“Kind hearts are more than coronets,And simple faith than Norman blood;”
“Kind hearts are more than coronets,And simple faith than Norman blood;”
“Kind hearts are more than coronets,And simple faith than Norman blood;”
but judging of things (the only really reliable test) on their marketable value, we shall, I greatly fear, be obliged to own that, individually considered, the coronets, and the blue blood have in this wicked world the best of it.
But carefully under lock and key as the reverend George kept his secret, there was one who discovered its existence, and who, having so discovered it, was ever, with true feminine inquisitiveness, peering behind the veil of the good man’s heart for further and more satisfactory information. Rhoda Vavasour’s first sensation, when the fact (in some subtle and inexplainable manner) of Mr. Wallingford’s hopeless passion became apparent to her, was one of actual fear. In an instant there rose up before her a vision of Lady Millicent’s stern and astonished face, a face in which none of her children had ever traced a sign of tenderness, or the faintest line of sympathy or pity. It was to that very hardness, to the repellant influence felt by timid shrinking Rhoda whenever her thoughts turned to or her eyes rested on her mother’s unloving countenance, that might mainly be attributed the encouragement—for she did in her silent, gentle way encourage the young clergyman to hope—which Rhoda gave to the Rector of Switcham. But there was yet another, and perhaps an equally powerful, reasonfor the “underhand deceit,” the “grovelling tastes,” as Lady Millicent would have, and indeed did in later days describe them, that were displayed at that period of her life by her daughter. Nature had endowed poor Rhoda with a susceptible heart, and a strong propensity to cling. In default of any other object on which to fix her affections, and of some more suitable prop round which to twine, it was only in the common order of things that to the sole stay within her reach, the tendrils (heartstrings is perhaps the most appropriate word) of Rhoda’s inner woman should have wound themselves round the engaging young parson, to whose exhortations, delivered in a voice singularly pleasing, she meekly listened, and who enjoyed in Lady Millicent’s pet schoolroom, and sometimes by the bedside of the sick, golden opportunities oflooking, at least, unutterable things. There could scarcely be a stronger proof ofretenue, both on the part of the rector and that of the young lady, than the actuality that Kate, who was usually so ready at discovering love-affairs, never once suspected the truth as regarded her sister. Not even the grand phenomenon, the mighty puzzle of Rhoda’s contentment at Gillingham, had sufficed to warn the rather precocious maiden that quiet, pretty Rhoda—Rhoda, who looked, as theold saying goes, “as if butter would not melt in her mouth”—was in love with, and meekly ambitious to marry the obscure young man at whom Lady Millicent, while she deigned to patronise him, decidedly turned up her aristocratic nose.
The reason for Rhoda’s silence when Kate alluded to the rector—a silence which, had Miss Kitty been in an investigating mood, that quick-witted damsel would speedily have speculated on the cause—must be now fully apparent to the reader. For a moment the shy girl thought and feared that her secret was discovered, and that, in shrinking mortification, she would be compelled to endure the wondering, kindly-meant questionings of her younger sister. The next words, however, spoken by the loquacious Kitty dissipated her alarm; and feeling intensely grateful for the reprieve, Rhoda listened with sympathising ears to the chattering girl’s remarks and surmises.
“I am afraid that what Horace says is right,” continued Kate, “and that it is this odious law-business which we have heard hinted at so long that takes mamma to London. One good thing is, that she cannot mean to keep us quite as much out of fun and amusement as she does here. Haven’t you noticed how she has gradually been giving up the righteous dodge? For ages—as weall know—balls were desperately wicked, and operas a positive abomination. It was only in the country that, according to mamma, there was any chance of being saved; whereas I heard Horace say only the other day, that people could inflame themselves quite as much with idols under green trees as in the excitements of a London season. I heard him say, too—”
“O Katie,” Rhoda broke out, “don’t, pray don’t, repeat the things—I mean that kind of thing—that Horace says! I cannot bear the remarks he makes about mamma; and I think that if you were not to encourage him, he would leave them off. And besides, I don’t know how it is, but I always feel guilty when I see mamma after we have been abusing her.”
She spoke very seriously, for little as Lady Millicent had either deserved the filial love or encouraged the confidence of her children, it nevertheless jarred against the girl’s sense of what was right and fitting when she heard the others talk, as they were wont to do,à cœur ouvert, of her mother’s small hypocrisies and underground plans.
Kate laughed merrily. “Weabusing her! I like that! Fancyyousaying what you think about milady! No, no; the time for that isn’t come yet. But wait till you’re tried, that’s all. It takes longer to provoke you than it does to irritate either of us. And then, if mamma is fond of anyone in the world, she is of you; I suppose because you are so very meek, always ready to let her think she is in the right, let her do what she will. But about this muslin, Rhoda. Hammond says there certainly is not enough for both; so I suppose, as it will not do for Miss Vavasour to look skimping before the eyes of London, you had better take the whole. Ah me!” stretching herself rather wearily as she stood before the cheval glass, and then letting her arms fall with a sigh too deep-drawn to have emanated from so young a breast; “ah me! how I wish I had a mother—a mother, I mean, like Lady Guernsey or Lady Pemberton, or even—don’t be shocked, you aristocratic thing!—even like Mrs. Clay. I want a motherly mother—one who would love and pet, and bore people about me—one that I could tell things to, and that would listen, and not look as if she thought one a fool. And besides—though that sounds horrid, I daresay—I should be glad of a mother who would care whether I looked nice, and who would give you, now that you are ‘coming out,’ enough of an allowance for you to dress as well as other girls. Sixty pounds a-year! Why, Lina de Lacy had that when she was fifteen, and mamma is twice as rich as Lady Guernsey. I wonder how youwillmanage! Run in debt, Isuppose, like Arthur. Poor Atty! But it will be worse for you than for him, if you are forced by money difficulties to marry someone that you don’t love, and—”
“I shall never do that,” Rhoda said, but in a voice so low that Kate could scarcely catch the words.
“So you think now; but, as I said before, wait till you are tried. And there is another thing, darling—you will have to marry for my sake. Only think, Rho dear, how happy we should be together! You with a nice home of your own, with no one to object to your ordering the carriage when you pleased, with no cross looks if you were a minute too late for prayers, with—”
Rhoda interrupted her by a laugh. “You might exchange bad for worse,” she said sapiently. “All husbands are not like Lord Guernsey, and I suspect that very few homes are so happy as Sophy’s was. I daresay, if we could look into the insides of many people’s houses, we should see plenty of girls a good deal more to be pitied than we are. And, Katie dear, whether that be so or not, one thing is certain, namely, that it is wrong—wicked even, I think—to be discontented, and to abuse mamma. Whatever she does or says,wehave no right to sit in judgment on, or to find fault with. Don’t be put out with me for preaching, dear Katie. I know I am not half so clever as you are; but—”
“But you are fifty times as good!” cried Kate; “and I believe in my heart that because you are so good and so patient, mamma does love you a little bit; while as for the rest of us—but what is the use of thinking about it?”—dashing a tear impetuously from her eyes as she asked herself the painful question. “Thinking over it won’t give one affection or kindness or sympathy; so I for one shall try to do without what would—at least so I fancy—make one contented anywhere and everywhere.”
