has already been made, showed herself anything but favourable to the new plan. Though a Yorkshire woman born and bred, the love of horses and of horse-dealing was not inherent in her septuagenarian breast. She was a tall, large-boned, but, in spite of her seventy years, still a well-favoured woman. John was her only surviving child, infantile complaints of various kinds having carried away four others before they had had time to wind themselves too closely round her heart; and in the said John, therefore—in his present comfort and his future fortunes—all her best{42} affections and her keenest interests were concentrated. Many were the anxious moments endured, and not a few the querulous remarks uttered, by the farmer’s cautious wife before the complete success of the undertaking, so judiciously, and withal so conscientiously, carried on by her husband and son, laid her fears to rest, and effectually put a stop to her gloomy forebodings of loss and ruin. It is true that the excellent woman was kept a little in the dark regarding the details of the business which was already making for the breeding establishment of Beacham and Son a name throughout the land. The “old lady”—for by that title John’s stately mother was known in the neighbourhood of her abode—would have been not a little startled had she chanced to learn the amount of money that had been invested at Updown Paddocks. She seldom, after having become perfectly convinced that the “concern” was a safe investment, alluded to the subject; but it is more than probable that had Mrs. Beacham been required to make a rough guess at the sum-total expended yearly on the “horse-breeding business,” she would, without much hesitation, have named something under half the amount that John, who was no niggard of his cash, thought nothing of paying for the least costly of his pure-blooded “sires.{43}”
Mrs. Beacham was justly proud of the increase of wealth and consideration which had accrued to her family by means—as she was fully justified in believing—of the intelligence and undeviating rectitude of her husband and son. But, most of all, in the simplicity of her feudal zeal, she was boastful of the friendship and unfailing regard evinced for both by the “good Squire,” as he was everywhere denominated (for they were tenants, not of Mr. Vavasour, but of “milady”), by that discriminating and kindly gentleman. A deeply-rooted love of the animal of whose race so many noble specimens were always to be seen at Updown Paddocks would have been alone sufficient to account for Cecil Vavasour’s frequent visits to Mr. Beacham’s establishment; but, in addition to this, there was a genuine liking and sincere respect for the two men who never permitted the desire for gain to triumph over their sense of honour, and who, although they breathed the air which is supposed to be so deleterious to honesty, yet retained a pure and healthy sense of what was due, not only to their customers and themselves, but to the noble animals on whose merits they so successfully traded. Cecil Vavasour thoroughly enjoyed the five miles of pleasant country walk, which had for its end and object a chat with Lady Millicent’s model tenants—the Beachams of Updown Pad{44}docks. He delighted in their shrewd uncommon sense, in their practical equine knowledge, in their cordial welcome, and, above all, in the sight of the young stock gambolling over the sweet short pasture of the Paddocks, whilst their sober mothers cropped the staff of their lives in placid and unmolested enjoyment.
The deaths, under very different circumstances, of the Squire and John’s greatly-regretted father took place within three months of each other. The illness of the latter was a lingering one, induced by imprudent self-exposure to wet and cold; and when at last the news went forth that the old man was no more, deep and general was the regret expressed by all ranks for his loss. His widow, too, mourned very sincerely for one who had been a good husband for the space of near upon forty years to her; but then she was so fortunate as to have “John” to comfort her, and he, as all the neighbours round would have been ready to acknowledge, was “a host in himself.”
It was the last day of April, the eve of “the maddest, merriest day in all the glad new year,” and the eve, besides, of John Beacham’s wedding-day—the day that was to make him, according to his own belief, the happiest of human beings. The weather was lovely. The spring had been a{45} forward one, so that there were not wanting lilacs and laburnums, Gueldres roses and hawthorn blossom, to deck the maypoles and adorn the floral arch which it was the gallant purpose of the Switcham youths to erect over the churchyard gate, through which the bridal party had to pass.
The exceeding beauty of the girl who had won what was universally considered by her peers a prize in the matrimonial market, and a certain mystery which hung about her origin, would alone have been sufficient, without reckoning John Beacham’s well-deserved popularity, to account for the interest and curiosity created by the approaching nuptials. Honor Blake certainly was very lovely; that could not be denied. Fresh and sweet as a rose in June, with a profusion of light-brown wavy hair, melting blue eyes (had they in very truth a “look,” as Mrs. Tamfrey averred, in their languid depths?), and cherry lips that seemed pouting to be kissed; but for all this beauty, and partly, perhaps, because of her rich personal endowments, women—ay, and men likewise—were very curious to learn something certain and tangible regarding the quondam nursery governess at Clay’s Farm. All that was positively known regarding John’s fiancée amounted to this—namely, that her early childhood had been passed at a superior description of farm-house{46} in the far west of Ireland, and, moreover, it was very apparent that she had been delicately as well as tenderly reared. At the age of seven, a person calling herself the child’s aunt had removed the little Honor from the affectionate care of the “widow Moriarty,” the “snug woman” who had hitherto acted a mother’s part by the blue-eyed Irish maiden; and the next important event in the little girl’s life was the being placed in a respectable country boarding-school, where she completed an education that was more solid than ornamental. Eventually, and when she had reached the age of sixteen, Miss Blake, through the medium of the above-spoken-of relation, whose name was Bainbridge, and who had been for many years in the service, as housekeeper, of a wealthy Sandyshire family, obtained the situation of nursery governess at Clay’s Farm. The Clays were excellent people in their line, and they neither overworked nor underfed the young person, who did her best, though she was still, as good-natured Mrs. Clay often said, “but a giddy thing,” to please them.
John Beacham, although he had not been behindhand in admiring Honor’s beauty, was too busy, and owned too little of a sentimental nature, to fall in love with her at first sight. She was such a mere child, too, compared to himself. He, a{47} man of thirty-five, weather-beaten, and with lines upon his brow, to say nothing of a rare gray hair or two that his old mother viewed with pain cropping out in his thick brown whiskers, was many a year too old to mate himself with that bright bud of beauty. But though steady John Beacham was wise enough in his calmer moments, and when safe from the glamour of Honor Blake’s blue eyes, to remember these salutary facts, it was altogether a different affair when he chanced to meet her, looking so brightly pretty, walking with the farmer’s children in the shady lanes, or when the little lake, on the borders of Clay’s Farm, was ice-bound in the cold December weather, making a sunny spot where her sweet radiant face was seen amongst the busy skaters. There is no need to dwell upon the not very remarkable particulars of this rustic courtship. John was Honor’s first lover—the first that she had ever thought or read of. Marriage—an affair to which she, like every girl of sense, of course looked forward to—seemed a pleasant, an exciting, and an important event in life. It would be delightful to have new clothes, and a home and children of her own; for Honor was very fond of, as well as patient with, little people; and perhaps her satisfaction at her approaching marriage was more closely connected with thoughts of baby-smiles and{48} “waxen touches” than the girl herself, in her pure and perfect innocence, suspected. Be that as it may, she did not hesitate, no, not for a single moment, ere she said “yes” in answer to John Beacham’s offer; nor afterwards, when the hour for reflection came, did she feel one pang of regret for the unqualified assent that she had given.
They were to be married in May—as John arranged before he left the small old-fashioned “company” parlour at Mr. Clay’s farm, in which this important chapter in the joint lives of himself and Honor had been opened. To be married in May,—that is to say, in two months’ time,—and not a word imparted as yet to the one so vitally interested in the matter—not a hint of what was going on dropped to the “old lady” at Updown Paddocks!
Mrs. Beacham, who had kept house for her well-beloved John from the hour when the old man had departed for a world where seed-time and harvest are no more, was a woman acknowledged by all who knew her (and, indeed, she had, for that matter, been known to boast of the peculiarity herself) to have not only a “will” but “ways” of her own. She was a bustling busy personage, one whom no one in her household would have ventured to “answer;” while as for{49} interference with any of her orders or arrangements, why not even John himself would have dreamt of such a thing. The love of power and rule was in her plebeian breast fully as firmly implanted as in that of the autocratic mistress of the Castle—the division of her kingdom would have been as unpleasant a disintegration to the one as to the other; and it therefore required some little courage on John Beacham’s part to enable him to go through with credit the duty of imparting to his mother that he was about to take unto himself a wife.
Between Mrs. Beacham and her son there had always existed a sincere, though not a demonstrative, affection. They had, moreover, no secrets from one another, and nothing in John’s previous life and conversation had ever tended to awaken in the susceptible mind of the “old lady” the natural jealousy of a mother. It was wonderful during his twenty years or thereabouts of manhood how very little the straightforward fully-occupied fellow had had to tell. On his first emerging from hobbledehoyhood, that discreet body, his mother, had not been without her fears that John would play, after the example of other lads, the lover and the fool. Anxiously, and much as a fussy trembling hen watches, when they seem likely to get into troubled waters,{50} the erratic movements of a brood of ducklings, so did the parent of honest unsentimental John torment herself with the fear that some “silly useless chit,” some “forward wasteful hussy,” was alluring her precious son into the hot waters of a love-scrape. Time wore on, however; the down gave place to bristles on the young farmer’s chin, his voice grew manly, and he took his place as one having authority in the family councils, while as yet he betrayed no symptoms calculated to justify his mother’s alarm.
The neighbours (for a single young man in John’s position is, to a certain extent, public property) began at length to grow alarmed at the apparently phlegmatic character of Mr. Beacham’s idiosyncrasy. It seemed to them so terribly likely that he would live and die a bachelor; and then what a throwing away of advantages, what a loss to some young woman or other of the many who would have said “yes” to John of such a house and home as would be provided for her at the Paddocks!
These lamentations and prognostics, when they reached the ears of Mrs. Beacham, were met not only with ridicule, but with an indignant protest. “What could they, a set of ignorant busybodies, know of what was passing in the{51} mind of a sensible man like John? She had no patience, not she, with that everlasting talk about getting married, putting thoughts into young men’s heads that wouldn’t be there without, and interfering in a way that no decent person ought to do with other people’s sons. If John meant to marry he would, and if he didn’t why he wouldn’t, and that was all about it; and for her part, she just wished that everybody would leave him alone and mind their own business.”
At length, and by the time that Mrs. Beacham had almost, if not quite, ceased to think of her son as a possibly marrying man, he—the hitherto practical and prudent bachelor—began to manifest certain symptoms, which, but for the sense of security into which she had rocked herself, could scarcely have failed to awaken the spirit of suspicion in the old lady’s breast. It was again owing to the hints of her neighbours, and the more outspoken words of that agreeable gossip the widow Thwaytes, that certain eccentricities perpetrated by her son reached his mother’s ears. Among the most suggestive of these eccentricities was the purchase in London of a “booky” of hothouse flowers, and the driving of his big black horse “like mad” to Clay’s Farm, in order that the gardenias and{52} the Cape jasmines might be fresh and sweet when they met the eyes of pretty Honor Blake.
At first, Mrs. Beacham positively declined to entertain the idea that at his time of life John would be that foolish as to be made an idiot of by a “gel.” As long as blindness to her son’s weakness was possible, she shut her eyes resolutely to facts, and refused to believe even the evidence of her senses. The neighbours might, and indeed at this interesting crisis they did, come about her daily like bees, buzzing restlessly about the tempting honey-pot, in which was silently fermenting a domestic event, in the boiling-point of which all felt themselves to be more or less intimately concerned; but busy though they were, and curious, as well as tolerably well informed withal, his mother, trusting to John’s good sense, and being herself either ignorant or forgetful of the power of the tender passion, remained tranquil in her fancied security.
But at last the storm burst, and the hour for full confession came. On one blustering March night, when the shutters of the old farm-house were closed against the wild north wind—when the mother and son were sitting at the sturdy well-polished mahogany table, he, with his account-books before him, while Mrs. Beacham, on thrifty thoughts intent, was engaged heart and{53} soul in turning the heel of a gray lambswool stocking—John, after much debating in his own mind as to the manner in which his communication could best be made, stammered forth the few initiatory words that rendered the after disclosure comparatively easy.
“Mother, you know Honor Blake?” and having so said, with his big manly heart beating a trifle faster than usual, John Beacham leant back in his chair, and thrust his two hands into his waistcoat-pockets.
The old woman dropped her knitting-needles in the extremity of her surprise and consternation.
“Know the girl!” she repeated, looking up blankly at John’s troubled face; whereupon he, taking heart of grace, entered upon his confession.
“Mother, it’s a long story, and I don’t know exactly where to begin.”
“Then you had better commence at the end,” said the old lady crossly. John, however, took her up at once. His hesitation and timidity had been terrible barriers to fluency so long as his mother’s feelings were to be soothed, and her jealousy of his affection laid to rest; but directly it became a question of temper—when once the old lady, as was her wont on rare occasions of irritation, began to take her son “up short”—then hesitation van{54}ished as if by magic, and John Beacham found comparatively no difficulty in telling his news.
“Come, come, mother,” he said cheerfully, “don’t take what I’m going to say that way. You couldn’t surely have expected—it wasn’t in human nature, you know—that I should go on all my life like this.”
“Like this! and what, I should be glad to know, do you mean by ‘this’? This, indeed! Why, John, haven’t you been done for, and cared for, and looked to? and haven’t you had a mother that’s kep house for you as careful and as regular, though I say it, as ever a house was? Haven’t I seen to the linen, and made sure you wasn’t cheated, as most lads are, by the woman servants, which they take advantage of their foolishness, and—and,” with a little quiet whimper that went to John’s heart, “what more—I only ask you that, John—can you want of a woman than what your poor old mother has done for you?”
This appeal, absurd and utterly unreasonable though it was, touched John; so rising briskly from his chair, he, to the manifest detriment of the crimpest of ruffs, threw his arm round the old woman’s neck, and kissed her withered but still rosy cheek fondly.
“Dear old mother,” he said cheerily, “as if I didn’t know all that! You’ve been everything to{55} me, God knows, and I should be a brute if I could forget it; but, mammy,” he went on coaxingly, and with a scarcely conscious use of the old and half-forgotten name which was hers in the long-past days of his troublesome boyhood, “you must remember that I am getting on; and if I’m ever to think about finding a wife at all, it’s time I set about it. Besides, there’s Honor, who—”
“Why, John, she’s Irish!” broke in the old lady, in a tone well calculated to convey the impression that she, at least, considered Miss Blake’s birthplace as an insuperable bar to any closer connection with himself. “She’s Irish, which is bad enough of itself, dear knows, without it’s being said of her, as it is said, which well you know, John, that she’s a young woman as hasn’t friends. In my time, which they say everything’s changed now, and more’s the pity—if folks was respectable they’d friends of some sort or another to show, which this Miss Blake seemingly has not; and, John,” lowering her voice to a whisper, although they were far enough removed from human ears, she and John in fact being the only two persons still up and about in the old house, “John, do you know, between ourselves, I shouldn’t wonder, that I shouldn’t, if the girl was to turn out to be a love-child!”
John was silent for a moment, being in fact{56} utterly at a loss how best to reply to these decidedly unpleasant suggestions. He had himself—but that was prior to the time when he had become so blindly and irrevocably in love—he had himself felt some misgivings, in addition to some little curiosity, regarding Honor Blake’s birth and parentage. Not, as he had since taught himself to think, that the matter was one of primary importance. To be sure, if he had a rather strong prejudice regarding such things, it was in favour of legitimate birth. He certainly would not be exactly gratified by the tardy discovery that his dearly beloved Honor was a “love-child;” but then, on the other hand, if his bride did chance to be that reprobated being, a friendless girl, why there was comfort after all to be picked out of that. Having no near and acknowledged kinsfolk of her own, she would be the more likely to devote herself exclusively to her husband; and it was this comforting reflection which enabled him to respond with tolerable boldness to Mrs. Beacham’s hypothesis.
“As to Honor’s being Irish, mother, I don’t think that matters much one way or the other. There’s good and bad in all countries, and in my opinion she’s as much too good for me, even if she was to turn out what you call a ‘love-child,’ as she is too young and too pretty.{57}”
“Too good!” retorted the old woman angrily; “I should just like to hear anybody else say such a word as that! I’d pretty soon show ’em what I thought of their opinion!”
John Beacham laughed. “There’d be plenty,” he rejoined, “if they were only bold enough, that you’d hear say that same, mother; for Honor is far and away too good for a man of my age, who has got somehow into bachelor ways, and who’s a rough out-of-doors kind of man compared to her. Yes, she’s far and away too good, and so you’ll think, mother, when you come to know her better. She’s as gentle as a lamb, and as playful, pretty creature! as a kitten, and not a bit vain nor stuck up, for all that she must know how beautiful she is. So very beautiful and delicate! Why she’s like a precious bit of china, or one of the sweet pink-and-white flowers in the Castle conservatory. I don’t wonder that people talk of her, or that they come from miles away to Switcham church just to get a look at the blue-eyed Irish girl—the darling that, with your leave, dear mother, I hope on May-day next to call my wife.”
John Beacham was certainly not intended by nature for a diplomatist; nevertheless, he showed some knowledge of human nature, and of his mother’s nature in particular, when he adduced the fact that the fame of Honor’s beauty had{58} spread far and wide, as an argument in favour of his marriage. If Mrs. Beacham possessed one ingrained weakness more patent than the rest, it was that very common one of steadfastly believing each and all of her belongings to be incalculably superior to those of a similar nature owned by anyone else. That her son’s wife would be beautiful beyond the average loveliness of womankind was a great point in favour of Mrs. Beacham’s future daughter-in-law. The worthy woman forgot—as who would not have done under the circumstances?—that beauty is a dangerous gift, and that a “fair woman,” should she chance to be without “discretion,” is often very inconveniently placed in a sober and quiet man’s household. For the moment too the old lady, who loved rule so well, forgot that the more attractive in person was her son’s bride, the less chance did there exist that she herself could “hold her own” against this new and overwhelming influence. For the hour, however, maternal love and a certain sense of gratified pride being in the ascendant, she replied to John’s eulogium in a manner which, notwithstanding the tone of plaintive resignation that marked her words, sent John reassured and comforted to bed.
“Well, well,” she said, with the sigh peculiar to elderly ladies when they are about to se poser en{59} victimes,—“well, well! I suppose that what is to be will be. In course, it isn’t for old folks like me to give advice to young ones. The weak must go to the wall, as it’s only right, I suppose, and nat’ral they should; and them as has had their day must just make room, like the trees and the plants as is withered away, for others. I only hope, that’s all I have to say, that she’ll make you a good wife, John; and if so be she does, why I’m not one—be sure of that—to be set against her. But it’s hard lines all the same, so it is. ‘A son’s not your son,’ as the saying goes, ‘when he takes him a wife.’ No, he’s not your son—come what come may.”
And Mrs. Beacham, after solacing herself with the utterance of this soothing reflection, took herself off quietly to bed.{60}
It was, as I before said, the day previous to that appointed for the wedding, and Mrs. Beacham, feeling slightly bemuddled and restless, and being withal half, and only half, reconciled to her son’s marriage, was passing a quiet hour in the large old-fashioned kitchen-garden, which had formed for the best part of half a century her glory and her pride.
In the days before John’s engagement to Honor Blake, and when the mother and son together ruled the household in harmony, and with a prudent yet not illiberal hand, Mrs. Beacham had been remarkable for a quiet cheerfulness of disposition and—making allowance for occasional outbreaks—for a kindly temper. The world had hitherto gone well with her, and she—in common gratitude bound—had gone well with the world. What wonder was it, then, that Updown Paddocks, with its cheery, hospitable mistress, and{61} with “young John,” so pleasant as he was, and open-handed, came to be well appreciated as a “good house,” to use a rustic but expressive phrase, throughout the whole country side?
There was something anomalous, as may already have been noticed, in the social position occupied by the wealthy owner of Updown Paddocks. A simple yeoman by birth, but withal well educated—for he had passed through the grammar-school, at which, according to his mother’s frequent boast, more than half the pupils were “gentlemen’s sons”—John Beacham, whose manners, if not fashionable, were such as to render him quite an admissible guest, was nearly as frequently met with at the tables of the middle-class aristocracy as at the humbler “boards” of those who might be more correctly termed his equals. As a natural result also of his profession as a horse-breeder (bear in mind, however, O captious reader, with what an honest and unselfish steadiness of purpose that trade was carried on), his intimate acquaintance amongst men socially very much his superiors rapidly increased; and so great was the esteem in which John Beacham, not only as an honourable man, but as one whose knowledge of horse-flesh could not be denied, was held, that at the time of his marriage with pretty Honor Blake it would have{62} occasioned no surprise to the Lord-lieutenant of the County had he been invited to meet at dinner the man whose yearly sales of stock amounted on an average to double the net-income of the acknowledged greatest man in Sandyshire.
Nor was Mrs. Beacham, after a fashion appreciated by herself, without her share of the popularity and honours enjoyed by her son. It is true that she was never included in the invitations over which her maternal heart rejoiced. Never, even in a dream, had the stately old lady, in her black lutestring dress, and her cap of finest Mechlin lace (a heirloom in her family), found herself a guest at Gillingham Castle, at Clifton Court, or even at the less-imposing table of sporting Dr. Thorpe, the very reverend the Dean of the neighbouring episcopal town of Gawthorpe. But the sensible old woman was quite content to be thus excluded: she entertained very shrewd ideas, not only regarding old womanhood, but the proprieties of life generally, and had not, at her age, to learn that, even had all things besides been what she, in her simplicity, was wont to call “suitable,” there remained the unanswerable fact that after a certain age ladies cease to be ornamental, and as dinner-table guests must therefore expect to be overlooked.
But although this autocratic middle-class{63} dowager had been hitherto philosophically content to remain in the background, it was more than probable that she would take a different view of this highly important matter, and would be less amenable to reason, should the beautiful daughter-in-law, whose loveliness might, as the saying is, “adorn a court,” chance to be more highly appreciated than herself by the society to which her son was by courtesy admitted. Even, however, were that not to be the case, there still remained the more than probability that the homage which in John’s home had hitherto been paid to herself, to her hospitality, her “pleasantness,” and her powers of causing social enjoyment, would be shared by, if not indeed transferred to, the far younger and more attractive woman who was so soon to make an inroad into Updown Paddocks. Like many hospitable people, Mrs. Beacham was rather inordinately fond of popularity, and the idea of sharing that popularity with a young and winsome bride was eminently distasteful to her.
Ah, well indeed is it for us that the dark corners of our hearts can be seen only by ourselves and by a God who judges mercifully. Our best friends and our dearest relations—the wife of our bosom, and the husband of our choice—might have to hold his or her breath with sur{64}prise and consternation could a glance behind the unholy of unholies be obtained, and what is thought and planned in those hidden corners be brought to light. Honor Blake’s future mother-in-law was neither a cold-hearted nor a cruel woman; and yet, as the time of her expected deposition drew nigh, it is to be feared that not a few of the reprehensible feelings which go far towards the making of a villain rose up within her breast against John’s unoffending bride elect.
“Well, mother, and what’s the case with you? Jolly—eh?” exclaimed a cheery voice behind the widow, as that grieving woman, with her head bent lower than was usual with her, prepared to take a fourth turn along her favourite walk. “Pretty bobbish—eh?” John repeated, attempting, after the fashion of cheerful strong-nerved persons, to brighten the countenance and enliven the spirits of the sorrowful by a loud voice and unaccustomed sportiveness of language. “Speculating on the crop of gooseberries, eh?” John added, offering his arm to his mother, who accepted the attention with a sigh that boded ill for the success of her son’s efforts. “Plenty of work this year in the preserving line, I expect; I never saw a greater promise of fruit.”
“It wasn’t the gooseberries nor yet the currants I was thinking of, John,” said Mrs. Beach{65}am mournfully. “It’s to-morrow was in my head, and I couldn’t help wishing, that I couldn’t, that Honor was more steady-like, and older too, John, for your sake. It would be better by half if she was nigher thirty than twenty. Why she’s little better than a child, and it’s not so easy, let me tell you, to put old heads upon young shoulders.”
John laughed hilariously. Naturally of a cheerful turn of mind, his spirits, as the hour of his wedded happiness drew near, grew almost boisterous, and although not given to the utterance of melodious sounds, he could have sung aloud for very joy through every hour of that his marriage eve.
“Thank you for nothing, mother,” he said good-humouredly; “I’m quite content with my young woman as she is. Youth’s a complaint that’s pretty soon got the better of with all of us, and Honor—Heaven bless her!—has got more sense and judgment, child as she is, than many an older woman. God grant I may make her life a happy one!” he added, raising his hat reverently. “If it depends on me to do it, I’m not afraid but what she’ll find all go smoothly at the Paddocks.”
There was a pause after this rather suggestive speech, a pause which Mrs. Beacham filled up by mentally asking herself what John could mean. Were his words intended to convey a hint? or,{66} what was still more hurtful to her maternal feelings, a warning? Could it be that John was already preparing to mount guard over his precious Honor? Had he thus betimes his lance in rest to defend her from domestic evils, from imaginary wounds to be inflicted hereafter by her mother-in-law? The thought flashed through her mind, bringing a look that was not altogether pleasant to her still bright, bead-like black eyes: one glance, however, at her son’s honest countenance was sufficient to make her ashamed of having for a moment entertained the suspicion that he had implied more than met the ear. He was in very truth incapable of aught that was not thoroughly open and straightforward, and the mother who bore him should have learned by long experience that the female art of innuendoing was as foreign to his nature and habits as the making a bonnet, or the concocting of a Sunday pie.
Mrs. Beacham, at the age of threescore years and ten, had not yet quite passed the age of impulsiveness. She had wronged that kindly-natured son of hers by a suspicion injurious to his habitual frankness, and to the affection towards herself on which she had such good reason to rely, and self-reproach rendered her for the moment both tender and apologetic.{67}
“My dear boy,” she said, pressing his strong arm with her thin be-mittened fingers, “it sha’n’t be my fault if this marriage of yours don’t turn out well. But I’m an old woman now, my dear, and you must make allowances. It may go a little hard with me at first, too, to see another cared for afore me, but I shall get used to that; and, John, you may trust your mother, for how could I help loving the woman that was good to my boy?”
“That’s right, mother,” said John heartily; “you couldn’t, I’m certain sure of that. And Honor will be good; never fear for her. She may be a trifle giddy and thoughtless, perhaps; though even if she’s that, I’ve got to find it out; but her heart—the darling!—is in the right place, and that, to my mind, is what signifies the most. I only wish you could have seen her with those children of Clay’s! It would have done your heart good. I declare, she’s been as patient as an angel with that little pickle Tom, when I should have liked nothing better than to punch his ugly head; and then as to taking care of one in sickness, you should just hear Mrs. Clay talk of her! So quiet and so sensible; always giving the medicines at the right time, and never a thought about herself, even if she was nights upon nights kept out of her bed, poor girl. Why, mother, she must be almost as clever about sick people as you are your{68}self—and that’s saying a good deal, as I, who have had an illness or two in my life, can witness to.”
The aged mother and her stalwart son were on the best possible terms by this time, she leaning with an air of proud maternal content on his arm as they stood together on the broad walk which ran along the far end of the well-stocked garden. The view from that spot was an extended as well as a pleasant one. Away beyond the bright green meadows, where the young stock leaped and gambolled on the springy turf—away beyond the not unpicturesque ranges of buildings suggestive of John Beacham’s lucrative business—lay “hedgerow elms,” and hills gray-blue in the soft spring sunshine, while to the right, beyond Clay’s Farm, where pretty Honor Blake was making ready for her bridal, an extensive pine-forest gave depth and “body” to the picture.
“Isn’t it pretty, mother?” John said. “I think the view from this walk prettier every time I see it. She’s sure, Honor is, to like the Paddocks; and only to think that to-morrow is to be our wedding-day; and that in a fortnight—not more; for I don’t intend to be away longer from you and home—only to think that in a fortnight my little Honor may be standing here between us, listening to the nightingales, I hope; for they’ll be singing in the hawthorn hedge, as they do{69} every year, by that time; and, O, mother, it all seems too bright and beautiful to be true!”
There was a moisture, strong man though he was and iron-nerved, in John’s clear brown eyes as he spoke of his coming joy, and his voice trembled with emotion. The old lady noticed his agitation; and again her heart was hardened, not against her son, but against the unconscious object of his love.
“He never shed a tear, that I can remember, ever since he was a man grown, for me,” was her silent reflection as they passed together into the old farm-house. Mrs. Beacham was, as I have endeavoured to make appear, very far from being an ill-disposed woman; and yet it was, perhaps, just as well for John’s peace of mind that he knew nothing of the strange complication of feelings which, albeit they owed their origin to devotion towards himself, threatened, nevertheless, to make shipwreck of the comfort and happiness of his idolised Honor.{70}
“Mayn’T I come in, Honor? O, please let me! Mother said I might come and ask; and I’ve brought you such a many pretty flowers. We’ve been up, Teddy and I have, ever since five o’clock, looking for sweet orchids in the south meadow. Do, O do let me in! I’ll be as good as gold; and I won’t rumple your new frock one bit.”
It was early morning yet on the eventful day which had been appointed for Honor Blake’s nuptials. Those early daylight hours had seemed very long to the girl who, for the first time in her life, had slept a troubled sleep; and yet, when little Jenny Clay, a chubby bright-eyed child of seven, tapped at the bride’s door, and vehemently implored to be admitted, the big white-faced kitchen clock had but just struck the hour of six, and it wanted still some four hours of the time when the little girl, already half wild with excitement, would enjoy her long-promised honour—namely, that of{71} being first bridesmaid to the heroine of the day, her dearly-loved Honor Blake.
Jenny was in her normal state a quiet rational child enough; but “the wedding” had, for the time being, turned everything (without, unfortunately, excepting the children’s brains) topsy-turvy at Clay’s Farm. A lawless time during the week preceding her wedding-day had Honor’s quondam pupils; and poor Mrs. Clay, what with the last baby, and the expectation, in the course of the summer, of a ninth visit from the widow Tamfrey, had enough to do in keeping, as she often remarked, the house from being turned out of windows.
During Jenny’s lengthened entreaty—an entreaty which had been responded to by a voice within the bolted door, begging to be left a little longer in peace—another door, the one opposite to Honor’s sleeping apartment, had been briskly opened, and a female head clothed in a many-frilled nightcap being protruded therefrom, a sharp, high-pitched voice was heard—infinitely to the relief of the bride-elect—calling Miss Jenny to order.
“Come away, you naughty girl,” cried Mrs. Clay, administering at the same time a gentle shake to the delinquent. “Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t have it? Go back to bed directly, or father’ll give you a whipping, so he will.{72}”
At this terrible threat, and with the fear of bed in broad daylight (and on such a morning too) before her eyes, Jenny began to whimper—a sound which so moved the pity of the bride-elect, that before the awful sentence could be carried into execution a sweet face, shrouded with waving masses of light brown hair, made its appearance at the half-opened door; and Honor, pressing the soft lips, that were a trifle less rosy than their wont, on Jenny’s upturned forehead, said tenderly,
“Do what mother tells you, my sweetie. It won’t be long now before it’s breakfast-time. And, Mrs. Clay, please not to think the children have disturbed me, for I have been up and about for ever so long. What a beautiful morning it is! Such a sunrise! I have been looking at it over the Eastheigh Hills; and to think that this is the last time, the very last time, that I shall ever sit at this dear little window, and hear the birds singing in the trees, and the cows, with old Barbara after them in her blue petticoat, coming in to be milked!”
The girl was in a melting mood that bright spring morning, for she brushed a tear from her long lashes, when Mrs. Clay, in motherly fashion, told her what a foolish child she was to be low-spirited on her wedding morning. “It wasn’t like{73} Honor,” she said, “to be down-hearted.” And the good woman was right there, for the girl’s moods were changeful as an April sky, and in another moment, stirred by a sudden memory, the sweet lips were parted by a smile.
“I saw Joe Gregg,” she said, “come across the meadow just now, with such a coat on his back! The tails trailing on the ground, and a nosegay as big as his head stuck in his waistcoat! I hope he won’t be very absurd at church, and make us laugh when we ought to be solemn.”
“Foolish fellow!” rejoined Mrs. Clay, laughing heartily as the idea of the village idiot, one of the most harmless of his unfortunate kind, obtruding himself and his hatchet-face and uncouth figure at the marriage ceremony, presented itself to her mental vision. “And now, my dear,” she added sensibly, “for goodness’ sake do put your nightcap on again, and go to bed; you’ll be as pale else, when John sees you, as if you’d had an illness; and white, you know, wants a colour. It’s very trying, as I’ve always said, to the skin, is white;” and kind-hearted Mrs. Clay, after this useful warning to the girl whom she had grown to love almost as a daughter, retired to her own apartment, and silence once more reigned throughout the narrow corridor.
