Volume 2 — CHAPTER XIV. HONOR FEELS LIKE A “LADY.”

Of all the many changes that had taken place amongst the characters in my story, none was more thorough, even though its features might be less boldly marked, than that which had gradually crept over the household of excellent John Beacham. From the moment when he dealt the blow that levelled his wife’s worthless parent to the ground, John had never been exactly the same man. A sense of failure, of a disastrous fall in his own esteem, was in some measure the cause of this woeful alteration: but there was more, and for worse than this, at the bottom of his apparent moroseness, of his often sullen temper, and of what his mother called his “silent ways.” There was far worse indeed than this—far worse than any morbid impression that he himself had sunk in the opinion of the world at large; for there was the sight of Honor’s altered face, and a near prospect, nearer day by day, of some cruel domestic change for this honest, single-hearted man, whose youth and manhood had hitherto passed so uneventfully.

The summer had passed away, the autumn-time had come and gone; from the hedge-rows of the Paddocks the last lingering leaves had fallen, and another new year was about, with the accustomed rejoicings, to be ushered in, but still things had not improved in John’s altered home. No sunshine of the heart brightened up the old walls, and yet, for all that inside there was gloom, it was necessary, for old custom’s sake, that the show of merriment should be kept up; for Christmas-time was nigh at hand, and hospitality, as well as jollity, had, time out of mind, been, at that festive season, the order of the day at Peartree-house. To give and distribute largely and ungrudgingly at the dying-out of the old year had ever been an institution in Mrs. Beacham’s family. “The Turtons,” she was wont to say (John’s mother was—as of course all the world knew—a Turton of Cradock, in the West Riding of York) “The Turtons always kep a good table at Christmas-time both for rich and poor, in their own county; and I’m not going to do different, though this is Sandyshire. Christmas comes but once a year, and it’s only right that when it does come, them as can afford it should give them as can’t their bellies full.”

In furtherance of this charitable object, preparations for feeding the hungry began betimes in the spacious kitchen of Peartree-house. No stronger proof could be adduced of the fact, that albeit often cross, disagreeable, and snappish in the privacy of home, Mrs. Beacham was, au fond, generous and kind-hearted, as the manner in which, on the grand occasion of Christmas-time, she fulfilled her welcome duties could fully testify.

“L’année est morte, vive l’année!” The old cry has been cried, and the old song sung, till some of us are weary of the semi-joyous and all solemn sound; but the good Samaritan at the Paddocks addressed herself, even as she had done for fifty years, to the congenial task before her; and, as I said before, the old kitchen of the farm-house reeked with preparations for the coming festival. Such a kitchen as it was! The ceiling half-covered from beam to beam with flitches of well-smoked bacon—with a store of precious delf, and a glittering batterie de cuisine in the shape of pots and pans, that excited envy in the hearts of half the housewives in the neighbourhood; and with a chimney so wide-mouthed and gaping that the largest spit in Sandyshire would have been scarcely long enough to span it!

The amount of fuel consumed in that “kitchen range” was, as Mrs. Beacham was given proudly to say, what nobody would believe; and yet if any of these incredulous ones had chanced to catch a glimpse at Christmas-time of that same furnace, methinks that their doubts regarding its consuming powers would, like other and more material things under its influence, have melted into thin air.

Many were the mouths which the hospitable widow felt called upon that day to fill. There was the great “house dinner” as it was called—to which were invited (a yearly custom so ancient at the Paddocks that the invitation had come to be regarded as a right) every man and boy employed by Mr. Beacham upon the farm and breeding-establishment. To these were added not only the wives and daughters of the middle-aged labourers, but the “followers”—if they were respectable, and their courtship was pour le bon motif—from adjacent farms, of the damsels connected with John’s especial retainers. It was a great object with the givers of the feast that everyone, on that day at least, should both be and look happy. On all other days (Sundays excepted) John was, though a just and liberal, very far from what is called an easy-going master. He required his good penny’s-worth for the penny given; and men taking service at Updown Paddocks did so with their eyes open—knowing that under the eye of their new master there would be little chance of shirking the duties they had undertaken.

By retainers so kept to their work, and in their places, it will readily be believed that the Christmas dinner at the Paddocks (which took place at three o’clock on Christmas-day) was an event of importance; and after the roast-beef and turkeys, the plum-pudding and mince-pies—plum-pudding with plenty of raisins and citron, let me tell you, and mince-pies fit for a lord-mayor’s dinner—had been duly discussed, there followed a dance in the big barn, with punch and pipes to wind up the entertainment.