The simple philosophy of the girl of seventeen, though in some respects rational enough, was, however, based upon very erroneous principles. The example of her more highly-valued sister might have demonstrated to her that “patience does its perfect work,” and that the most selfish of mortals, and those least to be affected by the claims of kindred and the universal prejudices of consanguinity, can yet be influenced, both as regards their conduct and their sensibilities, by the deference which real goodness never fails to obtain for those who, knowing what is right, do, as the poet adds, “always practise what they know.”
Thefirst sight of No. 23 Bolton-square proved ratherdisenchantantto the two young ladies, who for the last five weeks had talked and thought of but little else than the coming glories of the season. As they approached the sights andscentsof London, a dense fog, as it appeared to the novices, but which was, in fact, simply an easterly wind laden with dull yellow smoke, shrouded as with a veil every distant object on which they looked.
“This never can be London; and London, too, in the month of May,” thought Kate, as she looked out from the window of the railway-carriage on an atmosphere thick with discoloured smoke, through the mists of which the summits of sundry towers and steeples, together with the outlines of some nearer buildings, were dimly visible.
London in the month of May! And as Miss Katharine Vavasour realised the melancholy fact, it required all the counterbalancing comfort to befound in the recollection that Rhoda was at last “coming out,” to make amends to her for the lost country pleasures to which distance now lent a hitherto undiscovered charm. But if the time-worn, smoke-stained walls of the family mansion struck the imagination of Lady Millicent’s young daughters as gloomy and uninviting, what could be said of the interior, where the wear and tear of years was everywhere visible? In the spacious suite of drawing-rooms, the furniture of which had not been renewed for more years than Lady Millicent had ever cared to count, and where, “dingy yellow” vying with “dirty red,” everywhere displayed tokens that the letting of the town mansion of the Vavasours had been very promiscuously carried on, poor Rhoda (for Kate was too overjoyed at the change to take any lasting notice of the surroundings) stood in mute dismay. The last tenant had been an American—a wealthy New-Yorkian—who, following the “common and unclean” habits peculiar to his country, had not improved either the outward appearance or the intrinsic value, in a delicate female point of view, of the carpets. Probably Mr. John B. Foy, or whatever might have been the gentleman’s multifold cognomen, would have scorned the meanness of letting his house in the Fifth Avenue, or in University-square, to any Britisher or other foreigner desirous to witness the humours of “York City;” but, having paid a good many almighty dollars to an individual (a “female,” as the said New-Yorker might possibly have designated the superb Lady Millicent), he very naturally concluded that, viewing the matter commercially, he had a right to abuse as well as to use, in aristocratic Bolton-square, the privileges of his sex and country.
“Did you ever see anything so dirty, so shabby, so faded?” Rhoda remarked to her brother Horace, the first moment after their arrival when she found herself alone with him. “Mamma could have had no idea of how bad it was. Just look at the paint and the curtains! If they were but clean! But really, these are too horrid!”
“Wait till you make acquaintance with some of the other great houses that fine ladies give their balls and drums in!” Horace said. “It isn’t everyone who finds money for everything; and you will amuse yourself just as well in a room where the paint is dingy and the hangings old-fashioned, as you have any chance of doing in places that are kept in apple-pie order. In my opinion, and as far as I can judge, it’s ratherchiqueto be shabby in this kind of way, as well as in some others that I could mention.”
“But, Horace,” said Kate, who had joined herbrother and sister, as they stood, the one philosophising and the other listening disconsolately, in the midst of the much-reprobated family furniture,—“but, Horace, tell me about Arthur. We are to call this afternoon on dear Sophy. Mamma seems terribly afraid of being over-civil; and it seems a little bit unbrotherly of Atty not to have come last night to see us, so many months as it is since he and Sophy married. But I suppose it’s out of sight out of mind with them.” And Kate, laughter-loving Kate, heaved a little sigh as she quoted the well-worn proverb.
“Nonsense, it’s nothing of the kind; but women are so awfully fond of jumping at conclusions. Arthur would have been here fast enough, if he had hoped that any good could come of his putting himself in Lady Mill’s way; but it wouldn’t, and that is a truth, poor fellow, that he has not got at this time of day to learn.”
“But, Horace dear,dotell me what it is all about! I should have thought that marrying Sophy Duberly would have put everything to rights. The old man seemed so very fond of Atty, and Sophy, too. I should have imagined that all would have gone smoothly with poor Arthur when once he was one of them—once he was Sophy’s husband; and a baby coming besides, which Mr. Duberly was so anxious for. Really, Horace, Iam puzzled, and that is the truth. You always talk as if something dreadful was hanging over Arthur’s head, and—”
“Do I? Then I am a fool for not being able to keep my own and other people’s counsel. But,” lowering his voice, although Rhoda, who knew herself to be less trusted by her brother than his younger sister Kate, had discreetly walked away,—“there is no use in talking about it. Have you seen—”
“But, Horace, theremaybe use in talking about it,” interposed his sister. “We might do something, if we were able to put our heads together, to get Arthur out of his trouble. Union is strength, they say; and though the bundle of sticks is a pretty tough one—”
“And will therefore take time to break,” put in Horace sadly, “which is precisely the reason why there is no use trying to do it; for time is everything to Atty. If you knew old Duberly as well as I do, Kate, you would say the same.”
“But what has Mr. Duberly to do with it?” asked Kate.
“Everything. If anything should happen, which isn’t the least likely, to old Dub, all would be smooth as velvet for Arthur; but as it is—”
“As it is! O, do go on, Horace; how provoking you are!”
“Well, as it is—But here comes milady. I say, Katie, not a word! But I needn’t repeat that to you, for, considering you are of the feebler sex, you are one of the most reliable young persons with whom I happen to be acquainted.”
Thepreparations for Honor’s departure went on rapidly at Pear-tree House. Her wardrobe, for her station in life, was a tolerably extensive one; but besides that her stay in London was expected to be short, there was this simplifying fact as regarded the packing of Mrs. John Beacham’s things—namely, that she possessed no evening dresses. Handsome silk gowns (gownds, Mrs. Beacham called them) she owned in plenty; but they were made high, as became a decent female to wear them, and would have been pronounced ridiculouslyrococoin a London drawing room, where the female figure divine is displayedà toute outrance, and where nearly as much (anatomically speaking) may be learned of thatchef-d’œuvreof Nature’s workmanship as may be picked up in the dissecting-room or in the mostdécolletéstatuary display in Europe.
