Honor, to do her justice, never imagined an existence apart from her husband. She was not happy at home; the life there was unsuited to her, and John, she believed, did not love her well enough to care whether his mother tormented her or not. In London, on the contrary, she did enjoy herself, wildly, feverishly, but with a zest and an impulse that had nothing in it that was natural or lasting. When the day came, she longed for the hour which should bring Arthur Vavasour to her side; but with the longing came a kind of nervous dread—a fear of his impatience, an alarm as of a hunted animal at the thought of finding herself within his power—all which symptoms might have told a more experienced woman that in her love for Arthur Vavasour there was an alloy which, had he imagined its existence, would have deprived the longing for possession of more than half its value.
It is often a misfortune to all parties concerned that the same symptoms are indicative of various and opposite complaints. A blush is as often a sign of innocence as of guilt; and a beating heart beneath a visibly agitated bosom may be a token of other emotions besides the tender one of love.
When Arthur felt the throbbing pulse bounding beneath the pressure of his hand, he never doubted that, had he been tête-à-tête with that most peerless creature, she would have gladly sighed her love out on his breast, listening in tender ecstasy to his vows of eternal constancy. Nearer and nearer, happy in this blessed conviction, to his heart he held her, secured from observation in a shadowy corner, and safe under the protection of the remainder of the party, who lingered just out of earshot on the terrace.
Honor, afraid of offending her high-born lover, and sincerely hoping that never—never under less safe and satisfactory circumstances might a similar scene be enacted, contrived to stammer out the foolish, false, and guilty assurance,—an assurance that filled the young lover’s heart with the wildest hopes—the assurance, namely, that her heart was his, and that in his love she found her dearest, sweetest happiness!
CHAPTER II.
A LOVER FOUND AND LOST.
“I really am at a loss to make up my mind which is the most extraordinary—the man behaving in this way without encouragement, or your being so lost to everything that is—ahem!—due to your position in life as to allow him to think, to hope, that his proposals—most impertinent ones, I must say—could meet with anything but anger and contempt.”
Lady Millicent was seated on her presidential sofa, in the room appropriated in Bolton-square to her especial use. It was a dull, dark, business-looking apartment. The “third drawing-room” it was called, and in it milady was wont to receive such visitors as clearly were not there for purposes of mere pleasure, or with the intention of ephemerally enjoying themselves—men of law, serious men, with faces fraught with the care that the craving after six-and-eightpences is wont to impress on the human countenance divine, were seen entering, clearly with a purpose, the heavy door (white-painted and gilt, but shabby and tarnished now) that led to milady’s sanctum. It was a room into which her young daughters rarely intruded; and when, on the morning in question (it was that of the very day which Honor passed so feverishly with Arthur Vavasour by her side), Rhoda, poor, timid, nervous Rhoda, was summoned to an audience with her awe-inspiring mamma, she made her entrée with a beating heart, and, though she knew not wherefore, with a strong presentment of evil. The open letter in Lady Millicent’s hand was scarcely evidence enough to awaken in her mind anything at all approaching to the truth. Rhoda was as far as the poles from imagining that the sedate rector of Switcham, the quiet, unpretending young man, whose “duties” ever seemed so much above his pleasures, could have so far allowed his mundane feelings, his passions, that were of the “earth, earthy,” to overpower his well-regulated mind, as to induce him to offer to the great lady of Gillingham—the patroness of his living, and one with whom he knew himself to be not a favourite—his humble proposals for her daughter’s hand.
Standing droopingly in the august presence, and without a word to say either in her own behalf or that of her co-delinquent, the poor girl listened in silence to the stern and very bitter words of reprobation which fell from her mother’s lips. Perhaps until she so listened—until she contrasted the hard unsympathising nature of the woman to whom she owed her birth with that of the good, thoroughly-to-be-relied-on character of the man whose letter, with dimmed eyes and a very pitying heart, she had just contrived to read and comprehend—she had never rightly known how necessary the love of him, who for so many months had been her only object and point of interest at uncongenial Gillingham, had become to her.
“I am well aware—no justly-reproachful words of yours can make me more so” (thus one sentence of poor George’s letter ran)—“that I have no right, in a worldly point of view, to hope that you would look otherwise than contemptuously on my humble offer. I have little besides my deep affection, and my prayers that God would enable me to contribute to your beloved daughter’s happiness, to lay before one who deserves every good gift that could be bestowed upon her. A small, very small private fortune—a few hundreds a year only—in addition to the income derived from my living, is all that I possess. But, if I mistake not, Miss Vavasour’s tastes are simple ones, and she might, God aiding, be happier in the quiet home which she would deign to share with me than in the turmoil of the great world, and amongst the gay and rich, of whom it is said that it is hard for them to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“Methodistical stuff!” murmured Lady Millicent, turning over the leaves of a law-book, and delivering herself of the severe comment on her would-be son-in-law’s epistle at the moment when she rightly guessed that poor Rhoda had arrived at its conclusion. “Very bad taste, I think, my dear, of your admirer, condemning us en masse in this summary way. But now, do tell me,” laying down the pen with which she had been making notes, “what did you do at Gillingham to bring upon me such a letter as that? I should have thought—but one lives and learns—that if there existed a girl in the world who would have abstained from this kind of thing, it was you; and now I find that—”