He laid his hand very lightly on his wife’s bare shoulder as he spoke, giving the slightest of impulses to his touch; but, to his dismay, Honor, instead of obeying that impulse, recoiled from the pressure of his hand, and said in a low tone, but resolutely:
“I have done no harm. I am sorry, of course, if she is angry; but, John, you do not know—if you did, you would understand it all better—what your mother wrote to me. I would do anything for you—I would, indeed,” she added passionately; “but she hates me—she always did; and I will not—no, I will not humble myself before her!”
“You will not? There’s for you!” cried the indignant old woman, roused to fury by Honor’s resistance to her husband’s wishes. “Didn’t I tell you how it would be? Didn’t I say that you had got rather more than you could manage in milady there? Why, only to look at her is enough, and more than enough for me. If you call that”—and she pointed with a fierce trembling finger at Honor’s polished shoulders—“if you call that the dress of a modest woman, why you are a bigger fool, John, than I took you for. I should have liked to see my husband’s face if I had made such a wanton of myself as to—”
“Come, come, mother, enough said,” interposed John. “I don’t like the way that young women get themselves up nowadays a bit better than you do; but she’s in the fashion—Honor is, and anyway I won’t have her called hard names even by you.—Honey, my dear,” he went on more gently, as he noticed his wife’s quivering lip, “you mustn’t be so foolish as to think what you said just now. Mother doesn’t hate you; she couldn’t be so wicked, letting alone that you’re not one that the worst woman—which God knows she isn’t—could dislike. So, now do, for Heaven’s sake, let us have done with it all. You’re looking as pale and as cold”—wrapping the opera-cloak round her carefully, in order to conceal the smooth white shoulders which were so obnoxious in his mother’s sight—“as cold as death, my dear. Here, take a cup of tea; and, mother, suppose you have a drop of something warm?—Here, Hannah, bring in the ‘matarials’—as Joe Connor calls ’em—and let’s make ourselves comfortable.”
His voice—it was a very pleasant one at all times—sounded loud and cheerful through the ill-lighted room—it was a voice that his old mother dearly loved to hear; but, just then, so uncongenial were her own feelings, and so hardened was her heart against the girl whom she really believed to be “gay and giddy,” if not worse, that she refused to be softened by her son’s cordial tones.
“You may do as you please,” she said, rising in what was intended for a stately manner from her chair, “but I shall not remain in the same room with Mrs. John. Hate her, indeed! I never heard such words. ‘He that hateth his brother is a murderer!’—and nobody before ever evened me to that. I wish you good-night, John; and I hope that God will give you both better thoughts. I may forgive—but it isn’t likely I should forget.”
The door closed behind the jealous wrong-headed old woman; and John, preparing mechanically to mix his nightly jorum of weak brandy-and-water, heaved a more weary sigh than had often escaped his lips. There was something touching in the sound—proceeding as it did from one so habitually (at least to outward semblance) cheerful and insouciant—and Honor, hearing it, suddenly felt penitent and sympathetic.
“I am so sorry,” she said softly. “I know I was wrong—and, John, I should be so much happier if your mother would be kind to me. It was more that—I mean more because of her—that I seemed to care to stay away—I—”
“There, there, my dear,” he said, his arm round her waist, and drawing her towards him tenderly, “don’t bother yourself any more about it. We must all try to bear and forbear; and mother is old now—and old people have their fancies. You, poor little thing,” gazing pityingly on the wet eyelashes that swept her pallid cheeks, “I would make you happy, God knows, if I could. You are such a child still—and somehow, it seems to me that you were not made for this rough life of ours;” and John, loosening the hand that pressed the slender waist, sighed again even more discontentedly than before.