The smile faded from Honor’s face as she re{74}turned to the low seat beside the open window, and allowed her eyes again to wander over the fair scene without. Over the broad meadows, stretching eastwards towards the Paddocks, a filmy haze, light as the bridal veil of a disembodied spirit, was lingering still—lingering till the jocund god of day, “rejoicing as a bridegroom to run his course,” should lift it softly from fair Nature’s face.
In other and more prosaic words, there hung—no uncommon circumstance—a mist over the low-lying lands through which a certain little winding river called the Bram pursued its devious course. The day—there was no safer prognostic than that light and silvery nebulousness—would be a glorious one, and the bonny bride of that same first of May was, it might be hoped, fated to be another of the proverbially “happy” ones on whom the sun’s sympathising rays had warmly shone.
The girl—so soon to be that thing which man has made—a woman (it was simply a female that the hand of God created)—gazed out upon the peaceful scene—on the budding trees in which the loving birds were twittering, on the path through the meadows, trod so often by the merry children when she—scarcely more than a child herself—had headed their joyous company in merry search{75} of the dab-chicks’ nests lying peaceably in the reeds beside the Bram, or of wild flowers, fresh and sweet, cropping up through the long grass in the sunny meadows.
It was her wedding-day—her day of days—and yet something very like a sigh broke from the Irish girl’s lips, and there was a moisture (could it be the dew of tears?) upon her cheek. She was not unhappy—no, and a thousand times no—she could not be sorrowful with the love of a good man assured to her, and with the promise of such a home as it was in John Beacham’s power to give. She was certainly not unhappy. She had promised to be John’s wife unhesitatingly, and with a grateful heart. He had only done his promised bride justice when he had declared that she was neither vain nor aspiring. Honor could not be ignorant of the fact that she was beautiful, but of the power and the advantages of beauty she knew as little as did Mrs. Clay’s two-year-old child. It could hardly then be owing to a latent feeling that she was throwing her rare loveliness away—casting, so to speak, her pearls before swine—that Honor’s heart was at that moment heavy within her; and yet, could John have looked on her at that moment—could he have seen the listless attitude and the clouded brow of the girl he so fondly loved—he would{76} have been justified in reading repentance where he would have looked for joy. And, as I said before, he would have been mistaken. There was none—no, not even the shadow of a regret on Honor’s part for the promises that had so firmly bound her to be a farmer’s wife. Only the day before her spirits were as buoyant, and her heart as light, as in the joyous days gone by; only the evening before she had, with all a young girl’s natural pleasure in self-adornment, entered into the full spirit of the rôle in which her bridal costume was to play so all-important a part. The wedding-dress, pretty and pure and tasteful, although no hand more cunning than that of the humble Leigh artiste had been employed in its confection, had been pronounced by the jury of maids and matrons assembled to give judgment on its merits to be a decided success; and Honor, if the truth must be told, had been so childish—should we not, however, rather say so womanlike?—as to place clandestinely upon her fair head the wreath of orange-flowers (a real London cadeau from John), she blushing all the while for fear that any living soul might know what a vain silly thing she was.
All these signs and symptoms being taken into consideration, I think we are justified in the conclusion that Honor Blake did not actually experience regret that she was about to render kind,{77} prosperous John Beacham the happiest of men. She was a trifle confused and bewildered, perhaps, on that her marriage morning. In some way—how she could not have explained—the conviction had come home to her that being bound in wedlock means something more than new clothes, the congratulations of friends, accession of dignity, and even than spoken vows. It was all very nice and pleasant, that listening to pretty speeches, and contemplating the simple presents with which her friends (they were not numerous, and she had been so little in the world) had rejoiced the heart and gratified the harmless vanity of the whilom nursery governess. But agreeable as all this was, and novel, and soul-stirring, the time came, as we have seen, when she began to look at the more serious side of this, to her, vitally interesting question: took, in short, at the eleventh hour, to overhauling her stock of comforts and necessaries previous to entering the boat in which she and John were henceforth to sail together. And the first question she put to her own heart was, whether her store of love for the voyage, that promised to be a long one, was sufficient not only to last out the time, but was moreover of a quality to withstand the changes of heat and cold, and the many unavoidable trials both of calm and of rough weather. In very plain and simple lan{78}guage Honor, late as it was in the day, inquired of her own heart concerning this matter. Did she in very sober and earnest truth love as he deserved to be beloved the man to whom she was about to plight her troth? Did she hang upon his words, and watch, as for a glimpse of heaven, for his smile? Had she—ah! that was the test of tests—pined for him in absence, and, pure and innocent though she was, longed with shy, sweet blushes for the moment when considerate friends, taking pity on the engaged lovers, would leave them to an undisturbed and blissful tête-à-tête?
The reply to these home queries was not, I greatly fear, altogether satisfactory, as how indeed could it be, when it was the near prospect of that life-long tête-à-tête which first aroused the spirit of inquiry in Honor’s maiden breast? It was this prospect (could this have been so, my reader, if Love were lord of all within her?) that dimmed the lustre of her eyes, and cast a cloud over the sunshine of her spirits.
For an hour and more she sat in the same place, looking forth into the brightness of the morning, and hearing without heeding the murmurs of busy life that each moment became more audible throughout the house. For an hour and more she sat there, the light breeze fanning her flushed cheek, and cooling the full and crimson lips,{79} which ere another sun should go down upon the earth would be part and parcel of another’s wealth!
“What is the use of thinking?” she said half aloud, and rising with a slight shiver, for the morning air was fresh, and her light wrapping-gown afforded but a thin protection from the cold. “What is the use of thinking? There is no use of tormenting myself when I ought to be happy, in this stupid senseless way.”
And Honor was right. Use there could be none now in asking herself how much she loved the excellent man who in all loyalty believed that he possessed her whole, entire heart. She had not intentionally deceived him; indeed this inexperienced girl was little likely to surmise whether or not she had so deceived him. “Thinking” was, therefore, in her case, “but idle waste of thought.” Nothing—that at least was quite clear to Honor—was farther from her wish than to alter her relations with the generous lover, who, as the saying is, worshipped the very ground she trod on. For nothing that the world could offer, so she told herself, would she grieve or disappoint him; and so nothing remained for this young woman, whom so many in her own degree, and of her own sex, were envying for her good fortune, but to bestir herself, both mentally and physically,{80} and accept the good things that had been provided for her with a grateful heart?
A little womanly vanity—could anything be more natural?—came to the aid of John Beacham’s fiancée as she braided the soft brown tresses that the honest gentleman farmer was never weary of admiring. It would never do, she thought, to look dull and ugly on her wedding-day; so she threw melancholy to the winds, and decked her face with smiles, and called that busy little Jenny in, to hinder rather than to help the important business of the toilet. Honor’s was not a selfish nature, and when the children threw their arms round her neck, kissing her with more zeal than discretion, and calling her their “sweet, their pretty Honey,” she almost forgot the circumstance of the “new frock,” and returned the truthful caresses in much of the spirit which dictated their bestowal.{81}
“How like my mother to be patronising this wedding—just the thing she is certain to do! That sort of popularity costs nothing—not five shillings, or trust Milady for staying away.”
“O, but, Arthur, you forget the present,” said Kate Vavasour—“the present that cost, O, such a quantity of money!—mamma did not say how much. But it’s a brooch like a bull’s-eye, only flat, with a white stripe across it; and it came from the jeweller’s at Leigh, with several others to choose from, and mamma kept the biggest. She said it was ‘just the thing,’ but I can’t say that I admired it much.”
“I should think not,” said her brother scornfully—“a wretched Scotch pebble as a wedding present for the wife of such a tenant as John Beacham—a man whose father and grandfather were born and bred on the land! Such a favourite of my father’s too;” and Arthur Vavasour, who{82} had just returned from a nine-months’ foreign tour, and who, in the company of a pleasant and amenable tutor, had lost for a time the memory of Lady Millicent’s “wholesome retrenchments,” made a mental resolve to contrast her niggardly cadeau to Honor Blake with an offering of his own which would be more worthy of the bride’s acceptance. He and his favourite sister Kate, a lively girl, but without any great pretensions to beauty, and who, in Lady Millicent’s opinion, required a good deal of keeping under, were sauntering through the once beautifully kept conservatory, where now—infinitely to Arthur’s disgust—he could trace the same “odious system of dirty economy” which everywhere met his eye.
“It isn’t nice, certainly,” Kate said, stooping while she spoke to pick off the dead leaves of a neglected pelargonium; “I am afraid they will all think it so mean. Much better to have given nothing. However, I am glad we’re going; we so seldom do anything lively, that even this seems quite a change. Besides, Atty, you will like to see the bride. She was away last year with the Clay’s Farm children for change of air, after they had scarlet-fever,” continued Kate, who was a great picker-up of local news, a peculiarity in a young lady of “position,” for which Lady Millicent’s treatment of her children was in a great{83} degree the cause. “You missed seeing her then, I remember. But, Arthur, do tell me, is there no chance of the Castle growing livelier, do you think? What a time it is now since things have been as they used to be! and then that dismal half-mourning! It can’t be,” lowering her voice, “for my poor father all this time. Don’t you think now, Arthur, that mamma will surely make some change at Gillingham soon?”
“Can’t say,” said Arthur, throwing the end of the cigar he had been smoking upon the ill-cleaned mosaic pavement of the conservatory; “I never attempt either to understand my mother or to make the slightest guess as to what she is going to do. But about this wonderful beauty who is to be made a wife of to-day—who is she? And what do people know about her?”
“Not much, I believe. The Pembertons’ housekeeper, Mrs. Bainbridge, who has lived with them for ages, and who is a great friend of the Clays, recommended Miss Blake, who is her niece, to them as nursery governess to their children, and—”
“Governess, indeed! By Jove, what will that class of people come to next? However, I suppose it will be thought a civil thing to go and see John Beacham turned off. There never was a better fellow either in his line or out of it; and then, as{84} I said before, he was such an uncommon favourite of my father.”
“Yes, wasn’t he?” Kate said eagerly. She was a little thoughtless child of twelve when Cecil Vavasour died; but the kind father, with his mild face and winning voice, lived in her memory still, had taught her to like and appreciate all that he, in his useful lifetime, had seemed to value. “Wasn’t dear papa fond of the Beachams? How often he used to trudge away over the fields, with the thick ash stick that stands in the corner of the inner hall in his hand, to visit the Beachams at the farm! Poor dear papa! he used to say that he placed John first of the few honest men he knew. But, Arthur dear,” and she put her arm coaxingly within her brother’s, “do you really think that Rhoda will come out this year, and—”
“And will Miss Katherine Vavasour, as a natural sequence to that event, beam out upon the London world the year following—a consummation so devoutly to be wished? Upon my word, Kitty, though I am pretty well up to your crafty ways and clever little dodges, you have come to the very last person in the world who is likely even to give a guess at my lady’s plans. And as to asking her—why she would think such questions, especially from the heir-apparent, to the last degree indelicate, presuming—in the worst possi{85}ble taste, in short. But here comes Horace. He can, perhaps, throw some light upon the matter. He has twice the pluck that I have when it comes to tackling my lady. I don’t think, for some reason or other, that she hates him quite as much as she does me.—I say, old fellow,” he continued, as Horace Vavasour, a fair-complexioned, intelligent-looking young man, came loungingly towards them, with his hands thrust into his trousers-pockets, “do you happen to know anything of the prospects of this cheerful family of ours? Here is Kate, at sixteen and a half—isn’t that about the mark, eh, Kitty?—naturally crazy to know when there is any chance of her being married. Don’t laugh; it’s a serious business, as I have no doubt Rhoda thinks too, though she hasn’t the brass, like you, to ask leading questions on the subject. However, what do you say it is to be? London, or no London? Husbands, or no husbands? It is really time that these poor girls should know their fate.”
Horace, thus appealed to, shook his head ominously. “I am as much in the dark as you can be,” was his unsatisfactory exordium. “Milady will be long enough before she either chooses confidants from among her children, or holds a conseil de famille as to their individual hopes and wishes. In the mean time,” he added, stretching himself{86} wearily, “what a bore this life is! I declare I would rather break stones upon the road than go on as we do at Gillingham. No creature except the clergyman and the London lawyer ever asked to the house, and my mother so awfully serious and gloomy! I declare, since the day when I was supposed to have finished my education, and when old Collins took his final leave with a handsome present of my father’s photograph as a testimony of my lady’s regard and esteem, I have never once enjoyed the unpurchasable luxury of a laugh. The best chance to get one is to spend an hour with Thady Nolan in the stables. He’s an importation since your time, Arthur, and I assure you, from personal experience, that you would find his society quite a resource. He is full of genuine Irish humour—quite a character in his way—and never, by any chance, takes liberties.”
“I am glad,” Arthur said, “that my mother hasn’t reduced the stable establishment to quite the same miserable footing as everything else about this miserable place. Individually, it doesn’t so much signify to me; not personally, I mean. When a man is going to be married—”
“Then it is true? O, Atty!” exclaimed Kate, and her eyes filled with tears, for she loved that prodigal and tant soit peu unprincipled brother, of whose faults she knew so little, very{87} dearly, and the idea of his marriage was, in some undefinable way, a blow to her.
“True! Of course it is. What was there besides for me to do? There was that season in London, two years ago now—how time does fly!—when you were all living so quietly in the country here, and when I—but there’s no earthly use in going over it all again. All I ask of you is, whether you, Kate, or you, Horace, or anyone that knows us both, would suspect me of marrying Sophy Duberly, unless—unless I couldn’t help myself?”
“I can’t see that exactly,” Horace said. “She’s a very fine-looking girl, and always jolly, with plenty to say for herself. I only wish that I had the good fortune to make an impression on just such another. I like your talking like a victim, Arthur! Heiresses to twenty thousand a year are not as plenty as blackberries, and Sophy Duberlys don’t grow on every hedge, to be had for the picking.”
“Well, that’s true enough, and I daresay it will all answer very well. Sophy is, I believe, what is generally called a ‘nice girl,’ and has an idea that she is fond of me, which may, or may not, be an illusion. Of the two, father or daughter, I confess I think old Dub himself the best fellow. I like the house too. There’s a{88} laissez-aller about it that is perfectly delicious when contrasted with our home. There is not an atom of gêne at Thanes Court. One may say and do and look as one likes at Mr. Duberly’s house. There are no cranky speeches; no domineering determination that only one person in the house is to lay down the law. I declare that if our home had been the least like that—if our mother resembled in anything that jolly old boy at Thanes Court—I, at the unripe age of—under twenty-one—should probably not be about to tie myself for life—a thing to which, at present, I feel not the least inclination—to a young woman for whom at present—well, there is no use in being over-confidential—if Sophy were as lovely as the Calipegean Venus, or even as attractive and charming as John Beacham’s Irish bride, I shall probably not look much at her face when she has been my wife a year.
he repeated to himself as he walked slowly away through a rarely-used but admirably-proportioned billiard-room into an apartment on the ground floor, which, by prescriptive right, he considered as his own.
“Poor Arthur!” Horace said, when he and his sister were left alone; “I had no idea that he{89} cared so little about her. I wonder what my mother will say when she hears it is all settled?”
“I wonder, too. Be glad, I should think: but she won’t say so, and will be angry because she was not told while it was going on. You were, I suppose, you close, ill-natured, unbrotherly boy! Of course, those long letters from Atty while he was at Cannes, and which you kept so provokingly to yourself, were all about Sophy Duberly. Now, tell me, Horace—there’s a good, dear boy—didn’t he propose then? I am sure he did, and that he told you all about what he said to Sophy, and what she answered, and—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Kate; men” (Horace was nineteen, and the down was beginning to darken on his chin) “are not in the habit of wasting letter-paper on such nonsense. Arthur made running at Cannes, of course, but nothing was settled till he and the Duberlys met the other day in Paris. I am sure that no one ought to wonder at his marrying. People will stare, of course—I mean those who can’t look behind the scenes. They will think it extraordinary that the heir to such a property as my mother’s should marry when he is only one-and-twenty for money.”
“Not quite for money only. You said just now, yourself, that Sophy was nice{90}—”
“Did I? Well, so she is; and if I were half as good-looking a fellow as Atty, I should look out for a girl a quarter as nice, with an eighth part of Sophy’s expectations; and if she accepted me, I should think myself a deuced lucky dog. Heigh ho! What an age it seems before the examination time! I wonder how long my mother thinks one can endure such a horrible existence as this.”
“It can’t last for ever,” Kate said; “and it is quite as bad for us as it is for you; and yet you never hear either Rhoda or me lamenting over our fate as you do over yours.”
“O, girls are different! Women are meant to live in the country, and stay at home.”
It was not the first time that Katherine Vavasour had listened to the enunciation of this popular aphorism, and, as usual, it provoked her excessively. In her opinion, the “lines” that had fallen to Horace were very pleasant compared to those hard ones which had been meted out to herself and her sister. He was permitted a certain kind of liberty, had a horse to ride, and provided that the hours for meals were not infringed on, or the family-prayer bell neglected, he was allowed to go and come pretty much as he liked. As regarded her daughters, however, Lady Millicent’s family rules and arrangements were far more{91} strict. Since the simultaneous dismissal (for the flagrant offence of joint matrimonial attentions) of Mr. Collins and Kate’s steady middle-aged governess, Lady Millicent had deemed it her duty to still further circumscribe the narrow circle of her daughters’ pleasures. She was a woman who disliked trouble, so that a few “general orders,” such as that no books from the circulating library were to be read, and no walks outside the park walls were to be taken, formed the staple of her very stringent form of government. Against these retrenchments, as well as against the daily dulness of their monotonous existence, Kate Vavasour (Rhoda was made of more submissive stuff) was perpetually chafing. She dreaded the moment, too, when Horace would be emancipated from the yoke which so sorely galled her own youthful shoulders. His education had been principally a home one, a private tutor having for the last three years been busily employed at the Castle in preparing the younger sons for the ordeal of a civil-service examination. Horace had been very impatient of the home restraints which during those three years had been imposed upon him. Often had he been seized with an almost irresistible longing to fly from the tedious sameness, the almost unendurable routine, of his home life. Had Lady Millicent been only{92} tolerably sympathetic—had she entered the least into their feelings—been but a few degrees less hard, less self-engrossed, and less unwilling to allow her children a few of the pleasures to which young flesh believes itself to be heir—it is more than probable that Horace would have been less anxious to escape from an existence which after all contained, as in later years he was ready to acknowledge, so many of the elements of happiness. That he did not so endeavour to escape was owing partly to the affection of Horace Vavasour for his sisters, who were wont to protest with tears that they could not endure their fate if he, the only one who kept their house alive, were to desert them; and partly to the habit of submission which had grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength. Before Lady Millicent’s second son also there was a road in life marked out—a point in the horizon on which his eyes and hopes were fixed. That point in the future was the competitive examination for which he had been so long and diligently preparing himself; that road in life was the one that led, through mental effort, as a “government servant,” to distinction. The career chosen for Horace Vavasour was that of a “public man;” how far an almost strictly private education was calculated to fit him for that career may remain an open question.{93}
Family prayers were over at the Castle. The ladies and gentlemen, who I fear were very little the better for the ceremony, and the servants, who, if they prayed at that time in the morning at all, would probably have infinitely preferred doing so in their so-called “closets” than under the eyes of their employers, had each and all risen from their knees; and breakfast, never much of a meal, according to the young men’s view of the matter, was in progress.
“A fine day for the wedding, eh?” remarked Arthur. “I’m glad you’re going, ma’am; John is one of the best fellows going. I owe him some attention for teaching me to ride. A deuced stick, too, I was at first, and a precious deal of trouble I gave him. There is nothing like beginning early though, and John was as patient as—”
“Well, as patient as what, or who?” asked Lady Millicent, noticing that he hesitated—she{94} being one who, in the smallest as well as the most important occasions of life, never obeyed the valuable rule, Glissez mortels, mats n’appuyez pas.
“O, I don’t know!” replied Arthur, who hated having what he said investigated—torn into threads, as he called it—by his lady mother. “Nothing particular. I believe, though, that I was going to say—as a woman.”
“I daresay,” sneered Lady Millicent; “your experience in that line has been too extensive for the simile not to strike you at once.”
Arthur bit his lip to keep down the retort that had risen to his tongue. He was not so well disposed as he had a year before shown himself to be to bear in a patient spirit the being snubbed and tyrannised over. A lengthened absence, together with the flattering attention everywhere shown to the heir-apparent of Gillingham—to say nothing of the matrimonial engagement which made him feel so like a man—were all in their different degrees responsible for the symptoms of rebellion that were rife within him. Lady Millicent looked, too, according to Arthur’s fancy, especially provoking on that bright spring morning. The almost shabby “slight” mourning in which—for economy’s sake, as the world supposed—it was the wealthy-widow’s pleasure to deck herself, looked terribly out of keeping with the sunshine of the “glad new year,{95}” and with the bright fresh flowers (a cheap luxury) never absent from the breakfast-table at Gillingham Castle, and which, on that especial morning, were redolent of votive offerings to the first of May. It was sad to think that at that breakfast of herbs (Lady Millicent did not approve of stalled-ox-feeding so early in the day), and so soon after the return of the first-born son, that son should be constrained to strive—but happily not in vain—to keep his temper.
The hour of eleven had struck by the clock of the Switcham parish church when, punctual to the moment, there was seen driving up the gentle ascent leading to the picturesque old gothic building, Lady Millicent’s open carriage, drawn by the powerful high-stepping pair of brown horses, half-brothers, bred by John’s father, and sold by him ten years before for a “long figure,” for the use of the Lady Millicent Vavasour. John Beacham took an honest pride—aged animals though they were—in those horses; and when from the elevated spot in the churchyard on which he was standing he caught sight of their grand “tops,” and heard the rapid footfall of the powerful thorough-breds on the gravelled road beneath, the memory of his dead father rose up strong within him, and John, ere he stepped forward hat in hand to welcome the liege lady of Gillingham,{96} passed his honest hand over his eyes, to brush away the moisture that had gathered on their lids.
The little church, as Lady Millicent, with her two daughters, walked slowly up the aisle, was filled to overflowing with eager sight-seers. From the moment it became generally known that the great family from the Castle had graciously condescended to honour John Beacham’s marriage with their presence, public interest in that event had risen to its height. Already the wedding presents graciously sent to the oldest and most respected tenant on the Gillingham estates had been duly inspected and admired, and the miniature bust in bronze of “the late lamented Cecil Vavasour, Esq.,” a dozen or two of which had been cast by Lady Millicent’s orders for such occasions as the present, had been duly forwarded the day before as a mark of esteem to the owner of Updown Paddocks, had been passed round among the friends and acquaintances assembled at Clay’s Farm, and received its meed of approval.
The simple people were a little puzzled by the ponderous ornament destined to grace the delicate throat of the bride. It was “milady’s” gift, and therefore safe from either animadversion or suspicion; but, under other circumstances, it is just possible that some few judicious critics—the ladies especially—might have been tempted to{97} pronounce the “pebble” brooch, in its thin setting of pale chased gold, not only an ugly but a parsimonious gift. That noblesse oblige formed no portion of Lady Millicent’s creed was a fact that in some way or other had come to be, perhaps, dimly suspected by the little world over whom she reigned. It would take a long time, however, and an enlarged experience of her ladyship’s meanness, selfishness, and general incapacity, before the fact of those proclivities would become an accepted truth by those whose fathers had lived in the good old “God save great George our King!” days, and who had been brought up to believe in the Vavasours of Gillingham. The memory of the good Squire still lingered amongst them. There were stories yet extant of his kindliness, his forgetfulness of self, his open-handed charity, and his rare and simple common sense. What wonder, then, that with the savour of his good deeds yet lingering about the widow, there should still be found a few ready to respect where she respected, and willing to honour those whom “milady” delighted to honour?
The church was then, as I have already said, crowded with people, when Lady Millicent sailed graciously down the aisle, clad in the rustling black-silk dress which the curtseying school-children had known so long, and which had brushed their humble skirts so often. The bride{98} was momentarily expected, and when the excitement caused by Lady Millicent’s entry had subsided, and she was comfortably seated in the rectory pew, all heads were turned towards the door in momentary expectation of another and a still more important arrival.
The manner of Miss Blake’s coming was well known to the initiated. There were no high-stepping brown horses to convey her to the churchyard-gate; and if the arrival of the first performers in the little drama were delayed, it was probably because the wheels of the Leigh “fly” tarried in the narrow lanes (deeply rutted by the passage of Farmer Clay’s wagons) which led up to the farm-house. It was an ancient vehicle, and had been called originally, I believe, a barouche-landau, which had been called into requisition to convey the bride and as many of the Clay family as could conveniently be packed into it to the village church that day.
“Make yourselves as small as you can, children, for fear of tumbling Honor’s frock,” the good-natured farmer had said as he deposited his two delighted little girls in the roomy carriage, and then, his own portly person being perched on the box-seat, the equipage drove off. The party, with the exception of the bride, who was rather pale and thoughtful, was in high spirits; and if the Leigh “fly” did{99} smell a trifle mouldy, and if the busy hungry moths had drilled a few round holes in the dingy drab lining, why what mattered it to them? It was none the less able to carry bright Honor Blake to her bridal; none the less in the children’s eyes a grand part of the brilliant pageant which would, for many a day to come, render that sweet first day of May a bright spot in their memories.
“O, mother! if there isn’t milady’s carriage!” exclaimed Ruth, a rather precocious young lady of ten, who had very unwillingly abdicated in favour of that “owdacious” Jenny the honour and glory of holding the bride’s bouquet at the altar; and Mrs. Clay, as she afterwards expressed herself, was “struck all of a quiver” with the shock of perceiving that the Castle carriage had arrived before them. Through the little iron gate between the yew-trees, which was set wide open to receive them—and very near to which Honor, in her agitation, did not perceive the two young men, Lady Millicent’s sons, standing to witness the rural show—the simple cortège passed. Mr. Clay, a sturdy yeoman-like looking man, attired in a Sunday costume, in which he never either seemed or felt at home, tucked the bride, to whom he was about to play the part of father, tightly under his arm, and the rest following, they walked slowly up the{100} rising ground between the rows of commemorative tombstones to the church.
There was a slight movement, and a faint murmur of “Here she comes,” as the fair white-robed figure, her slight form half-concealed by a long floating veil—neither Honiton nor Mechlin, yet it served the purpose well—was first caught sight of, passing behind the old baptismal font. The faint blush that had risen over neck and brow as Honor entered and felt the gaze of many eyes upon her deepened into crimson as she neared the altar. Then a sudden change came over the clear complexion which had been but a moment before glowing as a rose, and “from that out,” as Mrs. Tamfrey, who was present, was afterwards heard to say, “the bonny bird looked for all the world as if she had seen a ghost.”
As for happy honest John Beacham, he played, as is generally the melancholy fate of bridegrooms, a very secondary part on the occasion. “M.,” all-important as he really is, sinks in his bran new coat and waistcoat, into something even less than insignificant by the side of the peerless creature in her robes of innocence, with the symbolic wreath upon her “shining hair.” No one but his mother thought much of John as he stood side by side with “the Irish gurl,” and in a clear manly voice pronounced the vows that bound him to her{101} whilst life should last. To the elderly woman, about to sink into the mild dignity of dowagerhood, that tall, broad-shouldered man, with his thick wavy hair, his clear blue eyes, and, as the worthy woman often boasted, his “wholesome” skin, was a far more important personage than that “slip of a girl” who had, at an age when he ought to have known better, made such a fool and “ninny” of her only son. Her eyes, from the moment that he entered the church, never for a moment left his face. The demon of jealousy, which in the solitude of her home she had in some degree successfully combated, returned with redoubled force at the sight of John’s proud and radiant face, filled with a tenderness which gave quite a novel expression to his sun-burnt features.
The ceremony was no sooner over than Lady Millicent, who was known to take a great lady’s gracious interest in the domestic affairs of her tenantry, came forward with extended hand and wished the young people joy. The little speech which she made on the occasion was listened to with the outward appreciation and respectful attention usually accorded to the platitudes of the powerful. Possibly John Beacham, whose young wife’s hand was trembling on his arm, would have preferred silent good wishes to this outward and highly-flattering demonstration of goodwill.{102} Honor, too, blushing as she was beneath the gaze of a church-full of wonder-seekers, would gladly have escaped to the cool vestry, whence, by a quiet path beneath the old yew-trees, she and John would have gained the neat new brougham which he had purchased for his bride, and which was in waiting to receive her. But this was not to be. Not to be, at least, until Lady Millicent had gone through the ceremony of alluding in gratifying terms to her late husband’s interest in, and she might almost say (Lady M. was certainly wonderfully condescending) her friendship for, John; not to be till, holding the bride’s hand within her own (an honour which it is to be hoped that young woman fully appreciated), she had expressed a gracious hope that Mrs. John would prove worthy of her mission upon earth—namely, that of being a true and obedient wife, and a devoted mother to the children with whom Providence might deign to bless her union.
“A very neat and appropriate speech,” laughed Horace, as the two young men sauntered out of the churchyard. “I should have liked to put in something poetical and complimentary about the ‘bridal of the earth and sky,’ for, by Jove! she looks a good deal too delicate and ethereal to be John Beacham’s wife.”
“She is very beautiful, certainly,” Arthur re{103}sponded. “I hope it will answer; but somehow those sort of marriages don’t always end as well as they begin;” and having thus lucidly delivered himself, they walked on for a short while in silence.{104}
“Nothing the matter, really, John. I am not ill, indeed—only stupid;” and Honor, leaning on her husband’s arm, looked up into his face with one of her sunniest smiles.
“Stupid! How’s that?” John said. “You were never stupid at the Clays’. You were gay as a bird there, my darling. What’s come over you, my sweet one? I hope you’ve got everything you want to make you happy?”
“Indeed I have, John,” said Honor, speaking with that smallest soupçon of a brogue which made everybody wonder, so young had she been when she left her native soil, how it was that the Celtic accent clung to her at all. “Indeed I have, John. I am very happy;” and she spoke so softly, and pressed the arm to which she clung with such a tender loving force, that John, entirely reassured, went on his way rejoicing.
Honor only said what she believed to be the{105} truth, and yet, for all that, her heart—although she could not have told you why—was heavy within her. Perhaps it was the enforced idleness of her life—for neither she nor John had anything to do at Ryde—which weighed upon her spirits. It had been so very different at the Clays’. There was Ruthie to teach, and little Jenny to pet and keep in order; to say nothing of Tom—that terrible Tom!—whose frock and trousers were always, do what you would, in the wash-tub; and Neddy, who was wise beyond his years, and whose questionings on abstruse subjects were for ever taxing Honor’s simple stores of knowledge to the utmost.
It might be, then, that she missed the avocations which kept her always busy in her old home; and besides, she had so early seemed to have exhausted all she had to say to John. They had talked over the kindness of the Clays, and laughed together, just a very little, at Lady Millicent’s grandiosity, which even Honor’s limited experience taught her was slightly out of keeping with the nature of her gifts. The trifling incidents of the wedding also—the abnormal and unexpected ones, that is to say—had more than once, in the dearth of other topics, formed cheerful subjects for conversation between the newly-married pair.{106}
“I was sure that Joe Griggs would do something extraordinary,” Honor said, “when I saw him coming across the meadow with that great bunch of yellow flowers stuck upon his coat. I little thought they were nothing in the world but dandelions, and that he had brought them to give me in the church. Mrs. Clay was quite vexed with me for taking them, but I couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings; and if they did stain my frock it didn’t signify much—I can turn the side-breadth, and then no one will know anything about it.”
John Beacham was profoundly ignorant of the mysteries of a lady’s dress; of “side-breadths” he knew no more than he did of Sanscrit, and he would hardly have noticed a stain if he had seen it; but he did know—and what was infinitely more to the purpose, he could appreciate—a delicate and an unselfish trait in the woman that he had made his wife. He thought it very “pretty” of Honor to accept the idiot’s offering, and so he told her lovingly as they wandered together in the pleasant walks outside the town, which in itself seemed to them both so infinitely dull.
Unfortunately for the success of their trip the weather proved very unfavourable for honeymooning. The sun that had shone so brightly{107} that glad May-day at “home” seemed to have entirely forsaken the sea-shore, along which John Beacham and his wife, for variety’s sake, sometimes turned their steps. To judge of weather matters from the severity of the cold, and the force with which the strong north-eastern blew upon “the Island,” a second and a sterner winter than the last was visiting the earth. The early leaves, nipped by the severity of the blast, hung brown and withered on the twigs. Noses were suggestively roseate, warm shawls were gathered closely round shivering forms, and the face of Nature was, as it were, hidden behind a cloud.
