Volume 2 — CHAPTER XIX. LE PREMIER PAS.

The preparations for Honor’s departure went on rapidly at Pear-tree House. Her wardrobe, for her station in life, was a tolerably extensive one; but besides that her stay in London was expected to be short, there was this simplifying fact as regarded the packing of Mrs. John Beacham’s things—namely, that she possessed no evening dresses. Handsome silk gowns (gownds, Mrs. Beacham called them) she owned in plenty; but they were made high, as became a decent female to wear them, and would have been pronounced ridiculously rococo in a London drawing room, where the female figure divine is displayed à toute outrance, and where nearly as much (anatomically speaking) may be learned of that chef-d’œuvre of Nature’s workmanship as may be picked up in the dissecting-room or in the most décolleté statuary display in Europe.

Honor watched and superintended, and indeed aided, in the packing up of her belongings like a woman in a dream. It seemed so strange, now the time was drawing near for her to depart, that she was actually going away from John. There was such a sense of protection in his presence—the sense of trust which all women feel, and love to feel, in the support of a good and brave man—that Honor began to be very miserable at the thought of bidding good-bye to her husband. Even after they had left the house, she would have given much, as she sat by his side in the trap, to have been able to say to him that she was sorry to leave the Paddocks. Had she seen a token of softness on his countenance, she would have opened out her heart to her true friend. But there was no such sign. Stolidly, and with his eyes never turned for a single moment on the sweet face beside him, John drove along the well-known road. He little dreamt of the softened thoughts, the half-formed wishes, that were welling up in Honor’s heart. He only knew that by her own wish she was about to leave him, about to leave his protection for that of the father who was so utterly unworthy of the trust. Ah, could he then but have looked into the vain foolish heart which yet, with all its vanity and folly, contained in it some elements of good, how changed might have been poor Honor’s lot, and what a chance of future peace and safety, if not of the ecstatic happiness of which simple women dream, might have been hers!

But it was not to be! Not to be, because the wife was shy and silly, and the husband prejudiced and proud. Not to be, because fate or Providence had ordered otherwise. Not to be? The words are terribly suggestive, and hard indeed it seems to believe, that while a poor weak woman is deliberating, it is a known fact to Him who ruleth the heart and searcheth out the spirit, that she will be lost.

John had decided not to part with his wife till he saw her safe under her father’s roof. At the Leigh station, where in less time than was usually employed in the trajet, the pair duly arrived, Will Snelling was in waiting to drive back the horse and trap to the Paddocks.

“Walk him up and down a bit, Will,” John said, as his faithful henchman gently stroked the old gray’s quarters, which gave manifest tokens of hardish driving. “I fancied we were late; clocks at the house too fast, I suppose. There, take that trunk, my man,” to a porter who seemed to have nothing more interesting to do than to suck a dirty straw while he stared at the heaving flanks of John’s thoroughbred steed. “Take that trunk, and look alive. The up-train’s late to-day, isn’t it?” He seemed determined not to trust himself with Honor. Like most men, especially those of a thoroughly manly stamp, he hated scenes, and the sight of a woman in even the smallest amount of grief or distress was especially annoying to him. Of what avail, besides, would it be to talk to Honor now on the only subject which contained interest for him? The die was cast. She was about to do the thing which he had thought and talked himself into believing that he most hated upon earth. His wife was to undergo the contamination of Norcott’s society; to mix with his associates; to listen to the conversation of men of his stamp and strain; and to return to him—ah, that was the rub! There was where the shoe pinched most! How would Honor return to him, and to the dull country life which alone he had to offer her? Would she be less of a fine lady, as his mother (and John had begun to think, with some degree of truth) had so often called her within the last few well-remembered months? Would she smile upon him more, talk more, be more interested in her home, and—thought poor John Beacham, with a sigh, as the train rushed onward at express speed to London, would she shrink less from his touch—the touch of one who loved her, for all his lack of refinement, his red hands, and his country-made coat, with a love which was not for an hour only, not for the brief space of a summer holiday, but for all the years that should be allotted to him upon the earth?

“Pleasant day for the end of April,” John remarked; “an east wind that cuts through you like a knife. Pin your shawl, Honor; you’d better;” and he drew up the railway-carriage window with an impatient jerk.

If they had but been alone, those two, if there had not been seated opposite to them a garrulous old woman and her maid, Honor might have said her say; John might have softened at the sight of her swollen eyelids, and all might have been well, or at least better, between them. The fellow-traveller, however, proved an effectual barrier to any such beneficial result. She did not come under the head of a strong-minded female, but was, on the contrary, one of the numerous unprotected travellers who divide their interests between their sherry-flask and the anticipation of an immediate and dreadful railway accident.

“I suppose there won’t be any signals, sir,” she said, addressing John nervously, for, as they neared London, the smoke floating on the breezeless air bore a striking and disagreeable resemblance to a November fog. “The railway people are so terribly careless. I declare, there’s no punishment too bad for them. We might all be robbed and murdered, and not one among ’em would trouble his head about the matter.”

In this way the old lady, after the fashion of her kind, maundered on, while nearer and more near to the head-quarters of dirt and smoke and crime the travellers rushed.

Honor sat mute, and with a sad and troubled countenance, by her husband’s side. She dreaded and yet longed for the moment when she would be freed from the miserable restraint, the almost unendurable combat within her, which was induced by his presence. Once alone—once safe in the cab which was to convey her far from him and from the associations connected with the painful past—she would breathe, she thought, more freely, and would be better able to prepare herself for the interview with her father and her father’s wife which was now so very near at hand. Honor now knew (none could have known better) that she had not done, in the spirit as well as to the letter, her duty to her husband. In thought she had strayed from him; in her daily life she had not cared to study his wishes; and above all—but that was happily, long ago now, and over—she had allowed the image of another man to stand between her and the husband who so loved and trusted her. To confess all this would have been more than Honor would have found moral strength and courage for, so she came to a compromise, after the fashion of the cowardly, with her conscience, and made an inward resolve that on her return, at a convenient season she would—not exactly make a clean breast of it to John, but that she would show him by her conduct, ay by her words if necessary, that she repented of her past proceedings, and intended, as much as in her lay, to make ample amends for it in the time to come.

