The word was out at last, the ugly shocking word that struck through Honor’s brain like a knife, and which, when it had passed the lips that spoke it, the irritated woman, when it was too late, possibly wished unsaid. In very truth, there was something startling in the sight of Honor’s livid face and flashing eyes, something almost painful even to the unsympathising witness of her agony in the change which a few outspoken syllables had wrought in that young girl’s countenance.
Rising suddenly from her chair, tossing aside with reckless hand the woman’s-work with which she had been occupied, her pretty taper fingers pressed against her throat (for there was a tightening there that felt like suffocation), Honor Beacham stood erect before her stepmother.
“You are wicked!” she stammered forth. “A wicked, cruel woman! John would not have used me so—John knows I do not deserve such words. I will go to him—to my husband—I will—”
“You will do nothing of the kind. If you do not know your duty, I must teach it to you,” almost shrieked the passionate old woman, losing all command over herself, as the idea of Honor’s appealing to John against his mother presented itself to her mind. “You think, do you, that John—that my son is going to indulge you in all your good-for-nothing ways? Why, girl, he said to me himself that it was high time something was done to bring milady to her senses; he said—”
But Honor—nervous, excited, and scarcely mistress of her actions—waited to hear no more. With a cry like that of a hare hard pressed by the hounds, she rushed from the room, leaving the startled old woman to ponder with some trepidation on the mischief she had wrought. Long, and not very comfortably, did she think over her words; but after a considerable amount of putting two and two together, and no little leaning towards herself as an oracle to be respected, the balance of opinion being on the whole decidedly in favour of her own proceedings, Mrs. Beacham arrived at the conclusion that she was fully justified in speaking as she had done to the erring Honor. Judging that strong-minded woman according to the average truthfulness of her sex, John’s respected parent could not, on the whole, be accused, while quoting John’s indignant words, of the sin of mendacity. According to the letter of those words, she was justified in repeating as a fact her son’s awful threat—the one which more than any other of her angry vituperations had told upon Honor’s feelings—the threat, namely, that her husband would, instigated thereto by his mother, bring his pretty young wife “to her senses.”
There was something very vague and terrible in this menace; and Honor, after locking the door of the pretty bedroom which John, little more than one short year before, had taken such pleasure in making ready for his darling, brooded over them with a sick heart and miserably. She was utterly in the dark, as I have already and more than once endeavoured to explain, regarding her husband’s character generally, and his feelings towards herself in particular. Could anyone at that particular moment—when she was brooding over her wrongs—over her husband’s coldness of heart and heat of temper; over his cruelty in delivering her over to the tormentor, id est, the mother who bore him, and her own misery in being condemned to live en tiers with two people who disliked and despised her—had anyone, I repeat, at that especial moment whispered in Honor Beacham’s ear that John the in-compris possessed in reality the very tenderest of hearts; that his apparent coldness towards herself was the result of a keen sense of personal and educational inferiority; and that a few sweet smiles on her dear lips, and a few kind loving words whispered in his ear, would make poor John not only the happiest, but the most demonstrative of husbands, Honor would simply have told that well-intentioned comforter that he knew not what he said, and, turning on her restless pillow, would have sternly refused to credit the fact that she was otherwise than a victim.
I fear me much that the behaviour of Honor at this crisis of her life will find few to excuse it; and yet to the thinking of the lenient there will be found some plausible reasons for her folly. In the first place, she was both mentally and bodily out of health. Of neither truths, patent though they were, had she any real or wholesome suspicion. She was too young, too ignorant of cause and effect, to be aware that the life she had been leading had thrown her into a mental fever, the which, seeing that it was a malady of weakness, required the nicest care and the most judicious of treatments in order to effect its cure. Neither could she give a name to the malaise, showing itself in languor, in nervous headaches, and in occasional heart-palpitations; all of which, with the carelessness so common to the young, she had hitherto allowed to pass unnoticed. That she was in no frame, either of mind or body, to do battle successfully against the violence of her own feelings and forebodings is very certain; and as certain is it that, though she did not yet what is called love the man who had conspired so selfishly against her peace, the image and the memory of Arthur Vavasour formed no small portion of her troubled thoughts, as she lay sobbing on her bed, and repeating to herself that she could not, would not bear the lot that lay before her.
“To the old,” as someone—I know not who—has truthfully said, “sorrow is sorrow, while to the young it is despair.” Despair at least as they to whom sorrow is new count the extreme of human suffering. The smallest insect, as the inspired poet tells us, “feels a pang as great as when a giant dies;” and Honor, frail little vessel as she was, could, she believed, endure no heavier or more wearing woe than that of submitting in her fresh young beauty—the beauty that Arthur Vavasour worshipped—to the tyranny of her mother-in-law, and the cold displeasure of a husband who loved her not.
