Volume 2 — CHAPTER I. WHAT DID HONOR KNOW?

“I had nothing to do with it! By the God that made me! by the—”

“O sir, pray don’t talk in that way. I never said—I—I never thought—no, no; things would have been different, must have been different, if I had.” And the flush on Mrs. Bainbridge’s pale cheeks (she was a sickly-looking woman) grew deeper still, through the violence of her protest.

“She died very quiet, poor dear,” the woman continued sadly, while the Colonel stood passively near her, biting with an embarrassed air the silver knob of the cane that he had flourished so debonnairily such a very short time before. “She wasn’t much put about, thank God; and it was a lonesome place, you know. Even the priest, Father Donovan, him as you may remember used to have stations twice a-year in the village, didn’t come to anoint poor Winny when she was dying. You see, they send for him so often when there’s no occasion; and—”

“But, tell me,” said Norcott impatiently, “does this girl, John Beacham’s wife, know anything about her parentage? Did the old people, your grandfather and grandmother, keep the child at Moyfeckan after poor Winny’s death? I don’t understand it all. Was there any money to support her—the girl, I mean? And where has she been living all these years?”

“Where has she been living?” retorted the woman, speaking for the first time in a very decided Irish accent, for she was excited, and in anger the old familiar brogue cropped out unchecked. “Are you asking me that? And are you thinking that my father’s daughter’s child would be wanting charity to bring her up?”

“No; not that. I know you were not poor people. Old Phil Moriarty was a ‘snug man evermore;’” he quoted, with an abortive attempt to be facetious; “but, you see, I didn’t know but what he—”

“Might have turned his granddaughter out of doors, and left her to starve, poor girl, because of your sin! Is that what’s in your mind, sir? Faix, you should have thought of that before you took—but that’s neither here nor there. My grandfather, respectable as he’d always kep himself, was not the man to turn his back on his own kith and kin, let ’em be never so unfortunate. It’s not the way of our country-people, and it was not his. Says he, ‘That grand jintleman was a schoundrel’—I beg your pardon, sir, I only repeat his words—‘and he’s brought throuble on as good a gurl as ever trod the ground; but it ’ull come home to him,’ says he—‘it ’ull come home to him one of these days;’ and with that he’d groan, as he sat in the hearth, like a possessed man.”

Again Colonel Norcott, who was growing very impatient, was about to interrupt her with a question, but she stopped him peremptorily.

“Afther my poor sister got a trifle over the effects of the medicine, and when the baby showed as if it would live, which it didn’t at the first, for they had both been very near gone, my grandfather sent for ’torney Fagin, and bade him make his will. It wasn’t much he had to leave, leastways to a gentleman it wouldn’t seem much. There was the lease of the farm, which was valued, I think, at sixty pounds, and there was the furniture to be auctioned, and his stock. Well, altogether it came, as far as the two could kalkerlate, to a couple of hunder pounds; and that grandfather took and left altogether—God knows I didn’t grudge it to her, and she, poor dear, without a character, and a young child at her breast—to Winny. There wasn’t much besides in the will, for I saw it myself; but there was something—something for you, sir.” And she looked up at him with a curious sidelong glance, which struck the Colonel as not particularly pleasant—“yes; the name of Colonel Norcott, the airmy gentleman, as my grandfather called you, sir, was in the will; and he left you, written in large letters—I remember he would have it so—his curse.”

Norcott endeavoured to conceal his annoyance by a laugh. “The vindictive old beggar,” he said, “and he used to be such a jolly old boy, and an uncommon good twist at the whisky-bottle! So the young lady was an heiress after all, and left off bog-trotting, I suppose, pretty soon? Come now, Mrs. B., you used to be a good-natured soul yourself in those days, and I really want to know something about my old friends in those outlandish parts. In the first place, how did the ho-tel business thrive? and—about Bainbridge; it’s so long ago since I saw him alive—never half alive enough, though, for such a fine woman as you—that its almost risky asking after him.”