Honor watched and superintended, and indeed aided, in the packing up of her belongings like a woman in a dream. It seemed so strange, now the time was drawing near for her to depart, that she was actually going away from John. There was such a sense of protection in his presence—the sense of trust which all women feel, and love to feel, in the support of a good and brave man—that Honor began to be very miserable at the thought of bidding good-bye to her husband. Even after they had left the house, she would have given much, as she sat by his side in the trap, to have been able to say to him that she was sorry to leave the Paddocks. Had she seen a token of softness on his countenance, she would have opened out her heart to her true friend. But there was no such sign. Stolidly, and with his eyes never turned for a single moment on the sweet face beside him, John drove along the well-known road. He little dreamt of the softened thoughts, the half-formed wishes, that were welling up in Honor’s heart. He only knew that by her own wish she was about to leave him, about to leave his protection for that of the father who was so utterly unworthy of the trust. Ah, could he then but have looked into the vain foolish heart which yet, with all its vanity and folly, contained in it some elements of good, how changed might have been poor Honor’s lot, and what a chance of future peace and safety, if not of the ecstatic happiness of which simple women dream, might have been hers!
But it was not to be! Not to be, because the wife was shy and silly, and the husband prejudiced and proud. Not to be, because fate or Providence had ordered otherwise. Not to be? The words are terribly suggestive, and hard indeed it seems to believe, that while a poor weak woman is deliberating, it is a known fact to Him who ruleth the heart and searcheth out the spirit, that she will be lost.
John had decided not to part with his wife till he saw her safe under her father’s roof. At the Leigh station, where in less time than was usually employed in thetrajet, the pair duly arrived, Will Snelling was in waiting to drive back the horse and trap to the Paddocks.
“Walk him up and down a bit, Will,” John said, as his faithful henchman gently stroked the old gray’s quarters, which gave manifest tokens of hardish driving. “I fancied we were late; clocks at the house too fast, I suppose. There, take that trunk, my man,” to a porter who seemed to have nothing more interesting to do than to suck a dirty straw while he stared at the heaving flanks of John’s thoroughbred steed. “Take that trunk, and look alive. The up-train’s late to-day, isn’t it?” He seemed determined not to trust himself with Honor. Like most men, especially those of a thoroughly manly stamp, he hated scenes, and the sight of a woman in even the smallest amount of grief or distress was especially annoying to him. Of what avail, besides, would it be to talk to Honor now on the only subject which contained interest for him? The die was cast. She was about to do the thing which he had thought and talked himself into believing that he most hated upon earth. His wife was to undergo the contamination of Norcott’s society; to mix with his associates; to listen to the conversation of men of his stamp and strain; and to return to him—ah,thatwas the rub!Therewas where the shoe pinched most! How would Honor return to him, and to the dull country life which alone he had to offer her? Would she be less of a fine lady, as his mother (and John had begun to think, with some degree of truth) had so often called her within the last few well-remembered months? Would she smile upon him more, talk more, be more interested in her home, and—thought poor John Beacham, with a sigh, as the train rushed onward at express speed to London, would she shrink less from his touch—the touch of one who loved her, for all his lack of refinement, his red hands, and his country-made coat, with a lovewhich was not for an hour only, not for the brief space of a summer holiday, but for all the years that should be allotted to him upon the earth?
“Pleasant day for the end of April,” John remarked; “an east wind that cuts through you like a knife. Pin your shawl, Honor; you’d better;” and he drew up the railway-carriage window with an impatient jerk.
If they had but been alone, those two, if there had not been seated opposite to them a garrulous old woman and her maid, Honor might have said her say; John might have softened at the sight of her swollen eyelids, and all might have been well, or at least better, between them. The fellow-traveller, however, proved an effectual barrier to any such beneficial result. She did not come under the head of a strong-minded female, but was, on the contrary, one of the numerous unprotected travellers who divide their interests between their sherry-flask and the anticipation of an immediate and dreadful railway accident.
“I suppose there won’t be any signals, sir,” she said, addressing John nervously, for, as they neared London, the smoke floating on the breezeless air bore a striking and disagreeable resemblance to a November fog. “The railway people are so terribly careless. I declare, there’s no punishment too bad for them. We might all berobbed and murdered, and not one among ’em would trouble his head about the matter.”
In this way the old lady, after the fashion of her kind, maundered on, while nearer and more near to the head-quarters of dirt and smoke and crime the travellers rushed.
Honor sat mute, and with a sad and troubled countenance, by her husband’s side. She dreaded and yet longed for the moment when she would be freed from the miserable restraint, the almost unendurable combat within her, which was induced by his presence. Once alone—once safe in the cab which was to convey her far from him and from the associations connected with the painful past—she would breathe, she thought, more freely, and would be better able to prepare herself for the interview with her father and her father’s wife which was now so very near at hand. Honor now knew (none could have known better) that she had not done, in the spirit as well as to the letter, her duty to her husband. In thought she had strayed from him; in her daily life she had not cared to study his wishes; and above all—but that was happily, long ago now, and over—she had allowed the image of another man to stand between her and the husband who so loved and trusted her. To confess all this would have been more than Honor would have found moral strength andcourage for, so she came to a compromise, after the fashion of the cowardly, with her conscience, and made an inward resolve that on her return, at a convenient season she would—not exactly make a clean breast of it to John, but that she would show him by her conduct, ay by her words if necessary, that she repented of her past proceedings, and intended, as much as in her lay, to make ample amends for it in the time to come.
She was roused from the train of thought into which these resolutions had led her by the sudden stopping of the train, the throwing open of doors, and the inquiry for tickets. The midday was very chill and sunless, and a striking contrast to the bright May morning—twelve months, minus a day, before—when the village children strewed fresh roses in her path, and the jocund sun shone out so brightly on her bridal!
John too had been, she recollected, a very different John in those days. The companion of that vividly-remembered wedding journey would not, she felt, have bustled her out so brusquely on the platform, and would have handled her small belongings with a far gentler hand. Life, however, is compounded amongst its countless atom-like events of so many contrasts, and so many memories of contrasts, that comparisons of the present are often as unsatisfactory as they are odious.
“Non c’è maggior stupiditàChe di recordarsi del tempo passato,”
“Non c’è maggior stupiditàChe di recordarsi del tempo passato,”
“Non c’è maggior stupiditàChe di recordarsi del tempo passato,”
when the current of our lives is running roughly over scattered stones, and when we need our best wisdom, patience, and tact, to carry us safely through a perilous crisis.
By an insignificant, but at the same time a somewhat singular, coincidence, the family from the Castle chanced to be in the same train, and in a carriage immediately behind that in which our travellers from Peartree-house had placed themselves. The fact of their near neighbourhood was patent to John: he was, however, in no mood to listen hat in hand, and with the old-fashioned show of respect—a remnant of the not wholly extinct feudal system which had descended to him from his grandsires—whilst Lady Millicent condescendingly acted the part of suzerain lady for his benefit. Hoping to evade altogether the notice of the mighty dame, John, after the fashion mutely objected to by his wife, hustled that young person in rather unseemly haste from the carriage.
“Be quick,” he said, as he hurried her away to a cab. “Don’t look that way; her ladyship is there, with the young ladies, and I have no time for stopping if I am to go back by the next train.”