As she dwelt—with the pleasure which under twenty is so often felt in the indulgence of a mournful self-pity—on her unmitigated woes, the idea, once before entertained, and never wholly forgotten, of finding a home for herself—of working for her bread—of escaping from the tyranny, the evil-speaking, the taunts and evil suspicions of her mother-in-law, flashed through her mind. At first, with something very like a shock—for to Honor the leaving of her husband’s house and home appeared (distinction without a difference though it was) a far more adventurous and desperate act than that which she had before, with tolerable calmness, contemplated—the act, that is to say, of separating herself whilst under her father’s roof from the husband who, in her opinion, neither loved, appreciated, nor understood her; from the man who could see her wronged, insulted, and put upon by the hard-tempered old woman, who, from the hour of her introduction to Updown Paddocks, had never ceased to make Honor’s life a misery and a burden to her;—the act and deed of remaining hidden in some obscure London lodging, had, as I said before, seemed simple and easy enough to the young wife when, encouraged and buoyed-up by the devoted attentions of Arthur Vavasour, she vaguely contemplated a future in which Mrs. Beacham had no share, but which was to be cheered by the unfailing friendship (Honor knew so little of men’s nature that she had faith in constancy, and dreamed of friendship as a delicious possibility) of her kind and disinterested adviser. But the prospect before her was a trifle changed by the point of view from which she now contemplated it; and far greater courage and strength of mind seemed required to induce her to leave her husband’s home than had been needed to enable her to stay away from it. As her fever of passion cooled, so did the power within her to take a step so decided and so desperate fade away likewise. Honor’s nature was naturally an indolent one—indolent and yielding. Should she be led, by the force of her own rebellious temper, to do that which would blight her name and ruin her hopes of future happiness, the guilt of that act would lie—as such guilts so often do—more at the door of another than at her own. Already the quiet tears of self-pity and womanly submission were taking the place of hysterical sobs and passionate ejaculations; already she was subsiding into the dull calm which is the natural consequence of over-excitement, when the voice, harsh-sounding and dreaded, of the domestic tyrant—whose will had grown to be law, and whose ways were not as the ways of her young daughter-in-law—smote suddenly on Honor’s sensitive ear, and awoke again within her the evil spirit of resistance. Mrs. Beacham was only, at that unlucky moment, in the exercise of her right; she was but scolding the girl-of-all-work, the female “odd boy” of the establishment, for some trifling neglect of her multifarious duties; but the evil done by that loud high-pitched voice was as surely effected, and its baneful influence on the listener’s mind was as great and fatal, as though the most inexcusable deed of injustice and cruelty had been then and there by John’s hasty-tempered parent committed. Rising in a sitting posture on her bed, Honor, with shaking fingers, pushed the hair back from her aching forehead, and repeating to herself more than once, as if in excuse for her premeditated sin, that she could not, could not bear her life at Updown, she slowly slid down her feet upon the floor, and (half mechanically at first) commenced her preparations for departure. For departure? Yes; but to what place, and with what ulterior end, she knew not. All she cared for was escape—escape from the sight and sound of the woman who had always hated her, and who, as Honor firmly believed, had begun to undermine her husband’s love and trust, and would eventually succeed in turning his heart against her. To live any longer under the same roof with one who had accused her of the vilest sin—who had reproached her in the coarsest terms, for acts of which she was utterly incapable—was, as Honor kept repeating to herself, more than she could endure. More unhappy, the foolish child believed she could not be. It might be hard, trying at first, and humiliating, to work as a servant, or in other ways, for her bread; but anything, to her then thinking, was better than her present life; and Arthur Vavasour—(it is to be feared that, innocent though in truth she was, that young gentleman played rather a conspicuous part in the programme of her future plans)—Arthur Vavasour would be ever at hand to aid, advise, and encourage her. On one subject only did Honor from the first, and wholly without reservation, make up her disturbed and rather bewildered mind. She would not, under any circumstances, take refuge under her father’s roof. That John would immediately commence the strictest search to discover her whereabouts Honor was well assured, and therefore it was above all things necessary for the preservation of her secret, that in Stanwick-street they should know positively nothing of her proceedings.
The only individual—alas, for this poor silly girl—this frail, weak vessel about to put to sea without a pilot, and with no chart or compass to guide it on its way—the only individual to whom the mystery of her setting sail on her adventurous cruise was to be no mystery, was the last person in the world to whom she should have confided the secrets of her life. To Arthur Vavasour—to the man whose “brotherly” kindness (he had been very cautious in his love-making of late, and Honor had in consequence grown proportionally off her guard)—to Arthur Vavasour only would she at once apply in this emergency for counsel and support. From him, she was well assured, she would never fail to meet with gentleness and respect. When she looked back upon his deferential manner—on his unceasing kindness, as Honor in her simplicity considered it—above all, when she compared that kindness and that deference with the aggressive treatment which from John’s unendurable parent had so greatly angered her, and also with the absence, for reasons which she knew not, of demonstrative affection from her husband—it is scarcely matter for surprise that Honor Beacham should have loved and cherished the man who gave to her—such was her woman’s faith—the offering which she prized the most; the offering, that is to say, of an affection on which, through evil report and through good report, and while life should last, she could confidently rely.