“He writes very unhappily, John,” Honor was saying. Her husband had a letter that they had been reading in his hand—a letter to John from Arthur Vavasour. It was the second that they had received from him; the first having been one so touchingly penitent that John Beacham for a long while after reading it was more than usually silent, keeping its contents to himself, and not alluding afterwards, in any way whatsoever, to the young man’s letter. But, if possible, he was after receiving it still more tender to Honor than he had been before; watching her, as she flitted about his sickroom, with eyes that glistened as they looked on her.
As soon as he was equal to the exertion, John answered the humble letter, which, coming as it did from the son of one whose memory was very dear to him, and whose good works were embalmed with the myrrh, aloes, and cassia of deep respect in the righteous man’s heart, gave deep and sincere pain to its recipient; and in his reply to the penitent effusion poor John took, as such an unselfish man was certain to do, a great portion of the blame, the guilt indeed, of all that had occurred upon himself. Had a stranger read John’s simple letter, he would very naturally have believed that the writer was guilty of other and worse offences than that of an impulsive yielding to first impressions, and of speaking hasty words with his tongue.
“I shall never forgive myself,” he wrote. “I was a brute and a fool, and don’t deserve the happiness of having my poor wife at home with me. Would to God, dear Mr. Arthur, that any prayers of mine and Honor’s could bring back yours; but it was God’s will that she should be taken, poor young lady; but I don’t understand how you can make things better by leaving your little one as well. I hope you will excuse my advising you; but I loved your father well, dear Mr. Arthur, as you know; and it grieves me to think that his son is going into banishment like for my fault. Surely the old gentleman would be best pleased for you to stay at home; and besides, from all that I can hear, America is not the best place for a young gentleman to live in. The young ladies, too, at the Castle would find it hard to lose you; and I should be always remembering, seeing your empty place at church, that it was me that was the cause you went. No, no, dear Mr. Arthur, you will think better of it still, I hope; and we shall see you riding with the young ladies about the Chace this summer, not exactly as if nothing had happened—for that could not be, even if it was right—but as your late lamented father would approve of, and as your ancestors did before you. I hope that you will be so good as excuse my boldness, and will believe me, with respect and affection,
“Your obedient servant,
“John Beacham.”
“P.S. There is one of the beautifullest foals ever dropped, out of Mad Flora by the Old Shekarry, in the five-bar paddock. I should like you to see her, so I should. You’d say you never saw a neater nor a cleaner made one. The stock is good, and no mistake.”
This letter—a letter written from the fulness of a kind and sympathising heart—found Arthur Vavasour at Liverpool, to which city he had resorted for the purpose of taking steam to the great republic—the land of soi-disant liberty—the land of the “stars and stripes,” “unwhipped and unwhippable for ever.” (I wonder, writing of that self-same flag, that some zealous descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers—some red-hot Yankee, friend and supporter of his black-bodied brethren—has not ere this voted for the suppression of the ruled, gingham-suggestive portion of the “glorious flag,” for now that the negro back is free from suffering, and the weary “son of Afric” need no longer toil, the stripes would seem, one might suppose, a worse than unnecessary, because a painful, reminder of the disgraceful past.) But to return to Arthur Vavasour in the half-Americanised city, and in the big hotel to which the love of the turtle has drawn many a man who, like me and, perhaps, you, O gentle reader, has no thought whatever of crossing the broad Atlantic in a Cunard steamer. Had those afflicted ones, who so deeply commiserated the forlorn lot of this poor widower, been enabled at that moment (Asmodeus-like) to look upon his saddened face, and form their own opinions, unbiassed either by prejudice or pity, they could hardly have decided that the events of the past month had told very severely upon this young British Sybarite. At twenty-two it is very easy to forget, and with the world (a considerable portion of it, that is to say) untried and unexplored before him, a young man of good birth, the eventual possessor of such an estate as Gillingham (for even Lady Millicent could not prevent the family property from descending after her death to her eldest son)—with, I repeat, such prospects as these, to say nothing of good health and a handsome person, it is hardly surprising that Arthur Vavasour should have felt very far from utterly cast down by the changes and chances of this mortal life, of which he had lately had such painful as well as mortifying experience. He was not alone, for, seated by the open window in a rocking-chair, and reading the last number of the Field, then a new publication, sat a young man whose name was Godfrey Tremlett, and who, having been a college friend—the fidus Achates of his semi-boyish days—had kindly consented to share the wanderings of the disappointed man in the lands beyond the sea, where the heavy foot of the buffalo tramples the silent prairie, and where, flying slowly but surely before civilisation, the red Indian (baptised with the baptism of the Christian’s “fire-water”) endures his lot with patience, looking, with stolid face and all a wild man’s stupid singleness of heart, to a better, that is, a more sporting country in the happy hunting-grounds where a good savage meets his due reward; in other words, Arthur and his companion’s point was Fort Jasper, and their intentions were to witch the world at home with accounts of their adventures, with details of their narrow escapes, and with the counting over daily of the head of game which they with their bow and spear had bagged.