Honor was very far from being a literary character; and yet—melancholy to relate—she had not been more than three days a wife when she found herself regretting that John was not more of a reading man. He could not be called a dull companion, for he took a real interest in the talk of others, was easily amused, and both his remarks and replies were sensible and to the purpose; but for all this, and though the scene and their position were new, time—there could be no doubt about that fact—did hang heavy at Ryde both with Honor and her husband. Sooth to say, the latter was rather like a fish out of water at that sea-side watering-place. The journey and the voyage thither, with that exquisite Honor by{108} his side, had been simply delicious, and the coming fortnight would, he had doubted not, pass as a too short hour of perfect and hitherto undreamt-of bliss. Too soon, however, the active-minded man, to whom absence of employment was such an entirely novel phase of existence, discovered that his short dream on the deck of the Ryde steamer was not destined to be realised. His beautiful Honor was not one whit less perfect, nor was his conviction that he was the happiest of men less firm, than when he led her first within the gates of Paradise: but—and there, in a word, lay the true cause of the evil—Ryde was not Updown Paddocks—not the place where the interests of his life had so long been centred; not the spot where the brood-mares, plump and matronly, and the young stock, wild with youth and spirits, met his eyes at every turn as he took his daily walks; not the spot, in short, where, at every moment of his life, he had something to do, to think of, and to project. Not to mince the matter, John Beacham—dearly and passionately as he loved his wife—was, at the end of ten days’ holiday-time, sick to death of the place to which he and Honor had betaken themselves to be happy. Never in all his life had he found the days so long, never in his experience had the wind howled and the sleet pelted during spring-time as it did at Ryde{109} during that memorable fortnight in the so-called “merrie” month of May.
“I wonder what the yearlings think of this,” was John’s remark, one bitter, blustering day, as he and Honor were boldly wrestling with the breeze on the long wooden pier. “I only hope that Simmons has been minding my orders. The worst of it is, that in these days understrappers are all for having opinions of their own—a thing I never was allowed,” he added with a cheery smile, “when I was a youngster. I think the old woman is about right in saying that everything is changed since her time. I wonder, though, what we should think of goings on if they were to come back to what she remembers them fifty years ago.”
“We should find some of them very funny, I daresay,” said Honor, laughing. “Dress, for instance. Now, I think Mrs. Beacham’s lace cap so nice for an old lady, but—”
“Don’t call mother ‘Mrs. Beacham,’ Honey,” John said. “Honey” was a pet name that he had bestowed upon his wife. It was sweet, he thought, and delicate, and besides in the Bible it was written that “honey was good;” so altogether it seemed to suit his little wife; and she, after laughingly telling him that the petit nom was still more Irish than her own, answered to it as readily{110} as though she had been called a “Honey” from her birth.
“I want my mother to be the same as if she was your own, Honey,” John said. “She’s a good woman—a better, to my thinking, never trod the ground. But she’s cranky sometimes. I can’t say that she isn’t that. You’ll have to bear with her, Honey, I don’t doubt, now and then; but you won’t mind that, pet? One must make allowances for old people; they get into ways of their own, you know, and it isn’t easy for them to change. Indeed, I’m not sure,” he added musingly, “that, after a certain age, anyone is much the better for altering the ways that they’ve got used to.”
“After a ‘certain age’! Ah, now, John,” Honor said in a tone of playful reproach, “sure you’re not going to say that you’re not the better for not living lonely like at the Paddocks? I only hope though—ah, you don’t know, John, how much I wish it”—and she spoke with a sad kind of earnestness—“that your mother—I’ll not call her Mrs. Beacham, if you don’t like it—will not think that you are the worse for change. I know I’m foolish, John, and young and inexperienced; but I mean to try and please her. I hope she’ll like me. Do you think she will,{111} John?” and she looked up wistfully in her husband’s face, awaiting his reply.
“Like you?” he repeated with an amused laugh at the intense absurdity of the doubt implied. “Like you! I should think she would indeed! Why, Honey, you’ll be her daughter, child—think of that!—and the light of the home that never had a daughter in it before; and you’ll be petted and made much of; and those pretty little hands of yours won’t have anything to do but to make pictures of the trees and flowers as you’re so fond of doing; and sometimes, especially of a Sunday evening, when my mother loves a hymn dearly, you’ll sing to us in that warbling way you used to do at Clays’. I haven’t forgotten—no, nor I never shall, if I live to be a hundred—the first time I listened to your voice, Pet. It was just a simple nursery song to please the children—not much to speak of, I daresay, either as to words or music—but somehow or other, I don’t know how it was, it went to my heart as straight as an arrow from a bow.”
They were on the pier still—that cold shelterless Ryde Pier—the wild wind whistling about their ears, and toying with Honor’s drapery in a manner more rudely familiar than was altogether agreeable to that young lady’s feelings. At that moment the vision of certain peaceful{112} lanes—lanes where the nightingales sang, and the clematis twined about the hawthorn-trees—flashed across her tenacious memory, and filled her mind with pleasant thoughts of home.
“Anything would be better than this,” she said to herself, as the nor’-wester, tearing round the extremity of the pier, so nearly swept her off her legs that she was forced to cling convulsively to her husband’s strong arm for protection.
John’s last words, and the cheery confidence with which he spoke of the success of their solitude à trois, from the contemplation of which she had hitherto nervously shrank, contributed not a little to her conviction that, all things considered, they would be better off at Updown Paddocks than listening in that half-deserted town to the melancholy murmur of “the sad sea waves.”
“What’s in your little head now—eh, Honey?” asked John, when the hearty laugh caused by the wind’s boisterous behaviour had subsided, and they were trudging calmly homeward to their early—that is to say, their six-o’clock—dinner.
“Nothing particular, only—”
“Only what? Out with it, pet,” persisted John, who could not help nourishing a faint hope that Honor, like himself, might be growing home-sick, and was only watching for an opportunity of mak{113}ing known her weakness—“out with it. I shouldn’t wonder now,” he continued archly, “to find we were both thinking of the same thing.”
Honor reddened up to the very roots of her hair. She was an inveterate blusher. A word, a look, nay even a passing thought flitting across her own pure mind, would send the red blood coursing under her delicate skin. This peculiarity, which formed one of her greatest charms, was a source of constant annoyance and mortification to the young wife. It was so tiresome to betray what otherwise no one would know anything about but herself; so provoking, that John might be guessing now that she was harbouring a wish that was not altogether flattering to his self-love. She was longing, though she would not have told him so for worlds, to go away from Ryde. The strangest feeling of depression—a depression for which she could not in the least degree account—was creeping over her spirits. To analyse her sensations would have been for this young girl simply an impossibility. That the aspect of life and the things of life had, in some inscrutable manner, changed for her, she was, after a vague fashion, aware. There was a shade over her future. An extinguisher seemed, by some invisible hand, to have been placed over the bright point in the horizon, where hope had{114} before shone with such undimmed lustre. Honor was far too untaught in the mysteries of our complex human nature to understand, in even a limited degree, why the sunshine of her life—in spite of John’s love, her matronly dignity, and her new clothes—seemed suddenly to have faded out. How was this young girl, this almost child, to surmise that the number of newly-made wives who go through the like ordeal is legion? Sooner or later, in a greater or in a less degree, the same flagging of the spirits, the same utterly-unexpected and hard-to-be-endured tædium vitæ, oppresses the young spirit which had soared, alas, too high, and had dropped to earth so quickly. Time and “habit” may, or may not, according to the idiosyncrasy of the sufferer, produce beneficial results; but who can deny that the condition is a critical one? Who will not be found willing to agree that this probable condition of mind should form matter for serious reflection before the irrevocable words are spoken which bind one woman to one man so long as their lives shall last? There is an easy-to-be-believed-in “flatness,” a flatness very depressing to the female mind, when the one great event—the epoch to which all the daughters of Eve naturally look forward—is past and over, and the wife has quietly to learn whether or not she is “dearer than the{115} bride.” Anticipation—highly raised, and coloured by the wondrous charm inalienable from the unknown—is at an end for ever; and fruition, in nine cases out of ten, makes poor amends for the loss of hope’s gay pleasures, and the absence of the joy which anticipation brings.
But, in addition to this, there were other and peculiar reasons why Honor should be unsettled, at least, if not discontented, in her mind. She had made the discovery that, in more ways than one, that excellent John, of whom before marriage she had comparatively seen so little, was unsuited to her! Beyond a mutual liking to be out of doors, and a decided fondness for dogs and horses, Honor could not perceive that they had a single taste in common. He liked music after a fashion; that is to say, it gave him pleasure to hear her sing a simple ballad, such as “The banks of Allan Water,” or the “Soldier’s Tear”—old-world songs, of which he liked to listen to the words when Honor took especial pains clearly to enunciate them for his benefit. Of modern poetry—of the “whispered balm,” the “music spoken,” which thrilled through Honor’s bright and teeming fancy to her heart—John Beacham was profoundly ignorant. Of Tennyson he knew little, save his name; while of the beauties of Longfellow he was as{116} ignorant as of the scattered pages of the Sibyl’s prophecies.
Now it chanced that this pretty, ambitious Honor, who, pending any positive information concerning her birth, had thought herself into the belief that she was born a “lady,” had arrived at the not wholly irrational conviction that her husband’s literary tastes (for a gentleman) might with advantage be more extended and refined. She was angry with herself for having come to this conclusion. John was so kind and thoughtful, so tender of her feelings, and so unwearied in his efforts to amuse her, that Honor felt quite wicked to have discovered in him even one shortcoming; and the consciousness that she was not so happy as he hoped to see her made the poor child feel positively guilty. That dear, good John! How kindly he had taken her about! What a number of excursions (getting wet through more than once in consequence) he had indulged her in! And if the weather had been but fine, would there have been a single nook, both in the Island and outside it, that the newly-married pair would not, during the passing of those uneventful days, have made acquaintance with?
If the weather had but been fine! Ay, there was the rub; but there also lay, in some sort, the way out of their difficulties.{117}
“I was thinking how unlucky we have been,” Honor said, when the quick blush had faded from her cheek, and the glance of deprecation had been withdrawn. “Not one single fine day have we had since we left Sandyshire! I wonder if it has rained and blown so much at home. O my poor feather!” she murmured piteously (for they were by this time within the narrow entrance of their cottage lodging, and Honor had taken off the little hat with which the wind and spray had been making havoc, and was twirling it with an air of half-comic dismay upon her fingers),—“my poor feather! and such a beauty as it was when it came home from Leigh!”
She was a child still in her love for new toys and the pretty trifles that adorn a woman; and almost a child she looked as she stood there stroking the pheasant’s breast (pheasant-plumage was the last new thing in hat-trimmings that had, at this period, found its way to Leigh), and pouting her rosy lip in simulated sorrow.
John Beacham was eminently “matter-of-fact,” a quality which goes very far towards the making of common sense. He believed Honor to be really fretting over her feather, and he comforted her accordingly.
“Never mind about the hat, Honey,” he said, after pressing his lips on the fresh rounded cheek{118} that was so temptingly at hand. “We’ll go home and get another. Hats and feathers wear twice as long in Sandyshire. The sea air is the deuce and all to pay for spoiling things. What do you say, pet? Shall we see if the weather ain’t better at the Paddocks? This place is all very well, and I’ve been as happy in it—well, as happy as a king, if a king ever is happy, which I’m doubtful of, unless it’s in the honeymoon; but home is home after all, and I—don’t laugh, pet; you’ll feel the same one day yourself—never can manage to feel at home anywhere else.”
“I didn’t laugh at you, John,” Honor said, passing her arm coaxingly within her husband’s. “I was only pleased to be going home. I believe I’m just tired of having nothing to do—you know you always called me a busy little body—and besides, I want you to go back to the pretty beasties you are so fond of. There’s Lady Bell; you can’t deny now, John, that you’re dreadfully wrapped up in Lady Bell! I’ve caught you more than once wondering what the baby would be; and then there’s the something Dove—what do you call her?—the beautiful gray mare with the wicked eye, that—”
“Never mind the mare,” put in John hastily; “and, Honey, mind this, I’m not wrapped up in{119} anything but you. I shall be glad to see the mares again, but if you care to stay—”
“But, John, I don’t care to stay; I would rather, a thousand times, go home; I want to begin my life—our life together—at the Paddocks. And there’s your mother too—your mother must be so lost without you. She said to me the very last thing: ‘Don’t keep John too long away; nothing goes on well without the master’s eye, and time lost isn’t so easy found again.’”
John Beacham laughed. There was his mother all over in those trite sentences. It was so like her, too, to mix up business with the fade sentimentality (as the old woman, had she known the words, would have termed it) of the wedding-day.
“My mother knows tolerably well what she is about,” he said, “and there’s often plenty of wisdom to be picked out of those dry sayings of hers. I’ll be bound now she’s counting the days till we come back; I can see her as plain now as if I was at home” (and John grew quite enthusiastic as the homely prospect rose up before him): “I can see her giving out the yellow soap for the house-cleaning, and keeping the maids up to their duty—ah, she was always a good one for that—and then off to the parlour to dust the ornamental china with her cambric handkerchief. Dear old mother! She mayn’t be one of the tender sort—not what I{120} call a crying kind of woman—but she’s good at heart, though I don’t remember—no, not even when my father died—I can’t say I do, that she what you may call shed tears. She may have done so, of course, and I not know it; but to the best of my belief my mother is just the kind of woman not to.”
It was characteristic of John Beacham, and of his extreme correctness and scrupulosity of speech, that after delivering himself of this interesting family diagnostic, he seemed somewhat uneasy in his mind, and as if not thoroughly satisfied that he had spoken no more than the exact and literal truth. It was characteristic too of his wife, and of a habit which was hers of putting this and that together, that she read to herself (all unwittingly, for the accusation of perusing “character” would have been received by a laugh of incredulity) not only in John’s cautious ways, but in the proof just adduced of her mother-in-law’s lack of tenderness, elements of future discomfort for herself. Visions of this maîtresse femme, stern, thrifty, and uncompromising, darkened her mental vision. Ever since her engagement to John, Mrs. Beacham had been, to a certain extent, an object of dread to the quick-witted girl, who felt instinctively that she would never be cordially welcomed, save by its master, to the old farm-house. She saw her now,{121} in her mind’s eye, with that symbolic piece of yellow soap in her bony hands—cold, square-cut, neat, and clean. Very, ay, terribly cold she must be, Honor thought, or she would have wept sometimes in the years that John had known her; Mrs. Beacham must—so decided the April-natured girl, to whom tears and smiles came both so readily—either have been blessed with a very happy life, or with very limited powers of feeling. It was pleasanter on all accounts to attribute the insensibility of her fellow-woman to the former cause; so she said in her gentle acquiescing way:
“Your mother is very fortunate in having known so few troubles; I think, though, that crying or not crying has a great deal to do with people’s constitutions. I cry dreadfully easily: I shall try not, when Mrs. Beacham—I beg your pardon, John—when mother sees me. She would think me such an awful little goose. But about going home, John,” she went on after a pause, during which her husband still continued looking silently at the empty grate; you see, he was so very anxious that Honor should not be led by him to return a day sooner than she felt inclined. “About going home; suppose we write and say we’re coming—you would like it, I know quite well, and I shall be so glad to see the roses in the dear old garden that you are so fond of. They will all be in blossom{122} soon, and then the new greenhouse, and all the pretty new flowers—”
“And the new pianner, and chaiselong, and sofa table,” John said slily—“you’ve got it all to see, Honey. I’ve had such a pretty sunny room new furnished for you—a room that my mother never used nor cared for. I don’t know how it was,” he continued musingly, “but she certainly never did care for that room. And yet it looks to the south, and opens out upon the garden. Windows down to the ground, you know, and yet not exactly to the ground; for there is a flight, or rather two flights, of old stone steps, that meet together in a sort of little balcony at the top; and the balustrades are iron, all as old as old can be, and covered thick with honeysuckles and roses. Yes, I feel sure that you will like your room, Honey, and be as happy in it, I hope, as a little bird.”
Honor felt sure of it too; it would be so delightful to step out among the pinks and roses in that dear old-fashioned garden at the Paddocks. She had only been there once—once on an occasion that it was not easy to forget, namely, when she had been driven over from Clay’s Farm by John to be inspected and pronounced judgment on by the formidable old lady in the black-silk dress, who watched her with such a keen-eyed{123} scrutiny, calling thereby so many painful blushes to her burning cheeks.
Those days of trial were happily over now. According to John—and Honor placed unbounded confidence in her husband’s judgment—there was no reason for the nameless alarm which had often filled her mind at the idea of sharing the home of John Beacham’s mother. By degrees, and partly moved thereto by the springing trustfulness of youth, the young wife had learned even to think with pleasure of that other inmate of her new home, whose affection she hoped to win, and to whose comfort it was her firm intention to devote herself.
“So that’s all settled,” said John, drawing a long breath, as he thrust his writing-desk from him, and threw up his big muscular arms for what he called a “stretch.” “Leave this at ten; strike across country; after the voyage to Reading, and—yes, that’s exactly it—be home for my mother’s tea at seven. Won’t she be glad to get the letter, that’s all! And sha’n’t I be glad to tell her that I’ve got the sweetest, to say nothing of the prettiest, wife that ever a fellow was blest with?”
“And your mother’ll say you spoil me,” Honor said, while a sigh struggled with a smile for mastery. “You mustn’t be making too much of me,{124} John. You’ll be having me, like little Tommy Clay, crying for I don’t know what, one of these days, if you don’t take care.”
“God bless you, my Irish darling!” exclaimed John enthusiastically, for the slight Celtic accent in which his young wife spoke made her words sound very sweet and winning to his ears. “God bless you! and while I live, and after it pleases Him to take me, may you be as happy, dearest, as you deserve to be!{125}”
A fortnight, minus two days, had passed since John Beacham was married, and once more, on the occasion of the return of the bride and bridegroom to their home, all Switcham was on the tiptoe of expectation. At the little wayside station, almost a private one for the accommodation of “the Castle,” few trains throughout the day were in the habit of stopping. There was one at 7.10 P.M., a fact to which the time-table and Bradshaw, those sworn enemies to indiscreet surprises, bore useful witness; and as by that train the bridal party was by the Switchamites fully expected to arrive, a considerable crowd had (when the down passengers were due) assembled round and about the station, ready, with more heartiness than good taste, to bestow on the returned travellers a noisy and a cordial welcome home.
Meanwhile John and his pretty wife had spent the greater part of the day in London, enjoying, amongst other inexpensive pleasures, the apparently{126} inexhaustible one of looking in at the tempting windows of the West-end shops. It was Saturday afternoon, and the carriages, as was usual on that day, were pretty well filled with passengers. Honor and her husband had already taken their places, the first bell had been rung, and only one seat remained unappropriated in the compartment which they occupied, when a handsome, distinguished-looking young man, whose face Honor thought she had seen before, came slowly sauntering along the platform. He glanced in a careless manner towards the carriages as he passed, but his eye chancing to catch sight of John’s honest sun-burnt face, he stopped, and nodding familiarly, asked the latter if there was a vacant place.
“Plenty,” John said cordially.—“Make a little room, Honey. That’s it.—Quite well, sir?”—shaking hands cordially with the new-comer, whom he introduced to his wife as “the young Squire.”
“You must excuse me,” he went on, speaking with the cheery voice and pleasant smile that were among the various causes of the well-known horse-breeder’s popularity,—“you must excuse me for calling you so. I’ve known you ever since you was such a little chap, and your noble father” (John’s ideas of nobility were somewhat confused, inasmuch as the simple fellow was weak enough to believe in the “patent” of a good man who “fears{127} God, and loves his neighbour as himself”)—“your noble father was ‘the Squire’ before you, sir, and we wouldn’t like the title to die out.—I have known this gentleman, my dear,” turning to Honor, who was blushing crimson behind her little coquettish veil, “ever since”—suiting the action to the word—“he was that high.”
Arthur laughed. The train was going at express speed now, so that conversation was carried on under difficulties. “You must have had wretched weather during your excursion,” he said, addressing himself less exclusively to Honor than he would have done had she been exactly in his own position in life. He was, as I have more than once said, a very good-looking young gentleman, and being besides unfortunately endowed with the often dangerous gift, described by one of the most brilliant of French novelists as l’œil à femmes, he was a little in the habit of bonnes fortunes. Honor, too, was looking wonderfully pretty, as she sat opposite, with lowered eyelids, colouring under the pleasing consciousness of being gazed at and admired. Arthur was not much troubled with shyness, but for some reason, or other he did not find it quite easy just then to talk to John Beacham’s wife.
“Well, I can’t say that the sun did trouble us much,” John said: “as I told Honor there, she{128} might have left her parasols and sun-shades behind her. Such a fortnight as it’s been I never knew before, for the time of year. We’ve come back a day or two before time; but we were half afraid the old lady would find it dull by herself at the Paddocks, to say nothing of the stock,” he added, laughing. “Honor tells me sometimes that she believes I care more for the mares and foals than I do for kith and kin.”
“Ah, now I didn’t say quite that, John,” Honor said in a very low tone; but Arthur caught the words and replied to them:
“I’m sure you didn’t, Mrs. Beacham, and John will be forgetting his out-of-door amusements altogether, now that he’s got something better than kith and kin at home. I only wish that we were half as well off at the Castle. The old house has grown more melancholy than ever since I went away. By Jove, what a county it is! No hunting—no neighbourhood—nothing earthly to be done!”
“Why don’t you take to breeding?” John asked; “there’s an interest for you at once. Manage one of your own farms, and have plenty of young stock, and, take my word for it, you’ll be all right then.”
Before Arthur could make any reply to this characteristic piece of advice, the train had{129} slackened speed, and looking out, he announced that they had arrived at Switcham. It was, as I before remarked, a small unpretending station, very quiet as a rule, which made the crowds assembled in and about it all the more remarkable.
“What can be going on?” said Honor. “John, look at those people. Maybe the Queen is coming along the line;” and she looked out curiously upon the throng, as the long train slowly rolled on towards it.
Suddenly there was heard a shout—the welcome cry of a hundred tongues, as the bride’s fair face was recognised, and John Beacham, the man whom both rich and poor loved and respected, was known to be once more amongst them. Honor drew back, embarrassed and distressed.
“O, John! it’s because of our coming home,” she whispered; but John was too busy, and, if the truth must be told, too pleased at this public reception, to be very ready with his sympathy.
“Switcham! Switcham!” shouted the bustling official, as he threw open the carriage-door; and in a moment John was on the platform, his hands full of packages, and a broad smile of unmitigated happiness lighting up his honest face.
“Can I be of any use? Hadn’t you better take my arm?” Arthur said. He spoke in the{130} soft conventional tone which the constant mixing with what is called “good society” renders habitual, but to Honor, at that moment of (to her) real distress, it seemed the confidential whisper of a friend, and the gentle intervention of a champion.
“Make way!—Will you be so good?—A little on one side, there’s a good man,” urged Arthur, pressing forward with John Beacham’s bride upon his arm, and addressing certain individuals amongst the complimenting crowd, who allowed their curiosity to get the better of their good breeding, with an impertinent amenity that was not without its effect. “Stand back, please.—That’s all right.—This is your brougham, is it not?” to Honor, who, pale, bewildered, and overcome, was looking round helplessly for her husband.
“O, you needn’t expect Beacham yet,” said Arthur, laughing; “he is shaking hands with everybody, right and left. That’s what comes of being popular. It would be long enough before all those fellows wanted to shake hands with me. Ah, there he is! You will let me see you safe into the carriage? By heavens! what are all those fellows going to do?” he exclaimed, as a number of young men and boys, who had crowded round the brougham, gave evident tokens of preparing for an ovation. Already the {131}coachman—one of John Beacham’s most trusted retainers—was off his box, and had taken his professional stand by the head of the powerful, high-stepping bay mare, whose traces were hanging loosely at her sides, and who was beginning to manifest very decided symptoms of impatience. Honor was greatly agitated—her nerves, like all those of persons who feel deeply, were not strong—and the shout of welcome which had brought tears to her eyes, and a globus hystericus to her delicate throat, was still tingling in her ears. Arthur felt her hand tremble, and her breath come quick and pantingly from her parted lips. He feared she was going to faint, and in his exasperation made matters worse by swearing at the crowd, and devoting to perdition the authors of her annoyance.
At that moment (the whole affair had not occupied many minutes) John Beacham, hot, red-faced, and happy, made his appearance. He laughed heartily, having no suspicion of his wife’s distress, at what was going forward.
“Fire away, boys!” he cried to the strong men who had already taken the Wild Woman’s place in the shafts. “Rather you than me, this warm day, anyhow!—Jump in, Honor;” and then, looking round at his wife, he saw with dismay how pale she was. “Never mind, Pet; they’re good{132} fellows, and they won’t be long about it.—Now then, away with you!—Good-bye, Mr. Vavasour;” and Arthur, standing by, his eyes fixed on the white frightened face within the carriage, saw, as in a dream, the laughing, shouting throng, and in the midst of it, moving slowly onward, the dark-green brougham that bore the lovely Honor to her home.
“By ——” he muttered to himself, as he gathered up the reins of his dog-cart, “to think that such beauty as that should be wasted on a boor!{133}”
It would be hard to say whether gratified maternal pride or a perhaps natural jealousy was uppermost in Mrs. Beacham’s mind when she saw from her parlour window the uproarious advent of her belongings. It was delightful to think how popular John was,—for what but the respect and affection in which he was universally held could, in her opinion, account for the great amount of bodily exertion attendant on dragging a heavy carriage a mile and upwards to the very door of the Paddocks? It was pleasant also to reflect that she was the mother of one whom the world delighted to honour; but with that reflection came the alloying thought that another, id est, the “Irish gel” sitting complacently—for so Mrs. Beacham pictured her—by the side of the infatuated John, was to come in for far more than her merited share of popular attention.
The house from which the stern old lady watched the return of her son from his first{134} lengthened absence was a long, rambling, one-storied abode, built of brick whose hue was mellowed by age, and with its south front covered almost to the roof with two centenarian pear-trees, the fruit of which was renowned for its size and flavour throughout the whole country-side, and to which, moreover, was owing the name of “Pear-tree House,” that had, time out of mind, been the appropriate designation of John Beacham’s home. From the elevated site of that home, those within, who chanced to be gazing from the south windows, could obtain an excellent view of what was passing in the Paddocks outside. They could trace the well-kept private road winding through the bright green meadows, which were portioned off from each other by shade-giving hedgerows, and dotted with white freshly-painted gates. Many a time had Mrs. Beacham, knitting in hand—she could make a stocking blindfold, as the good woman had been heard to boast—sat at the window of the small low-roofed parlour (the parlour with the heavy beams across the ceiling, which she never would allow to be modernised and made smooth), watching the coming of her son—listening for the sound of his well-hung dog-cart, or the swift footsteps of the weight-carrying thoroughbred bearing his owner home, after a hard day’s exercise, to his evening meal.{135}
The news that “the master” was on the road, that the Wild Woman had been left behind at Switcham, and that the carriage was being drawed home by the boys from the village, was not long in reaching Pear-tree House. It was through the means of Letty the parlour-maid, a young woman given to holding evening converse with smart serving-men over out-of-sight palings, that the intelligence arrived at Mrs. Beacham’s expectant ears.
“Coming home without the horse? Stuff and nonsense!” exclaimed the old lady, rising from her seat, however, with considerable alacrity, to ascertain the truth or falsehood of Letty’s report. She was not kept long in suspense. Round the thick screen of laurel-bushes there was heard a confused sound of human voices, shouting, laughing, and hooraying,—then the carriage, with John and Honor inside, was drawn up with a rush to the door, and “the master,” much moved with happiness and gleeful excitement, sprang out upon the hall steps.
“Well, mother,” he said, kissing her cheek with warm affection, while his arm was thrown round the old woman’s waist, “what do you think of this start? Jolly, ain’t it?” And in the exceeding delight of the moment he forgot his precious Honor altogether!
She was well content, poor child, to be over{136}looked. It had required a strong effort on her part not to mar her husband’s enjoyment by any display of foolish womanly weakness. She felt faint and nervous, and the painful shrinking from her first interview with the dreaded autocrat of Pear-tree House had returned with redoubled force as the crisis of arrival drew nearer and more near. She had made no sign, however, of her distress, and had even contrived, in the fear that John might make the uncomfortable discovery that she was less happy than himself, to summon the ghost of a smile to her pale and quivering lip.
They were standing together—those three who fully expected that all the years of their future lives would be passed together—on the broad, well-worn stone steps leading to the entrance-door of the house. Mrs. Beacham had returned her son’s embrace with interest. There was for the moment unmixed pleasure in seeing his well-loved face again; but, because of that very pleasure, her welcome to Honor was stiff and ceremonious. A touch of the small cold hand with her unbending fingers, and a kiss on the pale cheek that grew paler still under the infliction, was all the greeting bestowed by John’s mother on the daughter he had brought home to her.
“Three cheers for the missus!” shouted John’s volunteer team, whereupon the air rang with the{137} loud hurrah that only British throats can give. Inspired by the near prospect of the strong ale which they foresaw would be forthcoming from the far-famed Pear-tree cellar, not a boy or man amongst them spared his lungs, and twice and again, each time more deafening than the last, burst forth the ringing cheer, till even John was fain to put his fingers to his ears, and to cry, with a laugh, “Hold, my friends; enough!”
“I’m sure, my good fellows,” he began, when the tumult had in some degree subsided, and the necessity of returning the compliment by a speech was evidenced by the expectant looks of the bystanders, “I’m sure that my wife is uncommonly obliged to you.” (His wife! thought Mrs. Beacham senior, who, having hitherto been considered in the light of “missus” at the Paddocks, had taken the compliment to herself.) “My wife,” repeated John, laying what poor soured Mrs. Beacham considered an insulting stress upon the obnoxious word,—“my wife has, I am sorry to see, retired. She is not very strong, and the journey has knocked her up; but another time—”
“At the christening of little master, eh?” cried a shrill voice from the very centre of the crowd; whereupon there was a laugh—one of those rude, coarse, blustering laughs with which untaught human nature, before it has learnt to{138} discriminate between wit and humour, erects the sole form of joke which it is capable of understanding.
John looked about him in dismay. It was dreadful to think that Honor—his delicate blushing Honor—should have overheard, and been shocked by, that horrible allusion. For the first time since he had known her it was a relief to find that she was not by his side; he only hoped that she had gone upstairs—to bed—anywhere rather than run the risk of being wounded by such coarse, such premature remarks.
“I have been more gratified than I can well express,” John went on to say, and briskly enough this time, for he wished to get the whole thing over, and to have his house to himself, “by the flattering manner in which you have welcomed us home again. I see a great many old friends’ faces among you, and I hope one day to see your wives’ faces—and may you all be as happy as I am! There is plenty of ale, thank God! in the cellar, and as cheering is thirsty work, to say nothing of coming up here against collar this warm day, I hope you’ll all accept a glass apiece, and then go back and set the bells of Switcham Church a-ringing. I’m not much of a hand at a speech, and so, as it’s getting late, and{139} we’re all pretty well tired, I shall wish you a very Good-Night.”
He shook hands heartily, after this delicate hint, with those that stood nearest to him, and the crowd, eager to taste the reward of their exertions, caused no further delay by any lengthened expression of applause. In a few minutes all was peaceful outside the south front of the old house. There was no sound save the faint rustling of the wind among the branches, and the last twitter of the birds ere they nestled to their nightly sleep. Only inside was there strife. Not the strife of outward jangling, or of sneering words, but the far more perilous discord that lies hid behind a smiling mask. John’s mother was very civil to Honor, but she could not forgive her for the slight put upon Mrs. Beacham of the Paddocks.
“Three cheers for the missus” indeed! It remained to be seen, the old lady said to herself, who was mistress at Pear-tree House. Two couldn’t be, that was very clear; but if Mrs. John fancied that she was going to “knock under,” why all that she could say was, that that young woman would find herself pretty considerably mistaken.{140}
“Do any of you happen to know when Arthur is going to be married?”
The question was Lady Millicent’s, and she asked it of her three younger children one day towards the end of May, when Arthur was absent for a few days in London, and the family dinner—not a very lively one—had been just concluded. The servants—two of them in plush and powder, with their chief in all the dignity of a white tie and glittering studs—had left the room, and milady, looking as usual fat, fair, and comfortable in her dark dress, a little passée de mode, ensconced her double chin within the palm of her puffy white hand, and quietly awaited a response.
