Volume 2 — CHAPTER XIII. LADY MILL HAS BUSINESS ON HAND.

“Did you in all your life ever see anyone so changed as that pretty Mrs. Beacham? Not less pretty, I don’t mean that; but she looks pale and serious, and to my thinking still more like a lady than she did when she was married!”

The words were Kate Vavasour’s—bright, cheerful, merry Kate—who was walking home on Christmas-day from church with her brother Horace—a “public man” now, and a very occasional and not over-willing visitor to his old home.

Several events of importance, events influencing more or less the well-being of certain individuals connected with this story, had occurred during the swiftly-passing months which had changed the year from midsummer to winter.

To begin with: Arthur Vavasour (who after his farewell meeting in Danescourt grounds had not again seen Honor Beacham) had, according to expectation, been made one with Sophy Duberly before the altar. In less than a month from his coming of age, the marriage ceremony was celebrated with becoming pomp in London, the “happy pair” departing immediately afterwards for the Continent, bent—according to the newspapers—on a “lengthened tour abroad.”

Nor did any long period elapse before Horace Vavasour also broke the weary chain that bound him to home. He had yearned for the long-hoped-for emancipation; but he experienced—a good deal to his surprise—when the time came for bidding adieu to Gillingham, very little of the exultation which he might naturally have expected to have been his portion. All unknown to himself, the home-raised lad had grown attached to the old place. The grumblings and complainings, the discontent, and the longing for change, were more a habit with him than the result of conviction; and when the hour of parting came, and he looked back on the tearful faces of his two sisters, standing gazing after him on the steps of the marble portico, Horace would gladly have given up all his cherished hopes to remain with those dear fellow-victims in the old home that he was leaving.

As was only natural, however, those regrets were not of long duration. Lady Millicent had not made home so sweet to the children committed to her care, that they should continue for a lengthened period to pine for the few blessings which that home afforded. By swift degrees, regret for the past ceased to have a place in the memory of the absent one; whilst the recollection of the many privations, the dulness, and the tyrannous rules of far-away Gillingham, remained fixed, as with a sculptor’s chisel, on his heart for ever.

Kate was during that, to her, dull Christmas time, the only daughter of the house at home, for Rhoda (an extremely unusual proceeding) had been allowed to accept of a pressing invitation from the Guernseys to spend a month with them in Paris.

“Two women were grinding at the mill,” Kate said merrily to her brother, “and a jolly grind it was too! And it’s just as well that one was taken, and a great bore that the other—meaning me—was left behind.”

Horace, who had very good-naturedly given up several far pleasanter engagements for his sister’s sake, and who purposed spending a dull week at the Chace with the kind purpose of enlivening poor Kate’s worse than solitude, pinched her cheek playfully.

“All the same a hundred years hence,” he said; and forthwith there commenced on both sides a series of questions and answers necessitated by the separation of several months which had taken place between them. There was much to say. They were on their way to church when the conversation about Arthur and his wife began—about Arthur, who was said to be by no means cured of his reckless habits of extravagance, and whom Horace had parted with only a week before under the portico of the Grand Hotel in Paris.

“I didn’t think Sophy improved in looks; but then there is a reason, I believe, for that; and besides, she had been making lion-seeing a toil instead of a pleasure. She is a jolly girl, though; and I consider Arthur to be one of the luckiest fellows I know.”

“I wonder if he thinks so himself,” mused Kate.

“I daresay not. Do we ever value any of our blessings till we lose them? Do you think I cared much about this dear old place till I found myself tied to that precious office as a paid clerk? Sounds pretty considerable mean, as the Yankees say, doesn’t it, when one’s mamma has something about sixty thousand per annum?”

“But you like it, Racy. It’s better than this, I’m sure. Ah, how I should like to be you! and how I envy—no, I don’t envy Rhoda, because I’m glad she’s happy, poor dear; but I often think what fun she’s having, and I wonder whether it will ever be my turn to go away.”

