It was now the middle of May, and during a swiftly-passing fortnight Honor Beacham, continuing her course of semi-deception regarding her father’s condition, and entirely concealing from the husband whom she believed to be exclusively absorbed in his own pursuits and interests the fact that her days and nights were spent in one continued round of exciting pleasure, went on her way—if not rejoicing, at least in a condition of such delightful mental inebriation, that she found barely sense or time enough to ask herself the serious question, if the life which she was leading indeed were joy.
John’s answer to her letter, written under the influence of hurt feeling, and penned by a man utterly destitute, not only of the art to make a thing appear the thing it is not, but of l’eloquence du billet in general, was one exactly calculated to rouse in a high-spirited nature a dormant inclination to rebel. In it there was an implied right to command, a right solely arrogated (to Honor’s thinking) by reason of the writer’s indifference to her proceedings, and scanty appreciation of her merits. “You will come back, I suppose,”—so wrote the unwise man, who, on his side, had so egregiously erred in his estimate of character,—“you will come back when you have had enough of London. I don’t say to you, ‘come home,’ for women that are made to do the thing they don’t like are, as mother says, not over and above pleasant in a house. We are uncommon busy, too, just now; there is painting to be done, and the chintz to be calendered, so perhaps you are as well out of the way of the bother.”
Poor John! Could Honor have heard the heavy sigh that broke from his full heart as he closed the letter; could she, above all, have looked into that heart and read its secret sorrows, she could not have doubted of her husband’s love; and perhaps, removed from the glamour of Arthur Vavasour’s presence, from the mesmeric influence of a passion which was becoming terribly overpowering in its hourly-gathering strength, she might have been again a happy woman in the simple fashion and the humble sphere to which she had been brought up. Such a “chance,” however, was not for the foolish, beautiful woman who, with half-tender words (for, alas, it had come to that) from her high-bred adorer lingering on her memory, read the simple letter, which it had cost so much pain to write, in anger and in bitterness. Tossing it on her toilet-table with an impatient jerk, she told herself that John did not care for her. It was nothing to him, she said mentally, whether she stayed away or not; but as she inly spoke the words, the fingers of her little gauntleted hand—she had just returned from riding in the Park—dashed away something very like tears that had gathered on her long lashes and nothing short of the recollection that she was going in a few hours’ time to dine at Richmond with Arthur Vavasour and a few other friends of her father’s prevented her (for it would be dreadful to make her appearance with red eyes) from indulging in the luxury of a “good cry.”
That party to London’s prettiest suburb—an evening’s enjoyment which was to include a row towards Twickenham and Teddington on the clear, flowing river, and a delicious dinner after dusk in one of the charming cabinet particuliers appertaining to the Star and Garter, and opening on its pleasant gardens, had been for days looked forward to with keen anticipations of delight by Honor Beacham. They were to proceed thither in two open “hired carriages,” in one of which was to be seated Honor and the Colonel’s wife, while Arthur Vavasour and a dull, unobservant Mr. Foley, a gentleman, like Pope’s women, “with no character at all,” were to occupy the opposite seats. In the second carriage the party collected was likely to be of a far more noisy, as well as a more congenial, description. Mrs. Foley—a lady a little on the wrong side of thirty, and whose animal spirits, being apt occasionally, as the saying is, to “get the better of her,” were in their full swing of triumph on such an occasion as a Richmond dinner—arrived at Stanwick-street punctually as the clock struck four, arrayed in a toilet which, but for the still more amazing costume of the young lady with whom she was accompanied, would have decidedly monopolised the attention and wonder of every female observer in that quiet neighbourhood. Shaking themselves clear of the straw and tumble, consequent on their cab-drive from some distant locality, Mrs. Foley and her bright-eyed sister Dora Tibbets stood on the doorsteps of No. 14, laughing noisily—more noisily than ladies of their stamp often laugh when no one of the male sex is present to stir their spirits up to boiling point. Their dresses, as they stood there in the bright sunshine of a May afternoon, were of the kind better suited to a wedding breakfast than to a “quiet dinner,” as Fred Norcott had described it, in the country. Light and fair and frolicsome they looked; women with more auburn frizzled hair about their heads than could, by the most lively and charitable imagination, have been supposed to be their own, with bright pink roses mingling with their hirsute ornaments, and with a quantum suff. of poudre de riz softening the lustre of their complexions.