The girls from either side of the richly-furnished table glanced furtively at each other, and Horace, who was feeling especially bright, in consequence of having that day received the long-looked-for notification that his examination would take place in the following week, tapped his{141} fingers lightly against the mahogany table, with an assumed air of taking no interest in the question. He was seated in his brother’s place, a half smile—a smile in which there was much latent satire—playing over his intelligent face. Probably Lady Millicent’s real or affected interest in her son’s proceedings rather amused than disturbed him.
“Can’t anyone answer?” said Lady Millicent, who, like all great people, had an objection to being kept waiting, and who was apt to be what is vulgarly called “put out” by any apparent absence of obsequious respect. “It doesn’t give much trouble to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and Arthur is so extremely mysterious that I am unfortunately obliged to address myself to others for information.”
“I think it depends a good deal on his coming of age,” said Horace, who, in spite of a certain vein of cynicism which occasionally gave bitterness to his words, was sincerely attached to his brother, and ever ready to give him a helping hand.
“I don’t suppose that old Dub will make any objection to its being a case of no settlements on our side—he’s such an uncommon liberal old fellow; but, as Atty says,—and upon my word I think he’s right,—it is awfully disgusting to owe everything to a woman.{142}”
“Your poor father was of a different opinion,” said Lady Millicent drily, and with her voice lowered to the properly pathetic tone in which alone she allowed herself to speak of her dead husband. Horace turned very red at this unexpected and, as he mentally called it, indelicate remark. He was by nature an observant character, and young as he had been at the time of his father’s fatal accident, he had, without entertaining any desire to spy into peccant places, into the rifts, great or small, of his parents’ inner life, already seen enough with those keen eyes of his to convince him that only the outside surface of things was smooth in his stately and prosperous home. The two lads had during Cecil Vavasour’s lifetime been accustomed to hear much obsequious praise and prosternating flattery of their mother. For years they had grown up in the faith of her prudence, her large-mindedness, her liberality, and her cleverness; and it was not till long after they were fatherless that either Horace or Arthur became entirely convinced that Lady Millicent had shone with reflected lustre only, and that the good gifts for which the world had given her credit were not hers, but those of the husband who had borne his faculties through life with such a meek and unobtrusive grace. How far Lady Millicent was at that time aware of the{143} fact that the eyes of not only her children but the world were opened to her shortcomings we need not now inquire. Proud and arrogant though she was, “milady” would have been very far from pleased could she have learned the truth, and known what a “falling-off was there,” where but a few short years before all tongues, both male and female, great and small, were wagging in her praise.
“Please, dear mother,” Horace said, with the angry spot deepening on his brow, “to remember that my poor father’s name can never be brought in—in—this way without giving pain to all of us. I always feel that the opinions of one that is dead should be held even more sacred than those of a person who is absent. The latter may come back either to uphold or to deny them, while—”
“My dear Horace,” interrupted Lady Millicent haughtily, “this will never do; you will be thought—pardon me for saying so—a terrible bore in society if you take to laying down the law in this prosy way. I little thought when I asked you a simple question about your brother what I was bringing upon myself.”
Horace laughed good-humouredly. Like most young men, he hated a scene of any kind, and was very apt, for his sisters’ sake as well as his own, to turn off Lady Millicent’s attacks with a joke.
“Thank you, ma’am, for the hint,” he said{144} good-humouredly. “It was a great mistake on my part dogmatising in such a ponderous fashion. As to your question, my dear mother, I really believe that Arthur is waiting to learn something of your wishes on the subject. As we all know, he will be twenty-one next month.”
“Yes, the parish register could have told you that,” put in Lady Millicent sarcastically; “but I confess to seeing no connection whatever between your brother’s age and his marriage.”
She fixed her eyes firmly on her son as she spoke. They were large, handsome, defiant eyes, the only good feature in her face—good, that is, if a feature can be called so which assists to give a hard and unfeminine expression to its owner’s countenance. Again Horace endeavoured to pass the matter lightly and playfully off.
“Well, it is very absurd, I daresay,” he said; “but somehow or other, though, the two do seem to be connected. Perhaps, as I said before, Arthur does not quite like marrying in forma pauperis. He may expect that the tremendously important event of his coming of age would be ushered in by a ‘ceremony’ which would require his presence. You can understand, my dear mother,” Horace went on rather hurriedly, for he felt that he was treading on dangerous ground,—“you can understand that this is rather an—an awkward{145} subject to talk over with you; and besides, you will, I am sure, enter into his feelings about Mr. Duberly. He is, as I said before, a capital old fellow; but, nevertheless, he may perhaps take it into his head to think that Arthur’s family might—might come forward—”
“Come forward! Why, the man’s father was a cowkeeper, or a butterman, or something of that kind! You don’t mean to say that they are going to make difficulties?”
“Not difficulties. O, no. Mr. Duberly would never run the risk of ‘dear Sophy’ losing what she had set her heart on. I believe that if she wished to marry the chimney-sweep—”
“Which would be not at all an unsuitable alliance.”
They all laughed, following Lady Millicent’s lead, that lady evidently thinking that she had made rather a happy hit. Kate, however, who was growing nervous, telegraphed to her brother a hint that he should be silent—a caution which the wilful Horace utterly disregarded.
“Poor old Atty,” Horace said, very impertinently his mother thought (in fact, it was really surprising how greatly his approaching emancipation was awakening the spirit of self-assertion in his juvenile breast),—“poor old Atty, it is terrible to think that he should be driven at his time of{146} life by force of circumstances and adverse fate to such awful encanaillement as this!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘adverse circumstances,’” said Lady Millicent, looking very stern, and rising from her chair with a considerable accession of dignity; “if young men will be extravagant and get into debt, they must take the consequences;” and having so said, Lady Millicent, after signing to her daughters to remain where they were, swept grandly out of the room.
“O, Horace, how could you!” exclaimed Kate in an awe-struck whisper.
“How could I!” mimicked Horace. “How could I what? Why, you little goose, when shall I make you understand that it is always better to take (metaphorically speaking, of course) the bull by the horns? You ought to know that by this time; but, as you don’t, I can only repeat what I have said fifty times before—that, what with your grimaces and Rhoda’s tears, you are about the two silliest young women in Christendom.—Now, Roe dear,” he went on, addressing his eldest sister in a tone of mock displeasure which, together with the quaint name which he had bestowed upon the quiet and slightly sentimental girl, set Kate off—no unusual occurrence—into what Horace called a fit of the giggles,—“now, Roe dear, what in the world are you crying about now?{147}”
“I wasn’t crying, Horace,” said Rhoda. She was rather a pretty pale-faced girl, whose tears—for her nerves were weak—came at very slight provocation to her eyelids. She had wiped one furtively away while her brother began to “chaff” her about this well-known propensity, and then was quite ready to say tremulously: “I wasn’t crying, only everything seems so uncomfortable; and it is so odd, not knowing when Arthur is to be married. I believe he has told you! Now, has he, Horace? Don’t be ill-natured;” and both the girls at once set to work to kiss and coax him.
“Paws off!” cried Horace, laughing. “No, then, he hasn’t—upon my word, he hasn’t. There! I hate not knowing the truth as much as you do; and I only wish he was to be married next week.”
“And why?” Kate eagerly exclaimed; “you usen’t to like—”
“Usen’t! What grammar! You’ll want Miss Bates back again if you can’t speak your mother-tongue better than that.”
“Never mind my mother-tongue,” Kate began impatiently. “I want to be told—”
“You want to be told a thousand things that you’ve no business to know. You are both as curious as a couple of magpies; but you may{148} chatter till midnight without getting a word out of me. I’m off to the stable for a smoke; so you needn’t bother me any more.”
In spite of the cheerful air and janty manner with which he endeavoured to conceal his troubles, Horace Vavasour did not smoke on that especial evening “the pipe of contentment;” nor could the corn-bin on which he sat be in the smallest degree considered as typical of that well-known “carpet of hope” on which the lethargic Turk is supposed to take his ease.
“It is all my mother’s fault,” he murmured to himself, as he kicked his dangling heels disconsolately against the solid oak. “If my mother would but behave like other people! If she had kept up her house and establishment in London, or even if she had given Arthur the means of living like a gentleman, I never will believe that he could have got into these awful scrapes. What will happen if he does not marry soon, God knows; and yet for that poor girl’s sake one ought not to wish it. I was sure how it would all be if once—” He drew a long whistling breath, and threw down the end of his cigar, crushing its last spark out with the heel of his boot. It was nine o’clock now, and the great church-like stable-bell had already called the “faithful” to evening prayers; and from force of habit, it is to be feared,{149} rather than from a higher and more Christian cause, Horace Vavasour hurried back to the Castle. He did not seem to himself, however, to care much whether he infringed Lady Millicent’s rules on that sweet May evening or not. He was a man now, with a man’s profession, a man’s cares, and, to a certain extent, a man’s responsibilities. For years—very long years they appeared now as he looked back to them—he had nightly seen that long array of serving men and women lining the old oak wall, and, as it were, praying. He had heard his lady mother read many a blessing over their heads; but somehow or other the ceremony had not seemed to bring a blessing with it; and Horace was certainly rather consoled than otherwise with the reflection that from that day forward, for many a night to come, he would be allowed to spend his evening hours as he pleased.{150}
It was now the middle of June, and Honor Beacham was undergoing the often painful process of “settling down” in her new home. The observation is no new one, that the presence of a mother-in-law, be she the parent of either wife or husband, in the ménage of a newly-married couple is seldom conducive to happiness. Honor, in common with all the world, had heard the aphorism—heard it without believing it; for why, she had often asked herself, should there of necessity be jealousies and bickerings amongst those who were so near of kin, and whose interests were identically the same? For her part, although a certain nervous shyness, rare amongst her country people, made her a little “foolish,” as John called it, when she thought of the possible difficulty of pleasing his mother, yet, on the whole, she had entertained no doubt of her success. The experience of her short life had not accustomed{151} her to failure. As yet, Honor had met with far more smiles than frowns, as she stepped gaily along the flower-strewn path of life. Why, then, was she to entertain misgivings of the future? Why suppose that her untiring efforts to gain love and praise would be likely, in the case of John’s obdurate mother, to be met with nothing better than “snubbings” and mortification?
“Well, Honey, and how do you and the old lady get on together?” was John’s first question, when, on the evening following their return, and after an absence of many consecutive hours, he found himself alone with his young wife.
Poor Honor! What would she not have given to be able to say with a full and grateful heart that John’s mother had been “so good” and “kind” to her? that henceforward she could love the dear “old lady” as though the strongest ties of blood had knitted them together? She would have been so glad, too, to give John pleasure; for well she knew how much, how very much, at heart he had it that she and his mother should, to use his characteristic phraseology, “pull well together.” Poor Honor! poor little well-intentioned Irish maiden! She was sadly, altogether indeed, deficient in moral courage, or in that early stage of her married life she would have done that which might have changed the whole future of her existence; namely, have{152} frankly confessed to John her belief that never, do what she could, and strive with all the powers of both head and heart, could she hope to succeed in softening Mrs. Beacham’s feelings towards her.
Against such a course, not only the tenderness, but the harmless, natural vanity of the young wife revolted. It would be hard upon John to be told that his expectations were so very far from being realised, and it would be almost equally hard upon her were she forced to confess that she had so signally failed in making a favourable impression. Honor, I am ashamed to say, had shed more tears on that her first day’s experience of an actual “home” than were either sensible or becoming. Her poor little lip had quivered painfully when Mrs. Beacham, treating her “like company,” had politely refused her assistance in such small household cares as the dusting of dainty china and the “tying down” of bottled gooseberries, both of which tasks were, as Honor thought, quite within her powers skilfully to perform. But it was worse still when, at the early dinner (without John, who was kept away by urgent business connected with the “stock”), her mother-in-law, calling her “Mrs. John” with stately formality, had kept her at arm’s-length in a forbidding manner better imagined than described. In vain she strove by all the simple arts she knew to work her way within{153} the fence that girded the good dame about as though with palisades of iron. She spoke of John—her John—with a large warm-hearted admiration and a meek self-effacing gratitude that might have warmed a heart of stone. But all in vain. Mrs. Beacham evidently considered that laudation of John was an encroachment on her own rights, and, with a snort of dignified displeasure, turned the subject to one more within the province and capacity of the daughter-in-law whom she neither wished nor intended to love. John Beacham little guessed how sore a heart it was that watched so longingly that day for his return. If he thought about Honor at all (and dearly as he loved his wife, why should he have thought of her when his hands were so brimful of business, and his head, long though it was, could scarcely carry all the weighty load that, for the nonce, it had to bear?)—if he thought, then, about Honor at all, it was to fancy her sitting side by side with “the old lady,” talking, as foolish women do, with eager interest about the trifles that to them make up the sum of life—the fashion of a bonnet, the wearing capabilities of a carpet, and the merits or misdemeanours of a maidservant.
There was not a misgiving as to the truth in John’s honest breast, while, helping himself to slice after slice of a cold sirloin, which he {154}pronounced as good a “bit” of meat as any in England, he dilated with the loquacity and verve of a man whose soul is in his subject on all that had taken place during his absence: the promise held out by the young stock, the health and well-being of the old, and the trustworthiness and intelligence of Will Simmons, who had been on the farm, man and boy, for forty years, were largely dwelt on; and for once, as it appeared by John Beacham’s showing, things had gone on quite as well during the master’s absence as they would have done had they been subject to his daily supervision. Verily “eye-service” was unknown in the breeding-establishment of Updown Paddocks!
And all this time, what was Honor thinking of as she sat by her husband’s side, her work lying idle on her lap, and her eyes fixed vacantly on the goodly joint so rapidly diminishing under the effects of John’s healthy appetite? He had not waited for the answer to his question regarding the way in which she and “the old lady” had “got on” together. The query had, in fact, been almost made unconsciously, no fear of a possibly unfavourable reply having for a moment crossed his mind; but to Honor, who had yearned for his return from a vague idea that there would be comfort and encouragement from his very {155}presence—to Honor, whose heart was sore and her mind engrossed by the failures and mortifications with which that long wearisome day had been fraught—the sight of that excellent John satisfying, with such evident gusto, his carnivorous appetite, and wholly engrossed by interests extraneous to herself, was anything but exhilarating. Nor were matters mended when, an hour later, the tired, contented man (the empty glass, where hot toddy had been, standing empty at his elbow) stretched himself comfortably in his big leathern chair, and slept the sleep of the just.
Will any of my readers, when I inform them that this was the climax of poor little Honor’s woe, and that at the sight of John’s slumbering form tears welled from her eyelids, be disposed utterly to despise my heroine, and condemn her as one unworthy the interest and sympathy of sensible people? If there be any such—and I am quite prepared to believe in their existence—all I can say is, that their knowledge of female nature is as limited as their charity for human weakness is small and inefficient. That this young wife was very far from either feeling or conducting herself as she should have done, I am quite willing to admit. The deep slumber of the unconscious John, to say nothing of the heavy breathing (I will not shock my refined readers by using a more definite term){156} that arose at stated intervals from his place of repose, ought to have sounded sweetly in his helpmate’s ears as a proof of good digestion and a mind at ease. Patiently—contentedly even—should she have bided the time of his awaking; while, instead, what did that impulsive Honor do? Why, with those foolish tears still glistening on her long lashes, she whispered a “good-night” to her mother-in-law and crept off to bed, nothing heeding the warning finger and the “hush—sh—sh” of the disagreeable old lady; acts which, in Honor’s condition of mind—for the poor girl was not, I grieve to say, perfect—were in themselves no trifling aggravation.{157}
It was on a Sunday morning, about a fortnight after the return of the travellers, that Honor had the first serious warning of coming “difficulty” with her mother-in-law. I have often heard it remarked, and I fear with some degree of truth, that the Seventh is very apt to be the one, of all days in the year, when domestic differences do most frequently arise. Why this should be is not, I think, very difficult of comprehension. To such women as Mrs. Beacham—to the habitually “busy”—the enforced idleness of Sunday hangs terribly heavy on the folded hands. When an active-minded and energetic female has nothing to do, there is a terrible temptation to be cantankerous. With John’s restless, vigorous-bodied parent the Sabbath was anything but a favourite time. She paid all outward respect to the hours between sunrise and bedtime on the “Lord’s day.” Her best gown was donned, and{158} her roast beef eaten; the knitting-needles were put away, and Cowper’s Sermons or Law’s Serious Call brought forward in their stead. Mrs. Beacham might even go so far as to call the “Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable;” but she was, nevertheless, very thankful (under the rose) when the irksome hours drew to a close; and if there did happen to be a day when, to use Letty’s favourite expression, “missus got out the wrong side of her bed,” that day was pretty certain to be the Seventh.
It would seem that John was not altogether unaware of this trifling peculiarity, for during breakfast-time he was seen to wink more than once with an air of comic warning to Honor, as much as to say, “Take no notice; this is but a passing shower, the looming of a summer cloud; the slightest possible crumpling of the tender roses with which our bed is strewn.” He was quite in the dark—Honor understood that well—as to the real state of things between her and his mother. He had yet to discover that, during his long daily absences, although no overt act, no words even of which she could actually complain, had made her life uncomfortable, still there was an undercurrent of “nagging,” a perpetual though not always a very perceptible “talking at,” on the old lady’s part, which was far harder to endure{159} patiently than the open harshness of language which Honor felt certain that John’s mother was often longing to attack her with.
The first Sunday at the Paddocks having been a hopelessly rainy day, there had been no walking along the lanes to attend Divine Service: the Seventh day had, however, now come round again, and the shy consciousness of early wifehood having a little worn off, Honor, as was only natural, had allowed her thoughts to wander to a no less important subject than the dress in which, at Switcham Church, she was to make her first appearance as a wife. The result of these meditations, and also—if the truth must be told—of a little stitching and altering, was as pretty a specimen of Sabbath-day adornment as ever entered the walls of a village church. And yet there was nothing (bright as a spring butterfly though she looked) the least over-dressed, or unbecoming her situation in life, in Honor Beacham’s attire. There were no incongruities, no single article of dress outshone or put shame upon the other, there had been no “trimming of robe of frieze with copper-lace;” but all was neat, effective, and, so far as Honor and the Leigh dressmaker together could achieve the desired object, according to the make and fashion of the day.
“Now then, Honey, let’s have a good look at{160} you,” exclaimed John, as, five minutes before the moment appointed for setting forth, his wife, with a blush of gratified vanity on her cheek (for the glass had told her she was worth the looking at), tripped confidently up to him for approval. Before he could speak, however, Mrs. Beacham’s harsh voice broke the charm, and John’s complimentary words were frozen on his lips.
“My good gracious me!” she cried; “why you’re never surely going to church in that thing!” and she pointed with a thick finger, clothed in the stoutest of useful bottle-green gloves, at Honor’s airy bonnet; a small senseless thing enough, but very becoming all the same, with its trimming of blue forget-me-nots, showing off to perfection the soft beauty of the brown braided hair, and matching the azure eyes, John thought, so prettily. “To church of all places!” continued the old lady, whose headgear, being of very ancient fashion and materials, had struck Honor as far more remarkable than her own. “Why, you’ll have everyone looking at you!”
“And like enough too,” said John with a laugh, and hoping by this judicious manœuvre to divert the rising storm, “let her put on what she may. But I say, mother, what’s wrong with Honor’s bonnet? I don’t pretend to know much about{161} women’s dress, about their crinoline and hairbags, for instance. You don’t wear one of them I’m glad to see, Honey,” he went on, twisting a shining curl that strayed upon her white throat round his big finger as he spoke. “I’m all for nature, I am; but as for the child’s bonnet, mother—”
“Now, John,” put in Mrs. Beacham irritably, “don’t you be foolish. I must know better than you can do what’s proper for a young woman to wear; and I say that such a thing as that isn’t fit to be seen within a church door.”
Honor could not help smiling—for she did not foresee to what extent her stepmother’s temper would carry her—at the old woman’s abuse of her unoffending costume. She felt certain too of John’s support, and therefore replied cheerfully:
“I am very sorry; I thought it such a pretty bonnet. However, I daresay nobody will look at it; and my best hat got so spoilt at Ryde—”
“Spoilt indeed! Ryde seems to have played the mischief with all your smart new clothes. And as if you could venture into church in one of those flighty pork-pies, that I hate the very sight of!”
“Well then,” interposed John, “as that matter’s settled, suppose we cut along. Got your Prayer-book, eh, Honey? That’s all right;” and he was half out of the door, when, instead of{162} following on his footsteps, Mrs. Beacham plumped her ample figure down on her own especial arm-chair, and planted her two hands defiantly on her knees.
“You may go to church, John, if you like; but as for me, if you’ve no objection, I prefer to remain at home.”
“Nonsense, mother! Come! The idea of going on so about a bonnet! I’m sure Honor doesn’t care, do you, Pet? She doesn’t mind what she wears, mother, not she! She’s pretty enough not to, any way,” he added in a lower tone; not so low, however, but that his mother heard the words, and grew thereupon more than ever determined to conquer and humble the object of John’s foolish admiration and absurdly weak and blamable indulgence.
“If she doesn’t care then, let her change it,” she said stolidly,—“let her change it. She’s got another in her box—one that a decent woman needn’t be ashamed to be seen in, and—”
“O, John, it’s such an old-fashioned one!” Honor broke in. “I’ve had it these two years, and it’s only fit for rainy days. I’d rather not go, indeed I would;” and the tears, I am sorry to say, were already very near her bright blue eyes.
John scratched his head in very positive perplexity. To yield to his mother had, from long{163} habit, become almost second nature to the good-tempered man; but then, nature—and nature too with a very powerful voice—pleaded within him strongly for Honor. He could not bear to see her vexed; and she would be vexed, that he knew right well, if they both—his mother and himself—went off to church and left her all alone. But then, if she so disliked the idea of wearing the two-year-old bonnet, and if—which he knew well enough would be the case—his mother would not yield, why what was to be done? It was the beginning of domestic troubles—a foreshadowing of the cloud that was to darken all John’s future life—the first faint warnings of the fell disease that, like the cankerworm, eats into the vital parts, and poisons the whole sap of life, and this truth (though John was far enough from shaping to himself any, even the most indistinct, of the evils that were threatening his peace) probably lay at the root of the strange discouragement which, while he turned his eyes alternately from his wife to his mother, gave a look of bewilderment to his usually placid face.
It was that look which decided Honor, showing her the way her duty lay, and awakening her pity for the man halting so helplessly between two opinions.
“After all,” she said to herself, calling up as{164} much philosophy to her aid as a weak vessel of her sex and age could hope to summon,—“after all, what does it signify? It is absurd to make so much fuss about a bonnet;” and then aloud, “I don’t care—indeed I don’t, John; and rather than vex you, I’ll change it in half a moment;” and she ran upstairs with an alacrity which confirmed John in the impression that she was an angel.
And so at the moment—or at least very like one—Honor felt that she had earned the right to be considered; for she was—absurd as it may seem to those among my readers who have either outlived, or have never been subject to, the weakness of personal vanity—about to make what was to her a great, ay even a heroic, sacrifice. She had so looked forward to appearing her very best that day. Religion, I grieve to confess, had little enough to do (when, alas I has it ever much?) with the fitting on of the best gown, and the extra smoothing of the shining hair. In nine cases out of ten, the remembering of the Sabbath-day does not mean the keeping of it holy. Jill, it is to be feared, goes to church to show herself; while Jack, in his best coat and Sunday hat, goes through the same ceremony that he may join his sweetheart. Can we wonder that too often these respective parties come to grief, and, like the Jack{165} and Jill in the story-book, wounds and bruises (metaphorically speaking) are the well-deserved consequences of their levity and supercherie?
Seeing then that the female mind is, both from nature and habit, loth to believe in the “glaring impotence” of “dress,” we may excuse this poor Honor for her petulance, and for the little angry jerk with which she threw open the old mahogany wardrobe, and drew from it the contemned and faded specimen of bygone finery. With a flushed face, and hands that trembled a little with the passing irritation of the moment, she tied the tumbled strings under her dainty chin, and then, without stopping to look at her “shabby” self in the glass, she hastened down the stairs.
John and his mother had already left the house when Honor, feeling very proud of her holocaust, and not a little eager to judge of its effect upon those she had endeavoured to please, rushed into the hall. She knew it was late, and moreover Mrs. Beacham was, she felt, precisely the kind of old woman who would not enter a Church after the service had begun for the world; but in spite of these and other excuses that might be made for the disappearance of her companions, Honor did feel it a little hard that they had not waited for her—a trifle provoking that John should have cared so little whether{166} she looked well or ill in that “guy of a thing” that she had put upon her head. She betrayed no outward signs of the foolish, perhaps too it may be called puerile, inward struggle—the battle against what I fear might almost be called a “bit of temper” that was rife within her. Overtaking John and his mother walking quietly arm-in-arm, “as if nothing had happened,” it was only natural, I think, that this silly girl should have entertained a vague impression that she, the bride of four weeks old, had been “thrown over”—and that, too, after she had shown herself so willing to “oblige”—for the sake of the “cross,” “fussy” old woman, behind whose broad uncompromising back Honor (and it must be confessed that at the moment she did not greatly love the sight) was trudging across the meadows, with her fair face—that bonnet was so very old-fashioned and ugly!—slightly overshadowed by a passing cloud.
It was only a trifle, you will say, that produced this inauspicious result; but need I repeat that trifles make up the sum of human life? Were we all to look back upon some of the most important incidents of our lives, I think—could we all be strictly honest with ourselves—we should be willing to allow that what seemed a mere “nothing” at the time was not without its influence, not only on our conduct, but on that{167} which goes by the name (for want of a better) of our destinies. Honor would have been as incredulous as her neighbours had it been suggested to her that in her present petulance there lay the germ of future peril, and that the apparently insignificant family feud with which that peaceful-seeming Sabbath had been marked was le commencement de la fin of her life’s history; and yet that so it was the events hereafter to be disclosed will greatly tend to prove.
Many and curious were the eyes turned towards “Farmer Beacham’s” pew that holiday in early June, when the sun shone out and nature’s garb was fresh, and when it would almost seem that, out of compliment to the bride, each daughter of Eve there present had bedecked herself in her Sunday’s best. With her head bent down and half hidden by the high oaken walls of the old-fashioned pew, Honor endeavoured, and not wholly without success, to remember that the “place in which she stood was holy ground.” She never once raised her blue eyes from the bran-new red-morocco Prayer-book—gilt-edged, and which was one of John’s earliest offerings to his betrothed—which she held in her hand. A shy consciousness that she was the observed of all observers in that crowded village church, together with the mortifying reflection which, malgré{168} elle, would intrude itself, that she was not “fit to be seen,” brought pretty waves of colour to the lowered girlish face.
From his place in the gallery, the most conspicuous one in the big, well-cushioned, luxurious family pew, there was one who throughout the service continued furtively to gaze upon the features which to his eyes were so surpassing fair. Though, for his age, he had seen a good deal of the world, Arthur Vavasour was still in every way too young to set the opinion of that world at absolute defiance; so he chose the opportunity when he and the rest of the congregation were on their knees, repeating with wearisome monotony that they were all “miserable sinners,” to gaze his fill at the farmer’s lovely bride. In the house of God, under the shelter of his folded arms, in the humble posture of a penitent, he was already breaking in his heart the one of the commandments on which most strenuously depends “our neighbour’s” peace, his honour and well-being!
Truly it was well for Cecil Vavasour that his sleep was sound in the churchyard vault that day, and that to him it was not given to look within the erring heart of his eldest born! That son, who in his beautiful childhood had been so very near his father’s heart, stood terribly in need that{169} Sabbath-day, proud and handsome and prosperous though he seemed, of the “effectual fervent prayer” which in the sight of Heaven “availeth much.{170}”
Before the summer days had begun to shorten, and by the time that Arthur Vavasour’s evident admiration for young Mrs. Beacham had begun to make his more cool and sensible younger brother seriously uneasy, the period—namely, the end of August—was fixed for the marriage of the heir with Miss Sophia Duberly, the only child of one of the richest nobodies in the county. A fortnight previous to the epoch named, Arthur would, unless, as Horace facetiously remarked, anything happened to the contrary, attain the mature age of twenty-one. As regarded the latter event, Lady Millicent had continued to maintain a dogged and portentous silence. She was well aware that her children, the girls especially, had hoped and expected that Arthur’s “coming of age” would not pass over entirely without the “praise and honour due” to a rich man’s son so situated; and though the traditional ox need not be exactly{171} roasted whole, nor gigantic bonfires lighted on the occasion, yet Lady Millicent was as well aware as if the county newspapers had not persistently proclaimed the fact that England expected her on this occasion to do her duty.
“I do really believe she would hinder Atty coming of age at all if she could,” Kate said one day, when Horace had “run down” for an hour to brighten up his sisters, and see how things in general were going on. “Mamma does so hate any of us being jolly.”
“And you call ‘coming of age’ ‘being jolly,’ eh, goosie? Learn then, O foolish child, that the event you speak of means ‘looking up,’ paying one’s own bills, being responsible for one’s own actions—being, in short, out of nonage, without the accruing of a grain of brains to oneself thereby.”
“But I suppose that something will be done,” persisted Kate, who, in spite of her brother’s repeated assurances that a miracle would probably not be wrought in her behalf, still nursed the hope that “milady” would at last be brought to reason. “I cannot believe that the 14th of August will pass like every other dull stupid day. I thought there was always a dinner, and a ball, and speeches.”
“And buttering up, and slithering down,” broke out Horace savagely; “toadying, flatter{172}ing, and lies! Of all the occasions in life when that kind of thing is carried on, there’s nothing like the coming of age of an heir-apparent!”
“I quite agree with you, my dear Horace,” said Lady Millicent, sailing in silently from behind a treacherous portière, and raising a painful doubt in her children’s mind as to the extent of her knowledge thus surreptitiously acquired of their opinions. “A great waste of words always, to say nothing of the whole proceeding being always in the worst possible taste.”
“Of course! The idea of crying Vive le roi! before the poor old king is dead! Simply monstrous, I call it. Arthur too quite agrees with me; and after all, what business has the county to trouble itself about the matter one way or the other?”
“I hear,” said Lady Millicent, who did not feel quite sure that her son was not speaking in the ironical vein to which she had so especial an objection,—“I hear that the Guernseys are going to make themselves more than usually ridiculous this year at Fairleigh. Lady G. intends to do the popular, they say, for a whole fortnight. Open house is to be kept—so intensely absurd! And people of all kinds to be asked! In short, a regular omnium gatherum!”
“O no, mamma, not quite that,” Rhoda said{173} timidly, but terribly eager withal to do away with an impression which might tend to exclude her from a participation in the gaieties of Fairleigh. “Not quite; and O, mamma,” gathering a kind of desperate courage from the emergency of the case, “you promised that if Lady Guernsey gave a ball this year, I should go to it. I know just how it is; Charlotte Mellon told me all about the arrangements. All kinds of people are to be asked to the archery meeting and the fireworks—all the out-of-doors amusements, that is; but at the ball there will only be the county families, and—”
“How delightfully dull and select!” said Horace. “And how highly satisfactory, Rhoda, to think that you will make your début under such very favourable auspices!”
“Anything is better than a mixed society,” said Lady Millicent loftily. “In these days one cannot be too careful whom one associates with. I foresee no end of annoyances with the Duberly connections. The women belonging to that class of persons are often positively dreadful. Really Arthur is much worse than thoughtless! Only this afternoon he has been the cause of my being excessively worried and disturbed! Here is a letter which I have just received from Mr. Duberly. I thought it most extraordinary when I saw the post-mark, Bigglesworth, that I should{174} receive a letter from any of the family; but I was still more astonished when I glanced over the contents. Read it! I really couldn’t get through it all, but I saw it was about your brother being so much at Updown Paddocks. His father—fancy the man talking to me about his relations!—considers it very wrong, he writes, and dangerous to be on the turf; and Arthur must, he concludes, have to do with race-horses, or he would never be so much with John Beacham at the Paddocks. You had better see your brother about it, Horace, as soon as possible. I really can have nothing to do personally with these people. They are respectable, of course, or your poor father would not have countenanced them; but they are terribly mezzo cetto, and when that is the case, anything approaching to familiarity had better be avoided.”
