“John,” Arthur exclaimed, “do not, for God’s sake, talk in this way. I declare before Heaven that you are mistaken. I swear to you that your wife—”
“Have you seen her? Do you know where she is?” cried John impetuously. Poor fellow! he would have caught only too gladly at the belief that his suspicions were unfounded, and that his still dearly loved Honor had been foolish only, but not guilty. O no, not guilty! the thought of that evil was too dreadful to be endured; so he said very eagerly, and with a touching entreaty in his tone, “Mr. Vavasour, only say—swear it to me by your father’s memory—that within these three days you have neither seen nor heard from my wife, and I will thank and bless you to my dying day.”
But Arthur could not, dared not, swear to this. With all his longing, not only to save Honor, but to console and reassure the excellent man who had ever treated him with such frank and cordial kindness, he could not take the oath required of him. He could not, even for the woman whom he loved, quite drag what he called his honour in the dirt.
The sight of his hesitation was enough, and more than enough, to confirm the husband’s worst apprehensions; and to what lengths his passion would have carried him, had not this stormy interview been interrupted, it would be hard to say. Already John had begun to pour a torrent of invectives on the young man’s head, when the sight of Kate Vavasour running, almost flying, down the broad marble staircase, arrested his words.
“Arthur, Arthur!” she screamed, “for the love of Heaven, for poor Sophy’s sake, come away. She is dying—dead, they think,” she added distractedly, for, in very truth, she scarcely knew what she said; “and you have killed her!”
CHAPTER XXI.
SUSPENSE.
Alas, alas for the young creature that was taken, and for the old man that was left behind! Kate’s words were only too true; and Sophy, the loved of many hearts—the wealthy heiress, on whose bright blooming face the winds of heaven had never been allowed to play too roughly—was numbered with the dead. She never spoke again, after they laid her upon her bed by the side of her sleeping infant; and that she died unconscious of the truth—that the frantic denials poured forth in his agony by Arthur of the guilt and treachery of which he had been accused, fell upon ears that heard them not—was, perhaps, the bitterest portion of his punishment. That he had been accused unjustly, and that he had in reality never what is called wronged the tender wife who had paid for her jealous curiosity with her life, was Arthur’s only consolation in his hour of trial and bereavement. He forgot that his freedom from actual guilt was owing to no virtue on his own part; forgot that in his heart he had committed the sin the bare accusation of which, overheard by his poor Sophy, had consigned her to an early grave; forgot that while she was tender, loving, and true, his heart, ever since he had led her to the altar, had been bound up in, and wholly occupied by, another. But if, in his yearning for self-comfort, and in the natural longing of cowardly mortals to escape from the sharp stings of conscience, Arthur Vavasour could find consolation in the reflection that he had escaped actual guilt, there was one who, from the hour when he was first prostrated to the earth by the intelligence of poor Sophy’s death to the day when his own sorrows were buried in the grave, could never bring himself to see any mitigation of Arthur Vavasour’s offence, or any plea for mercy on the ground that he had not been, in fact, faithless to his marriage-vows. To describe the grief, the frantic despair it might rather be called, of the father whose only child was thus, in the bloom of her innocent and happy youth, torn from his arms and from his love, would be impossible. The blow had, indeed, fallen with terrible suddenness on the aged head that never, never again rose erect, as it had done before, with the proud, glad look that prosperity and domestic content are wont to lend to their possessors. “Old Dub” (there was such a touching solemnity, a sacredness as it were, thrown around his undying grief, that the name seemed no longer to suit him, and died away speedily, as do the nicknames of children when age and wisdom renders their foolish petits noms inappropriate and absurd), “old Dub” was never the same man again after he had seen the delicate limbs of his dead daughter laid out for her burial. It was a touching sight to witness, that of the gray hairs falling over the white closed eyelids of the corpse, while the scant tears of age wrung from a father’s agony fell slowly one by one upon poor Sophy’s marble forehead. At the foot of the bed Arthur, pale almost as the dead that lay in its dread immovability before him, stood with folded arms, and with ever and anon a strong shiver shaking him from head to foot. He felt (it is the nature of his sex and kind) a good deal for himself, even in those moments of deep grief and self-reproach; and certain questions would intrude themselves on his mind which were out of place in the breast of a newly-made widower, and in the chamber of mourning. Would Mr. Duberly, who knew nothing at present of the share which he (Arthur) had in poor Sophy’s death,—would he be very hard upon him if, which was only too probable, he should come to know the truth? Would he believe in Arthur’s assurances, on his oath, that John Beacham’s visit had been the act of a madman, an act unjustified by any conduct, any intentions on Arthur’s part to injure or to wrong him? That the old man, sorrowing with a grief which would not be comforted, and lamenting over his lost treasure with “groanings that could not be uttered,” would not so believe, Arthur more than suspected. Well did he remember the jealous watchfulness, the unceasing solicitude, with which this doting father had striven to guard his child from even a transient sorrow; and it was not difficult to imagine the fury that would rage within his breast when the truth should be revealed to him that Arthur was, as Kate Vavasour had in her agony of fear and love exclaimed, his daughter’s murderer!
