Volume 2 — CHAPTER XI. HONOR SHOWS A LIKING FOR THE “BELL.”

Ten days—long and anxious ones—have elapsed since Honor’s instalment by her father’s bed (for, as may already have been surmised, old Mrs. Beacham and later John himself had been constrained, much against their respective wills, to return to the Paddocks without her), and Colonel Norcott, pronounced out of danger by Dr. Kempshall, has already partially recovered his normal tone of mind. By that time the mystery of Honor’s birth had ceased to exist, and all the little world of Gawthorpe, including the equally important and more extended one of Switcham and the surrounding farms, knew her for what she was—namely, the illegitimate daughter of Colonel Frederick Norcott, formerly of West Lowe Court, Sandyshire. Very little—nothing, it may almost be said—was ever addressed to John Beacham on the subject of his wife’s parentage. Of comparatively humble birth though they were, an instinctive delicacy warned the major part of his friends, that to John any allusion to the subject would be distasteful at least, if not positively offensive. The undefined suspicion also—strengthened by the fact that, during all the days spent in attendance on her father, John never was known to enter even for a single moment Colonel Norcott’s sick room—that he, John Beacham, was no stranger to the accident from which the gallant Fred was suffering, did not tend to render the shrewd Sandyshire yeomen particularly desirous of probing any hidden mental wounds which he might be desirous of concealing.

But in addition to all these causes for silence, there was a change—a trifling one, perhaps, and an alteration more to be felt than explained—in John himself. That he should have been preoccupied and taciturn whilst his wife’s father was lying between life and death was easily to be understood; but the dread of a fatal result was over now, and yet John’s brow was moody, and his laugh was heard far less frequently, was likewise far less hearty than of yore. The truth was that John Beacham, loving his wife with an entire and all-absorbing devotion, was repining, not only at her absence, but at the changes which, with the clear-sightedness of jealous affection, he foresaw would take place in his relations with Honor. Other feelings too, connected with his recent act, were perplexing, and rendering him ashamed. In proportion as his deadly fear of being a self-condemned murderer diminished, so did his softened feelings towards his late antagonist subside likewise. With the conviction that Colonel Norcott was no longer a sufferer from that burst of passion at first so truly repented of, there returned with redoubled force John’s antipathy to the man whom he rightly believed to be dead to every feeling of honour, every elevating sentiment of justice or of pity. From the moment when Colonel Norcott was pronounced out of danger, he had endeavoured, without exactly expressing his desire in words, to make Honor understand his wish that she should return to the Paddocks.

“It’s lonely without you, my dear,” he said more than once, standing with Honor in the summer twilight among the hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, in the old-fashioned inn-garden. “It’s very lonely, especially in the evenings; you know I’m not much of a reader, and I get very tired of the old lady’s knitting-needles—click, click, click! by the hour together. O, Honor, it will be very pleasant, dear, when you come home again!”

And Honor thought so too; at least, she comforted John by saying something of the kind, sending that honest farmer home with a lightened heart because of the awakened hope within him that very soon his wife would be again under the shelter of his roof.

“She’ll be here to-morrow, mother, or at farthest next day,” he said cheerily to the old lady on his return home, after the ninth day of Honor’s absence. “The Colonel is going on all right, thank God! Ah, mother, if you only knew what a relief that is! I never speak to Honor about what passed. I couldn’t well, seeing that he’s her father, worse luck! But I can tell you that I never slept—no, not a wink, that I can safely say—till he was out of danger; and what would have become of me, if so be he’d died, the Lord in heaven only knows!”

Mrs. Beacham laid down her knitting-needles, and looked at her son with eyes full of loving pity. Her nature seemed to have undergone a change since the eventful day of the Danescourt discovery. The mere fact of being once more alone as of yore, with John, had a softening effect, not only on her feelings towards him, but towards Honor. Her manner of speaking, therefore, towards her daughter-in-law was far more pleasant and tolerant than usual.

