He stopped, half afraid, in that public spot, on the well-frequented road, where the girl’s striking beauty attracted every passer’s eye to gaze upon her lovely face, of the emotions which his words had so evidently aroused within her breast. At that moment, judging from outward signs—from the rapid rise and fall of the bosom, shapely as that of the glorious statue that entranced the world, and from the changing colour of her rounded cheek—the accusation of coldness was not altogether warranted by appearances. And yet from those signs and symptoms the inference which Arthur drew was very decidedly a wrong, or rather an exaggerated, one. Honor was not in the least what is called “in love” with the man whose own passions and wild worship of his neighbour’s wife were making such desperate work within his inner man. Almost utterly reckless had those days of constant communion with her made him. He had cried havoc and let loose the dogs of contending passions within his breast; and if he had ever, when the waves of temptation were beginning to rise and swell, said unto them with an honest and true heart, “So far shalt thou go, and no farther,” that time was long since gone and over, and the submission of Cecil Vavasour’s son to the great enemy of mankind was an accomplished and a melancholy fact. But partly perhaps because the man who really feels an overpowering passion has less chance of moving the object of that passion than has the hypocrite who feigns a devotion which he is far from feeling. Honor Beacham did not, as I said before, love Arthur Vavasour. Like him she did; and greatly did she prize his devotion, his delicate compliments, his evident and irrepressible appreciation of the attractions for which her busy unsophisticated husband, the man whose affections were not for the moment, but for Time, appeared to care so strangely little. But although the eloquent blood that rose to neck and brow had not its source in the inner, and to Arthur the undiscovered, depths of her affection, although the visible palpitations of her heart could not with truth be traced to the consciousness of harbouring one unholy or forbidden thought, still Arthur’s words and sighs and glances produced upon this child of nature effects precisely analogous to those which might have been displayed had the love which he professed and felt been returned tenfold into his bosom.
“I did not mean to be unkind and cold,” she stammered. “Quiet, Nellie!” (to the mare she rode, and whose mild caracoles her own agitation was provoking). “It was all my fault for talking about going home; and, Mr. Vavasour—”
“Call me Arthur,” he broke in impetuously; “even you, who grudge me every word that is not stiff and formal, even you can see no harm in—when we are alone together—calling me by my name? Honor, I—”
She put up a warning finger, smiling as she did so after a fashion that would have turned a steadier head than Arthur Vavasour’s. She did not mean to be “coquettish;” there was no purpose in her heart to lure him into folly and madness. Honor’s were very simple, but at the same time very cowardly, tactics—tactics, however, which have lost ere this more silly giddy women than even vanity itself. In public glad to please, and feeling, really feeling pity for the man whose passion she understood without reciprocating it, Honor would “smile, and smile, and smile,” and seem to love; whilst in private—but then, to the best of her powers, and with an ingenuity of which none but a frightened woman could have been capable, she strove, and with good success, to postpone sine die the evil hour when she would perforce be brought to book, and when the lover whose attentions she would be more loth to lose than she the least suspected would insist on the decided answer which would render further trifling impossible—in private Honor might almost have been mistaken for a prude.
“How can you want me to call you Arthur,” she said, with the bright smile that lit up her countenance like a sunbeam, “when you know it would be wrong—so wrong (and that is the best way to find out what is wrong) that you would, or I should, be always in a most dreadful fright lest I should forget myself, and say it when other people were present? O, how I do hate doing underhand things! I wish now, only it is days and days too late, that I had written everything I was about to the Paddocks. Then they might have abused me for being wilful and fond of London, and plays, and amusing things; but they could not have hated and despised me for being false.”
“But,” said Arthur with a caress in his voice, which Honor, novice though she was, was at no loss to feel and understand—“but there are so many things which pass, that one cannot say to everyone—many things which are not wrong, as you call it, but which people at a distance would not enter into, and had better therefore know nothing about. And so they have been worrying you with letters, you poor darling, have they? Wanting you to go back, and—”
“O, yes,” Honor cried, brimming over with her wrongs, her yearning for kind sympathy, and with the self-pity which ever exaggerates the misfortunes which our precious self is called upon to endure—“O, yes, and Mrs. Beacham—she is so disagreeable; you don’t know half how disagreeable she can be, orders me to come home, and threatens me with all sorts of horrid things. I am to be scolded and taught my duty, and,” blushing beautifully, “someone has told them that I have been riding in the Park with you, and—Ah, Mr. Vavasour, I feel quite frightened, and I would rather do anything in the world almost than go back again to the Paddocks!”
“Anything?” he asked, throwing as much meaning into the word as the human voice was capable of expressing; but Honor, who was far as the poles from comprehending the evil that was in his thoughts, said eagerly,
“Indeed yes! anything! I would be a governess—you know I was a governess before—I would go out to service—be a ‘Lydia,’” and she smiled a little bitterly, “if I could only never, never see Mrs. Beacham’s face again.”
An expression which she took for amusement, but which was in reality indicative of very unholy triumph, passed over Arthur Vavasour’s dark, handsome face.