“How smart they are!” Honor whispered in dismay to Arthur, as the two caught a glimpse of the lively sisters from behind the muslin curtain of the first-front drawing-room.
“Awfully. It’s a bore they’re coming, but if there had been nobody it would have been worse,” said Arthur, leaning over her chair, and speaking in the low tones which always went so thrillingly to her heart. “Imagine! I might have been unable, all this evening, to say one word alone to you. And we have so few more days, Honor! You say that you cannot expect a much longer holiday; but tell me—do you never, never think what will become of me when you are gone?”
“Don’t talk in that way,” she said, one of her crimson blushes speaking far more eloquently than her words, while she tried to hide her confusion by carefully drawing on finger after finger of her delicate Paris gloves. “Don’t talk in that way; I must talk to these people now. You don’t know them, of course?” And rising gracefully, she went through the ceremony of introduction which her father deemed it necessary to perform.
The next arrivals (they dashed up to the door in a hansom, and remained talking up to the balcony during the few minutes that elapsed before the descent of the major portion of the party) were Mr. Foley, and a young gentleman of slightly horsey appearance, but who, nevertheless, contrived to snip his words and lisp as ridiculously as any foolish would-be fine gentleman in town. Captain Bowles was the son of a general officer, and was himself, though of small dimensions, and of anything but military bearing, a soldier. He was plain of feature, with a large mouth and a beardless face. His appearance was more that of an inferior order of counter-jumper than of a guardsman; nevertheless he was petted and made much of, especially by the fair sex. Mrs. Foley and her sister were “fine women,” and “fast,” so the general’s son—who would have been voted, under less favourable circumstances, a little snob—was allowed to stand up before them with his hands in his trousers pockets like a man; and while he minced his platitudes with graceful ease, was smiled on as fondly as though he were a hero and a gentleman.
There could scarcely have been found a more good-natured chaperone, duenna,—call her what you will,—than the Colonel’s lanky wife, seated opposite to dull, sleepy Mr. Foley, who, by the way, was an individual of no particular profession, gaining a precarious livelihood as “director” to one or two doubtful companies, and having a floating capital in the same. Mrs. Norcott, under cover of her pink parasol, kept up a dozy conversation with that harmless man of business, while Arthur Vavasour, who had no right whatever (seeing that his young wife was in the most delicate of situations—nervous during his absence, and only comforted by the certainty that he was within call) to be there at all, had—alas for the credit of poor selfish human nature!—forgotten every duty, and ignored the sacred claims of wifehood, for the sake of passing a few blissful hours by the side of the forbidden woman he adored. And she—that other wife, who still, strange as it may seem, and eke impossible to many, kept a large corner in her heart for home and duty, and the rough, tender-hearted man she called her husband—what were her thoughts, her feelings, as the tempter, with his bold beseeching eyes fixed on her blushing face, told her, in looks more dangerous still than words, the bewildering, but as yet only half-welcome truth that she was all the world to him, and that, to gain her love, he would cast to the four winds of heaven every tie on earth, as well as every hope of heaven?
For it had come to that with this “fond, foolish,” passionate young man. Made of the stuff that loves in wild extremes, unused to put a bridle on his fierce desires, restrained by no sweet early home-affections, the dear love, mother-love, that bids the profligate, sometimes in his wildest moments, to go no further—only a myth to him—with a God above but half believed in, and himself the deity on earth he worshipped—who can wonder that this man, vigorous with the strength and health of his one-and-twenty years, should make no effort to resist the devil that, without resistance, would not flee from him?