It is unfortunate perhaps, and decidedly suggestive, but so it undoubtedly is, that beauty leads the wisest amongst us terribly astray in our judgment both of character and motives. What observer, dispassionate or otherwise, who looked—were such a privilege granted to him—at lovely Honor’s face and form, lying indolently, lazily if you will, upon her narrow couch (the iron bedstead in the Stanwick-street lodging), would have been able to allow, without infinite regret and caution, either that she was wrong, or the least in the world deserving of punishment? A creamy complexion, slightly tinged with the most delicate of rose-colours; a tumbled mass of fairest brown hair—“off the flax and on the golden,” as Miss Pratt would say; blue eyes, “languid with soft dreams;” and full crimson lips, moist with the morning dew of youth and health,—composed a sum of attractions very decidedly calculated to disarm criticism, and to modify the verdict of “Guilty” with the strongest recommendations to mercy. “Youth” and “previous good conduct” were pleas which might be safely urged as extenuating circumstances in the case of poor Honor Beacham’s feminine sin of truth-suppressing; and as with her fair face slightly flushed, and her long brown eyelashes sparkling with indignant tears, she read, for the second time, a letter which Lydia (alias Polly), cross and out of breath with the labour of mounting the attic stairs, had just deposited on the bed, it was easy to perceive that the process of retribution had already, in some sort, commenced.
That letter, as the reader will have no difficulty in guessing, was the one mentioned in the conclusion of the last chapter as the happy result of old Mrs. Beacham’s interference with the connubial relations of her children. It took the well-meaning woman, as we already know, two hours in its concoction, and ran as follows:
“My dear Honor,—I write this to my great illconvenience, and to tell you that your conduct is not what it ought to be. John is not at home, but he was much surprised, as so was I to hear which we did by accident that you had been seen riding in Hyde Park in the place where I am told the ladies go, that honest women oughtnt to look at with a gentleman. I may as well say who Mr. Arthur Vavasour. Knowing the way you useter go on with that person I am not surprised at this, but John is, and I write to say that I cant have him vexed nor put out, and that you must come back directly and learn to behave yourself, and whats more, make yourself useful as you should do. Of course things wont be pleasant when you do come home, that isnter be expected, but we must take what Godamighty sends, and I knew when John married what it would be. I expect you will come back directly you get this, and I will send Simmons for you with the taxcart to meet the first afternoon train. John besides being so put about with what youve been doing is too busy with his horses to think of going himself.”
A pleasant missive this to receive at early morning-time, when the recipient’s head, a little turned by flattery and excitement, was full of fresh plans of pleasure, and was sedulously endeavouring to shut out intrusive thoughts of home, and to ignore the conscience-pricks against which it was so hard sometimes to kick! It would have been scarcely possible for the picture of what awaited her in her husband’s dull chez soi, to have been brought with more unpleasant force before the luxury-loving, indolent-natured girl, who was becoming hourly more what is called spoilt by the new life that she was leading. At no time greatly drawn towards her mother-in-law (could it well, all things considered, have been otherwise?), Honor, at that inauspicious moment, almost loathed the domineering, hectoring old autocrat, whose ways were so very far from being her ways, and who had thus unscrupulously laid bare to her the treatment that she, Honor, might expect when she should return tardily, and, alas, not over-willingly, to the sphere of the irritated old lady’s dominion. It may seem to some of my readers that the thoughts and feelings, the likings and dislikings of Honor, the married woman, bore but scanty relation to those of the same individual who, when a laughing, light-hearted, unselfish girl, had found it so easy to win, not only golden opinions, but, still surer test of worth, the affections of the small men and women committed to her youthful guardianship. But while making this objection, it is well to remind the critic of the truth, that we none of us show what we really are—either for evil or for good—till we are tried. With youth, and beauty, and good spirits,—petted too and much indulged, albeit she was “only a governess,”—with the lamp of hope burning brightly before her, and with no shadow darkling over the past, Honor Blake could have claimed small praise for being cheerful, yielding, and contented. It was in part, perhaps, owing to that very absence of trial that might be traced some of the striking changes that had apparently taken place in her disposition and character. Accustomed to be made much of, and dearly loving the evidences of being appreciated—well aware that her beauty was of that high and uncommon order which can be disputed by none, and that takes the senses, as it were, by storm—Honor, the stay-at-home wife of a staid and almost middle-aged man, had every chance of becoming discontented with the lot which at first sight, and before she had been allowed time to feel its flatness and monotony, had seemed to her all that was to be desired. That Mrs. Beacham—that the jealous mother-in-law, whom an angel from heaven would probably, under similar circumstances, have failed to please—should have had her lines also cast in the pleasant places of the Paddocks, had proved a real misfortune to Honor. “If she were anywhere but here!” had been often and often the girl’s inward cry, when the peace of every moment, and the bright coming of each returning day, were disturbed and darkened by the small aggravations of John’s crabbed and exacting mother. It is wonderful, the power that one person possesses to make or mar the comfort of a household. The constant fears of “something coming,” the dread of words being taken amiss, the fretful answer, or even the mute reproach of shrugged-up shoulders, and a peevish sneer, can make to a sensitive nature the interior of a home that outwardly seems fair enough a daily, hourly purgatory. Poor Honor! As she lay upon her bed, thinking how very near the time had come when she must perforce exchange the delights, mingled though they were with the bitterness of self-reproach, of her present existence for the uncongenial company, the harsh sarcastic words, and the contemptuous looks of her unloving mother-in-law, her heart sank within her with disgust and fear.