Mrs. Bainbridge sighed. She was, as the Colonel remarked, a very good-natured woman, one sign and evidence of which good-nature was, in his opinion, taking compliments in good part, and not objecting now and then to a little harmless flirtation. In the days when the free-and-easy Colonel (a squadron of whose regiment had been despatched to those “outlandish parts,” to do battle if necessary at a contested election) used to frequent the “best inn’s best parlour” in the large western town of Ballyderry, Mrs. Bainbridge, whose husband was an attorney (law and liquor are not unfrequently in the ould counthry dispensed by the same individual), would listen with flattering smiles to the pleasant blarney of the Saxon and the stranger. “Ah now, Colonel!” and “Shure you’re such a gentleman to talk,” were the full extent of reproof which Mrs. Bainbridge’s wifely sense of decorum urged her tongue to utter; and yet she was really a good woman, faithful, honest, and not in any degree forward or immodest. She was simply a little vain, and fond of flattering words. So agreeable too had the gallant Colonel contrived to make himself, that it needed all the unmitigated “schoundrelism” of which old Phil Moriarty had justly accused him, to open the then laughter-loving Mrs. Bainbridge’s eyes to the true character of her unprincipled favourite.

But although her eyes had been thus effectually opened, and albeit her anger against the destroyer of her sister’s life and character partook even of the character of rancour, so deep was it, and so endurable, yet nevertheless the worthy woman could not resist the tempting offer of repeating to a fresh listener the epitomised history of her widowhood, and the migration from her native land which followed on her “good man’s” decease.

“You see, sir, he was little better than a weight upon a woman’s hands, was poor Tom. He never enjoyed his health for a day since he married. Something in’ard, the doctors said; but it’s my belief they didn’t know much about it. He was a long while lying; and though, if I was to die to-morrow, I could say with truth that I never begridged him neither the time nor the throuble, nor yet the money he cost me; yet I couldn’t but feel he was a sore handful; and he wasted to skin and bone! Such work as we had to turn him in his bed at last, you’d never believe.”

“I daresay it was a bore,” remarked Norcott, whose weariness at these details was almost past endurance, but who felt, nevertheless, imperatively called upon to express a proper sympathy on the occasion. “People had better die when they are in that sort of state.”

“Well, and sure that’s true, sir,” rejoined Mrs. Bainbridge plaintively; “and die he did, poor fellow, like a lamb too, at last! Winny, poor girl, had kep up till then, doing what she could, which wasn’t much, for she was never strong, for all the lovely colour that was in her cheeks; but when Tom died she just faded away as well. He was always kind to her was Tom, and she’d a grateful heart, the crathur. Little Honor (we called her Honor after grandmother) was scarcely two months old then; but grandmother was a rare one to bring up a child by hand, and when Winny was taken, the child went to live altogether with the old people, till they died, that is to say; and after that—she was a pretty little gurl of seven years old then, and I’d been lady’s-maid to my Lady Kilkenny for six years and more—I put her to an English school, and had her taught the pianner and poetry, and the branches, thinking as she’d make her living as a governess in a genteel family; and so indeed she did, for she was two years, to a month a’most, teaching the little ones at Clay Farm, and earning her twenty pounds a year, and they making as much of her all the time as if she had been a child of their own. It’s little I’ve seen of the child, poor thing—I thought it was better not; girls will be asking questions, and what was I to say to her if she did? Best let her think she was an orphan; so, even when I have been in the country with ‘the family,’ I haven’t let her know; for I couldn’t have had such a young person as that in the housekeeper’s room at Sir Richard’s. So there it was—”

“Yes—and there it was—at that farm-house, I mean—that John Beacham fell in love with her pretty face and married her. I see it all now, and she is—let me see—not much over eighteen, eh?”

“I should think you ought to know as much of that as I do,” said Mrs. Bainbridge, bridling. “It’s nineteen year come September since you used to meet poor Winny of an evening in Lord Kilkenny’s demesne—and more shame for you to be desaving an honest girl that way. I declare you’re not worthy, that you ain’t, to be the father of such a sweet gurl as that, no, nor of such a pretty gurl, neither, for I don’t see that she favours you at all, while she’s as like her blessed mother as two peas in a pod.”

