The sun rose bright and cloudless on the day following Honor’s return; and John Beacham, whose hands were, as usual, brimful of business, and who moreover had decided, after a short consultation with himself, that his womankind were more likely to come to a good understanding without him, betook himself, immediately after breakfast, to the hay-fields, which were ripe for the scythe, and only waited the master’s fiat to lie in promising swaths upon the rich meadow-land which called John Beacham owner.
Honor saw him depart with a weary sigh. The prospect of a lengthened tête-à-tête with the stern old lady, whose brow never relaxed for a passing moment from its rigidity, and who had not even vouchsafed a distant “good-morning” in answer to her civil greeting, was a penance which it almost made her blood run cold to think of. Her own courage—the temporary boldness which was the offspring of hurt feeling and great but temporary excitement—had oozed out either at the ends of her taper fingers, or with the tears with which she had watered her morning pillow. When she found herself alone with her dreaded foe, poor Honor had not—as the saying goes—a word to throw at a dog; she was in the mood to cry her eyes out, and in the temper to long earnestly for pity and tenderness. One kind and encouraging word, one look even of sympathy, would have brought the poor thing on her knees before her natural enemy, and all might have been well between the pair whom God had joined together in bonds that nought save sin could sever.
For three days—three miserable days—during which John, engrossed by business cares, and hoping, as sanguine men in spite of appearances will, that all would come right at last, appeared to take no notice of the silence only broken by sarcastic speeches, and by the “talking at” (which to some women is a positive accomplishment) on his mother’s part, which reigned between her and Honor—during those three miserable days, the seeds destined to produce very bitter fruit were being sown with terrible certainty in Honor Beacham’s breast. She was the last woman in the world to endure without evil consequences the description of torture to which she was being subjected. Fond of popularity—eager to be loved—impulsive—passionate if you will, this girl, who could only be what she called angry for a passing moment, would, for anyone who, to use her own expression, have been “kind to her,” have been the most docile and tenderest of friends and dependents.
But unfortunately—most unfortunately, as the sequel will prove—it was not in Mrs. Beacham’s nature to forgive. She believed herself to be a Christian; she thought, so little did she know her own feelings, that she harboured neither malice nor hatred in her heart, but all the while there was scarcely a harder (and certainly there could scarcely be a harder seeming) idiosyncrasy than that which was owned by this soi-disant believer in the Christian faith. Mercy for Honor—pity for the wicked wife who had shown herself so false and flighty—she had none. The pale delicate face, bending over her woman’s-work, appealed to this unrelenting woman’s heart in vain. The days—even supposing them ever to have existed—when Mrs. Beacham knew what temptation was, had long since passed away, and were forgotten; all she remembered was that she had through all her married life been blameless, industrious, and submissive, and that these virtues endowed her with the right to be the judge and condemner of others was neither to be removed nor shaken. Poor Honor, poor little impressionable, impulsive girl! Her spirits felt very heavy, and her heart beat with almost painful quickness when, on the fourth morning after her compulsory return, Mrs. Beacham brought her work (it was her first time of doing so) and established herself alarmingly near to the broad old-fashioned window-seat, Honor’s favorite and accustomed working-place. Dragging after her the big sheet on which she was about to perform the housewifely operation of “turning,” her tortoiseshell spectacles fixed on her keen hawklike nose, John’s mother did indeed appear in the light of a terrible object to her timid and easily-subdued daughter-in-law. Honor did not possess (and well she knew her weakness) the courage requisite for self-defence; and during the short period of silence which followed on Mrs. Beacham’s establishment of herself in front of her own special little work-table, Honor, had she dared, would gladly have taken flight, and betaking herself to her room, have there waited in silence and solitude for her husband’s return. But to make this move required an amount of hardihood of which poor Honor was utterly incapable. She felt entirely subdued—oppressed beyond the power of description, by the very presence of her mother-in-law. Whatever resolutions—whatever plans of resistance she might have formed whilst alone, or in the presence only of her husband, faded away entirely when those light-gray, aged, but still penetrating eyes were fixed upon her, and when she knew with the intuition of fear that Mrs. Beacham was about to give her what is vulgarly called a “piece of her mind.”
The dreaded exordium began after this fashion:
“When you was a child, Mrs. John,” the old lady said, pushing up her spectacles and peering at Honor through her half-closed eyelids—“when you was a child, did you get any Bible learning? and was anybody good enough to teach you your catechism?”
“They were,” Honor replied, opening her large blue eyes in wonder, and using, to the old lady’s disgust, the peculiar Irish form of assent which, singularly enough, seemed indigenous in this girl who had had so little experience of her fatherland—“they were;” and then she stopped, poor child, marvelling greatly to what these singular opening questions were about to lead.
“Well, then,” continued Mrs. Beacham, spreading out two bony hands in simulated horror, “all I can say is, that I can see no excuse for you. If, besides being what I won’t defile my lips by naming, you had been turned out into the streets, as many of them creatures are, without eddication, and without knowing how to read your Bible, I might have, and so might John have, passed over something; but when a gell has been taught her dooty, and, more than that, when a gentleman as is respectable is good enough to make an honest woman of her, all I can say is, that when she can behave as you have done, when she can lie and deceive, and act light with other men, why she ought—and there ain’t a decent person that wouldn’t say as much—she ought to be ashamed of herself!”
To this coarse attack Honor vouchsafed no reply. The violence of invective employed by the determined old woman positively stunned her. The only feeling of which she was at all conscious was one of anger, of anger stirred up by grievous words in as gentle a breast as ever belonged to woman. The silence with which her words were received was very irritating to the speaker. She had looked forward, with very considerable satisfaction, to the moment when she should overwhelm her recreant daughter-in-law with a fire of well-merited reproaches; and now, to her infinite annoyance, her shots seemed to miss fire, and not a single one was returned as a proof that the volley had in any way been felt by the enemy.
“If anyone had told me,” the old lady went on to say, speaking very calmly and deliberately now, and as if determined that every word should tell—“if anyone had told me, fifteen months ago, that my son’s wife would bring his family—my family, that is to say, that has lived respectable time out of mind—to disgrace, I wouldn’t, no, I wouldn’t have believed it! It’s the first time (though I say it, as perhaps shouldn’t) that a Turton or a Beacham has numbered such a one as you among them; and I never thought to live to see the day when folks could point at one as bears my name, and even her to a wanton!”