There was not a grain (as I am sure must be by this time apparent to the reader) of that verycommon weakness popularly known as flunkyism in John Beacham’s honest, unaspiring nature. His wife, who was not, in ordinary cases, a mean judge of character, might have felt well satisfied, could she have often chanced to be present during John’s familiar interviews with men of rank and note, that subserviency was foreign to his nature, and that he was equally at his ease with the peer as with the peasant. It was only with the female sex—when that sex happened to be represented by an arrogant fine lady—that John Beacham, feeling completely out of his element, seemed awkward and constrained; so awkward and constrained that Honor, disposed to see everythingen noiras regarded her husband’s manners, rashly decided him to be vulgarly in awe of the haughty grandeur of her friend Arthur’s mother. That honest John would at any time have willingly gone a mile or two out of his way to avoid a chance meeting with the great lady of Gillingham, was undoubtedly true. Want of habit—for fine ladies of any stamp came very little in his way—was quite sufficient to account for this peculiarity; but the moral cowardice betrayed by this shrinking from a subjection to Lady Millicent’s queenly airs and condescending graciousness had often been a source of mortification to Honor. Since the memorable epoch of the Danescourt fête the foolish girl hadthought herself into the irrational belief that she might aspire to visit on terms of equality the upper ten thousand of the county. Before the most unfortunate discovery which had so fully developed the germs of ambition lying latent in her breast, Honor had more than once felt inclined to resent Lady Millicent’s supercilious notice—her over-civil inquiries, when church was over, after Mrs. Beacham’s health; and, worse than all, the occasional patronising calls at the Paddocks, when any heavy-on-hand visitors among the rare guests at the Castle chanced to express a wish for an introduction to Mr. John Beacham’s far-famed breeding stud. But if such had been Mrs. John’s feelings when stirred thereto partly by Mr. Vavasour’s head-turning attentions, and partly by the entirely vague but pleasingly deluding surmise that she was a “lady” born, how much more was she inclined to chafe against Lady Millicent’s offensive condescension when the to her blissful truth was no longer doubtful, and when Honor knew herself to be the daughter of a well-born gentleman, and the great-granddaughter (it was wonderful how soon she made herself acquainted with the family pedigree) of a baronet!
Very few words passed between John Beacham and his wife as they were rattled along the busythoroughfares leading from the Waterloo station to quiet Stanwick-street. A station cab is never a favourable locality for dialogue, and the fares on the present occasion appeared better pleased to be silent than to talk. Jingle, jingle went the wheels, and clatter, clatter, the ill-fitting window-frames, whilst every jerking, jolting moment brought them nearer to what would be alike a pain and a relief to both—separation!
At last—the time had seemed both long and short—the cab, leaving the northern precincts of the Park, turned into the dull, respectable little street where Honor was to find a temporary home.
“No. 14!” John shouted, with his head out of the window, and in another moment they pulled up before the Colonel’s door.
The last adieux were made—as such final farewells usually are—very hurriedly, and in a decidedly unsatisfactory fashion. It had been Honor’s settled purpose to give utterance to some kind words ere they parted—to say something—what, she knew not—that would be regretful and conciliatory; something that would make her own heart lighter whenheshould be far away. But partings, hasty partings especially, are something like death-bed repentances. There is hurry and flurry, there is alarm and confusion, thereis the consciousness of having so much to do, and so short a time in which to do it. At that moment, when poor John pressed his wife’s delicate fingers with a hand moist with heat and emotion, the presence of the parlour-maid, and the duty of seeing to Honor’s various belongings, checked any loving words that might have been hovering on his tongue, and almost before the object of his anxious solicitude had responded to his final “God bless you!” the vehicle, with John inside, had driven off, and Honor was left alone.
A gooddeal to her surprise, as well as not a little to her relief, Honor was informed by the parlour-maid—who struck her, even at a cursory glance, to be rather pert and forward—that neither Colonel Norcott nor his wife were at home. Mrs. Norcott was “gone for a walk,” Miss Lydia said (she was only Polly to the gentleman lodger). Mrs. Beacham had not been expected by such an early train, and she (Lydia)knowed—at least, so she had heard the Colonel say—thathewas obliged to go out on business.
Greatly reassured by this information on the score of her father’s health, Honor, who did not feel much inclined to encourage the young person’s familiarity by questioning her on the subject, entered the drawing-room, and seating herself on the comfortless-looking little sofa, covered with cheap highly glazed chintz, and stuffed with some material very antagonistic torepose, betook herself to not-over-cheerful reflections. For the first few minutes, grief—positive and unmistakeable, at being separated from her husband—filled not only Honor’s heart, but the blue eyes that looked vacantly through the confusing mist at the cheap toys and worthless ornaments with which Mrs. Norcott’s work-table was crowded. Only a few short hours before, how Honor would have ridiculed the supposition that her first act under her father’s roof would be—to cry! In the distance, the coming change had seemed to her a roseate opening between two parted clouds. To escape, though only for a season, from Mrs. Beacham’s despotic rule—to leave behind her the monotony and the dulness, the daily routine of uninteresting duties, and the hourly remindings that her married life had been a blunder—had all in their turn been subjects of rejoicing to Honor. But above all, far and away above all, there was the near prospect that the dream of her life would be at last realised, and that she would take her rightful place amongst the ladies of the land!
It is just possible that her introduction to that delusion-expelling front drawing-room in Stanwick-street, was not without its effect in causing a reaction in this aspiring young woman’s mind. Widely different, certainly, from anything thatshe had previously imagined, was that small, cheaply-furnished chamber! The faded carpet, in the centre of which was spread a brown-holland abomination, called—I have reason to believe—a crumb-cloth; frail painted chairs, whose appearance alone was a wholesome warning to the unwary, that a seatà laTurk upon the floor would be safer than trusting to their frail support; and above all, the cottage piano, with its once rose-coloured silk front discoloured by time and exposure to the blacks and flies of a London lodging-house, formed atout ensemblewidely different from any which Honor’s discursive imagination had hitherto called up.
For the moment the unpleasant reality produced on her mind a sobering effect, and with the natural lessening of her former desire to pay a lengthened visit in Stanwick-street, there came an increase of regret that she had allowed her husband to part from her in coldness and estrangement. It was partly—partly, indeed! why it was more than half—John’s fault that there was disunion between them; his fault and his mother’s; for whocould—Honor asked herself, as she had done a hundred times before—whocould, unless she were an angel born and bred, put up with the daily aggravations of Mrs. Beacham’s temper?
The young wife’s heart, as she sat alone uponthe hard sofa, pondering, amongst other things, on the unreliableness of the father who had, to all appearance, inveigled her to his house on false pretences, softened greatly towards her straightforward and true-hearted husband; and could she have known him better, could she have looked into the manly honest breast, and read in it all that there was of pain, remorse, and wounded pride, she must—the woman within her being, though vain and foolish, not ignobly constituted—have humbled herself before his better, higher nature, and, owning her many faults, she would have meekly prayed for leave to share his sorrows, as she had once gladly shared his joys. Such a diminishing, however, of John Beacham’s vexations it would not have been easy in this case to have allowed himself. The injury that he had inflicted on Colonel Norcott had, as we are already aware, ever since its perpetration, hung very heavily on his mind; and vile as he justly judged the victim of his ungovernable passion to be, he was none the less the father of his wife; and the conviction that he was bound to make all the reparation in his power for the offence that he had committed did not tend to make John Beacham’s life a happier one.