Amongst Lady Millicent’s “peculiarities” (and they were not a few) that of extreme bodily restlessness was one of the most remarkable. She was one of the very busiest of idlers, never for fifteen consecutive minutes, excepting at meal or prayertime, in the same place. These “fidgety ways” were troublesome, as well as frequently inconvenient, to those about her. To know where others of a household are, the more especially when those “others” chance to be of the nature of Lady Millicent Vavasour, is often of advantage{175} to the subordinates of a family. Severity, Caprice, an absence on the said subordinates’ part of knowing how anything “will be taken” by the “head of the family,” are each and all sufficient to account for the secretiveness, guilty in appearance, that kindles in both children and servants the very natural desire that the whereabouts of the domestic autocrat should not always be a matter of conjecture. But it was to no inward fever, no derangement of the sensitive nerves, that the nomadic condition of the lady of Gillingham could be attributed, for her health was perfect, and her constitution sound. The erratic habit had been formed in childhood, and had increased, instead of diminishing, with advancing years.
“I say, Miss Curiosity, that won’t do. You mustn’t read other people’s letters.”
Lady Millicent had glided with her accustomed stately step from the room; and Horace, in whose hand was Mr. Duberly’s open letter, glanced up at his sister Kate reading over his shoulder the epistle which her lady mother was either too autocratic or too indolent to answer. Kate’s colour, between shame and amusement, mounted visibly. Although taught by experience that his “bark was worse than his bite,” she was still a little afraid of her brother Horace.{176}
“I thought everybody was to read it,” she said deprecatingly. “Don’t be ill-natured, Horace; I do so want to know about Atty.”
“I daresay you do; and if you did, why everybody else would pretty soon be in the secret, and with a vengeance too! No, no, Miss Katie; a young lady who chatters to her maid is neither old enough nor wise enough to be told family secrets to—so off with you! If you want anything to do go to the terrace, and keep a good look-out for Arthur; tell him there’s a row going on, and that he’d better look sharp, and take the bull by the horns.”
“And now for old Dub’s letter,” muttered Horace, after convincing himself by ocular demonstration that both his sisters were sauntering along the broad gravel-walk, and, as he doubted not, exercising their united powers of guessing on the subject of Arthur’s misdemeanours. “Old Dub’s too straightforward to say anything that my lady can understand;” and with this dutiful commentary on his parent’s powers of comprehension, Horace Vavasour betook himself to his task.
“My dear Madam,”—so this straightforward letter began—“I greatly regret the necessity of calling your attention to the subject of your{177} eldest son; but as that subject is at present connected with the happiness of my only daughter, there is no other course left me to pursue. You are aware that Sophy is my only child, and your own feelings as a mother will lead you to understand that her welfare must be infinitely precious to me. My reason for troubling you to-day is very simple, and the question I desire to have answered is, I think, natural enough, being neither more nor less than a demand, on my part, whether the report that your son Arthur has a horse in training for the turf is true or false. You will perhaps be inclined to ask why I have thought it necessary to beat about the bush; why, in short, I did not put this question to your son instead of to you. To this very natural remark all I could say is that I did, without delay, mention the reports which had reached my ears to Arthur, and that from him I could gain no satisfactory reply. He neither positively denied or actually confirmed the scandal; for so great is my horror of gambling in any shape that I can designate taking a single step on what is called the ‘turf’ by no milder name; and the consequence of our conversation was simply this,—namely, that, being very far from satisfied either by your son’s words or manner, I take the liberty of requesting your{178} maternal aid in discovering the truth. Of your son’s constant, I was about to say daily, visits at the Paddocks there is, I fear, no doubt, and you can hardly wonder that, with my child’s future comfort at stake, I feel it my bounden duty to investigate thoroughly, and without loss of time, the cause and motive for a proceeding so remarkable. I have no desire that this inquiry, on my part, should be kept secret either from Arthur or from the world at large, and have the honour to remain, dear madam,
“Yours faithfully,
“Andrew Duberly.”
“Well, old fellow, you are in for it now! I wouldn’t be in your place for something,” said Horace when, half an hour after he had finished reading “old Dub’s” letter, and long before the annoyance caused by its perusal had in any degree subsided, Arthur lounged, after his usual indolent fashion, through the open window into the library.
“Well, what is the row? The girls told me there was something wrong. Upon my soul, one might as well pitch one’s tent in Mexico, or in the Argentine Republic, for any chance of peace one has in this confounded place.”
“Better a great deal,” said Horace seriously,{179}—“better, a thousand times, go to the uttermost ends of the earth than sow such a storm as, if I’m not mistaken, you will reap the whirlwind of by and by.”
“Well, but what is in the wind?” asked Arthur, smiling at the faint idea that he had made a joke.
“What! Just read that, and you’ll soon see what a kick-up there’s likely to be.”
“Prying old idiot!” exclaimed Arthur, tossing the letter of his future father on the table in disgust. “Why the —— can’t he mind his own business, and be hanged to him!”
“Perhaps he thinks that his daughter is his business; but however that may be, the deed is done, the letter written, and the question now is how you can satisfy old Dab’s mind that all is right. I conclude that it is all right, though I must say, Atty, it does, between you and me, look fishy, your going so very often over to John Beacham’s house.”
“But I don’t go there so very often,” broke in Arthur eagerly; “it’s all a pack of cursed lies. How could I go to the Paddocks every day, as the old fool says I do, when I am twice a week, at least, at Fairleigh?”
“Really! How pleasant for Sophy!” said Horace drily. “The worst of all this, though, is,{180} that old Dub isn’t quite in his dotage yet, and may be sufficiently up in local geography to be aware that, by judicious management, it is possible to reach Fairleigh viâ Updown Paddocks. Seriously now, Atty, can you in your sober senses think that the way you are going on is either right or prudent? Here you are, within a few weeks of marrying the girl you are engaged to—a nice girl, too, and you thought so yourself before you got spooney (nay, hear me out, for it is true, and you know it is) on John Beacham’s wife,—here you are, I say, making her (I mean Sophy Duberly) miserable; and what is far worse—for girls soon get over that kind of thing—you are sowing the seeds of lasting wretchedness in another man’s house. You are—”
“I—I am doing nothing,” broke in Arthur pettishly; adding, with brotherly familiarity, “What a fool you are!”
“Thanks for the compliment; but I must be a still greater fool than I am not to foresee a little of the mischief that is brewing there.” And he pointed over his shoulder in the direction of John Beacham’s home. “Why, even a child could see it,—even Katie, who for a girl is wonderfully unknowing in delicate matters of this kind and description—”
“But,” said Arthur, very seriously this time,{181} and speaking in language which would have carried conviction to his brother’s mind, even had the latter (which was not the case) entertained the idea that there was anything “really wrong” in Arthur’s intimacy with John Beacham’s family,—“but, Horace, I declare to you solemnly, by all I hold most sacred—I won’t say by my love for my mother, for I don’t love her, and it would be extremely odd if I did—but I swear to you by my father’s memory that there is no foundation, none whatever, for any of the spiteful things that people dare to say of John Beacham’s wife. She’s not happy, poor little thing, certainly, but—”
“Not happy? Why, what’s the matter with her? She’s got the best husband in the country, and the nicest house to live in—I declare I don’t know a more comfortable place than Pear-tree House—and the prettiest horse to ride, and—”
“Yes, of course; all that is very nice; but then there’s the old woman.”
“John’s mother? So she is the crumpled rose-leaf, eh?”
“Well, yes, in some degree; but then John himself is partly to blame. You see, he does not understand Honor.”
“That may be more his misfortune than his fault, poor fellow! But, Atty, I am sorry to hear that you have come to confidences. I had an idea{182} before all this that Honor was a quiet, good, honourable girl; and I know that the parson’s wife had the best possible opinion of her, when she was a girl, and used to teach a class at milady’s school; but what you say now makes me think her very far from either sensible or grateful—to say nothing of rectitude. When I know what a real good fellow John Beacham is, it seems such a shame of his wife to be complaining of him.”
Arthur laughed. He felt, in his superior wisdom, that his brother knew wonderfully little of the qualities required by a woman in the man who aspires to her love.
“Nonsense!” he said; “she doesn’t complain. One sees those things for oneself, without hearing about them. I never saw a gentler or a more forbearing creature than that dear little Irish girl, who is wretchedly out of place at Updown Paddocks. She is utterly wasted upon John, who, as you say, is the best fellow in the world, only so boorish compared to her, and so thoroughly unintellectual! Thinks of nothing from morning till night, and probably dreams of nothing then, but of his farm and breeding-stud. I declare that it seems the work of some horrible fate, some malicious demon, to have bound such a glorious woman as that to the side of a man so totally unsuited to her—so completely incapable of appre{183}ciating the beauty, and the delicacy, and the refinement—”
Horace stopped him with a laugh.
“The Lady Clara Vere de Vere and the clown, eh, over again? Well, I suppose it may be because I happen to be one of the rougher-looking sort myself—made of coarser clay, you know—that I cannot help having a sort of fellow-feeling for poor John. I wonder now, if I were ever to marry—and such an event is just possible, though I confess that it does not seem likely, as things stand at present,—I wonder, I was going to say, whether in that case any of you good-looking, languid swells—you fastidiously refined fellows—would be found willing to believe me capable of appreciating the charms of my own wife. Of course, it is not in the power of we ordinary mortals to make ourselves as agreeable as men who are blessed with straight noses, six feet of manhood, and wavy hair; but you might give us credit for some sense of the beautiful; you really might allow that we can see and feel and love the woman whom you admire, even though nature may have cruelly denied us the gift of charming in our turn.”
Arthur looked at his brother in surprise. It was very seldom that Horace, who was not of an impulsive nature, broke into so discursive a speech. He had a way—at least, so it had hitherto ap{184}peared—of taking life and the things of life so easily. Judging from the airy insouciance of his words and manner, his own lack of personal attraction had never weighed upon his spirits; the giving of advice, too, whether by implication or otherwise, to his big, experienced elder brother, was so out of Horace’s line, that Arthur’s surprise at this unexpected outbreak is scarcely to be wondered at. Any relative response, however, whether in the shape of protest against, or of acquiescence in, the general truth of his brother’s remark, appeared to him to be simply impossible, and he therefore betook himself to the open field of general observation.
“What a bore it is,” he said with a yawn that was not wholly the result of weariness, “that every simple thing one does gets commented on and gossiped about!”
“That comes of being an elder son. One of the penalties of greatness is the bore, as you call it, of being the observed of all observers. It would be long enough before the world paid me such a compliment. Seriously, though,” he continued, glad, perhaps, of the opportunity thus afforded of passing off as a jest the sarcasms which had in a moment of irritation escaped his lips,—“seriously, though, Arthur, this strikes me as being that unpleasant thing called a ‘crisis.’ If I know any{185}thing of old Dub, he won’t let this matter rest till it’s thoroughly cleared up. He wouldn’t have written to Lady M. if he hadn’t been in earnest; and now the question is, how the deuce you are going to tackle the old fellow.”
“God knows; I’m quite sure that I don’t!” said Arthur helplessly, for he foresaw endless difficulties—greater difficulties far than Horace could form any idea of—in the process of “tackling” to which his brother alluded. “It’s such a nuisance—such a horrible nuisance—to be questioned in this sort of way!”
“Is it? I don’t think I should mind it; that is to say if I was all right—all on the square, you know. The fact is, Atty,—and I can see it as plain as possible, though of course it isn’t pleasant to you to believe it,—that old Duberly has got two ideas about this business in his head; and these two ideas are, in my opinion, two too many. In the first place he is suspicious, as old fellows of that kind are so apt to be, about the horse-breeding part of the affair. Now, if you could tell him on your honour that you have no horse in training—that you have not the slightest intention, either directly or indirectly, of going on the turf—why there would be nothing more to be said on that score.{186}”
Arthur rose from his chair and walked about the room impatiently.
“But suppose I can’t swear to that?” he said, speaking in the annoyed tone of a man who had forced himself to utter a disagreeable truth. “The fact is,” he went on confidentially, “I have bought—on tick of course—one of John Beacham’s yearlings—the best he has bred since he began the concern—by Oddfellow out of Gay Lady. You never saw such bone! John’s quite certain—and you know how safe he is—that my colt—Rough Diamond his name is—will be a Derby horse. I paid a long price for him—I’m half afraid to say how much—but when one is so positively certain to make such a pot of money as I shall, why what does it signify?”
The look—half comic and half pityingly sardonic—that settled for a moment on the plain, but singularly expressive, face of Horace Vavasour would have been a study for a picture.
“So!” he drawled out, “the old fellow is not so far wrong after all! No wonder you were taken aback when he asked those leading questions!”
“Taken aback! I should think I just was! Why I should like to know what you would have been!”
“Quite as much disgusted, I suspect, if not{187} more than you were yourself; but somehow or other, Atty—though I don’t set up for being a bit better than other people—these are not, I fancy, exactly the kind of hobbles that I should have been likely to get into.”
“What do you mean?” asked Arthur a little sulkily. “It strikes me that I haven’t done anything at all out of the common way.”
“Not the least in the world,” rejoined Horace drily; “but that does not disprove what I said. I don’t want to boast. The fact, if it were proved, is nothing to be proud of; but I feel sure that I should not have made love to one woman while I was engaged to another; and as certain am I of this—that I should not have gone into partnership with an honest man like John, in order that—”
“Horace!” cried Arthur in a towering passion, and taking his stand in front of the chair in which his brother leant back, calm and impassible, “you have no right—none whatever—especially after what I said just now, to believe me capable—”
“It is partly from the very words you said just now that I draw my conclusions,” interrupted Horace. “What old Duberly drew his from can only of course be guessed at.”
“Guessed at! What utter rot! What confounded humbug!{188}”
“Well, have it your own way. Give up that poor girl Sophy—for it is giving her up if you don’t satisfy her father—be talked of all over the county as—”
“I don’t care a d—n about that,” growled Arthur.
“So many fellows have said before they were tried. Throw away all chance of that blessed home at Fairleigh, that the poor girls have built upon so much; and all because you haven’t the courage, or rather because you are too self-indulgent, to give up a little momentary amusement,—or rather, if you like it better, though I confess to considering it a distinction without a difference, because you happen to be a little—as I said before—spooney on John Beacham’s wife.”
Arthur made a gesture indicative of disgust.
“Hear me out, please,” Horace went on to say. “What I want you to do is, to think seriously of all these necessary consequences, and to ask yourself whether le jeu vaut la chandelle. I, for my part—but then I have the good fortune neither to be, nor to fancy myself, in love—have an idea that it does not. In the first place, remember—not that we are any of us in much danger of the fact escaping our memory—what a wretched home this is. Think what a contrast to the dulness, the restraint, the everyday—well,{189} I won’t go on; we both know only too well how wretched one person can contrive to make a house—but just think of the contrast to all this that Fairleigh is! Old Duberly, with his cheerful, hearty ways—I declare Lady M.’s are enough to give one a sickener of refinement; everyone allowed to please himself; no one lying in wait for occasions on which to differ; annoying trifles, or trifles that might have been annoying, delightfully slided over; and no ‘head-of-the-house’ tyranny, causing one to long at every hour of the day for the desperate remedy of a bloodless revolution—”
“That is all very true, but—”
“But what? I suppose you mean to remind me that you are not doomed to bear with the wretchedness of Gillingham for ever. Of course you are not; but in the mean time there are the involvements,—O Atty, I hate to talk of, but you know that there they are. And then there is poor Sophy—so fond of you, so trusting and affectionate. It would not break her heart, I know, to hear of all this nonsense; but it would make her deuced miserable.” And the younger brother, a little overcome by the picture he had conjured up, stopped for a moment to recover himself. Very soon, however, he was at the old arguments again. “She wouldn’t have a pleasant time of it,{190} of course. And as for Lady M., she would be less inclined than ever to give you anything of an allowance. You have ascertained that there are insurmountable impediments to raising money on the estates; and my mother—may her shadow never be less!—is a hale woman of, if I mistake not, forty-two. What do you say to your prospects? Inviting, eh? And just fancy what a blow it would be to the girls. Why, ever since it was all settled, and you wrote from Rome to tell us so, their spirits, poor things, have been entirely kept up by the idea—by the hope, I mean—of a kind of occasional home at Fairleigh. They are very fond of Sophy; and, in short, Atty, if you could but make up your mind to give up—well, all your interests at Updown Paddocks, all would go on quite smoothly again. You could answer old Dub face to face without fear of consequences; and—and I don’t think you would regret it, Atty,”—laying his hand affectionately on his brother’s shoulder,—“I don’t indeed. I think it pays, don’t you, old fellow, making other people—I mean those that one’s fond of—jolly?”
“Well, yes; I fancy it does,” Arthur said musingly; “and of course one hates this kind of thing. It’s nonsense, too, to suppose that I want to make any change—about little Sophy, I mean.{191} Of course I wish to marry her, and if it’s only to be done by giving up Rough Diamond, why, I’ve no alternative. It is a bore though; upon my soul it is! He is so certain to win! And then there’s all the nuisance of the talk with Mr. Duberly. I say, Horace, do be a good fellow, and help me out of this. It would do quite as well—ay, and better still—if you would settle the business for me.”
“How do you mean ‘settle it’?” Horace asked.
“Well, tell him you know that it’s all bosh; that there was no harm in life—you’d go bail for that—in my sometimes paying a visit of an afternoon, just to have a look at the stock, to Beacham at the Paddocks; and that—that, in short, the sooner I’m married the better.”
“And how about the Rough Diamond?” asked Horace, who felt perhaps the least in the world suspicious regarding the destination of that promising animal.
“O, I suppose I must sell him; not much difficulty about that. He wouldn’t be a shadow of use to me unless I entered him; which is, of course, out of the question now. I will see John about it this afternoon. There are lots of men who would give as much or more than I did for him. So that’s settled; and you may say so, if you like, with my compliments to old Dub.{192}”
“I’ll do it, of course, if you wish it,” said Horace, after deliberating for a few moments on his brother’s proposal; “but I can’t help thinking—don’t fancy, though, that I want to get off—that this is the kind of thing a man had better do himself.”
“Do you think so? Well, then, I don’t,” said Arthur, laughing: “and that makes all the difference. I should be sure to make a mess of it, while you are the coolest hand possible at that kind of thing. On the whole, it has just occurred to me, after I’ve seen John about the nag, that it wouldn’t be half a bad move to go to Pemberton’s for a week or so. He has been asking me to pay them a visit for weeks past, and I should escape from the festivities, as they call them, at the Guernseys’ next week. I hate that kind of thing infernally; and engaged people in public are always in a ridiculous position. Yes, I think I certainly will go for a week or so to Sir Richard’s.”
“Very good,” rejoined Horace; he was wise, as I before remarked, for his years, and therefore forbore (albeit he had his own opinion on the subject) any comment on his brother’s sudden resolution to leave the Chace during Lady Guernsey’s “popularity week.” “Very good; but, Atty”—as his brother, throwing open the French win{193}dow, gave evident tokens of a desire to cut short the interview,—“you are quite sure it’s all on the square about the colt? Of course you mean it now,” he added hastily, as Arthur turned round a red and angry face; “but everyone is liable to be tempted—I am sure that I am—and seeing Rough Diamond again might—”
“Not a bit of it. Don’t be afraid. I know what I’m about; only it’s not fair to John to leave him in the dark about it: so I’m off. No occasion to answer Mr. Duberly’s letter, I suppose, till to-morrow?”
“Well, I should say there is. However, I’ll ask my mother. It was written to her, though what old Dub was thinking of when he did that same is more than I can guess.”
“Lady Mill was deucedly indignant at the liberty,” said Arthur, laughing. “Few things have ever amused me more than my mother’s anxiety for this marriage, and her intense disgust at being brought into contact with any of the Duberly lot.”
“I wonder which will behave the worst at the wedding, old Dub or my lady! In quite another way he has ten times her pride, but then he is far more deficient in polish.”
They both laughed lightly at the ideas which this remark called up; and after a few more last{194} words, each brother departed on his own separate errand.
As Arthur Vavasour had predicted and felt assured, it required few arguments, and a very little exertion of diplomatic talent, to convince “little Sophy’s” good-natured parent that there was nothing really wrong either in the character or conduct of the “handsome young fellow” who had won his daughter’s heart. A short conversation with that “steady, sensible one of the brothers” (the thoughtful Horace), a little coaxing and petting on the part of his “darling girl,” and a positive assurance—it was “a case of honour, mind, Mr. Duberly”—more than once repeated—from Arthur, that he had sold the two-year-old (that wonderful Rough Diamond, of whom such great things were expected), to Colonel Norcott, of sporting celebrity, for an almost fabulous sum—were sufficient to set the unsuspicious, sanguine mind of “old Dub” at rest. Arthur Vavasour was received again with open arms at Fairleigh; the fatted calf, so to speak, was killed; and Sophy—caressing, tender Sophy—put on her best robe to do honour to the exculpated prodigal.{195}
Arthur VAVASOUR, in all that he had said to his brother regarding the state of things at Updown Paddocks, had not willingly diverged a hair’s-breadth from the truth. It had caused him more vexation than surprise to learn that other voices besides the “still small” whisper of his own conscience were beginning to enlarge upon a course of conduct, the imprudence of which—to use no harsher term—had long been manifest to himself. Young as he was in years, Arthur had not, after a jeunesse orageuse, still to learn how soon and easily the fair fame of a woman is breathed upon and tarnished. In more ways than one is the breath of man poisonous to his fellows. Well did Arthur Vavasour know that while he—the heir-apparent to wealth and honour—he, the strong man, armed at all points for the battle of life—would come unscathed out of the tainted atmosphere of suspicion, she, the tender bird{196} exposed to its baneful influence, would flutter her feeble wings, and fall killed morally by the strong insidious poison. Of this melancholy truth Sophy Duberly’s affianced husband was as cognisant as the oldest sage that lives; and yet so selfish was he and so graceless—you perceive that there is nothing singular and abnormal in this young man’s character and conduct—that he could not bring himself to forego a pleasure, many of the infallible evils to result therefrom, he, in his rare moments of reflection, so plainly foresaw.
His first visit to the Paddocks was the consequence (and this young sinner sometimes twisted the fact into a strange kind of condonation) of a pressing invitation from honest John himself. Partly from former respect and affection for the deceased Squire, and in some degree from a liking which he took to the open cheerful manners of the heir-apparent, John Beacham seized the earliest opportunity of making that young gentleman “free,” as it were, of the house in which his father had been so frequent and honoured a guest.
Nor was John’s hospitable parent behindhand in her well-meant endeavours to make Lady Millicent’s first-born understand that he was a welcome guest at Pear-tree House. He was always “pleasant-spoken,” she used to say, “without an ounce of milady’s pride about him.” “Young Mr.{197} Arthur” besides (and that was another important point in his favour) was very far from making himself “common” in the houses, whether large or small, of his lady mother’s tenants. I am afraid, after all, that this old lady was—after the fashion of her class in her day—something of a lord lover. The taste has somewhat left that class of late years, rampant as it still is on the higher rungs of the social ladder; and in Mrs. Beacham it was only preserved, and that feebly, by some of the traditions and associations of the past. She entertained an idea too that the son in whom all her hopes and pride were centred was better looked on, by reason of his acquaintance (professionally) with the titled ones of the land. It may be doubted, indeed, whether this simple-minded body did not, in some vague and unreflecting way, consider John’s friendship, or rather familiarity, with a rich earl of sporting proclivities, and the fact of his being, so to speak, “hand and glove” with the heir of Gillingham, decided proofs, had any been wanting, of her son’s general superiority to his fellow-men.
The fever of expectation and delight into which the usually sedate old woman was thrown on the first occasion when John informed her that “Mr. Arthur” was coming to see the “stock” and “take” his luncheon at the Paddocks, afforded{198} some amusement and not a little surprise to Honor. For herself she hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry that her acquaintance with Mr. Vavasour was likely to be improved. That his coming was not, by any means, a matter of indifference to her cannot be denied. It could hardly be that the railway journey passed in his company, short and uneventful though it was, had not left some trace of it behind. Beautiful daughter of Eve though she was, never had eyes of man rested on her face as those of Arthur Vavasour had done that day; but although her vanity had been to a certain degree gratified by a scrutiny which she had felt rather than seen, yet she had, whilst undergoing it, experienced a sensation of malaise—a nameless fear almost—which caused her rather to shrink from a first meeting with Arthur Vavasour. As regarded John, he took the event, for which his mother was making such grand preparations, quite as a matter of course. Beyond the fact that Mr. Arthur was the Squire’s son, and one to whom the farmer gave credit for possessing hereditary virtues, the handsome young man, who, as all the country knew, was engaged to the heiress of Fairleigh, was no more to him than any other visitor at the Paddocks. Not that honest John was the very least in the world what is called “a leveller.{199}” To “even” himself with those socially above him never entered his head. The ambition which of all others is the most apt to “o’erleap itself and fall o’ the other side”—the ambition, namely, of a churl to be a gentleman—was an infirmity quite unknown to the simple mind of the Sandyshire farmer. He was absorbed, besides, rationally and wholesomely, in his business, and that business, as John was quite conscious, he thoroughly understood. A sense of superiority (that sense, let it be remembered, being indorsed by the fiat of public opinion) is apt to induce (even though that superiority may be evidenced in a comparatively humble manner) a certain sense also of independence. This sense, then, was a strong and healthy resident in John Beacham’s breast. He knew—none better—that his knowledge of the business in which his soul delighted was anything but superficial, and it was to him a source of pride that his opinion in equine matters had grown to be treated as a law. I repeat that John Beacham was no “leveller”. He was quite as ready as his neighbours to “give tribute to whom tribute, and honour to whom honour,” is due; but it was pretty much the same to him, provided that the individual in question knew something about horse-flesh, whether guest of his were prince or peasant, duke or dog-{200}breeder. His thoughts ran entirely on his stock, and his mind was so fully engrossed by the future of his yearlings that he felt literally none of that common sensation of “not-at-homeishness” which is apt to render individuals in John’s somewhat anomalous position both awkward and uncomfortable.
Few men in any rank of life could be pleasanter as a host than the owner of Updown Paddocks. At his hospitable board, the rich and “great,” and even the self-important, “forgot to remember” that they were condescending. A native politeness induced by entire forgetfulness of self placed him on a par with the most exalted, the most fastidious, and the most sensitive. But, above all things, let it be remembered that he was true—true to the backbone. The air of the “stable,” as I have before said, had instilled no principles of trickery into John Beacham’s breast, and, as Cecil Vavasour had once been heard to remark, he would as soon expect one of John’s fillies to be capable of entering into a conspiracy to defraud, as that his old friend would in a single instance depart from the strict rules of honour and integrity.
“Now then, Honor, look sharp; I can’t have any dawdling to-day. When gentlemen come to{201} lunch at the Paddocks, they expect, and so does John, to find everything good. You won’t soil your white hands, that I don’t think likely, with helping in the setting on; but you might gather a few flowers for the beanpots all the same, and if there’s time afterwards you can change your gown afore Mr. Arthur comes. A silk one would look a deal better than that washy muslin. I’m sure John, poor fellow, gave you plenty of smart dresses, and you needn’t begrudge the wearing one of them now and then.”
Honor, who had already learned that there is ofttimes wisdom in keeping silence even from good words, proceeded with cheerful alacrity to the execution of one at least of her appointed tasks. The tasteless arrangement of those same “beanpots” had long been to her a source of minor discomfort, and often had she longed to work, with deft and dainty fingers, a reformation in the huge overgrown posies with which it was Mrs. Beacham’s pleasure to adorn the windows of the “best parlour” in the old farm-house. A very snug and pleasant room it was, and would have been a pretty one, could Honor have effected the change she was often planning, namely, that of introducing French windows instead of the old-fashioned lattices, which let in so little light, and impeded the view outside so greatly. And, as if{202} to make the room still darker, there were, ever and always, those dreadful beanpots standing never an inch out of their respective places on the spider-legged pembroke tables in front of the latticed panes. It was wonderful, Honor sometimes thought, how flowers could be made to look so little attractive as those which old Mrs. Beacham was in the habit of packing together for the adornment of her show parlour. The old lady’s floral tastes were of the massive and gorgeous school. She delighted in peonies, and many-coloured dahlias were her passion. Honor had more than once attempted a reform in this delicate branch of household duty; but Mrs. Beacham, who had no opinion of her daughter-in-law’s taste, had hitherto declined her offers, and nothing short of a press of business on the occasion of Mr. Vavasour’s visit would have caused the busy old autocrat to break through a fixed habit of her life.
Honor wondered to herself, as, with her large garden-hat shading her eyes from the sun, and a flower-basket on her arm, she bent over a favourite plant rich with pinks in brilliant blossom, dropping at the same time one of the treasures into her basket, whether Mr. Vavasour had the least idea what a commotion his coming to the house for half an hour was causing. She caught herself marvelling too whether he liked the smell of roast{203} beef and cabbage: for the house had been redolent of both when Honor gladly exchanged the scene of bustle and confusion, and the aroma of a meal more plentiful than refined, for the fresh air of heaven and the perfumes of the roses and the pinks. She did not hurry over her task. There was time enough before the arrival of their guest for a little more dallying with the flowers, a few more quiet thoughts over how she would look, and what he—that half-dreaded new acquaintance—would say to her. Honor had not the slightest intention of complying with the last of her mother-in-law’s injunctions; the “washy” dress—it was of soft blue muslin, and the girl looked like a bright azure flower in it, as she flitted about between the rows of fruit-bushes, culling the dear old “common” flowers that are still to be found in such ancient kitchen-gardens as the one that appertained to Pear-tree House—the “washy” dress that had provoked Mrs. Beacham’s animadversion was not, Honor determined, to be cast aside. Since the affair of the bonnet, she had resisted all attempts at interference with her toilet. The day too, as the sun rose higher and higher in the heavens, had grown oppressively hot, so hot that her fair face was a little flushed, and she loosened the strings of her hat that the light summer breeze might blow more freely round her throat.{204} The coolest spot in all the garden was the terrace-walk, a little raised above the level of a shady lane, into which those above could look over the trimmed sprays of what John—who loved the place, and smoked his quiet pipe there often in the summer evenings—was wont to call the “nightingale hedge.” With Honor too the terrace was a favourite resort: she would take her book there, or her work, and sit dreamily on the rough stone bench for hours, till summoned home by the shrill voice of her mother-in-law, who, being essentially a woman of action, had no patience with the “idle ways of John’s silly chit of a wife.” On that especial day, however, Honor had no time to waste in reverie. She would, she thought only rest for a moment under the shade of the old thorn-tree; the sun shone so glaringly down upon the teeming apple-trees, on the clean-kept rows of strawberry-beds sloping downwards to the gravelled walks, yellow and glowing in the midday heat. Honor could not, however, long remain, pleasant as it was, in that cool breezy place. Only a moment to pluck a sprig of sweet syringa from a shrub of ancient date, growing near the hawthorn-tree; only a moment to hear—Well! What did she hear? Why, the slow footsteps of a horse, advancing with even pace along the lane below! Instinctively she rose from her seat, and peer{205}ing over the hedge, she recognised in the equestrian, who politely raised his hat from his head (for a simultaneous movement had caused him to look towards the terrace), the figure of Arthur Vavasour.
It was too late to retreat, her blushing face was just above him, and she could only hope that he would not think her very missyish and forward. That road—the one that he had chosen—was not the usual one from Gillingham to the Paddocks, and this, Honor, feeling and seeming a good deal confused and awkward, endeavoured to make him understand. She had forgotten, or rather she had never heard, the proverb, that qui s’excuse, s’accuse; but Arthur both remembered and applied it. It is always a temptation to jump at conclusions that are flattering to our vanity, and the “jump” on this occasion was far too alluring to be withstood. Arthur had in good truth very little grounds for supposing that Honor had betaken herself to that quiet spot for the purpose of awaiting his arrival. He was profoundly ignorant, beyond the simple fact that she was beautiful, of all that appertained to or regarded John Beacham’s wife. Unfortunately too he had been a good deal thrown among a class of women, who would have taken no great shame to themselves had they been caught in the deed for which he gave that pretty,{206} unsuspecting Honor credit. Arthur had met with a good deal of petting and spoiling from the sex in general. He was handsome, and he knew it. Honor was looking tantalisingly lovely and attractive as she stammered forth her silly, smiling excuses; so—it was foolish certainly, but he was not yet “of age,” remember, and it would have been so “muffish” to ride on as if she were not there—so Arthur Vavasour, following the impulse of the moment, and meaning, as he would have said, no more than to be “civil,” contrived (without awkwardness, which would have been fatal in such a case) to spring with his feet upon the saddle, and to bring his face on a level with Honor’s.
