Volume 2 — CHAPTER XVI. JOHN DECIDES AGAINST HIMSELF.

If anything, John and his wife were—as the pleasant spring-time came on apace—happier in their ménage than had been the case some months before. It was not in Honor’s nature to dwell long either upon real or imaginary grievances, and moreover John had been so wonderfully, so more than ever, kind and good. He had seemed—quite silently, and with more tact than could have been expected of him—both to understand, and to set himself to remedy, the causes for Honor’s silly discontent. To Mrs. Beacham’s vexation—for she could bear less than ever that Honor should be spoilt—new books found their way, for its young mistress’s delectation, to the farm; the last and prettiest opera-music was sure to make its appearance there almost before Honor could have read of its reception by the critics, and—still stronger proof of John’s unwearied affection—he had taken by almost imperceptible degrees to amending his dress, and to an extreme watchfulness lest he should offend her with his tongue.

At that period of their joint matrimonial lives, there seemed to be a renewed prospect of happiness for one of the best and truest-hearted of men with the sweet young wife on whose love he had set his heart. There was no idle and désœuvré young gentleman now at hand to whisper compliments in the prettiest of ears; no handsome, high-bred roué to place himself in juxtaposition with a husband’s more homely features and less finished manners. But proh dolor! The thorn in the side was ever there; grievously and daily pinched the household shoe; for Mrs. Beacham’s temper, her love of power, and her jealousy of John, rather increased than diminished, thus almost neutralising the good effects of time, and of the real and inborn excellence of the two hearts which she seemed fated to torment.

The winter had been an unusually severe one. The frost that was foretold by Honor on Christmas-day—the day when, pleading a headache, she escaped the compliment of being wished health and happiness by her husband’s retainers—proved a severe and lasting one. For weeks, without a change or check, the north wind blew over the frost-bound earth. Heavily on leaf and branch hung a pall of snow, wearily plodded the feet of men whose daily toil was an unneeded thing; fuel grew scarcer day by day, and all nature, whether animate or inanimate, that was not rich, suffered.

During all the months that had elapsed since Colonel Norcott took his departure from the Bell, Honor had heard but little of her father. He and his wife had spent both the autumn and the winter abroad—where, Honor had not heard; for Mrs. Baker, whom she saw as frequently as the considerable distance between their respective homes (to say nothing of crotchety Mr. Baker) permitted, was never very communicative on the subject of her son’s whereabouts.

For a time Honor had lamented in secret over what she wrongfully believed to be her father’s forgetfulness of her existence. She had thought of, and hoped so much of happiness from her new ties, that when all that had occurred during that summer fortnight seemed likely to pass away as a dream that is forgotten, she sorrowed over it in exceeding heaviness of heart. Nor had the Colonel’s attempts to astonish the weak mind of his daughter, by opening out to her view some of the wonders of the, to her, unknown world, been without their effect in unhinging that mind, and unfitting it for a while for the everyday duties of her simple and uneventful life. Honest John was not far wrong when he decided that the “scoundrelly colonel” was beguiling the hours of sickness by describing to Honor something of the world of which she knew so little; but while surmising this, the worthy yeoman was quite incapable of fathoming the real motives of a deed that seemed so simple. How was he to imagine it possible that this man, who had voluntarily confessed to him (John) the heartless crime of which he had been guilty, should have done so solely with the design of reaping from his daughter’s beauty a harvest of advantage to himself? And yet, improbable as well as repulsive as this must appear, it was no other than the truth. There existed perhaps no accurately-defined plan in this model parent’s brain for the gathering to himself individual advantage from the judicious display of Honor’s loveliness; but it is none the less true that he had heard, and recollected with satisfaction, certain hints, corroborated by the evidence of his own senses, of Arthur Vavasour’s passionate admiration for John Beacham’s wife. That he was in some distant way connected with the prodigal heir of Gillingham—connected, that is, through the sale and purchase of John Beacham’s promising yearling, the reader may perhaps remember; how and to what purpose that connection was afterwards improved, remains to be made apparent.