“Your turn? God knows, my poor Kitty! It takes a longer head than mine or yours to fathom my lady’s projects. I heard from old Randolph the last thing before I left town yesterday that she was after some underhand work about the entail. She’ll never rest, I feel certain, till she upsets that clause, or whatever they call it, in my grandfather’s will which gives the reins of power to Arthur after he attains the age of twenty-five. Poor old Atty! I foresee no end of worry and bother for him if the news of this gets about; but we must hope the best, as Randolph says, while we prepare ourselves for the worst.”

Old Josh Randolph, as he was familiarly called, had been for very many years the trusted solicitor and man of business of the Vavasour family. A better-hearted and a more truly honest man—as all who knew him allowed—never existed than Joshua Randolph, as one proof of which it may be recorded in his favour that he had made no large fortune out of the quarrels and cantankerousness of his clients. Neither—to his credit be it recorded—had he ever taken undue advantage of their necessities. Young Vavasour, who had known “Josh” from the time when the heir-apparent was a lad at Eton, had had recourse to the old man’s advice in many a boyish scrape, and later, when the handsome youth had grown to be a man, and his “entanglements” were of a more complicated and less venial character, old Josh was still the attorney to whose counsels he turned, and who had never (all praise to him) been detected in that unfeeling act of pilfering, namely, that of making occasions for the swelling of his lawyer’s bill.

This rarely excellent individual had heard with regret and shame that work for the long-robed gentlemen was likely, through Lady Millicent’s bitter discontent, to be ere long cut out. He made no secret of his opinion on the subject, and Lady Millicent, finding that the family lawyer was not the “man for her money,” soon removed the light of her countenance from the steady, old-fashioned firm of which Mr. Randolph was the senior partner. Her ladyship’s first visit in the Lincoln’s-inn chambers (where old Josh received her with a slow and respectful courtesy, but without a grain of subservience either in his speech or manner) was also the last. Far too slow, perhaps indeed too rigidly honest, for the requirements of the maîtresse femme was the steady-going anti-progress solicitor. There was something in the very air of that business-room of his, an air redolent of musty respectability, that was utterly out of harmony and keeping with Lady Millicent’s grand manner, her rapid energetic movements, and the authoritative mode of speech which she habitually adopted. The experiment had been duly tried of taking the old man by surprise and startling him into acquiescence; but never—it did not greatly grieve the faithful Josh that so it was—did the great lady of Gillingham give a second thought to the inhabitant of that dingy room piled high with japanned deed-boxes and with ancient faded folios. The lawyer’s absence of sympathy in her ladyship’s cause was evidenced in every response he made to her questions and suggestions. A cautious man he was and a composed—one not to be lightly moved from his opinions, and who deemed the will of the late Earl of Gillingham a document almost sacred in its character. When Lady Millicent astonished the clerks at Messrs. Randolph and Bretts’ by the apparition of her stately person, she was far indeed from imagining that anything short of the most obsequious compliance with her wishes, and the most thorough and flattering approbation of her views and projects, would be the result of her condescension; and to a certain degree there was justification for her expectations. On the face of it, and at the first cursory view of the unmotherly mother’s purpose, there was certainly something that was, at the least, plausible, to justify her undertaking. The late earl’s will had been made very late in life, and long after Lady Millicent had been taught (no difficult task) to consider herself the future possessor, during her natural life, of that rich inheritance. In causing the important clause which deposed after a certain period the mother regnante in favour of the grown-up son, Lord Gillingham had, in his daughter’s opinion, departed in a most unjustifiable manner from the ways of his forefathers. Manifestly (as it was her purpose to prove) it was flagrantly unjust that such a will should stand. Long ago she had taken (privately) high legal opinions on the subject. She had consulted law-books, and entered largely into the question of precedents; the result of all which exertion and study was the visit to Lincoln’s-inn, which had been productive of nothing save anger and mortification. But because Lady Millicent could “make nothing” of the old lawyer, who was staunch in his adherence to Arthur Vavasour’s interests, it by no means followed that she felt any doubt either as to the rectitude of her project, or the advisableness of pursuing it to the end. She was a woman—as we know—of determined character, and, moreover, one in whom difficulty and opposition only increased in a tenfold degree the desire to succeed; so, without any unnecessary delay, she opened negotiations with another legal adviser, who took a different and more satisfactory view of the matter than that adopted by the uncompromising Josh; and one consequence of this proceeding was the remark made by Horace Vavasour to his sister Kate, on the ill consequences likely to accrue to Arthur from the bare rumour even of the proceeding in question.