Of all things calculated to injure the temper and depress the cheerful spirit on which the comfort of daily life depends, there is nothing more certain to produce this deplorable result than the retention within the breast of a deep-seated and a painful secret. John Beacham was not the kind of man to talk even to his wife of the inner feelings which he was not sufficiently of a physiologist to understand. His life was one of action—a simple, above-board existence; and till that fatal blow (a blow fatal, that is, to his own peace) was struck, there had been no hidden spot, no closet within closed doors, the chance opening of which caused the man’s heart within him to beat with quickened pulse, or kept him sleepless through the watches of the night. But now, alas! there did exist for his misfortune, in his hidden life, a secret—a secret the preservation of which was not precisely necessary to his reputation, and certainly not expedient for his safety; and yet John Beacham (why, for he was no casuist, he could not have explained) would not, for six at least of the best yearlings gaining bone and muscle in his paddocks, have had it known in Sandyshire that it was by a blow fromhisright-arm that Colonel Norcott had been so nearly sent to his last dread account; and this act of concealment—concealment, too, carried on for months—was revolting to his inborn sense of honour, and jarred against every habit of his previous life.
How far these, perhaps morbid, feelings reacted on those which he was beginning to entertain for his young wife, it would be hard to say; that they rendered him outwardly cold, and even irritable towards the woman whom he loved with such a devoted and unselfish love, was unfortunately but too true. Men of John Beacham’s stamp are poor dissemblers. He was ill at ease, provoked both with himself and her, and in some way or other needs must that the discontent caused by this weight of care cropped out, and that Honor, ignorant of the cause of hismaussaderie, attributed it to any other than the right one. Very frigid indeed and stern he often seemed, when a word or a smile from her might have dispelled the gathering clouds—might, perhaps, have caused him to forget the mortifying truth that it washerfather who shared his mortifying secret—her father, who, though base and unprincipled, was, compared to him, a high-born gentleman, and whose well-bred air, together with the potent charm of manner (a charm which, without comprehending, John was still capable of appreciating) had descended with added grace to his neglected child.
I have dwelt perhaps too long, and returned with perhaps too much pertinacity to the causes of an estrangement which may appear to some (who are not in the habit of considering the vast powerof apparently trifling causes) as, under the circumstances, to be unnatural, if not indeed impossible. But I have wished in some decree to extenuate the faults and mistakes of my poor heroine. I have done so from a conviction that in judging others we not only see but often suspect little of the latent causes of the sins which seem to us, and which in truth are, so flagrant and so disastrous. Blessed be He who seeth into the darkest places of the hearts of his failing creatures, and who, being himself perfect, can yet find pardon and mercy for those whom erring man forgiveth not!
Honor Beachamwas, as I think has been pretty clearly shown, a very woman in her faults and follies—her quick impulses—her yearning for love and admiration—her small ambitions—and her dainty phantasies. “Fine by degrees, and delicately weak”—like Pope’s inferior man—this semi-Celtic woman was evidently no philosopher at all; and, left to her own guidance, the chances were terribly in favour of her coming—to use the not inexpressive nineteenth-century slang—“to grief.”
How long those exquisite blue eyes of hers would have betrayed tokens of sorrow, had they not been quickly dried by a double-knock at the door of No. 14, must ever remain a problem. To be seen with red eyelids is an act oflèseloveliness, which Honor would never, could she avoid it, have been guilty of committing. Her little coquettish veil, too, was ready at hand to hide any traces of past emotion that might have been visible on her countenance; so that Mrs. Norcott, who entered the room trippingly, and with the attempt at juvenile grace peculiar to that colonial lady of forty-two, saw no reason to suppose that her country guest was otherwise than cheerfully and contentedly disposed.
Mrs. Norcott, in her London walking-dress, was not a person to be passed by without attracting due notice and comment. Attired in light delicate muslin, of a pattern and make better befitting a demoiselle in her teens, the fair Elizabeth probably imagined that she looked the character to which she evidently aspired—namely, a youthful matron in the pride and glory of early wifehood. A sash, tied behindà l’enfant, and a small hat of the species known asturban, served, doubtless, in her opinion, to complete the illusion.
“How longhaveyou been here?” she exclaimed, coming forward with a rush, and embracing poor Honor with the impulsiveness popularly known as gushing. “You’ll be glad to hear that the Colonel is better—really quite another person than when I wrote to you. But sit down, do. We didn’t expect you just yet. The trains must be changed, I think, or the Bradshaw, or something. But how’s your good husband?Sokind of him to let you come!” And Mrs. Norcott, having established her guest by her side upon theslippery sofa, pressed, in token of matronly sympathy, the little hand which she still retained within her own. “I am afraid,” she went on to say, “that you’ll think the Colonel looking ill. When I wrote to you on Monday he was terribly low, poor fellow; quite depressed, you may say, about himself. Men are such cowards, you know, when there is anything the matter with them. Brave as a lion the Colonel is before the enemy, at least so I’ve heard—but on a sick-bed as troublesome, and more so, I may say, than a child.”
“You must have had a trying time of it, I am sure,” Honor said sympathisingly. “I am not much of a nurse, I am afraid, but I will do my best; and as for sitting up at night, I am sure, though I don’t look very strong, I should not mind, it in the least; that is, I mean—” colouring with a recollection of Mrs. Beacham’s jealous guarding over her rights—“if you and my father would like me to be with him.”
Mrs. Norcott laughed—a little foolishly Honor thought.
“Why, happily for all parties unconcerned,” she said, “the worst is over now, and no more nursing required for one while. As I told you just now, Honor—I must call you ‘Honor,’ you know—the Colonel is better—quite himself, indeed, I may say. Has gone out for the first time to-daysince his illness. I expect him back every moment. Ah! there he is; I know his way of shutting the hall-door by this time. He never knocks, the Colonel doesn’t. Gentlemen always will have their latch-keys, you know,” she added playfully (a joke, by the way, which was lost upon the young wife, who had so much in the modern Gomorrah to learn and to unlearn); “and the Colonel, I suspect—there are secrets in all families—has been a bit of a rake; and—Ah, Colonel,” interrupting herself as the object of her complimentary remarks threw open the dooren maître, and strode towards the sofa; “ah, Colonel, here you are! And here’s Honor come—looking so well; and—”
He did not allow her to proceed, for, putting her obtruding figure with scant ceremony aside, he kissed his daughter (who had risen to greet him) with rather more than necessary warmth. The fervent salute, administered on both cheeks, brought the ever-ready crimson flush to Honor’s lovely face. It was a blush that owed its being not to the demonstrativeness of the paternal embrace, but to the unexpected presence of one whose advent had never failed in days gone by to call up that often false tell-tale witness. Close behind Colonel Norcott followed Arthur Vavasour, the man whose image still lingered in HonorBeacham’s memory—the agreeable, handsome profligate, who appeared in no way changed since in the grounds of Danescourt, she, nearly ten months before, had bidden him a not easily forgotten and rather emotional farewell.