Meanwhile, these two were not alone in enduring, with such patience as in the first dark moments of bereavement we can summon to our aid, the consequences of guilty passions, of deceit, of vanity, and of folly. Watching, waiting, grieving,—watching and waiting for the friend who came not, and grieving with bitter tears over her past folly,—Honor sat in the dismal chamber of that dirty and barely respectable lodging-house—a piteous sight, indeed, to look upon. As usual, the sense of error had been the result of mortification and of sorrow. Le remord est né de l’abandon et non pas de la faute; and if Arthur Vavasour had not been prevented in a manner as yet undreamt-of by Honor from keeping his engagement with her, and aiding her in the course which she had faintly marked out for herself, it is probable that Honor would have been far longer than was actually the case in arriving at a due and contrite sense of her mistakes. The hours after Arthur’s departure dragged on very wearily for the imprudent girl who, a prisoner in that dismal room, began, as the time wore on and she heard nothing either of or from him, very seriously and repentantly to commune with her own thoughts. It was then that the mist of prejudice in favour of a class above her cleared away for ever; then that she no longer craved to be what is conventionally termed a “lady;” then that she learned (the teaching was a severe and uncompromising one, but none the less effectual because of the heavy hand that had been raised in teaching her)—then it was that she learned the valuable truth that sterling worth is more to be desired than the outside graces of a soft manner and a flattering tongue, and that the heart of gold is better than the glitter of a refined and fair appearance. Instead of inwardly glorying in her near kindred to the well-born, and in lieu of rejoicing over the fact that she came of a gentle race, and that in her veins ran the pure Norman blood of the well-descended “Norcotts of Archerfield,” Honor Beacham would henceforth shrink in shame from the memory of her parentage, bearing ever before her the unwelcome and dishonouring truth, that the man to whom she owed the birth on which she had been weak enough to pride herself was, in very truth, nothing better than a swindler!
And out of the painful conviction that so it was there grew another, and if possible a still more harrowing thought—the thought, namely, of the more than possibility which existed of a life-long separation (the consequence of her own impatience under what appeared to her now chastened spirit in the light of very minor grievances) from the husband whose excellence she was tardily beginning to value as it deserved. It was true that she had committed no act which must of necessity cause an eternal breach between them, and equally true was it that she had, previous to her departure, written a half-protesting, half-apologetic letter—the letter of which the reader is already cognisant, and which (on such apparently trifling causes do the most important events of our lives depend) was not delivered at Pear-tree House till after its owner’s fatal visit to London—it was true, I repeat, that Honor had written a letter which might, she felt, eventually soften John’s heart towards her. In it she had explained, as well as she was able—she could not abuse as heartily as she wished John’s mother to John himself—but in it she had not disguised the fact that the old lady’s unkindness was the sole motive cause of her departure; nor had she hesitated to assure the husband she was leaving that she might, under other circumstances, have lived happily beneath his roof.
How keenly, as Honor strove to call to mind the only half-remembered expressions in that hastily-written epistle, did she regret that she had not endeavoured to fix them more firmly on her memory; for every syllable that she had written seemed to her of importance now, when wondering to herself what John was thinking of her, and whether or not she was beyond the reach of pardon.