Meanwhile, what was the reality regarding Honor Beacham’s whereabouts, what her feelings, and how had her husband’s sudden exertion of marital power affected her conduct?
The night-train by which she and John travelled homewards was due about midnight at Leigh, at which town it stopped for a few hurried minutes only, and then proceeded at express speed on its course south-westward. Happily for Honor, they were not tête-à-tête in their compartment. Childlike, she caught at any delay, any postponement of the explanation which was the inevitable consequence of her folly and—in some sort—her falsehood. To keep back the truth—not to tell that “whole,” when on that “whole” depends the spirit of the facts left half undisclosed and to be guessed at—is, disguise it, mystify ourselves with what sophistry we may, to lie unto our neighbour, and to deceive the one who trusts us. It was the consciousness that she had so lied and deceived, together with a certain amount of uninvestigated self-reproach as regarded the delight which Arthur Vavasour’s society had afforded her, that caused Honor to shrink with nervous trepidation not only from her husband’s questionings, but from the very sight of the keen-witted and sharp-tongued old woman who already, as Honor had every reason to believe, looked on her with no favourable eyes. Under these circumstances, the presence in the carriage which they occupied of a sleepy old gentleman and a wideawake young girl, who was in all probability his daughter, was a relief not only to Honor but to John; for he too, with all an honest, strong-nerved Englishman’s dislike to tears and domestic tragedies, recoiled from the duty of saying harsh words to the young wife, whose worst offence he felt inclined to believe had been a love of hitherto undreamt-of gaieties, the consequence of which very natural tastes was the sin—one of omission rather than commission—of giving a false colouring to the state of affairs in Stanwick-street.
Already, so kindly was the man’s nature, and so strong was his dislike to being what he called “ill friends” with those about him,—already had his displeasure begun to subside, and already had he begun to accuse himself of harshness in thus summarily dealing out hard measures against his wife. As she sat there silently by his side, the outline of her perfect profile just visible under the scarlet hood of her opera-cloak, and her pale lips quivering with the effort to conceal her emotion and check the tears that from moment to moment were on the point of escaping from their “briny bed,” it would have required but little to persuade the strong man near her that in his dealings with that frail but fairest flower he had been little better than a brute.
They were within a mile or two only of Leigh before the silence that reigned between them was broken, and then it was John’s clear and rather loud voice that awoke the elderly sleeper, and startled Honor from a very perplexing and wretched train of thought.
“Twelve o’clock, all but two minutes,” Mr. Beacham said, replacing a solid silver watch in his waistcoat-pocket. “We shall be at Leigh directly, and if there doesn’t happen to be a fly there,” he added, addressing himself more particularly to his wife, “we shall have to put up at the Dragon. The old lady expects me, and Simmons will be there, of course, with the trap; but you’d catch your death o’ cold without wraps, and—”
“O, I don’t mind! What does it signify?” Honor said impatiently, and even, as it seemed to John, a trifle crossly: whereas the hasty-sounding words were simply the result of the broken reverie, the seriousness of which made the question of a covering more or less upon her shoulders appear in the light of a very trivial affair indeed. Before, however, he could make any rejoinder to her impetuously-spoken reply the speed began to slacken, and a loud deafening “whistle” proclaimed the fact that their journey’s end was reached, and that unless something like a miracle were wrought in her favour, a very short period of time must in the common course of things elapse before poor Honor would find herself once more in the dreaded presence of her exacting and unloving mother-in-law.
“Now, then, my dear,” John said kindly, as Honor thought and hoped, when he returned to the train after a rapid investigation of the waiting carriages; “now, then, come along! look sharp; there is a fly—the one from the Dragon—so bundle in. It wouldn’t have done,” he went on, after they were seated, and the windows closed to shut out the night air, “to have kept mother up while I sent for this old rattletrap from the inn. Mother’s put out enough as it is, and I don’t know—upon my soul, I don’t—how she’ll take our coming in upon her like this. I tell you what it is, Honor, my dear, you must try—indeed you must—to pull better with the old lady. I thought you would at first; but somehow everything seems to have gone wrong; and then this business—this staying in London—and—”
He stopped abruptly at this crisis in his discourse,—stopped because, his momentary passion being over, the old feeling of inferiority to his wife, the undefinable consciousness of her refinement, her delicacy, her “good blood,” her ladyhood, as opposed to his roughness and plebeian birth, gained ground again, and checked the well-deserved reproaches that were hovering on his lips. Had Honor been at that moment clad in her customary dress of neatly-made linsey, had there been no blue flowers in her rippling hair, and had there been no “jewelled cross” glittering on her “snow-white breast,” John would have been twice the man he was—twice the man, that is, in his power to speak out to his young giddy wife the truth which it was good for her to know. But this simple-minded rustic felt, as we all of us more or less have probably done, the influence of show, of adornment, of superior dress, above all of a soft, gentle retenue of manner which puts to shame and utterly condemns the violence of the more impulsive and the outspoken. Angry, justly angry as he had so lately felt with Honor, John’s courage failed him when he commenced to reason with her on her shortcomings, and he paused, not knowing how to pursue a subject which could not fail to be displeasing to the youthful beauty whom he had so lately seen the admired of all beholders in the London playhouse. John little guessed—well would it have been for all parties had it been otherwise—what a very coward was at that moment the woman who, all unconsciously to herself, was making a poltroon of him. Trembling, shivering inwardly at the thought of the dreaded interview with her stern and relentless judge, Honor would have given much at that moment to have been certain of a friend and ally in her husband. It was her ignorance on this point, and not, as John suspected, the increased “fine-ladyism” which, unknown to herself, was evident in her air and tone, that kept her silent, even from mild words of apology and self-justification. Ashamed, frightened, and thoroughly detesting the companionship to which her husband was about to condemn her, it was little to be wondered at that John Beacham, believing her to have taken refuge in a “fit of the sulks,” relapsed into a silence which lasted till the wheels of the lumbering, misnamed vehicle, after grating for a few seconds along the well-known gravel, came to a stand before the ivy-covered porch of Pear-tree House.
If Hannah had seen that often-talked-of object of her awe and curiosity, an actual ghost, she could hardly have been frightened into a more violent start than that which jerked her stoutly-built person at the sight of her young mistress.
“My good gracious me! Who ever would have thought it?” she exclaimed, as she followed Honor’s lagging footsteps into the little parlour. “Why missus never expected you, mum, not for a moment—and everything going on so quiet! Dear, dear! it was only this very day as missus was a saying—”