“And now,” interrupted Honor, her tears checked as if by magic, and turning her large indignant eyes full upon her husband, “and now, what, pray, have you seen? You talk to me as if I had done something wicked, something disgraceful; whereas the worst crime of which I can excuse myself is a dread, a horror—I had better say the truth at last—of living with, and being tormented by, your mother. It is more than I can bear to live with her. I would rather beg my bread, rather be a servant a hundred thousand times, than go back to Mrs. Beacham and be treated as she has treated me. But,” suddenly letting down the window of the cab, and looking out into the street, “you are not really taking me back to Updown? John,” clasping her hands in wild entreaty, “I implore you not to let me live again at Pear-tree House. I don’t know why it is—I can’t account for it—but besides my being frightened at your mother, I have a fear upon me, a great dread, of that old house. Something, I am certain of it, as certain of it as that I am praying to you for kindness now, will happen if you take me home to Updown. I—”
“You are a goose, my dear, and don’t know when you are well off. There, there, don’t cry any more. We are close upon the station now, and people will think I have been beating you.”
The cab drew up to the entrance of the South-Western terminus as he spoke, and Honor, feeling that remonstrance was useless, allowed her arm to be passed through that of her legitimate guardian, and herself to be seated, with a very unwilling mind, in the carriage that was to convey her, luggageless and nervous, to the country home which she had learnt to loathe.
CHAPTER X.
“AS WELL AS CAN BE EXPECTED.”
The great day of the sporting year, the “maddest,” if not exactly the “merriest” day, was close at hand; and the world, both high and low, rich and poor, one against another, were on the qui-vive of excitement and the very tip-toe of expectation. Among these variously interested beings, one of those who had in reality most at stake, was Arthur Vavasour. Fortune, honour, credit, all were involved, and that to no limited extent, in the winning of the Derby race by that big-boned, coarse-made, but wonderfully staying horse, Rough Diamond. Time was (before the master passion had laid hold of, grappled with, and finally taken possession of this impulsive and ill-trained young man) when the result of the morrow’s racing would have occupied his every thought, and would have seemed to his eyes the most important of all earthly considerations. And all-important indeed it was; for spurred on thereto by money difficulties, and being but of a weak and unstable character, Arthur Vavasour had, as the reader must have already gathered, deceived, and to a certain degree outwitted, the shrewd and rather obstinate old man, whose ideas of honour and morality were so widely different from his own. By marrying Sophy Duberly he had for a time escaped the consequences of his own reckless extravagance, and of the gaming propensities, the knowledge of which would, as he well knew, have entirely prevented the union between himself and one of the richest heiresses of the day; but happiness had not followed upon his sin, nor had a sense of security been the consequence of his deception.
That Mr. Duberly was not wholly without his misgivings on the score of the young aristocrat on whom his daughter’s maiden affections were fixed was evidenced by the fact that “nothing was left,” as the saying is, in Arthur’s “power.” The allowance that “old Dub” made to his future heiress was liberal to profuseness; and Arthur himself, had he desired such an indulgence, might have had his path paved with gold, provided always that he, the retired Manchester man, was perfectly au courant of how the money was disposed of, and that his dearly-beloved Sophy trod the same brilliant way, side by side and lovingly with the partner of her life. More than this, however, for his son-in-law at least, old Dub was never likely to do. To have his penny-worth for his penny, to keep his accounts regularly and systematically, were, in his opinion, among the first duties of man; and any known neglect of these duties by his daughter’s husband would have annoyed and disquieted him. Well aware of this “absurdity,” as he considered it, on the part of his father-in-law, Arthur had for some short time after his marriage gone through certain minor forms calculated to convey the impression that he was a “business man.” A room, called by courtesy his study, had been devoted to his use; and a book dignified by the title of an “account-book” was disfigured by certain scrawling entries in Arthur’s large illegible hand, and was supposed to contain a record of Mr. Vavasour’s daily expenditure. Happily for him, old Duberly had hitherto either taken his business talents for granted, or, like many other good-natured, as well as slightly indolent people, had shrunk from discoveries which might only tend to his own discomfort, and the possible unhappiness of his child. Sophy—the darling of his age, and the sunshine of his luxurious home—was blithe and joyous as a bird which has just found its mate; and this being so, why was he to disturb her from her security, and fill her unsuspecting mind with doubts and fears which never might be realised? As long as Sophy, who was a very girl still in simplicity and buoyant spirits, went singing about the house (a little heavy in step now, poor thing, for she was very near to her hour of pain and travail), old Duberly was well content to let everything remain as it was, and to hope the best regarding his young and outwardly very likeable son-in-law. That there was any great harm in one who seemed so frank, and who was too young as well as too well-born (the Manchester man thought a great deal of birth) to have had either much opportunity or much temptation to sin, Mr. Duberly never for a moment suspected; but in spite of this trust, and gladly as he would have entirely confided in his daughter’s husband, there lingered, almost unknown to himself, a grain—the very shadow of a shade it was—of doubt; a doubt born of the former visits of Arthur Vavasour to the Paddocks, where lived the most beautiful woman that Mr. Duberly had ever seen, and where the “tempting” yearlings put on strength and muscle for the arduous work that lay before them. That such a doubt did linger in the old man’s mind was a fact of which he himself was almost ignorant. Had any human being ventured to hint a syllable in disparagement of Arthur Vavasour the blood of the quondam cotton lord would have been up at once, and he would have indignantly repelled the insinuations of the enemy. According to his own belief he had placed implicit faith in Arthur’s assurances that the turf and he were strangers, and that his “occasional” visits to Pear-tree House were either purely business ones, or were the natural consequences of his dead father’s respect and liking for honest, straightforward John Beacham.