“But how can it hurt Atty so very much?” Kate asked. She was puzzled, and not without reason, by the anomaly, that Arthur, who had married that “immense” heiress, and of whom the millionaire Mr. Duberly was said to be so fond, could be injured in any way by the report of Lady Millicent’s law-proceedings.

“How!” Horace repeated hesitatingly, and then broke out: “How! Why because from the time he was sixteen—from my poor father’s death almost—poor Atty has played the fool. And such a fool! Not having the most remote idea either of the value of money or of the wickedness of men and women; with our good father in his grave, and with—but we won’t talk of her. Poor old Atty! How often in those times that seem so long ago now, and so miserable—and yet what almost children we both were—he and I have crept at night into each other’s rooms to consult in our blind ignorance on what could by any possibility be done! Such a heap of silly ideas as we propounded then; such methods as we turn by turn proposed to keep the knowledge of poor Atty’s bills and foolishness from my mother!”

“I daresay that it would have been much better had she known it all then,” suggested Kate.

“Of course it would have been a thousand times better,” rejoined Horace, who was beginning to show some deference to his sister’s opinions; “but how were we to find courage enough to be open? I ask you, Kate—and no one could answer the question better—whether milady is the kind of mother to whom the most morally courageous lad in existence could, without a good deal of winding-up, confess that he had run-up bills, had betted on the great boat-race, had been to the Jews, and, in short, was no more worthy to be called her son?”

“Poor dear Atty! I don’t wonder he couldn’t do it; and I suppose (I can guess now, when I remember all the trouble he so often seemed to be in) that those bills never were paid, and that—”

“Not only not paid, but more, to the tune of thousands upon thousands, added to their amount. And then the Jews! But what’s the use of telling you, child, about such things? Here we are at the church-door, and we shall find milady—God forgive her!—saying her prayers with as much devotion as if—”

“Hush,” remonstrated Kate, feeling the indecorum, especially standing as they two did, on God’s-acre, of speaking harsh truths concerning their only remaining parent; “hush, Racy dear, she is our mother; let us try to remember it, however much she may do to put the fact out of our heads.”

“Did you ever see any one so changed as that pretty Mrs. Beacham? Still more like a lady even than she used to be—I mean, she hasn’t the same fresh country look that everyone admired so before. Mr. Delmaine thinks her both out of health and out of spirits; he said so yesterday afternoon to me when mamma and I went to the church to see the decorations. She attends to her class, though, at the school just the same as ever, and gets the children on wonderfully with their singing. How well they sang the anthem to-day! and all, Mr. Delmaine says, thanks to Mrs. John Beacham.”

Rather to Kate’s disappointment, her brother did not enter with much apparent interest into the question of Honor’s illness or her merits. And yet he was interested in John’s pretty, pensive-looking wife, more interested than could well be explained to the young girl walking by his side. There were many circumstances in Honor’s short life which were perforce unknown to the high-born and carefully-reared Katherine, whose secluded life kept her very little au fait of the doings and sayings of the outer world. Of the former intimacy of her brother at Updown Paddocks she had heard little or nothing; nor, though it was more than probable that the “ower true tale” of Honor’s birth had reached Miss Vavasour’s ears, was the subject one which could well be touched upon with a discreetly-brought-up young lady. Under these circumstances, it is only natural that Horace Vavasour should have manifested some unwillingness to pursue the subject touched upon by his sister. Concerning one cause, amongst others, of Mrs. John Beacham’s lowness of spirits he might have entertained his own ideas, but those ideas he, for the moment, wisely kept to himself.