Many months had not elapsed since the time when few would have enjoyed the simple pleasures of that holiday season more thoroughly in her quiet, lady-like way than Honor Beacham. Those months, swiftly passing, dull and uneventful as they had seemed, had transformed, as effectually as years of age and experience, a light-hearted and thoughtless girl into a dreaming, restless, and far from contented woman. Change, with noiseless foot and imperceptible approach—change, never resting, and for ever at its silent work, had done its appointed task on pretty Honor Beacham’s tastes and character.

Nor for honest John himself had the sure work of time and change been done less effectually than it had been accomplished for his wife. Not that any alteration was observable in his outward habits, for in truth he was busier and more active than ever, more engrossed with business cares, and, in Honor’s opinion, redder in the face, and in the evening time still more given than of yore, to silence and to slumber. His deep love for his young wife had not diminished; but busy men cannot afford, as Mrs. Beacham had been heard say, to “make a noodle of a woman.” In her day, men had something else to do than to be talking nonsense to a wife, and Honor must learn to do without such silliness. And Honor—as many a young wife has done before her, and as wives will do to the end of time—did learn the salutary lesson, that women are not married to be toys, and that for them, as well as for the bread-winners of the family, “life is real, life is earnest;” and that to “wait” does not comprise the whole duty of woman. Gradually—not so gradually, however, but that Honor perceived, with mixed anger and sadness, that so it was—John grew to be less mindful of her presence, and more forgetful of those petits noms of affection, those delicate attentions with which the busiest men in the early days of matrimony are in the habit of indulging their newly-bought toys. At that period of her life, it would have been well for Honor if to work had been one of the necessities of her being. With the instinct born of natural good sense and a desire to do right, she understood this truth, and made more than one effort to be permitted a share in the light daily toil which the old lady so jealously reserved for herself alone. She was naturally, as John used to say in the days of his courtship, when Honor was far too intent upon her paid-for duties to walk with or talk to him—she was naturally a “busy little thing,” and her time, now that she was a lady at large, often hung with perilous heaviness upon her hands. That old Mrs. Beacham was the last woman in the world to understand such a character as that of the young girl whom her son had sworn at the altar to love, honour, and cherish, has been made more than sufficiently evident; nor, even had she been able to comprehend Honor’s peculiar idiosyncrasies of disposition, would the old lady have been qualified, either through evenness of temper or steadiness of purpose, to guide her daughter-in-law in a safe and rightful path. Although, as time wore on, she was, in some respects (and in consequence chiefly of John’s diminution of outward conjugal affection towards his wife) more disposed to make the best of that erring young person, yet Honor was often reminded to her cost, that you never could be sure of Mrs. Beacham. Even at the exceptional season, when so many hearts and purses (I speak of those who boast such luxuries) are open, and when cantankerous feelings are supposed to be lulled to rest, the old lady at Updown Paddocks did, as will speedily be seen, allow her temper to crop up, to the great hindrance of individual and general enjoyment in the house over which she ruled.

“I suppose you mean to come and see the dance, Mrs. John?” (Honor was always “Mrs. John” with her mother-in-law, when the latter chose to fancy that her son’s wife was remembering the fact that in her veins ran the gentle blood of the Norcotts). “The people are used to see John, and as I always come in to have our healths drank, maybe they might be expecting you as well.”

It was seven o’clock, and they, the scarcely congenial trio, were sitting silently, that Christmas afternoon, in the little parlour, resting after the labours of the day; John reading the Farmer’s Gazette, and Honor musing silently in a big armchair, her habitual seat. In answer to the old lady’s question, she replied that she was quite willing to go, that there was no hardship in walking across the farmyard to the barn. The evening was fine—looking a little like frost, she thought.

“The sunset was beautiful,” Honor went on to say, falling back upon the commonplace, when she found her mother-in-law looking cross and dissatisfied at her lukewarm acquiescence. “I watched it from the hill above the garden. Such masses of red and purple, and such curious-shaped clouds! Did you notice it, John, before you came in?”

John was unfortunately at that moment so intent upon an article in the Gazette which touched upon a pet system of his own, that Honor’s question failed to strike upon his ear. The reason of his silence was perceived by her at once, and, like a good wife, she forbore to repeat her very trivial observation. All, therefore, would have been well, and no evil consequences would have followed on John’s wholly involuntary sin of omission, had not Mrs. Beacham, who chanced to be in rather an irritating mood, taxed her daughter indirectly with the terrible crime, in the old lady’s sight, of fine-ladyism.