It was the certainty that his father-in-law had so believed, and in consequence of that belief had consented to the already arranged marriage, which was the main cause of Arthur’s anxiety that Rough Diamond should, by winning the Derby, diminish the chance—a very slender one he hoped and trusted—of Andrew Duberly’s discovering the trick—for trick it was—that had been played upon him. “Manchester man” though he was, and somewhat rough in manner—to say nothing of his living out of the pale of Arthur’s “world”—that young man nevertheless, such is the force of moral worth, dreaded, more than he would have cared to own, the betrayal to his wife’s father of the secret which, for all his seeming carelessness, had not lain altogether lightly on his bosom. His debts—barring those of honour, considerable though they were—troubled him but little. Tradesmen, however careful of their own interests, will never press inconveniently for payment when they know for a certainty that in the family of their debtor there are assets sufficient to defray ten thousandfold the “little account” which added interest is yearly swelling. It was the floating paper, his debts to so-called friends, and above all, as I have just said, it was the guarding of his disgraceful secret, which, even under other circumstances than the present, would, on the day before the Derby, have made Arthur Vavasour’s brow a clouded one by day, and broken his natural sleep by night. And even now—madly, passionately as he loved the woman of whom it was guilt even to think, and from whom, to his intense annoyance, he had been so suddenly and violently separated—Arthur could not avoid the frequent recurrence of the oppressive thoughts connected with his own falsehood, and the morrow’s all-important event. Even on his way home on foot from the theatre—walking, contrary to his custom, because he desired time for thought previous to his return to home and Sophy—even then, with the memory of Honor’s bewildering beauty still fresh within his brain, reflections born of his complicated troubles forced themselves upon his unwilling mind. What would happen to him if the favourite—a chance quite, of course, upon the cards—were distanced? What would happen to him if—and the idea was not by any means a novel one—he could not trust the unprincipled associate in his scheme? what would happen if Honor’s father should in some way or other—Arthur had never gone the lengths of guessing how—play him at the eleventh hour false?
These and sundry other such-like questions were easy enough—as tormenting questions usually are—to ask, but the responses to them were not in the present case forthcoming. Plodding on, with anything but a young man’s elastic spring, Arthur wended his way to Hyde-park-gardens; and grievous as the truth must seem, there was not, in the certainty that one warm woman’s heart would throb with joy at his return, a drop of balm to soothe the wounds from which he suffered. And reason good was there that so it should be, for those wounds were of his own inflicting—dealt by his own guilty hand, and not to be healed save by the slow and painful process of repentance and atonement. Slowly, then, and with a troubled spirit, this man, who to the world’s eye appeared one of the most favoured of Fortune’s adopted darlings, proceeded on his way. Arrived at the grand spacious house, with its marble portico, its solid pillars, and its sculptured ornamentation, which he called his home, he paused for a moment, looking up with some feeling of undefined surprise at the more than usual amount of light which found its way through the closed shutters of the several windows. Almost before, however, he had time to lay his hand on the bell, the door was softly opened by a servant who had evidently been on the watch for his arrival, and a low voice—the voice of the hall-porter, softened and subdued in compliment to the momentous occasion—informed the young master of the house that Mrs. Vavasour had half an hour before given birth to a fine boy, and was “as well as could” reasonably “be expected.”
CHAPTER XI.
FROM LIVELY TO SEVERE.
On the whole it was a relief to Arthur that les convenances, according to old Dub’s view of the matter, stood in the way of his being an eyewitness of Rough Diamond’s capabilities on the Derby-day. His first feeling on hearing that Sophy’s trial was over, and that he had a paternal interest in the small pink-faced fraction of humanity which the nurse introduced to him as his son, had been one of unmixed satisfaction. As he silently kissed the pale but wondrously contented face of the young mother lying so still and motionless on the pillow, Arthur’s heart was full for the moment of the purest happiness that it had ever known; but the past—the inexorable and ever-pursuing past—treading on the heels of the present, embittered his transient joy, and destroyed, or at least darkened, all his prospects for the future. Almost before he had left the bedside of his trusting and silently rejoicing wife, the thought of the evil which a few short hours might bring about struck through him with an icy chill, while conscience with her probing pricks told him that he was unworthy of life’s choicest blessings. For even then—even at the instant when his mind and heart should have been wholly occupied with the fair young mother of his child—a vision of his Irish love—of Honor’s sweet caressing smile, and the exquisitely-moulded shoulders that had been, but one short hour before, so dangerously near to his caressing hand—rose up before him, and caused the bonds which united both him and her to objects unbeloved to be hateful in his sight. On the following morning old Mr. Duberly, in radiant spirits, and rejoicing over his grandson with a delight which struck Arthur as almost puerile in its character, gave his son-in-law plainly to understand that his place, for that day at least, was one within call of his marital duties. To watch by Sophy, to be ready if she should perchance express a wish to press his hand, or gaze lovingly on his face, were privileges which the affectionate old man would have found it hard to believe that Arthur might prize less highly than he did himself. The circumstance of that especial Wednesday being the Derby-day escaped his recollection altogether. Being himself totally uninterested in sporting matters, the idea that Arthur would by any possibility place the result of the great race side by side as an affair of note with the all-important event of the previous day, namely, the birth of his son and heir, would have struck “old Dub” as simply ridiculous, and he was therefore quite prepared for Arthur’s ready acquiescence in his views. The real truth was, as we already know, that Vavasour’s interests were far indeed from being centred on Epsom Downs. To gain the race by means of his own good horse, Rough Diamond, was certainly to him an affair of vital importance; but, unaware of the fact that Honor had been taken from Colonel Norcott’s house, and was already safe under her husband’s protection, the desire to see her once again, by stealth or otherwise, was stronger than any other feeling, and to remain in the neighbourhood of the woman he adored was the dearest wish of his unregenerate heart.