They shook hands, and at the touch ofhis, Honor’s colour deepened, and she bowed her head in very conscious shame that so it was. There are no outward evidences of internal emotion so apt to mislead, and that dangerously, as the simple and beautiful, yet alas too rare, effort of nature which is called ablush. It is very intelligible that so it must be. Men who, like Arthur Vavasour, live only (as they estimate living) in the light of women’s smiles—men who dearly delight in discovering proofs of their own power to please—will always see in a pretty woman’s heightened colour a tribute to their sure fascinations. Instinct—the instinct of self-preservation, bestowed for the protection of the weak—warned Honor, as it has warned other women before her, of the existence of this very popular delusion; and the premonition did not tend to moderate the carnation-hue that Arthur Vavasour gazed at with even more than the passionate admiration of the days gone by. Nor was his manner to her—the manner that she had always felt to be so winning—in any fashionaltered; and when he spoke, his voice was as soft, and his words as full of gentle meaning.
“I heard you were expected, Mrs. Beacham,” he said, and the slow lingering pressure of his hand, sent, as he intended that it should, a thrill through Honor’s delicate frame. “How long it is since we have met!”
“Very long,” Honor contrived to say; and then addressing her father, she said something that was not very coherent about her pleasure in seeing him so much recovered from his recent illness.
“Well, yes, I am better,” he said carelessly. “It wasn’t much besides a cold; but women are so easily frightened: Mrs. Norcott thought I was going to die, I believe, when she wrote, and was glad enough when your husband—by the bye, what an uncommon good fellow he must be!—allowed you to come and nurse me.Nurseme? You will laugh at that. I don’t look much like an invalid, do I?”
“No, indeed!” Honor said, with the pretty laugh, “restrained by gracefulness,” and yet which was so thoroughly Hibernian in its character; “I didn’t think, any more than John did, that you’d be up and about.”
“I daresay not; but I really was most uncommonly seedy for a week or so—ask Mrs. N.if I wasn’t; fever at night, and all that kind of thing.”
“Fever? I believe you!” responded his wife, who had been keeping up a not very well-sustained conversation with Arthur Vavasour; but who, like a true wife, was ready to endorse any and everything that fell from her husband’s lips. “You haven’t an idea how ill the Colonel has been. I declare, the day I wrote to you, Honor—I’m going to call her Honor, Colonel, from this out—I was that frightened, I didn’t know which way to turn. Says I, surely his friends ought to know—and then I thought of you; says I—”
But Colonel Norcott cut short all further reminiscence by a laugh.
“It’s one of my rules,” he said, “and you ought to know it by this time—never to go back to anything that’s disagreeable. Live and let live’s my motto, and forget and forgive is another—and what’s more, I practise what I preach, eh, Honor? No dwelling upon old grievances with me. I don’t say that I’m exactly saint enough to turn my second cheek to the smiter; and what’s more, I didn’t ask your excellent husband—who’s got a fist like a sledge-hammer—to knock me down a second time; but I don’t bear malice all the same—not a grain of it; and I shouldn’t mind—upon my word I shouldn’t—shaking hands with himto-morrow.” At this conciliatory speech Mrs. Norcott laughed heartily; Honor, on the contrary, looked very grave. There was something in her father’s words that jarred terribly against her sense of what was delicate and becoming. She had not been happy, lately with her husband—he had been cold and hard, and had not seemed to understand or value her; his want of outward refinement too had often offended her taste; but for all that, she both respected his character, and had taught herself to see nothing degrading in his position. When, therefore, she heard the Colonel speak in this slightly supercilious tone of the absent John, Honor felt rather indignant at the liberty taken. It was a very different affair, allowing herself and permitting others to be disrespectful to the man to whom she owed so much; so this girl-wife, whose heart was still in the right place, listened with a countenance from which the smile was momentarily banished, to the Colonel’s half-sneering mention of her husband’s name.
She was glad—for she felt called upon to say something—when Arthur Vavasour, by asking a question connected with the Paddocks, relieved her from the embarrassment of responding to her father’s flippant sally.
“You will ride, of course, Mrs. Beacham, while you are in town,” he said; “you will enjoy it somuch, and Lady Meg would be so immensely admired. I don’t think I ever saw so many fine horses, or such a number of pretty women, as there were in the Park to-day; but Lady Meg” (he had the grace not to say her mistress too) “would whip ’em all to nothing, as the Yankees say.”
Again the betraying blush rose to Honor’s cheek, as she explained to Arthur that there was no chance of her joining the equestrians in the Row. She had neither horse nor habit, she said, in London; and besides, John had only allowed her to come up on the plea of nursing her father; and now that he was quite well again, why—she supposed she had only to go home again.
“Nonsense! home again!” the Colonel said in his pleasant, cheerful way; “as if such things were to be allowed! Now we’ve got you here, young lady,” and he patted his daughter’s cheek affectionately, “here we mean to keep you. And if this John of yours says a word, why we’ll have him up too, and give him a taste of London life, which he’ll be the better of.—But I say, Arthur, where are you going to, old fellow? To dinetête-à-têtewith the missis, eh? We’re so far from civilised life in these confounded diggings, that I suppose it wouldn’t pay taking pot-luck in this shanty of ours; otherwise, you’re as welcome to what we’ve got as flowers in May.”
“Thank you, I should like nothing better,” Arthur said, his eyes, which were fixed admiringly on Honor, giving ample corroboration of his words; “but there’s a great spread—an awful bore it will be—at old Duberly’s; and then we have to go to something at Lady Guernsey’s—a drum, I believe, they call it—a sort of affair where you get stewed to rags, and pressed like beef-à-la-mode, or some horrid thing of that kind, afterwards.” Of course they all laughed as they said good-bye to him. Honor was especially cheerful on the occasion. Especially cheerful, because her heart was at the moment sinking so heavily within her. Sinking from an undefined and yet miserable sense that all she saw and heard was wrong. Wrong on Colonel Norcott’s side, inasmuch as not only he, but his wife, had, as was almost clear even to Honor’s unsuspicious mind, been in league together to deceive her—wrong on her own because it was patent to herself that the deception excited in her mind neither anger nor regret.
But feeling, as she did, both depressed and frightened at her novel position, Honor summoned one of her brightest smiles to her lip as her hand lay for a moment within Arthur’s. Colonel Norcott followed him to the head of the staircase, and after a short whispered conversation, returned to the drawing-room. He looked harassed and annoyed; and, now that the forced smiles and pleasant look had left his face, Honor could plainly see the marks that age and care had left there.
“Gad, it’s late,” he said, looking at his watch; and then Mrs. Norcott, in obedience to a private signal from her husband, asked Honor if she would not like to see her room.
“It’s a good way up,” she said, as they mounted the steep narrow stairs peculiar to the upper flights of modern-built houses of the calibre of No. 14 Stanwick-street. “The Colonel, of course, does not attempt it; but for young legs like yours and mine it’s a mere nothing.”