“Ha, ha, ha! I beg your pardon, though, Mrs. John, for laughing, but it is a good joke to hear you asking us busy folk if we’ve been amusing ourselves with looking at the sun! The sun indeed! My patience! To hear a woman grown like you talking such nonsense!”

“I don’t think,” said Honor, flushing up, “that it can quite be called nonsense looking at the beautiful things that God has given us to enjoy. I have nothing to do, either. I often wish I had. I read, and I draw, and work a little; but I often wish I was obliged to be busy. I shouldn’t think then, and I hate thinking.”

She had gone rambling on as if talking to herself. The fact that neither of her two companions were in the slightest degree capable of entering into the more sickly than sensible fancies of her young brain, had totally escaped her recollection, and she was startled, and that not agreeably, when John, laying down the paper he was studying, looked half sternly and half anxiously at his wife. He had not listened—who ever does listen to anything of the kind with entire impunity,—he had not listened without its producing some effect upon his mind, to his mother’s constant remarks and insinuations regarding his wife’s conduct and character. Since Arthur Vavasour’s marriage, and the consequent entire cessation of his visits at the Paddock, that raw had necessarily healed, but unfortunately those whose nature it is to buzz about the sore places which will sometimes even in the healthiest skin be found, are never at a loss to detect the peccant spots, while to keep the venom rankling in the wound is to them a pleasant, chiefly because it is an exciting, task.

It may seem strange to those who have not made human nature their study, that Mrs. Beacham—dearly loving her son—should have seemed to take positive delight in certain hints and allusions which, as she well knew, could not fail both to give him pain and to intensify the coldness which too evidently was beginning to exist between himself and his wife. If anyone had accused the old woman of the sins of mischief-making and evil-speaking, her surprise and indignation would have been great and vehement. In her own mind she probably believed that, by constantly endeavouring to make it appear that Honor, since the discovery of her birth, and her temporary association with those above her, had grown proud and fanciful and discontented, she, John’s mother, was simply doing her duty—a duty which had for its aim and object the wholesome correcting of “Mrs. John,” and the expedient enlightenment of a mind—her son’s, to wit—that was blinded by the mists of uxorious folly. That Mrs. Beacham was herself rendered happy by the state of things existing at the Paddocks must not be supposed; but that she was not so, proved only another exciting cause for the attacks upon Honor, which, whilst John often felt real uneasiness for Honor’s evident delicacy of health, worried the poor man terribly. Sometimes—not often, or probably his mother would have shown herself far more lenient to the pale-faced girl, who never disputed her will, but whose very submission was an aggravation—sometimes, as on the present occasion, John would turn angrily upon Honor, speaking sharply to her, after the fashion of even the best-tempered men who, without being able either to understand the why, or to suggest a remedy for the evil, find the comfort of their home broken up, through, as it seems to them, the wilfulness or the valetudinarianism of a woman!

“It strikes me, Honor,” he said, laying down the paper which he had ostensibly been studying, and speaking in a cold hard tone, at which his wife inwardly rebelled, “it strikes me that you have been talking a precious deal of what I call nonsense. You ‘do this,’ and you ‘don’t do it;’ You think, and you ‘hate thinking.’ Upon my soul, I’m ashamed, and that’s the truth, to hear you talk such rubbish. Now, I’ll just tell you what it is. I met Dr. Kempshall yesterday, and we got talking a little about you. Says he, laughing, ‘I tell you what it is, Beacham; you are spoiling that wife of yours by kindness. Women are delightful creatures,’ says he; ‘but it doesn’t do to let them have all their own way. She wants shaking up a bit, she does; and, above all, she mustn’t—take my word for it—be given way to. Those nerves that young women talk about are the deuce and all when they get too much ahead;’ and, upon my soul, I begin to think he’s right.”

The ready tears rose to Honor’s eyes at this unexpected rebuke; while, alas, swift as the lightning’s flash, the thought that one she had known in days gone by would not have used her so, darted through her brain.

“I did not mean to be troublesome; I beg your pardon,” she said, with a half proud, half sad submission which almost frightened John; and then, slowly rising from her chair, she left the two alone to talk over her behaviour as it pleased them best.