She could not help laughing; it was “such a foolish thing to do;” and then there came, after he had shaken hands with her over the hedge, the fear that the horse would move on, and that there would be an “accident.”
“He might move on—O, please don’t wait!” she said, feeling a little smitten with what struck her as an act of chivalry on the part of that good-looking young aristocrat.
“He won’t stir—he knows better,” Arthur said, as he steadied himself against a strong ash sapling that jutted out from the bank. “Steady, will you!” to the animal, who was picking out the{207} tender blades of grass for his own especial eating from among the ground-ivy, the delicate cranesbill, and the wild violets with which the pretty rural fence was lined. “He knows this road, and so do I, of old. Jack was my father’s cob, Mrs. Beacham—one of your father-in-law’s breeding, and he used always to come this way to the Paddocks.”
It was a pretty way—the prettiest, Honor thought and said—from the Castle; not that she had ever been the whole road—far from it, she said. It was a beautiful way, people told her, all through, but she had never been nearer to the Castle in her life than the end of Pender’s-lane. John did promise to take her farther when he had the time, and she was going to learn to ride, and horses were allowed in many places inside the Chace where a carriage wasn’t, so John said, and if so, why she might some day see, without giving trouble, she added meekly, a little of the beautiful place of which she had heard so much.
Arthur professed himself delighted to think that he could afford the wife of his old friend pleasure in any way; mentally regretting that, owing to his insecure footing on old Jack’s saddle, he could not be quite as delightful as he wished, or as the occasion deserved.
“It will be awfully jolly to have you on horse{208}back,” he said, “and Beacham will mount you in something like style.”
“O yes,” Honor said eagerly, “there is a chestnut—such a beauty! John calls her Lady Meg—that he is breaking for me; not a pony—quite a tall horse; and—O Mr. Vavasour, I told you so! Have your hurt yourself?”
She was answered by a laugh from below, and by the cheerily-spoken words, “All right!” as Arthur, who had suddenly, and nolens volens, found himself reseated in his saddle, rode away.
Once more left to the companionship of her own thoughts, Honor began to think how foolish it had all been; and then came the speculation as to how Mrs. Beacham would take the news (for it seemed a very important event to simple-minded Honor) of Mr. Vavasour’s escapade. If Honor had not been afraid of her stepmother (which she was), it would all have been plain-sailing enough. It had been a purely accidental meeting—no harm had been intended—and certainly Honor could not be called to account for the foolish risking of Mr. Vavasour’s bones. All this, and more, the perplexed and tired girl repeated to herself as she walked slowly on towards the house, thinking how best to tell the little story which was already assuming in her eyes the features of an “event.{209}”
To her surprise—for she had fancied he would be waylaid by John, and carried off at once to see the “stock”—she perceived, through one of the parlour-windows, Mr. Vavasour sitting on the ponderous sofa covered with peony-patterned chintz, and in amiable converse with his hostess, who was doing her best, in more ways than one, to entertain him. In a few more minutes Honor was in the room, and—mirabile dictu!—shaking hands with Arthur Vavasour. It was very evident that for some reason or other—what, Honor would have found it difficult to determine—he had kept the fact of that very innocent meeting on the terrace-walk a secret. Honor hardly knew whether to be relieved or sorry that he had done so. That she could do otherwise than follow his lead, never for a moment, strange as it may seem, occurred to her. The nature of this young wife was rather an ease-loving one, and to be spared the listening to Mrs. Beacham’s diatribes was felt by her to be a great boon; so she, unwisely it must be owned, held her peace, keeping Arthur’s secret (alas, that there should have been one, of even the most insignificant description, between those two!) alike from the cantankerous old lady, and the husband who had as yet given her no cause to fear that he would ever be severe either on her follies or her faults.{210}
From the time of that chance meeting, Arthur Vavasour became a very frequent visitor at the Paddocks. Ostensibly there was generally some business excuses for the “calls” that were made so often, and lasted so long. There was so frequently an ailing or an unsound horse, concerning which an opinion was required; and then, as we already know, the Paddocks lay so conveniently on the road to Fairleigh, that it was hardly surprising that poor Sophy’s somewhat fickle lover should stop to rest him on the way.
There is no denying the truth that young Mrs. Beacham did greatly enjoy Mr. Vavasour’s society. They had so many (the old reason!) tastes in common. He had read the books she liked, and he delighted in less commonplace and more classic music than “The soldier’s tear,” and that old, old “Banks of Allan Waters,” which Honor was so tired of. His voice too, when he{211} spoke, was so soft and low—an “excellent thing” in man as well as woman—and that same voice sounded doubly pleasant after a morning spent in listening to Mrs. Beacham’s querulous tones and harsh Yorkshire dialect.
It was surprising to herself how soon Honor felt at her ease with Arthur Vavasour, and how short a time had been necessary to make her forget that he was the son of that formidable Lady Millicent; while she—but what had been her origin Honor believed herself never destined to learn—it was enough that she had been but a humble teacher to some farm-house children, and that John, that best and kindest of created beings, had taken her, penniless and almost friendless as she was, to his home and to his heart.
There is something not altogether unsuggestive in the fact that John Beacham’s bride was, at that period of her short married life, for ever reminding herself that she “owed everything to John.” It almost seemed as though she were throwing up a line of defence, a formidable battery, to guard against any future attacks upon his peace. He was so really kind to her, not tenderly demonstrative certainly, and anything but sentimental; but she could trust him so entirely. John was never capricious, and rarely hasty or rough of speech; he never “bothered” either about trifles{212}—a delightful negative quality which many wives never appreciate properly till they have experienced the bore of having a womanly, housekeeping kind of helpmate “worrying” about a home, the space and means of which are necessarily limited. That John Beacham was all, and more than all, this, Honor was constantly repeating to herself. Perhaps—it was more than likely—she was anxious to hide, under this heap of estimable qualities, the aggravation of some of poor John’s trifling defects of manner, his few uncourtly habits, his sometimes ill-pronounced words. Be this as it may, Honor betrayed no sign, even to herself, that she would have desired any change in one so excellent and unselfish as her husband; it is even probable that, had not the peccant places been pointed by force of contrast, she would have found little to regret in John’s cheery voice and genial, though untutored, manners.
One great pleasure—the pleasure of which Honor had spoken with such girlish glee to Arthur Vavasour—that, namely, of riding on horseback—had been without loss of time vouchsafed to the breeder’s wife. She had a “wonderful figure for a horse” he had said from the first, and when to that was added the conviction that, though she had not been in the “saddle from a child,” his wife’s seat and hand were perfect,{213} John’s delight was extreme. The “teaching” proved a comparatively easy matter; Lady Meg was quiet as a lamb; and very soon (for John was often too busy to accompany her) Honor was trusted on horseback, with only a small farm-boy as attendant, to take her equestrian pleasure where she chose.
The only individual to whom this new state of affairs gave any umbrage was old Mrs. Beacham, who, when John did not happen to be present, grew very bitter on the subject of Honor’s favourite pleasure.
“It’s more than I ever had—and I a Yorkshire-woman born—is a horse of my own,” she said one day to Honor, as the latter stood waiting for Lady Meg, and looking very pretty and graceful at the window, her long green habit trailing on the floor, and her gauntleted hand (John had got her up beautifully) playing with her little dandified whip. “I wonder John can allow of such a thing as your riding about the country in this way. Things have got turned upside down with a vengeance since I was young.”
“John likes it,” Honor said, turning round with a smile that disclosed two rows of pearly teeth, and which ought to have mollified the sour old lady’s temper. “I never should have thought of riding if it hadn’t been for John,{214} and now I do love it so! I don’t think I ever liked anything half so much.”
“You’d like anything that kep you idle, that’s my belief. You’d leave everything for other people to do, you would. Anybody else may slave themselves to death, so as you keep your hands white and don’t bend your back to work.”
“Now, that is hard,” replied Honor, trying to laugh off the old woman’s irritation. “I won’t bear any more of John’s sins! Why, don’t you remember, mother”—she called her so, to please John—“don’t you remember how he came home one day and found me rubbing the table, and how angry he was, and how he said that neither you nor I were ever to do such things again, for that, thank God, he was rich enough to pay for servants to do the housework? Dear John! he always tries to please everybody.”
“More fool he! Everybody indeed! That’s the sort of thing that brings people to the workhouse. I was brought up different. I never could see, not I, the good of young people being idle. Work keeps ’em out of mischief, and hinders white hands, which ain’t of no use as far as I can see, except to make the gentlemen stare at ’em.”
It was perhaps fortunate for Honor that the old lady could not see the crimson blush that{215} mantled over cheek and brow at this coarse and uncalled-for remark. Had that been the case, Mrs. Beacham would have suspected—what was indeed the truth—that her daughter-in-law was quite conscious of, and felt indeed rather gratified by, the fact that one gentleman at least had both looked at and admired the taper fingers, white and soft as those of the finest lady in the land, to which Mrs. Beacham alluded.
At that moment, and while Honor’s face was still turned towards the window, a few heavy drops were seen to fall against the panes, and the prolonged roll of distant thunder gave tokens of a coming tempest.
“O, there’s the rain! How dreadfully provoking! Just when I was going out! What shall I do?”
“What will you do? Why, bear it to be sure, and be thankful you’ve nothing worse to bear. I’m going across the meadow to see James Stokes’ whitlow. It will be long enough before such a helpless thing as you has the stomach for such sights;” and so, grumbling as she went, the busy old soul departed—to do her justice, she was always ready to help—on her errand of mercy.
Honor sat down before the work-table, which was strewed all over with the marks of woman’s industry and handicraft—men’s lambswool stock{216}ings in readiness for mending, a corner of hideous patchwork protruding from an open basket, and a general aspect around of rather unpicturesque disorder. It was part of Honor’s daily employment to “tidy the tables” after one of Mrs. Beacham’s mending mornings was brought to a close, and, but for the rattling thunder overhead, she would have proceeded to her task at once. The noise of the storm, however, together with the solitude of the room, overcame and oppressed her—the vivid flashes of lightning, darting across her face, dazzled her eyes; so resting her face upon her outspread arms, she endeavoured, as best she could, to shut out the startling tokens of the tempest. But all in vain. Honor, though not (as it is called in common parlance) afraid of thunder and lightning, had it in her to be morbidly sensitive to an atmosphere heavily laden, as was the case at present, with electric fluid. Her head, which had begun to ache violently, seemed as if bound with a circlet of iron, and she felt miserably depressed and nervous—so nervous, that for almost the first time in her life she experienced a dread of being alone. It was intensely foolish and cowardly and absurd—of that Honor would have been the first, in her sober senses, to acknowledge the truth; but she was hardly herself just then, the thunder boomed{217} with such startling violence over the old house, and the wind, which had commenced with a warning murmur, was howling amidst the trees, as it seemed, in very rage and fury. Truly it was an awful storm. Each thunderclap sounded louder and more vengeful than the last, till gathering, as it would appear, its forces for a final outburst, such a volley rattled over Honor’s bent-down head, that in a perfect agony of terror she sprang upon her feet, and was rushing from the room when her steps were arrested by the sight of a human figure advancing rapidly from the open doorway.
A real cordial, even in that moment of bewilderment and fear, the cheerful voice of Arthur Vavasour seemed to Honor when he said lightly—
“What, all alone in the storm? No joke, is it? By Jove, I don’t know that I was ever out in a worse.”
She tried to recover herself; it was mortifying, hateful, to be thought such a silly coward; but her nerves were overwrought (meteorological influences have a peculiar effect sometimes on certain delicately-organised constitutions); and when another thunderclap, still fiercer than the preceding one, crashed over the old-tiled roof, and the room was all ablaze with dazzling light, Honor, pale and trembling, and utterly bereft, for the moment,{218} of self-command, uttered a faint cry of terror, and hid her white face against the nearest screen—that screen chancing, unluckily, to be Arthur Vavasour’s shoulder!
It was the wrong place for the wrong head certainly; nor did it rest there long. A slight, the very faintest, pressure of the hand that had in all loyalty taken hers, to reassure and strengthen the failing nerves, was sufficient to recall the trembling girl to a sense of the error into which the wild instinct born of alarm had led her. The storm, too, had suddenly abated in violence, the thunder was already dying away in the distance; and Honor, viewing her conduct from a commonsense as well as a commonplace point of view, felt thoroughly ashamed of herself.
“I can’t think how I could be so foolish,” she said, with a blush that made her look, Arthur thought, more beautiful than ever.
He laughed. He was very anxious to make her feel comfortable as regarded that quite unintentional act of trifling familiarity.
“I don’t know what you call foolish, Mrs. Beacham,” he said. “It strikes me that a woman who could stand such a row as that must be a very strong-minded party indeed. I didn’t above half like it myself, and having a lively recollection of the day when I was a small boy—when the big{219} oak in your husband’s meadow was struck with lightning, and a man killed under it—I thought that a wetting was better than that, so I cut along through the rain and—here I am.”
He had scarcely finished when another step, a masterful and heavy one, was heard in the passage, and John Beacham, out of breath and wet to the skin (a calamity concerning which, greatly to his mother’s displeasure, he was never known to trouble himself), hurried into the room.
After shaking hands heartily with Mr. Vavasour, the master of the house set about accounting for his sudden return and the plight in which he found himself.
“I was away at Leigh,” he said, wiping his face and head with a large coloured-silk pocket handkerchief, “when the storm began, and I saw at once it was going to be a sneezer. Says I to myself, ‘The missus won’t like this;’ not that I had any particular reason for thinking so. There’s been no thunderstorm since we knew each other—eh, Honor? But somehow it struck me that you might be frightened, so I told the ostler, though it was raining cats and dogs by that time, to bring out Scrapegrace in a jiffy. Tim thought I was mad, I do believe. You see,” he added with an arch glance at his audience, “he hadn’t a little wife at home to trouble his head about and make{220} an old fool of him. Says he, ‘You’ll be wet through, sir, before you’ve been out five minutes;’ and so, of course, I was. But what did it matter? I never troubled myself about a wet jacket, and Scrapegrace isn’t the boy to be afraid of a flash of lightning, so I threw my leg over the saddle and—here I am.”
“Here I am!” the very words (a singularity, trifling as it may appear, which struck Honor’s sensitive imagination at once) that Arthur Vavasour had used while accounting for his opportune presence at the farm. The two men were standing one on either side of her, and the marked contrast between them impressed itself for the first time on Honor’s mind and heart. There was John, large-framed and strong of bone; his rather massive features redeemed from plainness by the frank and kind expression which softened and almost idealised them; his skin roughened by exposure to the weather; and his hands, usually guiltless of gloves, brown, muscular, and manly. His very dress, moist and rain-stained, and his shirt-collar limp and blackened with the dingy drippings from the good man’s “wideawake,” told against his personal appearance; whilst, on the contrary, Arthur’s tout ensemble, from the crown of his dark waving hair to the tips of his well-made, though not by any means dandified,{221} boots, was as perfect as care and money and taste, to say nothing of an excellent material, in the shape of his own handsome face and graceful figure, could make it.
Honor felt the contrast, and a pang of self-reproach darted through her breast: of self-reproach and shame; shame that her head had rested, though only for a moment, against that well-made coat; and ah, far more fatal impulse than that which shame can give—the impulse that closed her lips against the avowal of the deed!
And yet, in very truth, there was nothing to tell; and, moreover, it would have given the matter far more importance than it deserved, had Honor made a small descriptive narrative, for her husband’s benefit, of what had occurred. And so, for a second time, where her relations with Arthur Vavasour were concerned, she held her peace; and the consciousness that there was this secret between them, albeit that secret was one of so very trivial a description, lent the kind of charm to the intercourse between Honor and Arthur Vavasour which is never without its fruits. Arthur had a sincere regard for John Beacham. The former was what is called an honourable man, but he was only twenty-one, and at that age, though flesh is in one sense weak, it is terribly{222} strong too. Honor was wonderfully fair, and the man had not courage to flee the temptation which the woman, beguiling him in her simple ignorance, was daily so unfortunate as to set before him.
Verily it was time that interference came; time that Horace, strong in brotherly affection, spoke his mind without fear of consequences to Arthur Vavasour.{223}
The intelligence which soon after reached the Paddocks, namely, that Arthur Vavasour was about to leave Gillingham, took Honor by surprise. Not that she was ignorant of the all-important fact that the time was drawing near when the heir-apparent was to take upon himself the duties and responsibilities of matrimony. There was nothing new to Switcham and its neighbourhood in the idea that their young landlord was at the early age of twenty-one to pass at once from the thoughtless irresponsibility of boyhood to the duller dignity of a man; and yet for all that, and though Honor had often heard her husband’s friends and neighbours talk over the coming event, she never seemed quite to realise the fact that Arthur Vavasour was going to be married. One reason of this might be that the future husband of Sophy Duberly was not in the habit of himself alluding to the approaching change. As Honor{224} sometimes said to herself, he seemed to entirely forget what was hanging over his head. His spirits were often fitful; at one time bright and joyous, at another depressed almost to zero. Honor, remembering his engagement, would often marvel at his fits of absence, his look—so strange in one so young—of brooding care; for during the many weeks which Arthur Vavasour had spent either at the Castle or as a guest of his future father-in-law, Honor had seen a great deal of Miss Duberly’s intended husband. There had been nothing conspicuous or curiosity-rousing in their intimacy. Other gentlemen came and went, and were offered lunch (that meal at the Paddocks was famed far and wide for excellence) by hospitable John Beacham; and other gentlemen might, if they were so disposed, join that pretty, modest-looking little wife of his in her daily rides on the Lady Meg. For how long, or rather for how short a time these two young persons would, under less propitious circumstances, have escaped the heavy censure which their thoughtlessness deserved, it would be hard to say. It was a great thing for both that one at least was but a bird of passage. Very soon (in a few short weeks only), Mr. Vavasour was to be married; and in the mean time there were plenty—a glorious safeguard for endangered reputations—of other things and peo{225}ple, besides the farmer’s wife, to be talked about. There was the trousseau of the bride, the number and beauty of her presents, and—still more immediately interesting to the young of all degrees in that division of Sandyshire—there were the anticipated festivities at Danescourt, in honour, as was almost openly declared by the popular Countess of Guernsey, of Arthur Vavasour’s “coming of age.”
Honor Beacham’s little head had at that time fully enough (like those of her neighbours) to occupy it. She was too young, too fresh-hearted and inexperienced, not to look forward with a keen anticipation of delight to the out-of-doors amusements that were to be enjoyed in Lord Guernsey’s park, to which all the “respectable” inhabitants of the neighbourhood, the “big” tenants, not only of Gillingham and Danescourt, but also the most highly considered, that is to say, the most prosperous of the Leigh tradesmen had been invited. Danescourt would in former days, before railroads were, have been deemed almost out of visiting distance from Switcham; but steam had done its usual work of approximation, and now it required but the short space of twenty minutes to convey the travellers from the furthest point of Switcham parish to the great lodge-gates of “the Court.”
But though young Mrs. Beacham was by no{226} means insensible to the coming pleasure in a few days to be vouchsafed to her unpresuming class, still there remained, it is to be feared, more space in her mind than was altogether advisable for thoughts of Arthur Vavasour and his approaching “change” of circumstances and life. She had grown, very different as were their positions in life, to know him (as she fancied) very thoroughly. From the first she had felt and seemed to herself to be the equal in degree, as it is called, of Arthur Vavasour. Whether it were that her individual nature was delicate and refined, or that, as the foolish creature loved to think, her birth, of the particulars of which she knew so little, was one sufficiently “gentle” to account both for the peculiarity of her tastes and the gracefulness of her appearance, must remain for the present an open question; one thing, however, is certain, namely, that she and Arthur Vavasour were not only rarely at a loss for subjects of conversation, but that never once in all their intercourse had he caused her to remember either by word or look that his position in life was more exalted than her own. Take it altogether, in spite of Mrs. Beacham’s crossness, and although John had been often very busy among his horses and his men, those two months had been a singularly happy time to Honor. She had enjoyed to a degree, which only to look back{227} upon was a delight, those delicious rides in evening-time through the shady lanes, those canters over the springy turf in the beautiful “Chace” which Arthur already talked of as his own, those strolls about the pleasant Paddock garden, when just a tinge of sentiment—of sentiment guessed at rather than expressed—mingled with Arthur’s more commonplace words, and lent the charm of charms, although she knew it not, to all that Honor gathered from her companion’s lips. She was indeed, and for that matter so also was John himself, thoroughly happy in the cheerful society of Arthur Vavasour. He was the familiar friend, the ever-welcome guest both of “master” and of “young missus,” and “as a friend” he deemed it his duty to impart to her the fact of his approaching marriage, and that he must, before many days would be past over, bid adieu to Gillingham.
She was in the garden that afternoon, and they (Honor and her friend) were standing together side by side on the famous terrace, when the latter said abruptly:
“Before I see you again, Mrs. Beacham, how many things will have changed! I shall be a married man—how absurd it sounds!—tied and bound by the chain of a wife!” and he laughed nervously as he said the word.
Honor, feeling rather confused, contrived to{228} murmur something about not exactly seeing the absurdity of the measure proposed. It might be entertaining, certainly, but she did not understand why Mr. Vavasour laughed.
“Well, I suppose I didn’t mean precisely absurd, but unsatisfactory somehow—startling almost at my age, you know—to be bothered by a wife.”
Honor’s sense of the ridiculous was struck by the word “startling,” and she laughed; such a musical laugh it was! Arthur thought she never looked so pretty as when she was amused.
“I suppose you have been warned in time?” she said; “it hasn’t taken you entirely by surprise that there exists a young lady whose lot it is to be Mrs. Arthur Vavasour.”
His quick eye glanced at her for a moment. Was there a shade, the slightest in the world, of pique in her words and tone? He could not say. Honor was not in the least prone to sarcasm, but her manner had a little taken him by surprise, and he answered hesitatingly:
“Warned! yes, of course I was warned—warned by my own follies, my own actual idiotcy, that I must do something of the sort. I suppose you know all about it—all that the world reports, at least. How that—I know one oughtn’t to say such things, but you are so safe—that there isn’t much{229} love in the matter. Old Duberly is as rich as a Jew—”
Honor opened wide the eyes of astonishment and consternation.
“Rich! yes, I know he is rich; but what is that to you—you, with all that money, that beautiful place? O, Mr. Vavasour, you never can be going to marry because the lady is rich! Think how dreadful not to love her! And people say, too, that Miss Duberly is young and pretty. Ah!” she continued musingly, “I know now what Mrs. Beacham must have meant when she said something of the kind; but I never, never would have believed it, unless you had told me so yourself.”
“Then don’t believe it now,” he said, drawing a step nearer, for he was touched and gratified by her implied compliment to the disinterestedness of his character and motives. “It is quite out of my line, I hope, to do anything of the kind. But, you see, fathers are different from sons—they look forward, which we don’t; and besides, I quite well remember mine saying to me once that he considered it rather a misfortune than otherwise for a man to be in love with the girl he was going to marry.”
“Did he say so? And John always tells me{230} that the Squire was such a kind, good man—the kindest and best he ever knew.”
“Yes, he was all that, but I fancy he was cold too; some people, you know, become cold—from disappointment, I suppose, or something—as they grow old. But about old Duberly’s money there’s a good deal to be said. You see,” he added, anxious to preserve the character for disinterestedness which he was conscious of not deserving, “that there is a likelihood of a title (that of Baron de Vavasour), which has been in my father’s branch of the family since the Wars of the Roses, being disputed after the death of a very old relation, who now bears the honours. My father was very anxious that I should some day be a peer of the realm—why, I never could understand; and as my mother does not trouble herself much about my advancement in life, I shall have to look out for myself.”
“And why? I am very stupid and ignorant about such matters, or I daresay I should guess.”
“I don’t know why you should, and I’m afraid I’m boring you all this time; but the fact is that in this enlightened country of ours enormous wealth—and the two fortunes united would be what is called colossal—can almost command a peerage. But there is a better reason than the one I have just been telling you of for my marry{231}ing an heiress—a reason which anyone connected with old Duberly might be proud of. They say he might be made a peer any day he liked, only from his high-mindedness, his wonderful liberality to the poor, and the excellent use he makes of an income of eighty thousand a year. A wonderful lot of money, isn’t it?” he continued, as he and Honor sauntered on towards the high holly-hedge which bounded the garden on the east side, and was ever a pleasant shelter from both wind and sun.
He did not expect to be answered—there could be no two opinions regarding the marvellous proportions of Mr. Duberly’s income; and indeed, his thoughts as well as Honor’s had wandered far enough away both from ambitious hopes and peers expectant.
“What a bore this going away is!” Arthur said after a pause; “I’m a wonderful fellow to get fond of a place. Do you get fond of a place? I mean a place one lives much in, you know.”
“I think it depends very much upon the people we are with,” Honor said, and the next moment regretted her thoughtless words; for Arthur said eagerly:
“Exactly! just my feeling. It is not the ‘where,’ but the ‘who.’ I should never have grown so fond of the Paddocks if—but you are{232} not going in, Mrs. Beacham? Do take one more turn—only one. It is such a beautiful evening, and the old lady cannot be so unreasonable as to expect you will waste it in the house. Hark! there is the first note of the nightingale. Won’t you stay and listen to it for the last time with me?”
His voice sounded very soft and persuasive, but Honor, usually so pliant to the wishes of others, was inexorable. It was very pleasant there among the roses. The summer air fanned her cheek with such a sweet refreshing breath, and it was hard to change it for the low-ceilinged parlour where Mrs. Beacham was expecting her, and which that worthy lady (who entertained rather an objection to fresh air in rooms) had a peculiar talent for rendering “stuffy.” Above all, it was hard to say “good-bye” to Arthur Vavasour—hard to leave her pleasant friend—the friend who “understood” her, and who had so often, with such quiet, unobtrusive kindness, saved her from the annoyance of old Mrs. Beacham’s “worrying ways.”
“I think I must go in now,” she said quietly, though her heart was beating fast. “I have been out long enough;” and her step was not very steady as she drew nearer to the house which, without him, she could not have told Arthur truly that she loved.{233}
He stopped, however, before they were within view of the windows, and exclaimed with angry vehemence,
“I shall say good-bye here, I hate public leave-takings. You will give me your hand, at least?”
Poor Honor! Her very anxiety to do right—her instinctive dread that something, she knew not what, might be said by Arthur that John’s wife ought not to listen to—did her ill service at that crisis of her life. Had she pursued her walk with an even step, and without the blushing agitation that betrayed her inward feelings, Arthur would never have taken courage to address her in those petulant and peremptory words. She was frightened, half angry, and half fascinated by his vehemence; but she never thought of withholding the hand he asked for. Why should he doubt her giving it? What had happened during that short quarter of an hour to change the friendly relations that had subsisted between them? It was all strange, and sudden, and bewildering; and tears of regret and reproach glistened in Honor’s upturned lashes.
She looked this way and that, in pretty and very manifest confusion, her soft red lips slightly pouting; it was so vexatious to be silly, and to have nothing to say just when she so particularly{234} wanted to utter something to the purpose; and then Mr. Vavasour—it was so rude and tiresome—would keep looking at her so! If he would only go! Honor felt quite sure that would be a relief. She had never in life before felt so thoroughly uncomfortable.
He spoke at last—what an age those few short moments had appeared!—and, still with her hand in his, said in a low voice, and feelingly, despite the badinage that neutralised its tone of sentiment,
“I hope you don’t mean quite to forget me, Mrs. Beacham? I’ve had a very jolly hour or two here with—John, since I’ve been at home this time. I shall think of you the day I’m turned off; perhaps you’ll remember to return the compliment?”
The words were trivial and foolish enough, but he pointed their meaning by such a searching gaze into Honor’s violet eyes, that she turned her head away abashed, and angry both with herself and him. Quickening her step, they were in another moment in full view of the “parlour” window, and then, and not till then, she took courage to reply:
“John will be very sorry when you’re gone—he said so only yesterday; and—and we shall all be glad to know that you are happy. Good-bye,{235} Mr. Vavasour, I must go in now.” But suddenly recollecting the claims of her mother-in-law to respectful observance, “Won’t you come and see Mrs. Beacham before you go? She is old, you know, and old people don’t like to be overlooked.”
Arthur hesitated a moment, and then declined the well-intended offer. He was in no mood for tolerating Mrs. Beacham’s old-world platitudes, and twaddling lamentations on his departure. His approaching marriage would also, as he was well aware, be brought on the tapis, and of that subject he had for the nonce had more than enough. Arthur was good-natured, lively, and popular—indeed, the heir was generally allowed to be far more affable than Mr. Horace—but, like most young men who are born to a “position,” and whom the world has helped to spoil, Arthur Vavasour did not “go in” much for spoiling others. If it did not interfere with his own comfort or convenience, he would be wonderfully kind and civil to a dull old man, or even to a disagreeable old woman; but as a rule, and when he was inclined to be otherwise employed, he forgot, or altogether ignored, the claims of useless people on his notice. His conduct on his departure from the Paddocks was an instance of this not uncommon peculiarity. After his interview with Honor, he was in no{236} mood—poor fellow—for the commonplace and the tiresome. He was very sorry, he said to Honor, he hoped that she would make his excuses to Mrs. Beacham, but he was late, and dinner was waiting probably (a fib on Arthur’s part) at the Castle. So, after one long, lingering look, under which the young wife’s colour rose tumultuously, and a silent pressure of her hand, he left her to the companionship of her own not very lively thoughts.
The message left by Mr. Vavasour was duly, and indeed with some slight amplification, conveyed by Honor to its destination. Her natural tact had led her to add some of the conventional phrases—a few of the banal expressions of regret which come so “handy” to the use of the kind-hearted and the courteous; but on the matter-of-fact organisation of the “old lady” these little civil emanations from pretty Honor’s brain were completely thrown away, for she was thoroughly “put about” by the departure, without the ceremony of leave-taking, of her young landlord, and nothing that Honor could either say or do possessed, for that day at least, the power of smoothing her ruffled plumage. Had Arthur Vavasour been gifted with the power of taking serious thought of the future, he would have reflected longer before he made an enemy of that pretentiously hospitable old woman. He little dreamt{237} that the seeds of distrust and suspicion were that day sown, by his own act of omission, in Mrs. Beacham’s breast; so true is it that our most trivial acts, our mignons and unnoticed sins, may one day rise up in judgment against us, and be unto us a means of well-merited punishment.
That night Honor retired to her own chamber with a very strong sense of ill-usage. She had returned from her walk out of spirits and subdued, but nevertheless she had done her best to be cheerful, had sung her prettiest ballads, and smiled her brightest smiles—but all in vain; Mrs. Beacham had been cross, and her husband, tired with his day’s work, had passed the evening in sound and uninterrupted slumber. Poor little Honor! Sitting there before the looking-glass, her rich brown hair rippling over her shoulders, she could hardly refrain from asking herself whether nature had made her so very beautiful, for this. She was beginning to think that, as Arthur Vavasour had once expressed it, she was rather “wasted upon John.” There were others perhaps (I am afraid that Honor was beginning to forget how much she owed to her generous-hearted husband) who might have been better able to appreciate her. There was one—O child, child! dwell not for your life—for your soul’s life’s sake—on that first thought that leads towards the broad road of sin! It may seem a{238} very trifling and unimportant thing that—contrasting in your mind the flattering devotion of a polished gentleman with the unstudied, homely ways of him who, come what come may, is, and must be, your yoke-fellow—that worthy, tired John, who slumbers while you sing, and who seems so utterly to ignore the fact that you are young and fair, has, you may imagine, given you a right by his lumpish somnolence, his unflattering insouciance, to consider yourself aggrieved; but, believe me, there is danger in such self-pityings as these. Remember that le mieux is never half so redoubtable an enemy to le bien as when the would-be lover is brought into juxtaposition with the husband, who, secure of his once-coveted possession, either neglects or seems incapable of valuing the better part of the treasure he has won. Honor, in the dearth of mental companionship, turned as instinctively as the flower to the sun to the “mind” capable (it is the old story) of understanding her. She was motherless, poor girl!—the child of no tender prayers, no eager, anxious hopes. Should she pass safely through her trial it will be well with her; but if she fall, God help her! for the world will not judge her less harshly because of the “extenuating circumstances” which may, let us humbly hope, recommend her to mercy in the day of doom.{239}
After the departure from the neighbourhood of Arthur Vavasour, there seemed at first to be a great gap in Honor’s life. He had told her that he was going to remain a fortnight or more in London previous to his marriage, which was to take place there in great form and state on the last day of August. Arthur had no intention, as he assured Mrs. Beacham, of being present at the Danescourt festivities. His mother—that was his avowed reason—did not view those festivities, in so far as they regarded him, with a favourable eye; and it was “better taste” (so Arthur assured his intimate acquaintances, his brother and his sisters included) to keep away, during Lady Guernsey’s well-intended hospitalities, from his home at Gillingham. His real motive for absenting himself was, however, a widely different one. He was well aware that not only would his intended bride be present, to expect, and with good{240} right and reason, that he should devote himself to her service, but also that the woman whom it was his fate to love (men are very apt to account for the indulgence of their evil propensities in some such irrational manner) with a passion hitherto by him undreamt of would be a guest though a humble one, within the walls of Danescourt Park; and those glorious eyes of hers—Honor’s eyes were haunting ones, and followed or rather led Arthur to what he was pleased to call his “doom,” when he was far away—would look their wonder if he kept aloof; an evidence of self-controlling powers, by the way, which Mr. Vavasour, to do him justice, greatly doubted his own ability on that occasion to display.