Honor, as she toiled after this active middle-aged lady, said something civil and commonplace about London houses being necessarily different from those in the country. She was very desirous not to seem hard to please and troublesomely fastidious, but the style of architecture prevalent in Sandyshire not being of the kind to qualify for alpine climbing, she was thoroughly out of breath and exhausted on her arrival at the journey’s end,—an end which, judging from appearances, was calculated to give rather a poor idea of the means possessed by the gallant Colonel and hissoi-disantheiress wife.
The little attic which Honor was instructed tocall her room was tolerably clean; for, as I said before, the house was one of recent construction, and the various defilements incidental to a course of habitation by a succession of fourth-story lodgers had not as yet rendered the guest-chamber of No. 14 utterly unendurable. But although even Honor—fresh as she was from God’s blessed country, from farm-house cleanliness, and from the traditional scents of lavender and roses—could not have justly called that small upper chamber dirty, it was nevertheless anything but inviting to the eye. The roof was sloping and low; the furniture mean and shabby; there was no wardrobe, and the chest of drawers, as Honor saw at a glance, would scarcely hold even the limited supply of garments which she had brought with her to Stanwick-street.
“Itissmall, as you see,” remarked Mrs. Colonel Norcott deprecatingly; “but I hope you’ll be comfortable. House-rent is uncommonly dear in London in the season—and the Colonel likes to have everything comfortable—and so much expense coming on, you know.”
She spoke the last words in a kind of confidential whisper, throwing a degree of playful significance over the implied suggestion. Honor, who did not know, but who felt that there was adessus les cartes, could only look with a slightlypuzzled air at her mysterious hostess; whereupon that lady, with what was intended for a pretty air of confusion, said:
“Another time, when we know each other better, being both matrons—there need be no secrets between us. Ah, I see, there is hot water—the girl of the house is generally so careless—you will come down when you are ready. The Colonel is particular about his hours: so don’t be long, there’s a dear. The Colonel always goes to his club after dinner, and you wouldn’t like to keep him waiting. Can I do anything for you? No. Well, then, I will leave you to beautify;” and so saying, Mrs. Norcott betook herself to her own, namely, the adjoining and equally unprepossessing-looking sleeping chamber.
Honor sat down on the edge of her narrow iron bedstead, and felt for the moment like one dazed. All that during the last hour had occurred was so widely different from her previous imaginings. Where was the sick-room, the wasted invalid, the atmosphere of physic-bottles and of gloom? Instead, had she not been received with chaff and cheerfulness? Was not her father in apparently perfect health? And already, simultaneously almost with her arrival, had not a visitor appeared, an intimacy with whom her conscience warned her had better be avoided, and regarding whom, asshe was well aware, her mother-in-law had already thrown out hints as uncalled for as they were offensive? And then, closely following on these mental communings, there came the more searching questions of, “What would John think of all this mean deceit? Would he not, in his indignation at the trick, instantaneously require her return?” Instantaneously? Yes! Honor felt well assured of that; John Beacham was the last man in the world to suffer patiently such a deception as had been practised upon him. He hated—of that too his wife was well aware—the man who had deceived him, with as much of rancorous feeling as he was capable of entertaining; and therefore any further sojourn on her part under her father’s roof would, were John to become cognisant of the truth, have been indignantly protested against. But, on the other hand, Honor herself, though aware that she had been lured under a false presence to Stanwick-street, was by no means disposed to disclose this fact to one so deeply interested as was John in all that so nearly concerned her safety and well-being. She was conscious, on the contrary, of a very decided inclination to remain, for the present at least, where she was. Of course this inclination—the mere passing of the desire through her heart, to say nothing of the yielding to it—was wrong,selfish, and unwifely to the most unpardonable extent. Honor, too, was well aware that she was guilty in not driving from her, at the very first onslaught, the tempter who assailed her. There was little excuse, save in the weakness of our most imperfect human nature, for the taking of this first dearly-bought step in wrong. It cost but little trouble putting that wrong foot foremost. She had but to be passive, nothing could be easier, and the affair, one might almost say, righted itself. But facile as it all had seemed, and scarcely out of the common order of things, the time came when that poor weak woman would have given all of life that remained to her, could she have, by so doing, annulled the decision of a moment, and thus averted all the terrible consequences that followed thereupon.
She would not write—so Honor, with very little hesitation, decided—to inform John Beacham that her father was well in health, and that her longer stay in London was uncalled for. It was wonderful, whilst acting thus, how many specious arguments she made use of to persuade herself that she was less guilty than she seemed. No one could imagine—so she told herself (sitting before the small painted mirror, with her fair hair hanging loosely about her neck and shoulders)—no one could by any possibility imagine that shecouldbe there for her own pleasure. Such a wretched room as they had given her! Room, indeed! Would anyone in his or her senses at Peartree-house have called that closet of a place by such an inappropriate name? And then her father, though his bodily health was acknowledged to be satisfactory, yet betrayed, in Honor’s opinion, evident symptoms of a mind ill at ease at least, if not diseased. His pecuniary affairs, too, struck his inexperienced daughter as being in no flourishing condition. The smallness andmesquinerieof the house (a part of which only was occupied by her relations); the absence of a man-servant—for Honor had picked up a good deal of the knowledge of “life” from the pages of three-volume novels; to say nothing of the dress, cheap though showy, of her hostess, betrayed to Honor the fact that either money was far less plentiful in her father’s than her husband’s home, or that penuriousness was a vice indulged in to a large extent among her newly-found connections.
“If my father were rich and prosperous,” she said to herself—and, to do her only justice, this ingenious though unconscious sophist firmly believed in the honesty of her excuses—“if my father were rich and prosperous, I should act differently, and write at once to tell John he is well. I should mind in that case less, I think, the makinghim have a still worse opinion of my poor father than I know he has at present. If I could hope that John would make excuses for them, I should know better what to do; but he would be simply furious. I know that he would never have let me come, if he had not believed that my father was suffering from the effects of that horrid blow; and perhaps, after all, hewas;and besides, if he did make the worst of his illness for the purpose of having me with him, where was the mighty harm? It only shows that my poor father loves me,” added Honor, sadly, to the wilful tender little heart, which was, alas, so likely to be led astray by its own warm womanly impulses.
It was with such false reasonings as these, that Honor persuaded herself to keep the real state of things a secret,pro tem.at least, from her husband. He would never, she decided—even if he lived to the age of Methuselah—understand her feelings, or see things (even if she wrote to him about her father) as she saw them; and so, after sighing a little over her husband’s small amount of solicitude and comprehension regarding the trifling things that so much make or mar the happiness of a young and childless woman, Honor entered on her course of deception. She was interrupted in her cogitations—cogitations which so materially affected the future happiness of one who, albeithe wore his heart, as the saying is, on his sleeve, Honor had proved herself to be so little capable of comprehending—by a hasty knock from the “girl of the house”—the “young person,” whose back hair was thrust into a greasy net, and whose upper woman was clothed in a red Garibaldi that had evidently seen service, which warned the visitor from the country that by indulging herself in reflection, she was doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Dinner was “on table,” as the parlour-maid (to whom Colonel Fred was in the habit of saying civil things) with no great show of respect informed her; and Honor, in some trepidation—for she did not feel exactly at home in her father’s house—hastily put the finishing touches to her simple toilette, and hurriedly, two steps at a time, in very unmatronly fashion, descended the many flights of stairs to the drawing-room. Colonel Norcott was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fireless grate, when his daughter entered with an apology on her lips, and a pretty deprecating smile lighting up her face. Mrs. Norcott had already taken her seat at the round table, which had been cleared for dinner, and was gazing with large anxious eyes, anticipative of evil, on the pewter dish-cover, not one of the brightest specimens of its kind, that graced the simple board.