Honor Beacham had now known for many a month the true and rightful cause of a discontent and a misery which, however little justified by that cause, grew daily less endurable. That cause, she understood full well at last, had always, ever since the day when she accepted the hand of plain John Beacham, been in existence. It had required, however, certain concurrent events to bring it fully and unquestionably to light; and those concurrent events had not, unfortunately, been wanting in the home of Honor Beacham. The real and very melancholy truth, to leave off speaking darkly, lay in this—namely, that Honor Beacham was perfectly unsuited, not only to the life she was fated to lead, but also to that most excellent John himself. Something of this had been dimly shadowed out to her in the early days of courtship; but more, far more, was revealed when the dry and uninteresting details of home life took the place of honeyed words and pleasing compliments. But it was reserved (is it not mostly so?) for the force of contrast to put the finishing touch to such deadly domestic discoveries as these. Very trying to Honor, after she had grown familiar with the refined voice, the subdued laugh, and all the conventional graces (as they appeared to her) of Arthur Vavasour, was the jubilant hilarity, the rather noisy speech, and, alas, the occasional philological lapses of her socially-untutored husband. Slowly, yet very surely, the evil worked, undermining imperceptibly the moral system, and rendering insecure the foundations of poor little Honor’s more rational hopes of happiness. But it was not till the memorable day when she made the discovery that in her veins ran purer blood than that which coursed with such a full and healthy flow through the arteries of her yeoman husband, that the mischief that had long been brewing began seriously to develop itself. Then the semi-Celtic girl, retiring into the fastnesses more of a perilous fastidiousness than of a vulgar commonplace pride, threw far away from her with reckless hand the happiness that was within her reach; and dark was the looming of coming events, which, although she saw it not, cast its shadow before her onward path. From the moment when Colonel Norcott, whose misdeeds were not unfortunately (as a warning to others) stamped upon his forehead, addressed and acknowledged her as his child, the bonds that bound this foolish Honor to the farmer of Updown Paddocks hung very heavily on her mind.

Yet, reader, I pray you not to blame her too severely for her involuntary fault. There was no ugly root of pride, no taint of what Mrs. Beacham called “fine-ladyism,” at the bottom of poor Honor’s loathing of a lot that on the surface seemed so prosperous and happy. No one—no, not even her severest judges, not even John’s prejudiced parent—could condemn more sternly than did the girl herself her worse than coldness towards her husband—her black ingratitude towards Heaven. But it was in vain she strove against the feelings which her conscience whispered were so base and wicked. In vain she told herself how good her husband was, how honest, how respected, and how generous. Honesty, generosity, and respectablity are excellent things in their way. With them to back him up, a man may defy change, and winter and rough weather. He may go through life with honour, and to his grave lamented; but, alas for him, such gifts may fail to win a woman’s love, or bind her truant fancy. Still, as I said, or rather, perhaps, implied before, if Honor had never chanced to mix with what the world calls gentlemen, poor John’s lack of refinement (vulgar he never could be called), his occasional conversational solecisms, his hands (a trifle red and rough), his boisterous laugh, and his general ignorance of the ways and speech of delicately-reared people, would not, in Honor’s opinion, have told so heavily against him—would not, in short, have so shamed, so repelled, and so—for it came at last to that sad climax—have so entirely disgusted her.

The absence of refinement in her husband’s manners and mode of speech had never struck Honor so vividly as on the occasion of her return to Pear-tree House after the ten days which she had passed at the Bell. The room in which her father had lain there was but a poor one; smaller and far less comfortably furnished than the nuptial chamber at the farm. The little room, too, near to it, which had been appointed for her especial use, and where, lying awake in the silent watches of the night, she had wept and wondered, so passing strange was the mutation that a turn in the wheel of Fortune had brought about, was scarcely larger than a closet; but it was near her father! “Father!” what a sweet sound it had for her, that word, and new as it was sweet. Twenty times a day did she repeat it in a soft caressing whisper, that only her own heart could hear; and very tender grew the large blue eyes, gazing on the nobly-shaped head, lying so still and motionless upon the hard inn-pillow.

It was not till two days and nights had elapsed since the accident, and Colonel Fred Norcott was pronounced on the road to convalescence, that Honor found either time or inclination to notice the, to her, wondrous elegance and refinement of the sick man and his surroundings. Once perceived, she was never weary of admiring what was to her so new, and so in harmony with her own natural tastes. The very sound of her parent’s voice, low and measured, the almost womanly beauty of his soignées hands, the marvellous details of his dressing-case, his ivory hair-brushes; why had not John a dressing-case, and beautiful handles like those, instead of—but what need is there to dwell either on honest John’s shortcomings, or on the thousand and one details which, absurd and improbable as it may seem, went far towards working a revolution in Honor’s feelings, and sent her back to her husband’s side an altered and a worse than discontented woman. Worse than discontented, inasmuch as the change which had been wrought in her was beyond her own control either to modify or to conceal; worse than discontented, in that it was scarcely likely that this newly-born fastidiousness would be less than fatal to the conjugal happiness of which there had been once so fair a promise in the quiet prosperous home of Updown Paddocks.