She was roused from the train of thought into which these resolutions had led her by the sudden stopping of the train, the throwing open of doors, and the inquiry for tickets. The midday was very chill and sunless, and a striking contrast to the bright May morning—twelve months, minus a day, before—when the village children strewed fresh roses in her path, and the jocund sun shone out so brightly on her bridal!

John too had been, she recollected, a very different John in those days. The companion of that vividly-remembered wedding journey would not, she felt, have bustled her out so brusquely on the platform, and would have handled her small belongings with a far gentler hand. Life, however, is compounded amongst its countless atom-like events of so many contrasts, and so many memories of contrasts, that comparisons of the present are often as unsatisfactory as they are odious.

when the current of our lives is running roughly over scattered stones, and when we need our best wisdom, patience, and tact, to carry us safely through a perilous crisis.

By an insignificant, but at the same time a somewhat singular, coincidence, the family from the Castle chanced to be in the same train, and in a carriage immediately behind that in which our travellers from Peartree-house had placed themselves. The fact of their near neighbourhood was patent to John: he was, however, in no mood to listen hat in hand, and with the old-fashioned show of respect—a remnant of the not wholly extinct feudal system which had descended to him from his grandsires—whilst Lady Millicent condescendingly acted the part of suzerain lady for his benefit. Hoping to evade altogether the notice of the mighty dame, John, after the fashion mutely objected to by his wife, hustled that young person in rather unseemly haste from the carriage.

“Be quick,” he said, as he hurried her away to a cab. “Don’t look that way; her ladyship is there, with the young ladies, and I have no time for stopping if I am to go back by the next train.”

There was not a grain (as I am sure must be by this time apparent to the reader) of that very common weakness popularly known as flunkyism in John Beacham’s honest, unaspiring nature. His wife, who was not, in ordinary cases, a mean judge of character, might have felt well satisfied, could she have often chanced to be present during John’s familiar interviews with men of rank and note, that subserviency was foreign to his nature, and that he was equally at his ease with the peer as with the peasant. It was only with the female sex—when that sex happened to be represented by an arrogant fine lady—that John Beacham, feeling completely out of his element, seemed awkward and constrained; so awkward and constrained that Honor, disposed to see everything en noir as regarded her husband’s manners, rashly decided him to be vulgarly in awe of the haughty grandeur of her friend Arthur’s mother. That honest John would at any time have willingly gone a mile or two out of his way to avoid a chance meeting with the great lady of Gillingham, was undoubtedly true. Want of habit—for fine ladies of any stamp came very little in his way—was quite sufficient to account for this peculiarity; but the moral cowardice betrayed by this shrinking from a subjection to Lady Millicent’s queenly airs and condescending graciousness had often been a source of mortification to Honor. Since the memorable epoch of the Danescourt fête the foolish girl had thought herself into the irrational belief that she might aspire to visit on terms of equality the upper ten thousand of the county. Before the most unfortunate discovery which had so fully developed the germs of ambition lying latent in her breast, Honor had more than once felt inclined to resent Lady Millicent’s supercilious notice—her over-civil inquiries, when church was over, after Mrs. Beacham’s health; and, worse than all, the occasional patronising calls at the Paddocks, when any heavy-on-hand visitors among the rare guests at the Castle chanced to express a wish for an introduction to Mr. John Beacham’s far-famed breeding stud. But if such had been Mrs. John’s feelings when stirred thereto partly by Mr. Vavasour’s head-turning attentions, and partly by the entirely vague but pleasingly deluding surmise that she was a “lady” born, how much more was she inclined to chafe against Lady Millicent’s offensive condescension when the to her blissful truth was no longer doubtful, and when Honor knew herself to be the daughter of a well-born gentleman, and the great-granddaughter (it was wonderful how soon she made herself acquainted with the family pedigree) of a baronet!

Very few words passed between John Beacham and his wife as they were rattled along the busy thoroughfares leading from the Waterloo station to quiet Stanwick-street. A station cab is never a favourable locality for dialogue, and the fares on the present occasion appeared better pleased to be silent than to talk. Jingle, jingle went the wheels, and clatter, clatter, the ill-fitting window-frames, whilst every jerking, jolting moment brought them nearer to what would be alike a pain and a relief to both—separation!

At last—the time had seemed both long and short—the cab, leaving the northern precincts of the Park, turned into the dull, respectable little street where Honor was to find a temporary home.

“No. 14!” John shouted, with his head out of the window, and in another moment they pulled up before the Colonel’s door.

The last adieux were made—as such final farewells usually are—very hurriedly, and in a decidedly unsatisfactory fashion. It had been Honor’s settled purpose to give utterance to some kind words ere they parted—to say something—what, she knew not—that would be regretful and conciliatory; something that would make her own heart lighter when he should be far away. But partings, hasty partings especially, are something like death-bed repentances. There is hurry and flurry, there is alarm and confusion, there is the consciousness of having so much to do, and so short a time in which to do it. At that moment, when poor John pressed his wife’s delicate fingers with a hand moist with heat and emotion, the presence of the parlour-maid, and the duty of seeing to Honor’s various belongings, checked any loving words that might have been hovering on his tongue, and almost before the object of his anxious solicitude had responded to his final “God bless you!” the vehicle, with John inside, had driven off, and Honor was left alone.