“Like! I should think she was! Why, it’s the same face! The same hair and eyes, and the same—”

“Ah! that’s just it!” broke in the widow passionately; “and it’s because I caught Colonel Fred Norcott looking in the same way at those pretty blue eyes and that beautiful hair, as he used to do at the poor girl’s that’s dead and gone, I thought it time to speak.”

“But I didn’t know,” said the Colonel, reddening this time with legitimate shame and anger. “How was I possibly to know that—”

“No, no, in course you couldn’t; I allow that. And now, having been forced, as it were—which I didn’t want to—to say all this, all I have to ask is that you’ll just hold your tongue about the matter. I’ve always kep a good deal out of her way, poor little thing, because I didn’t want to be questioned either by her or by anyone else; she has heard I’m her aunt, and that’s pretty well all. While as for John—though to be sure, Honor’s pretty enough, God bless her! to make a man bear anything for her sake—yet it’s my opinion he’s just the sort not to be best pleased when he found out that his wife wasn’t an honest woman’s daughter. As for the old lady, I wouldn’t be in Honor’s shoes (from all I hear) for a good deal, if the truth came out in her hearing.”

The Colonel was silent for a few minutes, and while unconsciously cutting with his cane the tall fragrant blossoms of the “meadow sweet” that grew beside the path, he thought with his usual astuteness and rapidity on the reasons for and against his following the widow’s advice. On the whole—and he came to the conclusion far more quickly than would have been the case with nine out of ten of his sex who had chanced to be similarly situated—on the whole, he decided that it would probably pay better to (judiciously, of course) allow his relationship to Honor to transpire. She was wonderfully pretty, and—but we need not follow this man through the network of reasoning, or rather through the tortuous underground plotting of his subtle mind. For all that he came of gentle blood, and had been reared under the roof of an “honourable” father, Frederick Norcott was, or rather had become, one of “the creeping things innumerable” which, among “both the small and great beasts” of mortality, do everywhere abound. He had lived too long upon his “wits” not to keep those weapons sharp, and to the last degree serviceable; a man he was, thoroughly confident in the inexhaustibleness of his own mental resources; for he had too often during the course of his oiseau sur la branche existence had to trust exclusively to those purveying talents of his, not to appreciate those useful gifts at their full value. He owed them a deep debt of gratitude for the good service they had done him in the mixed society of the New World, where he had been so fortunate as to hit the fancy of the “nice person” now raised to the state and dignity of—as she herself termed it—Mrs. Colonel Norcott, and who, though her grandfather had laid the foundation of his large fortune in a not over creditable manner, was possessed of as many hundreds per annum as would enable Fred to begin the world afresh.

“Then you feel quite certain—as certain as you can be of anything—that this little girl knows nothing, guesses nothing, about her birth? You see I am obliged, a little for my own sake, though of course I should be careful for hers, to be particular. Perhaps you may not have heard—we poor devils, you see, in the colonies may marry and be divorced, may die and rise again, without anyone at home knowing anything about it; so very likely you may not have heard the astounding fact that I have taken,” and he laughed rather foolishly, “to myself a wife?”