The period to which I have brought my story, is, as has already been shown, the middle of the month of April. Honor had been nearly a year a wife, and the season, after the long and severe winter, seemed likely to be a genial one.

On Wednesday morning, the Wednesday of which mention was made in the preceding chapter, a letter (no very common occurrence) had arrived for Mrs. John Beacham by the morning’s post. It was a large and somewhat portentous-looking missive, directed in a hand unknown at the Paddocks, and when Honor came down to breakfast she found it lying ostentatiously upon her plate; while the old lady, eyeing it askance, was waiting, with as much patience as she could summon to her aid, the moment of disclosure.

Honor took up her letter, and, as is the frequent habit of people whose correspondence is scanty, and with whom time is not money, she examined its exterior with a prolonged and minute investigation. The postmark was London, and the handwriting, at least so Honor conjectured, was a woman’s. She had no idea, not the very slightest, from whom the big, and yet unbill-like, epistle came; and it was probably that very ignorance which made her loth, in that presence at least, to open the envelope and set conjecture at rest.

But though reluctant, open it she was well aware she must. The moral pressure of two pairs of eyes—for John, I regret to say, did not prove himself on this occasion to be deficient in the so-called feminine vice of curiosity—was upon her; and therefore with a hand that trembled a little (for Mrs. John’s nerves were, as I have before hinted, none of the strongest) she proceeded to open the despatch.

The first words that it contained which caught her eye was the signature, “Elizabeth Norcott,” in large letters at the bottom of the page; and the sight was not calculated to make her read with greater composure the following lines:

“My dear Mrs. Beacham,—I write these few hurried lines in your father’s name, and at his request; for he is, I regret to say, very far from well, and utterly unable to write himself. A severe cold, which the doctors fear has settled on his lungs, is your dear father’s ailment; and it is one that makes him very low, poor fellow, indeed. It would be a great pleasure to him, and indeed to me as well, if you could make it convenient to pay us a short visit just now. Of course, if your good husband objects, we can say no more; though I must say that I think Mr. Beacham owes your poor father some compensation for all he went through last year. I have engaged a very nice bedroom, clean, though small, for you, on the third floor; for I feel sure that unless detained by some of the troubles that married women have to go through, we shall have the pleasure of seeing you without delay in Stanwick-street. If you will write me the train you intend coming by, I will be at the terminus to meet you; and I beg to remain, dear Mrs. Beacham,

“Yours sincerely, “Elizabeth Norcott.

“You see I have heard everything from the Colonel. We both think it right for married people to be confidential.”

Honor’s first thought, as she finished the hasty perusal of this singular epistle, was one of joy. Joy that at last, and after so long a time of weary waiting, relations with her own “family” (poor, foolish Honor!) were renewed; and the hope held out that something might come—something agreeable to herself—of the dénouement from which she had for a time hoped so much.

With a deep blush, for she was quite conscious of the necessity that existed of concealing this unwifely feeling, Honor pushed the letter across the breakfast-table to her husband.

“From Mrs. Norcott,” she said, doing her best to seem occupied with her tea-making. “And she says my father is ill. O, John,” she continued, setting down the teapot, and speaking almost malgré elle, for she had purposed choosing her opportunity better,—“O, John, mayn’t I go to London? Mrs. Norcott asks me very kindly, you see, and—”

“Yes, I see,” John said hurriedly; “and you’ll be very glad to say yes; anything for a change! So like the women!” and he jerked his head pettishly; a sign of annoyance which Honor had learned to thoroughly comprehend.

“I shouldn’t ask to go,” she said, “if my father were well;” and as she spoke the sound of tears was audible in her low voice.

“He never troubled himself much about you as long as he was well,” growled John. “Some people are ready enough to take anything that’s offered to them, it seems to me.”

