“Glad, to be sure,” said Arthur, taking up his gloves, and troubling himself less than was altogether brotherly about poor Rhoda’s first and, as the preoccupied young man considered, thoroughly uninteresting love-affair,—“glad! Why it’s the most disgusting piece of folly I ever heard of. Such bad taste too! But it’s all my mother’s fault. If a gushing young woman like Rhoda had seen some good-looking young fellows every now and then, she would never have got spooney on such a slow prig of a parson as George Wallingford. An excellent young man, I daresay, in his way; but excellent young men haven’t much of a pull in these days, except when girls haven’t anyone else to talk to. Trust me, it won’t be long, if I know anything about such matters, before Miss Rhoda finds another lover ready to knock this spooney fellow out of her head.” And Arthur Vavasour, satisfied with this summary settlement of a question which probably appeared to him in the light of a very commonplace affair indeed, hurried away to his appointment in Stanwick-street—hurried to the presence of the still pure-hearted woman, for the love of whose bright eyes the silly young man was ready to lose his all of peace on earth, the goodwill of friends and kindred, and that much-prized but unexplainable thing for which no other nation save our own can boast even the simple name—the name, that is, of Respectability.
CHAPTER III.
WHAT WAS HONOR DOING?
It was Sunday at the Paddocks,—Sunday afternoon,—rather a ponderous season in the old silent house; and John was, sooth to say, a trifle tired of his own thoughts, to say nothing of the sight of his respectable parent poring, spectacles on nose, over the heavy sermon (a Sabbath duty with her, and a habit which she was far too old to break), that kept her in a blissful doze through two hours at least of that long afternoon of rest.
The early dinner was over; and the house being very quiet—no sound more startling than the buzz of the flies upon the window-pane breaking the stillness of the restful time—John Beacham, who had ensconced himself in his big arm-chair, feeling dull enough, poor fellow, without Honor, began to experience not only the influence of the heat but of the Sabbath beef and pudding; and his eyelids, “drawing straws,” as the saying is, closed gradually over the tranquil scenes before him, and the deserted husband found himself in the land of dreams.
How long he had slept he knew not, when he was roused by a man’s step in the entrance-hall near him, and by a voice which in the first bewilderment of waking he failed to recognise as that of Jack Winthrop, the owner of the wicked chestnut, and a distant neighbour, whose visits, few and far between, were usually paid on that dies non to a business man, a Sunday afternoon.
“Hallo, old fellow! taking a snooze, eh?” was Jack’s jovial greeting; and then the two men shook hands, while Mrs. Beacham, adjusting her spectacles, and with rather a scared look in her sharp old eyes, endeavoured, under the appearance of being still more wideawake than usual, to hide the fact that she had been asleep.
Jack was not much—as he often remarked himself—of a ladies’ man. He was far more at home in the stable than the drawing-room. Nevertheless, and especially when he had on his go-to-meeting coat and hat, he could shuffle through the usual forms of social good breeding with tolerable success. Of these forms, a short dissertation on the weather, past, present, and to come, together with a few polite inquiries regarding the health and whereabouts of the members of their respective families, stood first in importance. It was to the last of these conversational duties that Mrs. Beacham was indebted for some valuable information regarding the proceedings of the erratic young woman whose continued absence was to the old lady a perpetual source of mingled anger and satisfaction.
“Well, and how do you get along without the missus; eh, John?” asked the visitor. And then, with a rather meaning wink and a jerk of his smoothly-brushed yellow head, “I expect I’ve seen Mrs. John since you have; caught sight of her yesterday morning as I was tooling through the Park. She was a-horseback, looking like paint,—so she was, with such a colour,—and the young Squire along with her. There was a servant behind ’em on a screwed bay horse; and I didn’t think much of the one the missus rode either—a leggy brute! She wouldn’t think much of him, I fancy, after Lady Meg. But you’ll have her—the missus, I mean—back again soon, I doubt.” And the worthy, stupid fellow—stupid, that is, in everything but what regarded horse-flesh—pulled up at last, entirely unconscious that he had applied the match to a train, and that a “blowing-up” of some kind or other would be the inevitable consequence of his thoughtlessly-spoken words.
It was not till some hours later, and when Jack—who had been walked over every acre of the Paddocks, and been encouraged to linger longer than visitor had ever lingered before in each loose box and stall—that John Beacham and his mother, each in their several elbow-chairs, consumed their meal of herbs—id est, their tea and bread-and-butter—in silence and in gloom. John had delayed, with a cowardice very unusual to his open, natural, fearless character, the moment, dreaded beyond any previous moment of his life,—that, namely, when Honor’s conduct, her duplicity, her shamelessness, and worst of all, her dislike to him and to her home, would infallibly come under discussion between himself and his mother. To describe John’s sensations during the revelations of Mr. Winthrop would be impossible. To hear that his Honor,—the fair young wife whom he had pictured to himself living a secluded life in her father’s dull and poverty-stricken home,—to hear, I say, from authority undeniable, that she was recreating herself with horse exercise in the Lady’s Mile with a young gentleman,—the young gentleman of whose designs, or rather the report of whose designs, upon his wife’s affections, Mrs. Beacham had already more than once irritated him by hinting at,—was to receive a stab sharp and cruel, as it was wholly unexpected, in the warm honest heart that still contained within it such a wealth of love for the backsliding absent one. He had made no sign—it was his way (a misfortune in some cases) to make no sign till such time as the gathering stream of passion, defying all control, burst through its bonds, and spent itself in outward fury—he made no sign of what he was enduring whilst Honor’s sin of suppressio veri (to use the mildest term) was shown up in glaring colours by his officious visitor. From his manner—but then Jack was not an observant character,—that sporting individual would never have imagined that his old friend was undergoing torture very difficult to endure with outward composure; and that John Beacham did so endure it was partly owing to his dread that the old lady, who was not famous for concealing what she called her “feelings,” might, by an outburst of indignation, betray the mortifying fact that his young wife was wronging and deceiving him. That such a manifestation was to the last degree unadvisable was so clearly and intentionally demonstrated by John’s demeanour, that Mrs. Beacham, though sorely against her will, limited the expression of her wrath to an “Ah, well!” followed by the compressed lips which so often betray that wrath “to be kept warm” is being nursed within the breast.
It was with curiously different feelings that the mother and son awaited the time when Honor’s conduct, as revealed by Jack Winthrop, should be in solemn conclave sat in judgment on, and, as a matter of course, condemned. For that time—for the auspicious moment when John should have returned from that interminable walk, when his Brother farmer, “drat him” (I am afraid that, Sunday though it was, the worthy old lady did indulge in a mild imprecation or two on the head of her unconscious visitor), should have taken his departure, and when they two should be sitting comfortably (?) over their tea, Mrs. Beacham longed with a feverish and impatient craving. It was so hard, so very hard upon her, that she was perforce obliged to keep this weighty discovery within the limits of her own breast. A secret, like a very young man’s forbidden love affair, is worth nothing unless you can divulge it to the one friend who promises with such solemn vows to keep it closely (as closely, poor confiding one, as you have done yourself); and had the widow Thwaytes chanced to “drop in” that Sunday afternoon—a step which that scandal-lover would infallibly have taken could the remotest surmise of the delightful existing field for gossip have reached her ears—the delinquencies of the absent Honor would very soon have become public property at Switcham. Such luck, however, as a visit from her congenial humble friend was not, on that day at least, in store for the busy irate old woman, who, strong in the strength of her Sabbath silk gown and great in her conscious dignity of mistress regent at the Paddocks, sat prepared to make—certainly not the best of her young daughter-in-law’s shortcomings.