Mrs. Bainbridge was obliged to plead guilty to the amount of colonial ignorance implied by this last suggestion. She did not, however, express any surprise that the Colonel at his time of life (a “household form” of words, under which the Colonel winced) should have decided to get married. She could understand, too, that for peace, as well as decorum’s sake, that gentleman’s pro-nuptial peccadilloes had better remain in the background. No exposure, no punishment inflicted on the destroyer of her sister’s reputation, no mortification incurred by the man who had first betrayed and then left her young sister to die, could bring the unhappy girl back to her lost life—no repentance, supposing, which was among the most improbable of human events, that Col. Norcott should exhibit signs of penitence, could make amends for the guilt and misery of the past. There was a time when Bridget Bainbridge, goaded by the memory of her sister’s wrongs, would have striven hard for vengeance on the head of the seducer; but many a day had passed since Winnifred Moriarty had expiated her follies with her life. For more than eighteen years all that was mortal of the pretty Irish girl—the “heather-bell of Ballingarry”—had been mouldering beneath a black and rotting cross in the overcrowded burial-place of her native parish. Warm-hearted Mrs. Bainbridge had shed some very bitter tears when she looked her last on that dreary spot, and invoked, we grieve to say, the vengeance of Him who is as mighty to punish as to save upon the head of the absent profligate; but Time, as I was about to say, had produced its normal and blessed effect of softening the angry feelings, and making the rough places in human memories smooth. It is not often, I think, except in tales of fiction, that a wrong is treasured up through years upon years, in spite of change and absence, gathering intensity from the fermentation of the added heap. In real life, the principle of letting bygones be bygones is usually found more convenient to carry out than the more Corsican one of “nursing one’s wrath to keep it warm.” That same wrath is apt to become a dangerous element to the individual in whose breast it is nurtured. There are enemies, besides, whose comparatively elevated position endows them with a certain immunity from punishment—from punishment, that is to say, at the hands of the lesser ones whom they have offended. It was some such immunity as this that Colonel Norcott enjoyed in his final arrangements—if arrangements they could be called—with Mrs. Bainbridge. In addition to the natural subserviency common to all classes of the animal man, it is hardly to be supposed that the excellent Bridget should have been for so many years housekeeper in a “good family” without entertaining a certain amount of that respect for gentlefolks per se, which is so decidedly indicative of her class. With all her strong natural indignation, all her innate, as well as authorised conviction that the man standing there before her was a villain from top to toe, she yet could not divest him in her mind of the false prestige with which mere quality is often unhappily surrounded. Colonel Norcott—a county gentleman—insolent, airy, and well-bred, was still, wicked as he was, to this respectable woman a personage; and being such, she gave him to understand that, as far as his connection with Mrs. John Beacham was concerned, her tongue was sealed.

The Colonel expressed his satisfaction at this result of their conference. There was no good, that he could see, in raking up the ashes of the past, and it would be both wrong and cruel to distress Honor with the knowledge of her mother’s fault. Of course he was very much annoyed at what had taken place, and if he had found that Honor had been in different circumstances—was in want of pecuniary assistance, in short—he would of course have done what he could to provide for her.

“And I hope that you and I will always be good friends, Mrs. Bainbridge,” he wound up by saying; “I’m always to be found. The Bell at Gawthorpe, or Bleak’s Club-house in the Haymarket, are sure places to direct to if you should want to drop me a line.” He held out his hand (taking credit to himself the while for his condescension) to Winny Moriarty’s sister as he spoke, but for the second time within an hour the offered civility was rejected by humbler, though purer, hands than his. In spite of the apparent forgetfulness into which a natural love of gossip had led her, Mrs. Bainbridge was not to be surprised into the condoning of her sister’s wrongs. “The Colonel” had a very pleasant way with him, but that did not set matters right as regarded Winny; and now that she had said her say, and prevented mischief in the event of Colonel Norcott “trying on” his old games with Honor, Mrs. Bainbridge was glad to make her curtsey and depart.

She had no intention of making herself known as a relation to the Beachams. As she had said to the Colonel, she had no wish to be questioned regarding her niece’s parentage. Honor had never seen her since she herself was a little child, and need never know that she had spent an hour or two with the upper servants from Sir Richard Pemberton’s place at Danescourt. As far as Mrs. Bainbridge was concerned, she deemed that only shame could accrue to herself and her family from any mention of what had occurred in those old, old days at distant Moyfecken. Honor was happily married, and so it appeared was the man who seemed to entertain so small a share of parental feelings regarding his child. The interview with that unscrupulous gentleman had not been a pleasant one, but it was over now, and Mrs. Bainbridge saw no cause to regret that she had informed Colonel Norcott of the near ties of blood which bound him to the pretty wife of respectable, popular John Beacham.