He spoke crossly perhaps, for he felt sore on this especial point. He was so well convinced that the Colonel did not really feel one particle of parental love for Honor; while in his own breast, in spite of seeming harshness and of momentary fits of anger, there was such an inexhaustible well of undying tenderness, of conjugal and yet purely unselfish devotion. Can we wonder, therefore, that he was susceptible—jealous even—when it became in the most remote degree a question between his claims and those of Honor’s father on her love and duty? Can we wonder that he turned with instinctive repulsion from the idea of her exchanging, even for a day, the protection of his roof for that of Colonel Norcott?

Honor remained silent after John’s last remark. Not that she felt in the slightest degree disposed thereby to abandon the hope which Mrs. Norcott’s letter had held out. She knew John far too well not to be certain that a very little coaxing, or even the shedding of a single tear, would be sufficient to gain for her all that she required. She had only to lay her little hand upon John’s stout arm, and look pleadingly with her large blue eyes into his good kindly face, and the all-important matter would be at once satisfactorily disposed of. But in the mean while, and pending a fitting opportunity for the use of her secret weapons, she kept silent even from the good words with which she intended to bring her husband over to her will.

To John Beacham, however, in his present mood of mind, his wife’s taciturnity was both perplexing and vexatious. Feeling well assured that the question of the journey to London was not by any means disposed of, he would have greatly preferred a present settlement of the difficulty, to the state of suspense which he feared would be, for some hours at least, his portion; it was therefore rather a relief than otherwise to him when Mrs. Beacham—who, to do her justice, seldom kept her fingers long out of the domestic pie—volunteered her opinion on the subject under discussion.

“In course, John, you know your own affairs best,” she said, “and I make it a rule, and always have done, which those that knows me best can certify to, not to interfere in other people’s business. But if you’ll excuse me,” and the old lady smoothed her black-silk apron with an air of dignified humility, “if you’ll excuse me, I should venture to advise that Mrs. John may be allowed to go and see her father. I may be right and I may be wrong; but if he hasn’t his health, poor gentleman, he’s to be pitied; and them that has should give way a little, and meet him half-way, instead of standing out, which isn’t, in my opinion—but then I’m an old-fashioned body—altogether right. He’s Mrs. John’s father, you know, is the Colonel, though it isn’t often the poor gentleman gets spoken of in this house; and blood’s thicker than water, and—”

John interrupted this harangue with a gesture of impatience. “There, there, mother, that’ll do,” he said pettishly; “no need to hammer away so long on one subject. If the man that’s been a brute to Honor, and to her mother before her, is to have it all his own way, why let him; and—”

How this worthy man, who with all his warmth and kindliness of heart had, as we know, a quick temper of his own, might have wound up the sentence had not his words been arrested by a sudden recollection of the respect due to his womankind, is best left to the imagination. With such a disposition and nature as this right-minded man possessed, even the most trivial of offences—offences, too, of which only his own conscience was the silent witness—were almost certain to be followed by the desire for expiation. No sooner, therefore, had the wish that condign punishment might follow on the Colonel’s misdeeds been suppressed, than he said in a gentler tone to Honor:

“If you think your father has any claims upon you, my dear, why then you had better write and say to Mrs. Norcott that she may expect you up in London. As mother says, sick people have to be given way to. I don’t know much about bad health myself, thank God; but—No, don’t thank me—settle it your own way, and if you’re pleased I’m pleased;” and having so said, John went his way to his daily business on the farm.