“I am so sorry,” Honor was beginning; “I had my trunk to unpack; and my hair was so tumbled that I was obliged to undo it, and—”
“And you couldn’t have been quicker if you’d done it for a bet,” said the Colonel good humouredly. “So now for the miserable meal we call dinner. You’ll wish yourself back at the farm-house, I suspect, when you taste the nastiness that Mrs. Thingummy treats us with. You get rather different grub at home—eh, Miss Honor?”
His daughter laughed lightly as she took her place beside him. It amused her greatly to be called “Miss Honor,” just as if she were a girl. And then he looked at, and spoke so kindly to her that she was already beginning to feel at home in the Stanwick-street lodging. With the large-boned, youthfully-dressed matron, dispensing with an air that was intended to be genteel, the ill-dressed, London-flavoured whiting from the scantily-filled dish before her, Honor did not expect to feel much kindred sympathy. Mrs. Norcott was, however, to judge from external appearances at least, good-natured, andfacile à vivre. If she had ever enjoyed the prestige of being that often self-reliant and arrogant character yclept an heiress (a fact of the truth of which Honor began to doubt), there had as yet cropped out no signs either of a love of domination or a purse-proudspirit. A harmless vanity, joined to a blind worship for the Colonel, had hitherto struck Honor as the most distinguishing feature in the Australian lady’s idiosyncrasy.
“If you can eat that stuff it’s more than I can,” said the master of the house, pushing away his plate with disgust. “You see, my dear child, what it is to have a father who hasn’t one shilling to rub against another. I—”
“Now, Colonel, I am surprised to hear you talk in this way,” put in his wife. “There are a precious good many shillings in three hundred pounds a-year, or I am a good deal more out in my arithmetic than I think I am. The idea of talking in this way before your daughter! Why, she’ll think she’s come among beggars, to hear the way you’re going on.”
Fred laughed sardonically. “Not much need to talk about it, I think. Those horrible whitings fried in black grease render all further explanation on the subject nugatory. I don’t suppose that any affectation of superfluity is likely to deceive Mrs. Beacham; and, in my opinion, it is always better to be plain-spoken. You’ve got a poor devil of a father, my dear child, who finds it hard enough, I can assure you, to make both ends meet. Of course you will be uncomfortable here, I expectthat; but I do flatter myself that you won’t throw me over, Honor, because I’m a poor man. I’ve trusted in women all my life, and never had cause to repent it yet; so here’s your health, my dear, and may you enjoy health and wealth and happiness long after your poor old father has been laid under the sod.”
He had taken advantage of Lydia’s momentary absence to utter this pathetic speech, and as the red Garibaldi was not there to mar by force of contrast the Colonel’s paternal platitudes, he got through his toast swimmingly. In another moment, and before Honor’s hand, which had been lovingly extended to meet her father’s, could be withdrawn, the parlour-maid, in whose roguish black eyes the “first-floor front” was certainly no hero, had bounced back into the room, bearing before her a large specimen of that economical and succulent dish known to housekeepers as a juicy leg of mutton. Nothing overcome at the sight of this delicacy, Mrs. Norcott pressed a slice, cut with the gravy in, on Honor’s acceptance.
“What, not a mouthful? Dear me now, how sorry I am! Is there nothing we could tempt you with? It’s because the mutton’s raw, perhaps, that your stomach turns a little at it. Lydia, can you get nothing from the larder for Mrs. John Beacham? That knuckle of ham, now—”
Miss Lydia grinned broadly. “You’ll never see that there mouthful of ’am again, ’m,” she said pertly, and after the fashion of one accustomed to speak her mind. “The Kunnle he atethatfor his breakfast this morning afore he went out;” and having so said, she went on briskly with the important duties of her calling.
To Honor, accustomed as she was to “the land flowing with milk and honey” of the old farm-house at Updown Paddocks, the state of the Stanwick-street larder appeared a most deplorable affair indeed. As for her father—her high-bred, distinguished-looking father, with his delicate aristocratic hands, his dainty golden sleeve-buttons, and, in her opinion, his warm paternal heart—she could hardly refrain from tears as she looked upon his futile efforts to eat the nauseous food that was set before him. She had not been reared, as we know, in the school of over-refinement, and to do violence to her own feelings in order to spare the self-love of another was one of the consequences on an advanced state of civilisation which had not, as yet, made itself felt in the somewhatarrièreparish of Switcham. To feign an appetite if she had it not was not therefore amongst the small deceptions which Mrs. Beacham felt called upon to practise, and for that reason the poor girl rose dinnerless, or, as she would in her ignorance have called it, supperless, from that untempting board. No sooner had the energetic Lydia retired, closing the door upon all (save its unwelcome perfume) that remained of that highly-unsatisfactory repast, than Colonel Norcott, taking his hat from a side table, announced his intention of going out.
“Only for an hour or so—just to smoke a cigar in the open,” he said carelessly. “You’ll be in bed though, Honor, I suppose, before I come back? Beauty-sleep, eh? We mustn’t lose those country roses sooner than we can help, or we shall have John looking us up with that stout stick of his. Gad, how quick he struck, and how it tingled! I can feel it now;” passing his hand playfully over his forehead. “Took one so deucedly by surprise, you know. Hadn’t an idea, of course, that he was going to do anything of the kind. Nothing but a light cane in my hand, talking quietly about old times, when, without a word, down comes the sledge-hammer, and, by Jove! Iwasfloored.”
“He was very sorry afterwards, indeed he was,” Honor said pleadingly. “I have heard him say so often. He hardly knew what he did. If he had not been sorry, he would never have let me leave the Paddocks to-day.”
“Wouldn’t he?” chucking her under the chin. “Looks sharp after his pretty wife, eh? But asto being sorry, I can believe as much of that as I like. If he had been, he would have answered a letter that I wrote to him some time ago about Rough Diamond; but as he didn’t,” and a very vindictive expression flitted across his bearded face, “I know what to think, and, what is more, shall probably act upon the conviction I have come to.”
Honor could onlylookher surprise at this wholly unexpected outburst. Before, however, she could utter a syllable in extenuation of her husband’s sin against politeness, Colonel Norcott had taken his departure, leaving her to spend the hours till welcome bedtime came in listening to the uncongenial gossip of the woman whose society was by himself so evidently unprized. Honor’s first experience of genteel life in London was certainly neither an amusing nor an instructive one.