The fêtes—it was now past the middle of July—were to commence in three days’ time, and the certainty that her friend would take no part in them had thrown a little damp on Honor’s highly-wrought expectations. The pretty new dress, another of John’s expensive cadeaux, was not to her the “thing of beauty” that it had been when she had wondered to herself, in all innocence (Honor’s thoughts and mind were pure as yet as unsunned snow), whether Mr. Vavasour would think her well-dressed—dressed “like a lady,” in short, which was Honor’s ne plus ultra of ambition. It would be a pretty sight—she could look forward to that; and{241} it was very good of John to give up a whole afternoon—two even, he said, if it would please her and his mother (ah, Honor, how silly it was to half resent this sharing of your husband’s attentions!)—to see the “tomfooleries” at Danescourt. But although Mrs. John Beacham would of course make her appearance on the croquet and the archery ground, yet the zest, the charm of the day’s amusement, seemed, in some to her incomprehensible way, to have momentarily departed, if not to be utterly extinct. But it was when on horseback, and during the long rides, longer than ever now, which she took during those sweet summer afternoons, that Honor the most missed and regretted her companion. She had no “young friends,” no intimate associates of her own rank and degree, with whom to exchange the nothings or the somethings, as the case may be, which are of interest to juvenile matrons, whose housekeeping is in its infancy, and whose husbands are rich enough to make the ménage, trouble a source of pleasure and of pride. Honor stood, for her misfortune, very much alone at the Paddocks. There was something, as I once before explained, anomalous in her husband’s position—a something which, even had his wife not been what the neighbours called a little inclined to be “set up,” would have prevented her being “hand-and-glove” with such{242} personages as the widows Thwaytes and Tamfrey, or even with Miss Parsons, who sold caps and bonnets at a “high figure” at Leigh, and dignified her shop-girls with the title of young ladies. It was unfortunate, I repeat, that young Mrs. Beacham, for the reasons aforesaid, found herself companionless in the home which John had hoped to make so pleasant for her; and it was doubly unfortunate in that, by eschewing as intimates those with whom her husband’s mother did not consider herself too good (forsooth!) to consort, Honor contrived without much difficulty to provide herself with more than one very efficacious enemy.
It chanced that in the afternoon succeeding Mr. Vavasour’s farewell visit, the widow Thwaytes, who had for many years occupied the post of humble friend to the greater lady at the Paddocks, had come panting along the lanes (for the day was warm, and the fair pedestrian inclined to “stoutness”) to take a neighbourly cup of tea with her more aristocratic crony. As the reader may possibly remember, albeit he has to glance mentally as far back as the first chapter of this story, the widow Thwaytes, being withal a good-natured woman enough, was by no means ill-disposed towards the sweet-spoken beauty of whom the Clays, and, indeed, all who knew her, “thought{243} so much.” Very willingly, and often feeling that the jealous-tempered old lady was decidedly in the wrong, would Mrs. Thwaytes have spoken her mind to her old chum and neighbour on the subject of Honor’s merits. It angered her at the first to hear Mrs. Beacham’s querulous and uncalled-for innuendoes against her daughter-in-law; but the time soon came—after it grew to be unmistakably evident that “Mrs. John meant to keep herself to herself”—when the widow went over, heart and soul, to the enemy. Her ready sympathy, which procured her many an excellent “dish” of her favourite beverage, was well appreciated by the mistress of Updown Paddocks; “mistress,” as her guest persisted in calling her, in spite of Mrs. Beacham’s plaintive assurance that she had nothing now to do with the management of John’s household, and that if things went wrong she was not answerable for them. Her day was over; but the time would come, perhaps, when some people—she named no names—would find that new brooms, though they swept ever so clean, were not so good as old ones, and that pretty faces couldn’t make up for fanciful ways and idle habits. Mrs. Thwaytes would listen by the hour encouragingly to these outpourings of a wounded spirit, and though very far, as I before hinted, from an ill-natured woman, she would{244} occasionally throw in a drop of balm in the shape of an admittance that Mrs. John was but young, that she would improve in time, and last (not least in novelty and conclusiveness), that it was a moral as well as a physical impossibility to place an old head on the shoulders of the young.
It was with some such conversation as this that the two old gossips (John was never in the house at that hour, and Honor was getting ready for her ride) were beguiling the time on that warm July afternoon. The window of the “parlour” was wide open (it was not the best apartment; that was kept sacred to visitors of a more aristocratic stamp than the widow Thwaytes), and from it there was a view of the ancient paved court, or stable-yard, where the Morello cherry trees grew against the north wall, where Honor fed her pigeons in the morning, and where stood the lichen-covered old horse-block which Honor, in default of Arthur Vavasour’s assistance, was fain to climb, in order (it was rather an ignoble proceeding) to mount as best she could that graceful, high-born animal, the Lady Meg.
“A little nearer, please, Jem, I can’t quite reach the stirrup;” and Honor, standing on the top of the block, which had, in the days of John’s father and grandfather, done good service{245} in its line, with her long habit just raised enough to show her dainty foot, and with her fair girlish face slightly flushed, both with amusement and vexation, tried by coaxings and caresses to draw the mare within her reach.
“She’s frightened, that’s what it is, Jem,” she said. “So! Meg!” and again she stroked the mare’s arched neck with the tips of her gauntleted fingers. Near enough, however, to be mounted Lady Meg would by no means consent to be led, and Jem scratched his head at last in perplexity.
“It’s a pity the young Squire beant here,” he said; whereupon Honor flushed crimson, and Mrs. Thwaytes, who overheard the words, laughed significantly.
“Lead her on once more, and then try again,” Honor said, feeling desperate with those two pairs of aged eyes fixed curiously upon her. Jem did as he was ordered, and the experiment proving successful, Honor mounted her steed, and with an unconcern that was less real than affected, rode slowly away.
“Humph! I’m glad that Milady has had to help herself at last,” Mrs. Beacham remarked. “No fine gentleman from the Castle to put his hand, with the beautifullest of gloves on, under her foot to-day! What was good enough for{246} John’s grandfather she’ll have to find good enough for her. I’ve no patience, I haven’t, with such stuck-up ways.”
Mrs. Thwaytes listened and sighed. The subject on which her ally had touched was not one that could be pursued without due thought and deliberation. As yet, though well aware that a mean maternal jealousy had begot something very like hatred to Honor in Mrs. Beacham’s breast, the widow did not feel by any means thoroughly assured that she could safely touch upon the impropriety of Mr. Vavasour’s intimacy with John’s young wife. The old lady had not, in that quiet busy home of hers, marched even ever so laggingly with the times. In a groove, her mind was that of the right woman in the right place. She had never, in the course of a long life, striven to throw off a prejudice, or struggled to free herself from the trammels of a preconceived and stolidly retained idea. To the simple (may I be pardoned for calling it the pure?) mind of the farmer’s widow crime was crime, and had never been softened by a petit nom. On the second of those two tables of stone, at which, for nearly forty years, she had looked reverently from her pew, there were certain Commandments which she (in common with many of the young, who say their{247} Catechism, and are taught to fear God) believed, as regarded herself and her belongings, to be futile and useless ordinances. “Thou shalt not steal;” “Thou shalt do no murder;” “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” It was right, of course, that the injunctions should be there; but what had she or hers, or, indeed, any respectable members of the community, to do with wickedness so horrible? Mrs. Beacham was neither a newspaper reader, a novel lover, nor a dissecter of human character and motives. Of the degrees of crime, of relative amount of guilt (temptation and temperament being taken into account), she was as ignorant as poor Joe Griggs, the village idiot; and this being so, her companion having withal sufficient shrewdness to comprehend the same, that worthy gossipmonger hesitated slightly, and took time to choose her words, before she startled Mrs. Beacham with the news of what the Switcham folks might, could, or did say about John’s pretty wife. She had laughed significantly—for a woman who could not be called ill-natured, it was not a pleasant laugh—as Honor rode away. That young lady had been more than usually “’aughty, the saucy thing!” Mrs. Thwaytes had told herself that afternoon, and she did not feel at all inclined to spare her any of the consequences of her misdeeds.{248}
“She’s a pretty creature, is Mrs. John,” she said, with a commiserating sigh, as the two congenial spirits resumed their places (they had been, as I said, watching Honor “mount” from the window) at the tea-table; “a sweet pretty creature, and so I always said. It’s a pity she’s so thoughtless, though it’s the way, as one may say, with young folks. We should remember that we was young once ourselves, and not be hard upon them as is like the little bears with all their troubles afore them.”
“I don’t know what you mean by troubles,” said Mrs. Beacham, stirring her tea with a great accession of energy. “John’s wife isn’t likely to have much of them, I fancy. The work’us isn’t built, no, nor yet the alms’us, that’s to hold her, I’m thinking. We can pay our way, and can put a pound or two on one side at the end of the twelvemonth; and for that,” she added solemnly, “I’m thankful to the Lord this day.”
The widow, feeling slightly rebuffed by her friend’s serious tone of remonstrance, was silenced for a while; the occasion was, however, too tempting to be lost, so she continued with greater caution the difficult task of opening her companion’s eyes to the truth.
“Well, well, mem,” she said soothingly, “to think that you should fancy I had need to be told{249} that! There’s more troubles, though, as we all well knows, than those which comes from poverty, and it was of them I thought it my dooty to speak. I beg pardon if I’ve offended,” dusting the crumbs from her company silk dress as she spoke. “It’s a painful thing is dooty, and what’s got through at all times with a heffort, which, as the Bible says, is its own reward.”
“I know what the Bible says as well as you do,” retorted Mrs. Beacham loftily, “which I read it times and often when other folks that shall be nameless is in their beds; and if you come to dooty, Jane Thwaytes, let me tell you that—”
“Lor’ bless me!” put in the general dealer in a fright, “you’re taking me altogether wrong, mem; it was t-totally of someone else I was a-speaking, and, indeed, a-thinking of. There’s many a night, if you’ll believe me, that I’ve laid awake a-wishing, and a-wondering how I was to go through with this unpleasantness. People will talk, we know, and injynes won’t stop ’em; but if you was just, maybe, to say a word or two to Mrs. John—” She paused, for something in the hard but still mobile face of her companion revealed that the insidious droppings had taken effect upon the stone, and that the worst part of her evil work, namely, the beginning, had been accomplished. Mrs. Beacham, however, was not the kind of{250} woman to allow (if she knew it) of any, even the most homœopathic triumph, over her either by friend or foe. To whatsoever extent she might dislike her daughter-in-law, and though it is to be feared that she would have welcomed any occasion of either humbling or annoying her son’s petted wife, the proud old woman would have shrunk sensitively from any open scandal, and would have stoutly denied any assertion calculated to bring discredit on the honour of her son. The idea of Honor being spoken of in the manner hinted by the widow Thwaytes, was positively hateful to her, and she parried the affront in her haughtiest and grandest manner.
“I don’t understand your meaning, Jane Thwaytes,” she said, “and I don’t want to. Talk, indeed! I’d soon talk them if they gave me any of the nonsense going on in the village about this house. Talk, indeed! The idea of people talking!” and the irate old woman sniffed and snorted vigorously at the bare idea of a climax so preposterous.
Mrs. Thwaytes was terribly distressed. She would not, as she solemnly declared, have had Mrs. Beacham “put out” for the world. It had given her trouble enough, goodness knew, to stop people’s evil tongues. It wasn’t Mrs. John’s fault—that she always had said—that gentlemen would{251} look after her. Mr. Vavasour had made a little free, perhaps, but it didn’t follow that Mrs. John had anything to say to him; anyway, he was to be married in a fortnight, people said and, as far as Switcham was concerned, it was, as everyone must allow, “a good job too.”
A good job, in sooth; but the boon would have been a still more precious one to all concerned if the officious widow had been gagged before she could administer that “harmless hint,” and present that innocuous nut to her grand friend to crack. Mrs. Beacham was not one who received ideas with exactly wax-like ease, but once a novel thought took root within her, it would have been as hard to efface it from its granite bed as to destroy letters graven “with a pen of iron on the surface of a rock.”
“Well, Honey,” said John Beacham, when he met his wife an hour or two afterwards at the doorway of the parlour; he a trifle tired with his hard day’s work, and quite ready for the meal he called his supper, while Honor, her long habit gathered up over her arm, was looking all the fresher and prettier for the exercise she loved, “well, Honey, and how did Lady Meg carry you to-day? Rode her pretty fast, eh? Took her a breather, I suspect, on the downs. I{252} must be looking out for one with more bone for you soon. Women are the deuce and all to ride a horse hard,” he added, with a laugh, as he helped himself to a foaming glass of home-brewed ale.
Mrs. Beacham, who had struck Honor as looking more than usually crabbed, here put in her word.
“If Honor doesn’t know how to ride, I think she had better give it up,” she said. “I wonder, John, you should like to have your horses ruined with her working them to death.”
John was immensely amused at his mother’s remark. It was such an excellent joke, her taking him in earnest. The idea of his kind-hearted, gentle Honor—his wife, who petted and spoilt every living thing that came in her way—being seriously believed capable of riding a great strong horse to death, was to him irresistibly comic.
“Well, that is a good un!” he said, as soon as he had recovered from the excess of merriment in which Honor’s natural sense of the ludicrous, and the contagion of John’s irresistible laugh, had induced her to join. “That is a good un, by Jove! Why, mother, you must think that Honor is a ‘great jockey,’ as the Paddies say; but I can tell you that she’s far and away too good a rider to damage a horse. I never knew man or woman to have a better nor a lighter hand on a hors{253}e’s mouth. You should hear Mr. Vavasour talk of your seat, Honor! And he’s a pretty good judge of such things. Arthur Vavasour is his father all over about horses, and what belongs to ’em. I’m sorry he’s gone; and more sorry, too, that he’s changed his mind about Rough Diamond. He’s a sure card is that animal, and I would a deal rather that Arthur had him than that Colonel Fred Norcott, that he says he’s sold him to.”
Mrs. Beacham had fixed her eye steadily on Honor’s countenance from the moment that Arthur Vavasour’s name was mentioned; and when her son had finished speaking, she said in a cold, inquiring manner that could scarcely fail to convey the impression that more was meant than met the ear:
“Well, if you haven’t tired out the horse, you’ve made your own face red enough, in all conscience. I say, John, did you ever see such a colour as Honor’s got all of a sudden?”
John Beacham looked at his wife admiringly, and the flush, as he did so, deepened on her face.
“I don’t see much difference,” he said with a laugh. “Honor’s always like the pretty rose that has grown ever since I can remember next the big lavender-bush in the kitchen-garden—they call it the ‘maiden blush,’ I think; not but what you’re something redder now, Pet? It’s the{254} being looked at, I suppose. Why, who knows? I might begin blushing myself, if anybody took the trouble to notice my looks. But they don’t; the more’s the pity—ain’t it, Honey?” and getting up from the table, for his evening meal was over by this time, he laughingly patted his wife’s glowing cheek, and then kissed it fondly—so fondly, that Mrs. Beacham, looking on with jaundiced eyes, and with the evil demon of maternal jealousy let loose within her, could hardly succeed in keeping that precious thing, her temper.
“I wonder what’s come over the old lady,” John said, when he found himself that evening alone with his wife, and could indulge in a few minutes’ confidential discourse before sleep—the deep, healthy sleep of the weary—overtook him. “She isn’t half the woman she was. She’s grown peevish, to my thinking, and nagging—a thing she never was given to before. Perhaps it’s her health,” he added meditatively. “She’s a strong woman for her time of life; but she’s getting on, and I fancy she’s altered—don’t you think so, Pet? Grown wrinkled-like, and haggard, eh?”
Honor could not perceive any outward change, she said; and in the matter of temper, the subject being a delicate one to discuss with her husband, she deemed it wisest to hold her peace. To her great relief, unsuspecting John was too sleepy{255} to pursue the subject, and in a few minutes his deep regular breathing was the only sound that broke the stillness of that large old-fashioned bedchamber.
Honor was what is called a light sleeper, and the early birds had begun to twitter in the branches before her eyes were closed in slumber. She was but eighteen however, and therefore sleep, when it did steal over her senses, was dreamless and refreshing. Under twenty-five, all our material acts, when they are done at all, are done so thoroughly!{256}
Arthur VAVASOUR had, as the reader has already learned, found little difficulty in persuading the kind-hearted, unsuspicious man whose colossal fortune had been made in the manufacturing districts, and who entertained exalted ideas (very convenient ones on this occasion) of the honour of a high-born English gentleman, that he, Arthur Vavasour, was entirely free from spot or blemish, or any such thing as regarded his future son-in-law’s intimate acquaintance with John Beacham and his two yearlings.
Old Dub, as he was familiarly called, inhabited, during his annual sojourn in the country, a magnificent “mansion” on the western borders of Sandyshire. It was an abode that had once belonged to a Duke, and princely hospitality had been, during the residence of the aforesaid nobleman, for a lengthened period dispensed within the noble walls of Fairleigh Manor. His Grace, how{257}ever, coming—according to nineteenth-century slang—“to grief,” the place was degraded to the hammer, being purchased by the solvent Mr. Duberly for a sum that would have liquidated any debts save those of a Duke or a crowned head, but which was barely sufficient to satisfy the more clamorous creditors of the quondam owner of Fairleigh.
The immediate change for good effected in the neighbourhood through the abiding therein of a wealthy proprietor, who paid his bills and “lived cleanly as a gentleman should,” was very speedily evident. It might be supposed, too, that the satisfaction at that change would have been great and general. This, however, was far from being the case. There is a certain magic in the very name of Duke, and the “neighbourhood,” clinging, in a kind of stupid, unreasoning way to old associations, old habits, and traditions, took exception at old Dub; and for a long while either treated him as a usurper, or consented, as it were under protest, to admit him among their intimates. This was the more extraordinary, inasmuch as the new-comer showed very little inclination to hide his talents, id est his pieces of gold, in a napkin. On the contrary, he not only kept open house, and was ten times as genial as the “Dook,” but he owned (as we have shown) a very{258} nice-looking daughter, who was withal (for Mr. Duberly was a widower) the heiress to his wealth; whereas the “Duchess” girls were plain young women with high noses, whose only fortune was the pedigree on which their parent had brought as much discredit as it is possible for a duke to entail upon his belongings.
But notwithstanding all his manifest advantages, “old Dub,” the merchant-prince, who paid his way, employed the people, and was a blessing to his neighbourhood, found it up-hill work to conciliate the goodwill of individuals whose social tastes had been refined—ripened, indeed, so to speak—under the sunshine of ducal notice, and who had enjoyed the privilege of ducal proximity. By slow degrees, however, the thorough excellence of the man told against the spurious advantages of position; the memory of the princely banquets few and far between as compared to those offered to their acceptance by the new owner of Fairleigh, faded away from the minds of the invited. “Dub’s” wines were excellent, and his daughter’s face (to say nothing of her being an heiress) was fair to see; so in process of time, the descendant of the Manchester warehouseman took his place—no longer under protest—amongst the magnates of the land; and the dark-eyed, lively Sophy was sought for in marriage by the great ones of the earth.{259}
“Say no more about it, my dear boy; say—no—more,” the kind-hearted old man had said to Arthur when the latter, for the first time after Horace Vavasour’s vicarious explanation, found himself in the library at Fairleigh; “say—no—more;” and, as he spoke, pausing between each word as if to emphasise their meaning, he pressed his wrinkled hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I’m almost sorry I wrote to Milady at all. I suppose,” rather wickedly, “that it made the deuce and all of a kick-up, eh? As for Sophy, I can tell you, I’ve had a pretty time with her! I wish you joy of that young lady, Arthur!” and he laughed heartily, the good old man, at the excellence and originality of his joke. “And so you’re off to the Pembertons? old family friends, you say—All right; just as well to keep those sort of people up, I daresay, though I can’t say I have many of the kind to trouble me. No young ladies there though, eh, to worry Sophy? You young London fellows are not always to be trusted,” and again he laughed—a genial hearty laugh that did one good to hear.
“No, indeed,” Arthur said, joining, though rather feebly, in the merriment. “All that sort of thing is over for me now. I shouldn’t care to go to Sir Richard’s, only it is an old engagement; and if I don’t go now{260}—”
“You won’t be allowed to later, you rogue! Is that what you mean—a previous engagement to Miss Sophy, eh? Well, well, my dear boy, do as you like about it all—or rather, I should say, what Sophy likes. And now be off with you. You’ve given more time already than she’ll think right to the old fellow, and you’ll find her in the conservatory, I fancy, or, if not, in her own flower-garden. By George!” continued the old man, rubbing his forehead with a recollection half comic and half sorrowful of a certain interview with his daughter, whose tears he was never known to be proof against, and who had shown herself a true woman on the occasion of her lover’s temporary eclipse,—“by George! what a way she was in, to be sure! I could hardly fancy it was my little Sophy, the slip of a girl that I was dancing on my knee no longer ago than yesterday, as it seems! And now she’s a woman, and able to take her own part; ay, and your part too, my lad. God bless her! I could have told her then, only I didn’t like to, she was so rampageous, and it doesn’t do to spoil the creatures, that I was more than half sorry I’d called you over the coals. But on the whole, Arthur, it’s just as well as it is; and between ourselves, my boy, although I don’t know that my brother the parson, who is going to splice you and Sophy, wouldn’t call me an old{261} fool for saying it, I’m not sure that I don’t like you the better for what’s past and gone. You might, you know—and I’m told that many a young man would have done such a thing—you might have kept it to yourself that you’d given that long sum for one of John Beacham’s yearlings; for it was a long sum, eight hundred pounds, I think your brother said it was; and terribly like gambling, you must own, it looked! However, that is all over now, and you are well out of it. I am sure you think so too, eh?”
Arthur hesitated a little ere he answered this leading question. For some reason, which it is not necessary at this stage of the story to explain, he was not particularly partial to talking of that famous colt, known in the betting-ring, and in sporting circles generally, as Rough Diamond. It is just possible that he was not quite so glad to be what Mr. Duberly called “out of it” as that gentleman seemed to think; still, he contrived to answer cheerfully enough that “it was all right,” and that he hoped that Norcott would have good luck with the brute now he had got him.
“Ha, ha!” laughed the cheerful old man. “So Roughrider, or whatever his name is, has come to be called a brute, eh? The way of the world, sir; the way of the world! Whatsoever is our own is perfection; but directly it becomes{262} our friend’s—poof!”—and he snapped his fingers significantly—“it isn’t worth a brass farthing! Seen the sort of thing, by George! a hundred times. But I say, Arthur,” lowering his voice to a whisper, “about this Colonel Norcott; what and who is he? I’ve a sort of idea that I know something about him. Didn’t he go to the colonies, or the dogs, or some confounded place? I’m a bad hand at remembering that kind of thing; couldn’t even when I was a young man; and now I might as well try and recollect who built the Monument.”
Again, as at the mention of Colonel Norcott in connection with that unlucky steed Rough Diamond, Arthur looked ill at ease. He answered readily enough, however, to the effect that he believed Colonel Norcott had formerly been in the Irish Greys, but that it was long before his time, and that he (Arthur) knew very little in any way about the purchaser of John Beacham’s colt.
“In the Irish Greys, was he?” Mr. Duberly said thoughtfully. “Ah, that reminds me! How little it takes sometimes to do that kind of thing! Colonel Norcott was the man—correct me if I’m wrong—who had something to do with an advertisement. Answered one from a respectable young woman, eh? and—ah yes! It all comes home to{263} me now. A bad business—a shocking bad business indeed!”
Arthur reflected a little, and then said that he was afraid, from some things he had heard, that Colonel Norcott was the identical man existing for life under the kind of cloud alluded to by Mr. Duberly. “I don’t think that I ever heard the particulars,” he said. “I fancy his wife left him, or was an objectionable person, or something extenuating of that kind. She is dead now, fortunately for him, and he has married again, I fancy—some colonial person, whom they say is rather nice.”
“The triumph of hope over experience, eh?” remarked Mr. Duberly, who was rather fond of extracting from the limited stores of his memory sundry quotations, ancient as they were classic. “But what has the man been doing down here? Is he in society, or is he not? He is a fine-looking fellow enough for a middle-aged man. I saw him one day driving what you call a ‘trap’ in the High-street at Leigh, and asked who he was. What is his connection, I wonder—for I suppose he has one—with Sandyshire?”
“O, as to that, there is reason enough for his hanging about here,” said Arthur, glad, as it seemed, to offer a legitimate guarantee for Colonel Norcott’s quasi-respectability. “The Norcotts{264} are, or I should rather say were, a county family. Fred Norcott’s father was a rich man, and his mother, who is nearly related to the Pembertons, has a comfortable jointure, luckily for her, as her son (there was only him) managed to get rid of everything else very early in his career, I fancy.”
“And lives now upon his wits, I suppose?”
“Partly; and then I imagine his mother helps him a little; not much, though, for she is married again to a Mr. Baker, who is not particularly attached to Colonel Fred. The Bakers—he is a retired solicitor, or something of that kind—live in a pretty little place about three miles the other side of Leigh; and the fact of its lying convenient to the Gawthorpe racecourse is quite sufficient to account for Fred Norcott turning up occasionally in these parts. And now, sir, having told you all I know and suspect about the family, I think I may as well go and say good-bye to Sophy.”
Leaving the placidly happy old man comfortably ensconced, newspaper in hand, in his favourite arm-chair by the wide open French window of the library, Arthur Vavasour went in search of his betrothed. He knew as well almost as if the interview were over what would take place between him and that tender, unassuming, rather commonplace little girl (as I am afraid he called her) who was waiting for him in the magnificent{265} conservatory, book in hand, but without a passing idea, poor child! save of the man who gave her in return so little of his love, so small a portion of his waking as well as sleeping thoughts. There was none—and the want in her case was a serious misfortune—of the “delightfully capricious,” the “charmingly various,” the “tantalisingly mysterious,” in the character of Sophy Duberly. Her nature, which was simple and guileless as a child’s, could be read at a glance in the soft brown eyes, honest, tender, and trusting—eyes which are rarely to be seen in a human countenance, but which those who are addicted to canine friendships can recollect in the head of more than one faithful beast which has lain at his feet, and been unto him as a brother. Coquetry, that useful woman’s weapon, was an utterly unknown “arm” to this simple-hearted heiress. The most practised teacher in the female art of self-defence would have failed to make Sophy understand the handling of that perilous instrument. Her “yea” was “yea,” and her “nay” “nay,” and somewhat “yea,” “nay,” it is to be feared that her variety-loving intended sometimes found her.
In person, this humble heiress to countless thousands was quite sufficiently attractive to have been loved—as all women in her position naturally desire to be—for herself alone. Her{266} features were not regular, nor can her eyes be described as either large or “liquid;” but her figure was fine, her complexion good, her teeth white, and her tout ensemble decidedly effective. She worshipped Arthur Vavasour with a devotion which was alike unmerited and inexpedient. At Rome,—where he first became acquainted with the millionaire English mees, at whose feet penniless princes with titles dating from the days of the Tribunes laid their pedigrees humbly down, and where the money of the Manchester warehouseman proved the “open sesame” to the highest and the most exclusive society,—Arthur Vavasour had taken a high place amongst the many aspirants for Miss Duberly’s favourable notice. He was his mother’s son, and that mother, at present in possession of an income of some thirty thousand pounds per annum, must, in a very few years (for the particulars of the Earl of Gillingham’s will were in the world very generally known), abdicate—or rather, be very unpleasantly deposed in favour of her eldest son. With such prospects as these, it was impossible to attribute mercenary motives to that handsome, agreeable pretendant; and that Mr. Vavasour could be thinking of marrying for money was an idea that never once presented itself, either to Mr. Duberly or his daughter. It was{267} pleasant to believe that the attentions of one in Mr. Vavasour’s position must of necessity be so purely (as was patent to the world) disinterested. To Sophy, who had been duly warned against the mercenary nature of all human motives, the conviction that Arthur was an exception to the general rule was especially delightful. After all that she had heard, and read, and seen—after the raids by impecunious aristocrats into the regions where the richer ten thousand guarded their well-earned gold, of which she had more than once been herself the destined victim—what wonder that this middle-class young lady, who was not (what girl of any promise is?) without her small ambitions, should have seen in Arthur Vavasour the realisation of all her fondest dreams, her highest aspirations?
She made no secret of her preference. An indulged and petted only child, Sophia Duberly had never known the necessity, scarcely even the advisableness, of sometimes keeping her feelings to herself; and so it followed that Arthur knew full well, long before the avowal had been made in words, that the rich heiress loved him.
It was well for him that Miss Duberly could not guess how very slight was the effect that the discovery produced upon him. Well, too, for him that the girl to whom he was about to plight{268} his troth knew, in common with all the world, so very little of the actual state of affairs at Gillingham Castle. They were a proud race, those Vavasours; their pride—Arthur’s, at least, taking the turn of resenting in silence his mother’s meanness, love of power—call it what you will—which led her to keep him, the heir-apparent, so “short,” that he was driven (that was the young man’s way of putting it) to run in debt, and eventually to marry for money; results which were of course intensely odious and “disgusting.”
The heir of Gillingham was descending in a very compromising manner from his pedestal in thus mixing his blue blood, and being brought down to the dull dignity of a “family-man,” by an enforced union with the Manchester man’s daughter. Arthur had, however, no resource but to submit. In silence (with the single exception of his almost unbounded confidence in his brother Horace) this self-indulgent, self-pitying young English gentleman bore his cross, inwardly chafing the while against the “shifts” to which he was reduced, and the self-denial that he was sometimes called upon to practise.
It was not till Arthur was firmly established in the good graces of the merchant-prince—not till he was, in short, one of themselves—that he ventured to open the eyes of Mr. Duberly to the{269} peculiarities of Lady Millicent’s character, and the unjust as well as unmotherly conduct of which he was himself a victim. As he had fully expected would be the case, this confession had no power to shake his hold on the good opinion of the unsuspecting Duberly. As a matter of course, Lady Millicent (whose pride and “stand-aloof” ways had already caused her to be no favourite with the plain-spoken, independent millionaire) came in for her full share of invective, and of a contemptuous ridicule of which, had she known of its existence, she would have strongly disapproved; but it is more than probable that “old Dub” liked his future son-in-law even better after this rather humiliating confession than he had done before. The love of patronising and protecting is inherent in most human breasts; and fortunate, indeed, is it that so it has been ordained to be, for where very frequently, were it otherwise, would the feeble and the friendless be? The love, then, of patronising being one of our nature’s idiosyncrasies, and Mr. Duberly not being unnaturally constituted, that excellent man felt more than ever disposed to act a father’s part towards the “good-looking young fellow” of whom his only child, his dearly-beloved little Sophy, was so fond.
With regard to that simple-minded and rather{270} benighted young lady, who was entirely ignorant of the great moral truth that over-indulgence is equally prejudicial to the grown-up among mankind as it is to children of a smaller growth, she scarcely knew how to make enough, (after the knowledge of what she considered his ill-usage,) of Arthur Vavasour. The way that she petted and coaxed, and yielded to, and made much of this not particularly humble-minded young gentleman, was, as the Yankees say, a caution. It was very nice, of course, and sweet, and flattering, and the object of all this worship ought, by rights, to have demonstrated unbounded gratitude, and have shown himself to be more deeply and ardently in love than ever; but for some reason or other—human nature is so thoroughly inscrutable that we can by no means account for this unsatisfactory result—Arthur’s affection for his unsuspecting and devoted fiancée began to decrease in an inverse ratio to that which she so evidently entertained for him. Of this melancholy decadence he was himself, for a while, happily unconscious; indeed, it required the awakening within him of another love to arouse this infidèle malgré lui to a proper sense of his position.