It was exciting work that talking over their plans, examining maps of the country (rather vague ones, it is true, but not on that account the less interesting to the travellers), and slaying in anticipation countless numbers of harmless animals then roaming unsuspectingly over their native wilds.
Mr. Godfrey Tremlett was a rather heavily-built young man, fresh-complexioned, with a fat, beardless, good-humoured face. His appearance was not precisely that of a sportsman; indeed, that very morning, when he had tried on a certain hunting-suit, very short in the skirts and slightly eccentric in fashion (he had invented it himself, and took much credit to himself for the idea), Arthur, forgetful for the moment of his recent affliction, went off into roars of laughter at the singularity of his friend’s appearance. Neither abashed nor affronted by this proof of intimacy, Godfrey spun round before the glass in an accès of self-satisfaction, which no friendly ridicule had power to check. He was essentially and invariably good-tempered. His high spirits were proof against the normal ills, the daily worries, the hourly contretemps of existence. He had no taste for what is generally called society. Ladies, as a rule, he considered a bore, and “fine ladies” he held in absolute, nay almost physical, dread and horror. He was not extravagant; on the contrary, he made the most of a small patrimony which had descended to him from his deceased father, and contrived to save yearly out of an income of something less than five hundred per annum a sufficient sum to enable him to enjoy in some sporting-fields or other—in Scotland, Norway, or wherever the fancy led him—a few months of excitement and variety.
To Mr. Godfrey Tremlett the idea of accompanying such a “real good fellow” as Arthur Vavasour in the search of the latter after change and a forgetfulness of his troubles was simply delightful. He pitied his poor friend immensely, and did not at all intend that Arthur should give way to the low spirits which are generally supposed to be incidental to his situation. Neither, it must be owned, did the young widower himself betray any signs that the task of consolation would be either an impossible or a difficult one. Already change of scene, of projects, and of mode of life had produced their normal effects (as regards the young, at least) on Arthur Vavasour; and, judging by his frequent laugh, the zest with which he entered into the arrangements for his approaching campaign, and, more than all, his evident enjoyment of the good things that were set before him (namely, the calipash and calipee, which were pronounced by these two young gourmands to be as the nectar and ambrosia of the gods), it would have been easy for the least observant of lookers-on to convince himself that the affliction with which (for his own selfishness, his own want of moral principle, his own vanity and folly) Arthur Vavasour had been visited was but for a season, and only lightly felt by this voluntary exile.
“He does not recover his spirits,” Honor said to her husband, after reading the short farewell letter in which Arthur had recapitulated his reasons for leaving England, and had dwelt in touching terms on his loneliness and his repentance. They little thought, that husband and wife, whose peace had been blighted, and whose mutual confidence shaken, if not destroyed, by this man’s indulgence in vile and selfish passions, how little call there really existed in this case for compassion, and how easy it had been for Arthur Vavasour to feign a sorrow he had ceased to feel.