“It’s been a sore trial, John, I’m sure of that,” she said; “but Honor won’t be the one, I’m sure, not to forget and forgive.”

“Forget and forgive!” John repeated warmly. “Why, in Heaven’s name, what or who has she got, I should like to know, to forget and to forgive? Is it the man who behaved like a brute and a scoundrel to the poor soul her mother, or is it me, that gave him only what he deserved, the villain, that Honor’s to be forgetting and forgiving?”

Poor Mrs. Beacham, completely taken aback by this unexpected outburst, could, in the impossibility of excusing herself, only resume her knitting in dignified silence. She had not the remotest idea how she had offended John—John, whom she had never in her life before known to be so cranky. If he could not talk to Honor about the “crack” on the head that he had given her “papa,” why, surely, that was as much as to say she had a right to be offended. So argued to herself this sensible old lady; nor were her reasonings, all things considered, entirely without their modicum of common sense.

Meanwhile, Honor herself, as we have just hinted, was by no means fretting after a return to the Paddocks. She had been made a great deal of during her absence; and Honor was a young lady to whom the process of being made much of was especially agreeable. Perhaps the one of her new connections by whom she had been the most petted was (and the circumstance is very characteristic of the woman’s character) Colonel Norcott’s colonial wife. It was through Mrs. Baker’s advice that the person who was, next to herself, the most deeply interested in the Colonel’s recovery, was, without loss of time, telegraphed to of his danger. Honor, who, as the reader may already have perceived, was not remarkable for moral courage, betrayed some faint symptoms of alarm at the measure. Her grandmother, however (Mrs. Baker always insisted upon her rights of relationship, and would be called grandmamma, however much shy Honor endeavoured to escape the duty), her grandmother strove as best she might to steady Mrs. John’s nerves on the occasion.

“You will find my son’s wife one of the best and unpretending of women; but that, my dear, has nothing to do with the question. If she were the least good-natured and the worst of human beings, our duty would remain the same, and that duty would be to have no secrets from Mrs. Norcott. Even if Fred were certain to recover, I should still repeat the same. Let everything be above-board and open. I don’t know whether you understand French. You do? So much the better, for there is a motto in that language which, to my thinking, should be written in letters of gold on ivory: Fais ce que dois, avenne que pourra. And now, my dear, be so good as to ring the bell, and we will despatch the message without loss of time to Mrs. Fred, who is staying with some friends at Ryde. On all accounts, it will be better for her to be here, for Mr. Baker is very uncomfortable at the cottage without me; and you, too, should your father give signs of amendment, which, please God, may be the case, will not be sorry, I am sure, to return to your husband and your home.”

To this very natural supposition Honor made no reply, save by a little inward shiver, which was patent only to herself. At that moment, the appalling fact that the home for life which she had made for herself was one thoroughly unsuited to her tastes as well as feelings, broke with its fullest force upon John Beacham’s wife. She felt—God forgive her for her ingratitude!—that she positively loathed the idea of returning to the companionship of her mother-in-law—to the mesquin, wearisome talk of household economies, of the shortcomings of serving-maids, the failure of a “baking,” or the “coming in two,” in careless Jane’s or Sally’s hands, of jug or basin. How soon, or if ever, but for two adventitious contingencies (the contingencies, namely, of her mother-in-law’s disagreeableness, and the converse as regarded her friend Arthur Vavasour), Honor would have made the discovery that her life was a spoiled and miserable one, it would be hard to say. Not for any imaginable consideration would she have been willing that the dear old lady, whose kindness and gentleness and refinement had so won upon her heart and fancy, should obtain any, even the faintest, inkling of her state of mind. It was bad enough to be discontented, vile enough to wish the past undone, her marriage with that devoted and excellent John a dream of the past, and herself free to love and wed in a sphere more congenial to her tastes—the sphere, in short, to which she was in a manner born. All this, I repeat, was odious and wicked enough; and Honor, feeling it to be thus wicked and odious, was naturally desirous of being herself the only confidante of the sad secrets of her untamed and inexperienced heart.