The conviction that he is bound to marry one woman while his feelings, passions—call them what you will—are wrapped up in another, can{271} never be agreeable to any man. Arthur Vavasour was no practised dissembler, and it was fully as much as he found himself able to effect to prevent Sophia Duberly, during a stay of four-and-twenty hours, from discovering the truth—namely, that though he was with her in the body, his thoughts—alas, for her!—were far away.{272}
On the 23d of July, in the year 186—, the day remarkable as that on which Arthur Vavasour reached his twenty-first birthday, crowds of people of every degree, and all, as it seemed, on pleasure bent, were assembled in the park, and along the roads that led towards the beautiful “seat” known as belonging to the Earl of Guernsey. It was a pretty place—not “princely,” like Fairleigh, or frowning proudly in baronial grandeur, after the fashion of noble and time-honoured Gillingham; but, though inferior in magnificence to its more imposing neighbours, Danescourt was, after all, a mansion and estate not wholly unworthy the rank of its owners.
Lady Guernsey, who was country born and bred (albeit one of the most popular women in England, and perfectly “at home” everywhere), was greatly attached to Danescourt. She was never so happy—so said those who knew her best,{273} for Lady Guernsey was a person who talked very little about herself—as when, the London season being over, she could devote herself at “dear” Danescourt to her garden, her children, and her poor.
The Lacys were a large family, there were seven of them—“the curate’s half-dozen,” Lord Guernsey used often to say, with a cheery laugh, which would have sounded pleasant from any lips, but was, of course, doubly exhilarating from a lord’s. He was a capital person altogether, that “belted earl,” whose girdle was capable of encircling the slender waists of two modern guardsmen, and whose face beamed so pleasantly with genuine good-nature, to say nothing of the good things of this life, that the man must have been morose indeed, and ingrained with mental jaundice, whose spirits were not lightened by the glow of his genial companionship.
Between the Vavasour family and that of the Lacys, who were comparatively new settlers in the county (their coming dating as lately as the Restoration), there had never existed any of those ties, either of friendship or family connection, which near neighbourhood is sometimes known to cement. Though, as it is only natural to conclude, many brave sons and fair daughters must, in the course of centuries, have sprung from the re{274}spective marriage-beds of those highly distinguished families, no intermarriages had taken place between them. The hereditary politics also of the two races were, and always had been, diametrically opposed—one reason probably, among many, why no closer bonds than the cold ones of acquaintanceship had hitherto linked together the members of two of the most ancient, as well as most respected “houses” in the county.
The Earl and Countess of Guernsey, who, as I before said, were genial, warm-hearted people, would gladly (not for the sake of Lady Millicent, whom they did not like, but for that of the young people at the Castle, whom they did) have established warmer and cordial relations with their neighbours at Gillingham Castle. They were unfeignedly sorry for the poor girls, whose youth was blighted by Lady Millicent’s selfish adherence to a system of seclusion—a system introduced and persevered in, as Lord Guernsey, who was an outspoken man, did not hesitate to say, far more from the promptings of a parsimonious spirit than from any deep and lingering sorrow for “poor Cecil’s” death.
“Don’t tell me,” he would say, speaking almost bitterly for one so habitually good-tempered,—“don’t tell me about Lady Mill’s being a ‘pattern widow.’ She is no more a pattern widow than{275} she was, at any time since I have known anything about her, a pattern wife or a pattern mother. I never had any patience with all that flunkeyish humbug about Lady Millicent’s perfections. Whatever good was done in that family—and a great deal was done, that we all know—is to be attributed solely to Cecil Vavasour. As for Lady Mill—”
“Well, well,” put in Lady Guernsey good-humouredly, “I think there is something to be said for her. That Will of her father’s must be terribly trying to a person of her domineering temper.”
“So are a great many wills—all wills, in short, that are antagonistic to our own. It doesn’t follow, though, that we are justified in trying to set them on one side. In my opinion—but then I have never been tried,” he added, laughing, “by a similar aggravation—in my opinion, the will of a dead man, like his last injunctions, ought to be held sacred. A curse is more likely than a blessing to follow on its being set aside.”
“And they do say that Lady Millicent is going to try the case—against her own son, too! It looks unnatural; but I still say, although I am anything but fond of her, that there is some good in Lady Mill. She is fond of her children, after a fashion; she is anxious about them when they are ill, which isn’t often, for there never were{276} more healthy creatures; and I really think that but for this clause in the will—I mean, if it had been left to her to manage that great fortune in her own way—Lady Millicent would have given no cause for the world to say that she is neither a good mother nor a faithful stewardess.”
“Perhaps not. You women know one another’s characters and motives best. Lady Mill may have hidden excellences in her nature (very securely hidden, too, I must say), which it requires a woman’s penetration to discover. My experience of life tells me that if there be anything estimable in a tremendously rich person like Milady Millicent, that same estimable quality increases and magnifies itself a hundredfold in going from mouth to mouth; while, on the contrary, the praiseworthiness of the poor is a very unfructifying and unprofitable article indeed. For my part (mind, I expect to be abused), now that the fashion is gone by of glorifying my Lady Millicent—not that it would have gone by if poor Cecil had lived—for my part, and I say it without fear of being contradicted, what I think is (and I repeat it again), that all the talk there used to be about her being faultless, and all that kind of thing, was totally undeserved. Like thousands of other prosperous people, she never did anything openly bad. She was not, I daresay, much given to{277} breaking the ten Commandments; but then, I should be glad to ask, where were her temptations? Ladies are not much in the habit of swearing; she had neither father nor mother to honour or dishonour; there was nothing for her to covet; and, God knows, no man in his senses would covet her!”
“You are not very charitable to poor Lady Mill,” said the Countess, laughing in spite of herself at this résumé of their neighbour’s “gifts.”
“Charitable? I should think not! Who with any Christian feeling would be charitable to one who has gained for herself such a name for hardness of heart, while she professes to respect God’s holy law and commandments, as Lady Millicent Vavasour? I am not, I hope, either a humbug or a prig; but I like to see people act up to what they profess, and I should have a better opinion than I have of our neighbour at the Castle if she talked about religion less, and acted up to its dictates more.”
“In my opinion,” said Lady Guernsey thoughtfully, “more than half of her pretended love of seclusion and country life, which people have said so much about, arises from selfishness and indolence!”
“Bravo!” said his lordship in delight. “I knew it would come! Let a woman alone, if{278} she’s a sensible one, for arriving at the right conclusion. Now, I’ll tell you what it is, Gertrude,” he added more seriously, and placing his wife’s hand within his arm, as they strolled together under the branching chestnuts of the grand old avenue leading to the house; “I’ll tell you exactly what it is. There may be, as you say, no real harm in Lady Millicent; but she is neither tender, nor open, nor womanly. Gad, what should I do, and what would the children do, with such a mother as that? As for the poor things at the Castle up there, I declare it’s a shame to see her muddle away their existence as she does. Those two fine young men—Arthur, particularly, who, between you and me, is a little soft, and who required no end of judgment in his raising—are utterly ruined.”
“I hope not, poor things,” said Lady Guernsey, who was given to look, even more than was her lord, at the bright side of every shield, “I hope not; one never can tell how boys will turn out. I’m often really quite uneasy about Ernest; and yet—”
“You needn’t trouble yourself, my dear Gertrude, about him. Ernest is one of your quiet, lymphatic sort, but both those young fellows at the Castle are of another kind of constitution; and I’m as certain that Arthur, at least, will come to{279} grief, as I am glad that his poor father didn’t live to see it.”
“I often thought that Mr. Vavasour wasn’t pursuing the wisest plan in the world about his boys,” remarked Lady Guernsey pensively. “The Vavasour children never seemed to be allowed to find their own pleasures like other boys and girls. They were very good, I daresay, and were always well-behaved; but I used often to fancy it would have been more natural if they had been naughty sometimes like their neighbours.”
“Much more natural! And then the plan of sending Arthur to travel with that kind of half-and-half gentleman tutor was very bad. For my part, I don’t believe Lady Mill knows a gentleman when she sees him. All she thinks of is Power, and all she dreads is the time when Arthur will be twenty-five, and the hour for her despotism will have sounded. My own idea is—and many people, I fancy, suspect the same—that she is making up a purse against the evil day of dowagerhood. One thing, however, is certain, namely, that all this—this unfortunate state of things at Gillingham—is a sad business for the poor on the estate. Already the appearance of the cottages, and, above all, the state of moral feeling among the labourers on the Gillingham estate, has undergone a serious change for the{280} worse. The lower orders—I hate the name, but it says what I want to express—were secure of Cecil Vavasour’s sympathy. Ay, even of his friendship, while as for his widow—But enough of this; for our own motes, my dear Gertrude, are, after all, not so completely eradicated that we can afford to lay so much stress upon the beams that we may happen to discover in our neighbour’s eyes.” He spoke only half seriously, for Lord Guernsey was one of those who take a cheerful view of all things and subjects; but the conversation just narrated was not without its effect, inasmuch as his wife obtained in consequence free leave and permission that on the occasion of Arthur’s twenty-first birthday Danescourt should be as gay as a full bevy of summer guests could make it. Nominally, the festive week at the Court had nothing to do with Arthur’s coming of age. The good-natured host and hostess were too desirous of giving pleasure to each and all of the young Vavasours, for any hint of the truth to have designedly passed their lips. But for all their caution, it did, of course, come to be noised abroad that the Guernseys were teaching Lady Millicent her duty, and that for once in their lives her young daughters were to be indulged in the opportunity of enjoying themselves.{281}
“Well, mother, ain’t this better now than to be sitting mending stockings, and to be bothering about pickles and preserves at home?” asked genial John Beacham of his highly respectable parent as mother and son, sitting in the front-seat of the most well-appointed of “traps,” were jogging quietly along the pleasant lanes towards Danescourt.
It was somewhat against the grain, and not a little to his own inconvenience, that John Beacham was devoting a day to amuse his womankind on that eventful twenty-fourth of July. Danescourt was a good five-and-twenty miles from the Paddocks. In little more than half-an-hour the travellers could be conveyed by rail from Switcham to Gawthorpe; the latter place being the nearest town and station—distant about three miles—from Danescourt. But Mrs. Beacham unfortunately entertained, amongst other immutable{282} prejudices, a very decided one against steam locomotion. As a rule she was not greatly troubled with “nerves;” but the exception was when, by some extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, she found herself whirled along in an express-train, gasping for breath, and ejaculating piteous appeals for protection to that Power which, under the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, we are all of us so given both to ignore and to forget. It was a standing joke (when that lady was not present) that old Mrs. Beacham invariably began to say her prayers the moment the pace of the train by which she was travelling commenced to accelerate. Indeed, so patent and unmistakable were her sufferings, that John—well-to-do, open-handed John—who, “thank goodness, was not obliged to look twice at a shilling before he spent it,” and who was unwilling to turn a day’s pleasure into one of penance, decided to drive his mother and his pretty wife in the new “trap;” services of that famous horse “Jolly Boy,” an animal who could “trot his nine mile an hour, sir, without turning a hair,” being put into requisition on the occasion. As a matter of course, her own personal dignity being concerned in the matter, Mrs. Beacham had required some pressing before she allowed herself to be persuaded to attend the gala scene at Danescourt.{283} She was not wanted, the old lady declared, in such gay places as that. At her age she was better at home minding the house; while other people, who were fond of gadding about, took their pleasure in Lord Guernsey’s park. It was rather provoking, Honor thought, to see her stepmother poser en victime, when she, the younger woman, was perfectly well aware that had Mrs. Beacham been sixteen instead of sixty-five, she could hardly have looked forward with greater satisfaction than was in fact the case, to that day’s long-promised “outing.” That she, Honor, did not press her stepmother to do violence to her feelings by condescending to form one of the little party to Danescourt was a fruitful source of aggravation; and when the old lady did eventually take her place in the front-seat of the “trap,” attired in a wonderful new bonnet from Leigh, and a Paisley shawl of many colours—her own choice, and worn for the first time that day—her temper could not, with justice, be said to be above its average standard of good humour and composure.
With a little sign of resignation Honor took her place on the back-seat, where, for the next three hours, she was doomed to be imprisoned, her limbs cramped by sundry bags and boxes—for they had decided to spend the night at Gawthorpe—and her view circumscribed by Joh{284}n’s broad shoulders, and by the gaudy shawl pinned with old-fashioned tightness round his mother’s ample back. Though wanting yet two hours to noon, the July sun was already darting its broiling rays over the travellers’ heads; and Mrs. Beacham’s solid cotton umbrella, hoisted for that autocratic lady’s comfort, materially interfered with that of the slight figure behind, which was clad in the simplest of airy muslins, while there rested on the thick braids of her fair hair a dainty hat that was, in Mrs. Beacham’s opinion, most reprehensibly juvenile and coquettish.
“Better, ain’t it, mother?” John said, as the well-bred brown horse dragged the heavy weight behind him through the sand of a cross-country lane. “The country is beautiful to-day. Hold up, Jolly Boy; and, Honor, sit close, my dear. This road is rather in a go-to-the-bad state; and it wouldn’t do to be pitched out in the dust in that pretty get-up of yours.”
Honor laughed. She was a girl—child enough, also, you may say—to be amused by the jolts that half shook her out of her seat, and so greatly disturbed the old lady’s temper. In the excitement of the drive, the changing of the scene, and the anticipation of the coming gaiety, she had forgotten Mr. Vavasour altogether; and that gentleman would have been but ill-pleased could{285} he have guessed how small a share he had in young Mrs. Beacham’s thoughts during the long drive that day.
“Well, thank goodness, here we are at last!” exclaimed the discomfited old lady, when at length a sudden turn in the high-road brought them in sight of a pretty ivy-covered lodge, which stood invitingly open, and which John informed Honor was the principal entrance to the Danescourt grounds. “Such a dusting as I’ve had to be sure! I declare to goodness that my best silk won’t be worth five shillings when I get it home. A silk, too, that cost me seven shillings a yard no longer ago than last May twelvemonth, and was as good this morning as it was the day I bought it.”
“Well, mother, we must buy you another, that’s all,” said John good-humouredly. “But, I say! if there isn’t jolly Jack Winthrop, with the old chestnut out, I see!—How are you, Jack? and how’s the mare?”—pulling up Jolly Boy to have a few moments horsey talk with his old acquaintance. “Sound again, eh? Steps a little short still, don’t she, with the near foreleg?”
Jack Winthrop, who was a wiry-made sporting-looking character, in a black cut-away and a low-crowned hat, was sitting behind a wicked-looking “red” mare, the which animal was harnessed to a vehicle called a dog-cart, but incapable{286} of containing, with any degree of comfort, any creature, four-footed or otherwise, in addition to the said wiry Jack himself. He gave a knowing nod and wink to John, and threw an admiring glance at Honor, as he passed, at the full swing of the wicked chestnut, the more steady-going “family man.”
John shook his head gravely. “There he goes!” he said. “That’s just the way with those fellows! Jack, now, has doctored up that mare of his; and some poor devil of a muff will be stuck, I’ll answer for it, before the day is out.”
It was scarcely, however, the place or the season for moralising. They were by this time in the ruck of carriages and horsemen, all going in one direction, and John Beacham’s attention was amply employed, not only on the steering of Jolly Boy through the crowd, but in returning the cordial greetings of his many friends and acquaintances. At length, and after sundry exclamations of alarm, and more than one involuntary clutch at the reins on the part of John’s agitated parent, the little party in the “trap” came in sight, through an opening in the trees, of a great white marquee, capable—if the voice of rumour could be believed—of containing within its canvas walls a whole regiment of soldiers, the said marquee having{287} been erected in a broad and sheltered glen, at about five hundred yards’ distance from the house. The scene that presented itself to Honor’s admiring gaze was full of life and colour and animation. The band of an infantry regiment, at that time stationed at Leigh, was thundering forth a popular polka, adapted to brazen instruments in full regimental force. Groups of well-dressed people were scattered here and there over the greensward: the branching trees lent a delicious shelter from the fierce rays of the summer sun; and a glimpse that could be caught by the curious of the interior of the tent disclosed an array of plates, dishes, and glasses that would have caused the heart of a fasting man to dance with anticipated bliss.
“Now, then, look alive! Jump out! The horse won’t stand in this row,” said John, a little impatiently perhaps, for Jolly Boy, in spite of the five and twenty miles’ journey, was restless with excitement, and Will Burton, one of Mr. Beacham’s trusted “helpers,” who had been sent on by train to wait his master’s coming, was holding him (though with some little difficulty) steady by the bit during the “young missus’s” descent.
Honor made what haste she could, gathering together her full skirts to save them as best she might from the dusty wheel, and feeling,{288} she scarcely knew why, a something in her husband’s tone that jarred against her sense of what was delicate and becoming; jarred too against her own consciousness of beauty, of being well-dressed; of being, in short, a little woman worthy to be petted and admired. She was not cross—far from it—as she shook out her ample drapery and took John’s sturdy arm, while Mrs. Beacham held firm possession of the other; but, though not the least angry with her husband, Honor was too habitually good-tempered, and, at the moment too happy, to be that, she was perhaps rather more disposed than she had been before to greet with satisfaction any appreciating words or flattering attentions which might chance to fall to her lot. Nor were such opportunities for the gratification of a vanity which was more natural than harmless, likely to be wanting. Honor’s beauty was not of the kind to be passed over in a crowd, be that crowd ever so dense or individually preoccupied. The exquisite colouring, delicate as it was rich, of her bright young face—the lips slightly parted, red and dewy—and the violet eyes, half-shy, half-laughing, made up a tout ensemble that many a man turned and turned again to look upon, as Honor Beacham flitted amongst the throng that day, leaning on her husband’s arm.{289}
Many gentlemen, as I have just said—gentlemen, that is, by brevet and by prescriptive right—made themselves conspicuous that day by their open and undisguised admiration for John Beacham’s beautiful wife. Honor was, unfortunately, precisely in the position which of all others renders a young woman the most easy to be beset by this indelicate description of flattery. There is something in the very name of a “horse-breeder’s wife” which at once connects itself in the mind with what is as “fast” and “slangy” and forward as the most fast and free and horsey among the “fine young English ladies” of our day. Those who chanced to know Honor personally might have proclaimed the contrary; but somehow young men in general do not care much to assert that a beautiful girl with whom they are acquainted has betrayed the reverse of the proclivities above alluded to; so, for lack of a cham{290}pion, those who were not acquainted with Mrs. John Beacham judged of that young woman as it pleased them best.
Amongst the class of “gentlemen” above alluded to—messieurs qui suivent les femmes from rule, from habit, and from inclination—the one that stared the most at, and followed the closest on, Honor’s footsteps was the individual with whom the reader has already made some slight acquaintance in his character of owner of that celebrated yearling yclept Rough Diamond.
Colonel Norcott, whose history in his native county had been for some years “a blank,” was at this period of his life somewhere about five-and-forty years of age. Five-and-forty, bien sonnées, nevertheless he looked younger than his age, for his figure, which (whatever else he had lost) he had been fortunate enough to keep, was slight and juvenile; his hair, though less luxuriant than of yore, was still thick and glossy; and his face, which, though always plain, even to ugliness, was singularly attractive and intelligent, had stood so well the wear and tear of years that many pronounced Fred Norcott a better-looking man in middle-age than he had been in the days when a greater amount of personal beauty might fairly have been expected of him.{291}
Frederick Norcott, an only and over-indulged son, was barely seventeen when he commenced his career in life as a light dragoon. He possessed great natural shrewdness, a good memory, and a rare gift of rendering himself agreeable to those whom he desired to please. Principles he had none. To instil any such troublesome things into his son’s youthful mind had been deemed by Fred’s father a work of supererogation. Fred would be well off, had good connections, and was rather a sharp fellow than otherwise; so the country gentleman, who knew but little of the world, and who—his own nature being both a proud and a cold one—had himself kept clear of scrapes, sent his only son forth into “life” with the injunctions to do nothing dishonourable, and never to make a fool of himself.
There are some young men thus ushered into a world of trial and of temptation, for whom the code of honour—in so many respects the Christian code—would stand in stead of what are called higher principles, and would keep them at least tolerably straight in the path which they were fated to tread; but of such exceptional young men as these Frederick Norcott did not, unfortunately for himself and his friends, happen to be one. Cursed with the strongest passions, adoring as well as despising women, utterly selfish, and a gambler{292} to the backbone, who can wonder that Frederick Norcott should very early in life have become bankrupt in fortune, friends, and reputation,—in all, in short, that should make existence valuable to its possessor? But for the wars, which were consecutively so instrumental in the “keeping going” of sundry of England’s impecunious sons and heroes, Fred Norcott would very soon have been laid on an extremely comfortless shelf. How he contrived to live, after his paternal inheritance had been reduced to actual nothingness, was pretty much a secret between the Jews, his creditors, and himself. As a soldier, however, he stood high. As fearless before the foe as he was audacious with the fair, Fred Norcott, as long as shots were flying, and human flesh and bones were required to stop them, kept his head above water tolerably well. But the day of reckoning came at last. Ships came back full instead of empty of soldiers from the East; the last rebel Pandy was scattered to the winds; the dead had buried their dead, and hungry creditors began to think of gathering up the fragments that remained. For a time—why does not appear, except for the reason that some men do possess more than others the gift of softening hearts—Colonel Norcott’s natural enemies seemed disposed to allow him that highly improvable item, time. Perhaps seeing that the Colonel{293} came under the head of that large class, namely, “distinguished officers,” it would scarcely have paid, immediately after his retirement from the service, to be hard upon him. To have coarsely insisted upon payment—to have “taken steps” for the “settlement” of their long-standing accounts—might have occasioned the loss to those rapacious tradesmen of the custom of better men; so, as I said before, they waited for a while, with what patience they could muster, for the turning of the tide.
As is generally the case, immunity from punishment was very far from working either reformation or improvement. The iniquities which Fred had committed in the green tree were perpetrated by him still more villanously in the brown. At the age of thirty-six, there were few atrocities, chiefly under the rose, of which he had not been guilty; and it was at that age—an age at which the wild oats are supposed to be sown, and the new leaf lastingly turned over—that the ex-dragoon committed the act of which “old Dub” entertained so vague a recollection, but the consequences of which eventually drove Colonel Fred (with all his debts upon his head, and very little money in his pockets) to Australia.
This climax in the career of the ex-dragoon took place about a dozen years before the opening{294} of my story; and Colonel Norcott, after spending ten of those years in banishment, had returned to his native land a wiser if not a better man. Nor had he, as we already know, returned alone; for there was a Mrs. Norcott—a colonial heiress, it was said—who had taken pity on Fred’s poverty and loneliness, and endowed him with her hand and fortune. At the time my story opens, two years, or nearly so, had elapsed since Colonel Norcott—gay, agreeable, but slightly under a cloud—made his reappearance on the stage of the London world. How or at what period terms had been made with the creditors to whose former leniency the prodigal owed so much, history deponeth not. That they were satisfied with the turn affairs had taken was evidenced by the fact that “the Colonel” roamed, with a free step and jarret tendre, about his former haunts; while for the nonce—whether such a state of things would last remained to be seen—a veil seemed by common consent (amongst the laxest portion of Colonel Norcott’s former acquaintances) to be thrown over his past delinquencies, and non mi ricordo, save amongst the ultra strict, was as regarded his errors the order of the day.
“Who is that gentleman, John?” asked Honor, her face still flushed with the crimson tide that a prolonged stare from Colonel Norcott’s bold in{295}sinuating eyes had thrown into it. “I fancy I have seen him before. Did not he come to the Paddocks one day about buying a horse?”
“A great many people do that, my dear,” responded John absently. “Came to buy a horse, did he? And which of all these gentlemen is it that you mean?”
“Which? O, that one! there he goes—the tall man in the light coat; you can see him now between the trees, talking to the person that you call Jack Winthrop.”
John Beacham, who had a moment before been intensely amused by watching an animated game at “Aunt Sally,” turned in the direction indicated, but at first without being able to discover the object of his wife’s curiosity. The hand that rested on his arm positively trembled with impatience. Honor could not account for the strange interest which she seemed to take in that middle-aged, distinguished-looking man. To her, Colonel Norcott, erect and soldier-like, with his grand military bearing, and his five-and-forty years so bravely carried, seemed almost an old man, or rather an old prince. Somebody very remarkable he was—of that Honor had no doubt; and the fact of his having noticed her did not tend to lessen the interest that he had excited.{296}
“O John, can’t you see him?” she said eagerly. “There, he is out of sight now! Why wouldn’t you look before? I know he is somebody great—a foreign prince, or something of that kind.”
John laughed gaily. “Why, child,” he said, “what do you know about foreign princes? Do you suppose there’s anything in the cut of their jib different from other people’s? Why, if you want to see an article of that sort, I’ll bring you a mustachioed fellow up to lunch one of these days. There’s plenty of all sorts come, one way or the other, to the Paddocks. They speak pretty good English, do most of the mounseers, or there ain’t many words would pass between me and them. But about this gent, Honey, that you’re so anxious to know the name of. Is that him, coming back again, and looking this way?”
By this time the tall figure of Colonel Norcott was again in sight, swinging his cane, and sauntering slowly towards the spot where John Beacham, with those two very different specimens of womankind—one leaning upon either arm—was standing. It must have been evident to any looker-on whose attention was not otherwise engrossed that the Colonel manifested a decided inclination to haunt the spot where that beautiful face and élancée girlish figure were to be seen and admired. Honor, perceiving his return, felt that so it was;{297} and the shy blush rose again to her cheek as she answered John’s question in the affirmative.
Rather to her surprise, the latter turned away abruptly, thus avoiding the meeting with the gallant Fred which must otherwise have taken place.
“O,” he began, and Honor knew by his heightened colour that her husband’s naturally quick temper had received a touch of the spur, “so that’s the party, is it? Well, Honey, I won’t promise to bring him up to the house—that is, at least, unless I’m obliged to, which I don’t think likely. Why, my dear, that’s Colonel Norcott, a man who—but never mind; you’ve nothing to do with what he is, nor I neither, excepting that he bought Rough Diamond of Arthur Vavasour, and—well, I never thought to care so little whether a colt of my breeding proved a winning horse or not.”
“They were great people once in the county were the Norcotts,” put in Mrs. Beacham. “I’ve heard old Mrs. Parsons—she that was mother to the fly-away thing that keeps the shop at Leigh now—say, times and over, that Madam Norcott—which she’s nothing better than Mrs. Baker now—used to buy gownds of her that a duchess might have wored; and she could afford it too; and it was a pity that this young man made ducks and{298} drakes of everything, for it was him, warn’t it, John, that brought the family down to what it is?”
Before her son could answer, which he was about to do in the affirmative, the well-known proverb having reference to a certain gentleman in black who shall be nameless, was once more unsatisfactorily illustrated by the reappearance on the scene of the spendthrift in question. Coming this time totally unawares upon the unsuspecting trio, it was impossible for John to evade, as he had before done, the meeting with a man of whose character and principles he entertained the worst possible opinion. The object of his dislike came forward with a dégagée air, and after nodding in a patronising manner to John, stopped in the middle of the broad turf-covered walk, thus effectually barring the passage.
“Fine day! Looked like rain this morning. Your wife, eh, Beacham? Happy to be introduced. We’re kinder pardners now, as the Yankees say, and you must wish me good luck, Mrs. Beacham, with Rough Diamond. Ladies have all the luck in racing, and I shall expect you’ll remember me in your prayers.”
“I hear the colt is looking well,” John said stiffly. “I’ve no interest in him myself now he’s out of Mr. Vavasour’s hands;” and he was mov{299}ing on, when Colonel Norcott, stepping on one side, joined himself (walking on Honor’s side) to the party.
“Been riding lately, Mrs. Beacham?” he said coolly. “That little mare of yours is a pretty goer; but then, who should be well mounted if you are not? Of course you had the pick of your husband’s stables, and there’s nothing like them, I always say. Such luck, too, Beacham, your stock have. By George! I expect to make a pot of money out of Rough Diamond.”
“I hope you won’t be disappointed, sir,” said John drily. “And now,” stopping dead short, and looking resolutely at a turn in the road which led (at right-angles) in another direction, “and now I believe that we must wish you good-morning. I am a business man; and as I don’t often afford myself a day’s leisure, I wish to make the most of it;” and having so said, he bowed with grave civility to the Colonel, and drew his womankind away.
Fred Norcott was not the kind of man to be easily repulsed. He did not stand in the slightest awe of John. “A low fellow of a horse-breeder, you know,” is the way he would have described the man whose watchwords were truth and honesty, and whose palm was as pure as a sucking child’s from bribes. “A fellow who ought{300} to be obliged to a gentleman for noticing him, which one wouldn’t do, you know, except for his wife. By Jove! such a pretty creature! Such eyes! and a foot—”
But there is no need to follow this unchartered libertine in his (imagined) unseemly rhapsodies. That he did intensely admire the wife of the man he affected to despise had been made quite sufficiently evident during that short colloquy, not only to the object of that admiration, but to honest John himself. The latter was not either of a quarrelsome or a susceptible temperament. It was not in his nature to take umbrage at any respectfully evinced appreciation of his wife’s beauty. Anything so pretty as Honor was of course made to be looked at; but looked at, not with eyes of convoitise—not with the bold, much-meaning, purity-tainting stare with which men of the stamp of dissolute Fred Norcott bring burning blushes to the cheeks of girlish beauty. John’s blood had boiled within him when the colour, stirred by the bad man’s gaze, had risen to his fair wife’s brow. He could have felled that slight, delicate-looking libertine to the ground with one blow of his powerful right arm, and the act would have done good, perhaps, to both men; but John had, for the moment at least, his passions under control, and the quondam soldier was left standing scath{301}less upon the greensward, and gazing vacantly at Honor’s retreating figure.
The abruptness—not to call it rudeness—with which John Beacham had given him his congé seemed to have produced very little effect in rousing Fred Norcott’s indignation. The impression that the sight of Honor had made upon him was far too powerful for any other emotion either to lessen or to remove it. The fact was that in the Celtic beauty he had traced, or fancied he could trace, one of those extraordinary resemblances which sometimes, in our walk through life—looking back, it may be, along the “wondrous track of dreams”—startle us into retrospective thought.
“How like! My G—d! how like!” he said to himself. “The same fair hair, and long dark eyelashes. The same—”
“I beg your pardon, Colonel Norcott; but I believe you are thinking of Mrs. John Beacham?” and a middle-aged woman, neatly but plainly dressed, who had approached unperceived (so constant was the hum of voices, and so soft and thick the turf beneath her tread), dropped a curtsey to the gentleman, and begged to say that her name was Bridget Bainbridge.
As is the frequent case with intriguing persons, Colonel Norcott’s first idea, when he chanced to{302} find himself accosted by a stranger, was, that he was about to be imposed upon; he therefore—albeit a little taken aback by the sound of a name which he had not heard for many a bygone year—commenced an immediate scrutiny of the woman’s features, in order the better to secure himself against the evil of being “done.” Apparently the investigation was corroborative, for after a moment or two he said in a hurried whisper:
“It is a long time since we met, and you have chosen rather a public place in which to make yourself known. If you have anything to say, go in that direction,” and he pointed to a narrow pathway, leading to a dense shrubbery of evergreens. “Go,” he continued authoratively; “and I will join you in a few moments.”
The woman who had called herself Bridget Bainbridge seemed about to speak, then stopped, hesitated a little, as if unable to make up her mind as to the best course to be pursued, and finally decided on following the Colonel’s directions. The latter, after waiting—with a strange look of perplexity in his face—for a few brief moments, turned away in an opposite direction, but in one which, for he knew the “lay” of the Danescourt grounds well, would conduct him eventually to the place where Mrs. Bainbridge was waiting for his coming. His step was far slower{303} now, and infinitely less assured, than when he had advanced with that air conquérant of his to damage with a word and look the peace of mind of that bright rustic beauty. There was evidence of thought in his lowered head, and of a nameless anxiety in his knitted brow. Something had tamed his spirits since he had caught sight of that quiet-looking middle-aged female, and as he approached the place where she was waiting for him, the pulsations of his heart grew quicker, and large beads of sweat stood out upon his forehead.
END OF VOL. I.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
spent in the secluson=> spent in the seclusion {pg 18}
succesfully combated=> successfully combated {pg 101}
gossipped about=> gossiped about {pg 184}
change your gownd afore=> change your gown afore {pg 201}
She was girl=> She was a girl {pg 284}