“I cannot do it!” she said half aloud. “And John, too! What will he say to me?” And at the thought of her husband’s displeasure, the wife who had lacked moral courage to speak the truth began to feel that, rather than face those two outraged and indignant spirits, she would gladly flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, and be at rest. To be alone—to work for her bread—to suffer hardship in every miserable and even degrading fashion—all this appeared to Honor (she being at the age and of the nature to jump at conclusions, and to imagine no evil equal to the present ones) infinitely, ay, a thousand thousand times, preferable to putting her pretty neck again under the yoke of angry Mrs. Beacham’s thrall, and to the endurance, from morning’s dawn to evening’s light, of that unpleasant old lady’s disagreeable form of being good and useful.
The idea of obeying her mother-in-law’s behests, and returning with the least possible delay, did not, after the first shock of reading the letter, either form any portion of Honor’s thoughts, or tend in any degree to increase her troubles. Go, till she had fulfilled one or two of her remaining engagements, she would not. To that conclusion she had come at first, and being one of those exceptional characters—characters, I suspect, more fanciful than real—whom a silken thread can lead, but who, like the Celtic animal that shall be nameless, turn restive when coercion is the order of the day, young Mrs. Beacham, resenting the old lady’s tone of authority, set herself, with a determination of which one short year before she never would have believed herself capable, against that distasteful dose, the swallowing of which she knew (none better) to be her duty. Perhaps—we do not say it would have been so—but perhaps had John written to her, even angrily, this wrong-headed, but still warm-hearted, young woman might have been a trifle more amenable to reason, and better disposed to bear with patience the lot that she had drawn; but John, as we well know, did not write to his young wife at this momentous crisis of her life. He was busy. Epsom was at hand. Betting, sporting men were daily finding their way by express trains to the Paddocks, and all John’s interest, time, attention were taken up, so Honor entirely and half-gladly believed, by other cares and pleasures than those connected with herself. “He does not trouble himself enough about me either to write or to mind whether I am here or there,” she said with a sigh, as, standing before her small mirror, she noted self-complacently each of the undimmed beauties by which she believed her husband set so little store. “He does not care enough about me to be displeased if I ride with Arthur Vavasour. His mother says so—the tiresome old thing!—but I don’t believe her; and she shall not—no, she shall not—have the satisfaction of thinking she has frightened me into obedience;” and with that doughty resolution Honor descended her many flights of stairs to breakfast with her newly-found and outwardly affectionate relations.
CHAPTER VI.
WHAT, SELL ROUGH DIAMOND!
The breakfast meal at No. 13 Stanwick-street, not being either a varied or a luxurious one, did not occupy much of Colonel Fred Norcott’s valuable time. It commenced, however, frequently at so late an hour, owing to the stay-out habits over night of the master of the house, that twelve o’clock often struck before the table was what Mrs. Norcott called “cleared,” and the room ready for company.
Which company consisted usually, at the time of Honor’s stay, but of one visitor—the visitor whom, for reasons best known to himself, Colonel Norcott was ever on the watch to conciliate and flatter. Arthur Vavasour’s appearance in Stanwick-street was usually so timed that his host’s horses—animals chiefly devoted at that period to the use of his daughter—should be walking up and down before the house in readiness for Mrs. Beacham’s appearance. On the eventful Tuesday morning—the Tuesday in Epsom holiday week—which was hereafter to be a strongly marked one in Honor Beacham’s memory, Colonel Norcott, departing somewhat from his accustomed habits, was early astir—so early that at a little after eleven he might have been seen, his cigar between his lips, standing on the steps of the house he occupied, and evidently waiting for some person whose coming was longer delayed than the Colonel found altogether agreeable. At last, walking briskly round a corner, with a very preoccupied expression of countenance, and swinging in the air a light riding-whip with the manner of one lost in thought, Arthur Vavasour, the individual expected by Honor’s impatient parent, appeared in sight.
“By George! you’re late,” Colonel Norcott said, pulling out his watch and displaying it reproachfully before his friend. “I haven’t more than five minutes to spare. Five? I haven’t got three! But if you’ve anything you want particularly to say to me, I—”