Had any friend of stalwart hearty John Beacham’s, who had known the farmer one short year before, chanced, after that period of absence, to come suddenly upon him as he took his solitary way across the home-paddock, that friend could have scarcely failed to notice the change that had taken place, not only in John’s countenance, but in his walk and manner. The cares inseparable from married life had fallen, and that with no feather-weight, upon the man whose step was once so brisk and buoyant, and his smile, so frank and genial, was the index of a mind at peace with himself and in good humour with the world. He whistled as he went, not from the absence of, but from a plethora of anxious thought; for John, though he had yielded to his wife’s entreaty, and to his mother’s counsels (counsels which he little suspected were given with the latent object of lessening Honor’s home influence), in the matter of the proposed journey, was yet very far from being satisfied with the result of the morning’s deliberation. Strive as he would—and John was a man who read his Bible, and endeavoured as much as in him lay to do his duty towards his neighbours—strive as he would, he had never yet succeeded in feeling, in the most fractional degree, in charity with Colonel Frederick Norcott. A bad and baneful man he believed the father of his precious Honor to be; and believing this, John viewed—with perhaps excusable dread—the prospect of his wife’s temporary domestication in the Colonel’s family. What but harm, he thought, could by any possibility come of this companionship with all that was vile, unprincipled, and false? That Honor could return to him the pure-minded woman he now knew her to be, John believed to be impossible; and therefore it was that, whistling as he went, the heart of the man was heavy within him. He had not proceeded beyond the length of two fields, when he fell in with one of his most trusted men, employed in carefully leading up and down a sandy lane one of the most valuable of the thoroughbred sires. A grand animal he was, large of bone and muscle, and simply perfect in his magnificent proportions. Over the well-rounded hips, the mottled skin shone and glistened in the sun’s rays, and there was both love and gratitude in the animal’s open fearless eye as he rubbed his velvet nose against his master’s outstretched hand, and neighed his answer to John’s morning greeting.

Bill Snelling looked on approvingly, and at the conclusion of the ceremony, after passing his fingers, as is the custom of his kind, over his mouth, he said respectfully, but in a tone which conveyed a good deal of latent meaning—“Maybe you’ve seen the morning paper, sir, to-day? There’s summat they tell me in the Advertiser about Rough Diamond. A screw loose there, or somethink. There’s never no being up to them fellows; but it would be d—d bad luck—begging your pardon, sir—so it would, if anything went wrong with the Derby favourite. If ever I saw a colt likely to win the stakes, it’s that ere two-year-old, and—”

But we need not follow the irate Bill either in his enthusiastic encomiums on the favourite, or his unqualified abuse of the rascality practised by all patrons, whether gentle or simple (?), of the turf. That there was to be found, however, “one righteous man” in that modern Gomorrah, none knew better than the sapient Bill. He had not lived, man and boy, for more than fifteen years in “master’s stables,” without having made the discovery that the “governor” was one in a thousand. At the Paddocks there were no tricks practised. Rich horsey youths, blinded by their fondly fancied equine knowledge, were never within the precincts of John’s well-ordered establishment beguiled to their undoing. Latent unsoundness was there never concealed, nor incipient vice guarded as a secret. All was fair and above-board, as all the world (the knowing ones with a certain alloy of contempt) were willing to acknowledge, in the breeding-stud of trustworthy John Beacham. Trustworthy! O, if it be indeed true that justice is so little tempered with mercy, that for every idle and involuntary thought, as well as for every evil deed, we are to be held alike accountable; if to covet be as punishable as to steal; if to look with eyes of convoitise at our neighbour’s giddy wife is tantamount to the breaking of the seventh commandment; and if to hate our brother is to be a murderer, why then I greatly fear that erring John Beacham sinned on that bright April morning one of the sins that are “to death.” For, when he turned away after his short dialogue with communicative Bill Snelling, there was an added amount of hatred in his heart towards the owner of the Derby favourite. Proud as he was of his “stock,” had any other man than the Colonel been the possessor of Rough Diamond, he would have rejoiced in his probable success; but, matters standing as they did, the honest man could almost have found it in his heart to pray that the Winner of the Great Race that year should be any horse rather than the one which Arthur Vavasour purchased some ten months previously of himself, and which that young gentleman soon afterwards, under peculiar circumstances, and without profit, disposed of to Colonel Frederick Norcott, formerly of the 26th Dragoons, and now of 14 Stanwick-street, London.