Volume 2 — CHAPTER XXI. HONOR DECEIVES HERSELF.

Honor Beacham was, as I think has been pretty clearly shown, a very woman in her faults and follies—her quick impulses—her yearning for love and admiration—her small ambitions—and her dainty phantasies. “Fine by degrees, and delicately weak”—like Pope’s inferior man—this semi-Celtic woman was evidently no philosopher at all; and, left to her own guidance, the chances were terribly in favour of her coming—to use the not inexpressive nineteenth-century slang—“to grief.”

How long those exquisite blue eyes of hers would have betrayed tokens of sorrow, had they not been quickly dried by a double-knock at the door of No. 14, must ever remain a problem. To be seen with red eyelids is an act of lèse loveliness, which Honor would never, could she avoid it, have been guilty of committing. Her little coquettish veil, too, was ready at hand to hide any traces of past emotion that might have been visible on her countenance; so that Mrs. Norcott, who entered the room trippingly, and with the attempt at juvenile grace peculiar to that colonial lady of forty-two, saw no reason to suppose that her country guest was otherwise than cheerfully and contentedly disposed.

Mrs. Norcott, in her London walking-dress, was not a person to be passed by without attracting due notice and comment. Attired in light delicate muslin, of a pattern and make better befitting a demoiselle in her teens, the fair Elizabeth probably imagined that she looked the character to which she evidently aspired—namely, a youthful matron in the pride and glory of early wifehood. A sash, tied behind à l’enfant, and a small hat of the species known as turban, served, doubtless, in her opinion, to complete the illusion.

“How long have you been here?” she exclaimed, coming forward with a rush, and embracing poor Honor with the impulsiveness popularly known as gushing. “You’ll be glad to hear that the Colonel is better—really quite another person than when I wrote to you. But sit down, do. We didn’t expect you just yet. The trains must be changed, I think, or the Bradshaw, or something. But how’s your good husband? So kind of him to let you come!” And Mrs. Norcott, having established her guest by her side upon the slippery sofa, pressed, in token of matronly sympathy, the little hand which she still retained within her own. “I am afraid,” she went on to say, “that you’ll think the Colonel looking ill. When I wrote to you on Monday he was terribly low, poor fellow; quite depressed, you may say, about himself. Men are such cowards, you know, when there is anything the matter with them. Brave as a lion the Colonel is before the enemy, at least so I’ve heard—but on a sick-bed as troublesome, and more so, I may say, than a child.”

“You must have had a trying time of it, I am sure,” Honor said sympathisingly. “I am not much of a nurse, I am afraid, but I will do my best; and as for sitting up at night, I am sure, though I don’t look very strong, I should not mind, it in the least; that is, I mean—” colouring with a recollection of Mrs. Beacham’s jealous guarding over her rights—“if you and my father would like me to be with him.”

Mrs. Norcott laughed—a little foolishly Honor thought.

“Why, happily for all parties unconcerned,” she said, “the worst is over now, and no more nursing required for one while. As I told you just now, Honor—I must call you ‘Honor,’ you know—the Colonel is better—quite himself, indeed, I may say. Has gone out for the first time to-day since his illness. I expect him back every moment. Ah! there he is; I know his way of shutting the hall-door by this time. He never knocks, the Colonel doesn’t. Gentlemen always will have their latch-keys, you know,” she added playfully (a joke, by the way, which was lost upon the young wife, who had so much in the modern Gomorrah to learn and to unlearn); “and the Colonel, I suspect—there are secrets in all families—has been a bit of a rake; and—Ah, Colonel,” interrupting herself as the object of her complimentary remarks threw open the door en maître, and strode towards the sofa; “ah, Colonel, here you are! And here’s Honor come—looking so well; and—”

He did not allow her to proceed, for, putting her obtruding figure with scant ceremony aside, he kissed his daughter (who had risen to greet him) with rather more than necessary warmth. The fervent salute, administered on both cheeks, brought the ever-ready crimson flush to Honor’s lovely face. It was a blush that owed its being not to the demonstrativeness of the paternal embrace, but to the unexpected presence of one whose advent had never failed in days gone by to call up that often false tell-tale witness. Close behind Colonel Norcott followed Arthur Vavasour, the man whose image still lingered in Honor Beacham’s memory—the agreeable, handsome profligate, who appeared in no way changed since in the grounds of Danescourt, she, nearly ten months before, had bidden him a not easily forgotten and rather emotional farewell.

They shook hands, and at the touch of his, Honor’s colour deepened, and she bowed her head in very conscious shame that so it was. There are no outward evidences of internal emotion so apt to mislead, and that dangerously, as the simple and beautiful, yet alas too rare, effort of nature which is called a blush. It is very intelligible that so it must be. Men who, like Arthur Vavasour, live only (as they estimate living) in the light of women’s smiles—men who dearly delight in discovering proofs of their own power to please—will always see in a pretty woman’s heightened colour a tribute to their sure fascinations. Instinct—the instinct of self-preservation, bestowed for the protection of the weak—warned Honor, as it has warned other women before her, of the existence of this very popular delusion; and the premonition did not tend to moderate the carnation-hue that Arthur Vavasour gazed at with even more than the passionate admiration of the days gone by. Nor was his manner to her—the manner that she had always felt to be so winning—in any fashion altered; and when he spoke, his voice was as soft, and his words as full of gentle meaning.

“I heard you were expected, Mrs. Beacham,” he said, and the slow lingering pressure of his hand, sent, as he intended that it should, a thrill through Honor’s delicate frame. “How long it is since we have met!”

“Very long,” Honor contrived to say; and then addressing her father, she said something that was not very coherent about her pleasure in seeing him so much recovered from his recent illness.

“Well, yes, I am better,” he said carelessly. “It wasn’t much besides a cold; but women are so easily frightened: Mrs. Norcott thought I was going to die, I believe, when she wrote, and was glad enough when your husband—by the bye, what an uncommon good fellow he must be!—allowed you to come and nurse me. Nurse me? You will laugh at that. I don’t look much like an invalid, do I?”

“No, indeed!” Honor said, with the pretty laugh, “restrained by gracefulness,” and yet which was so thoroughly Hibernian in its character; “I didn’t think, any more than John did, that you’d be up and about.”

“I daresay not; but I really was most uncommonly seedy for a week or so—ask Mrs. N. if I wasn’t; fever at night, and all that kind of thing.”

“Fever? I believe you!” responded his wife, who had been keeping up a not very well-sustained conversation with Arthur Vavasour; but who, like a true wife, was ready to endorse any and everything that fell from her husband’s lips. “You haven’t an idea how ill the Colonel has been. I declare, the day I wrote to you, Honor—I’m going to call her Honor, Colonel, from this out—I was that frightened, I didn’t know which way to turn. Says I, surely his friends ought to know—and then I thought of you; says I—”

But Colonel Norcott cut short all further reminiscence by a laugh.

“It’s one of my rules,” he said, “and you ought to know it by this time—never to go back to anything that’s disagreeable. Live and let live’s my motto, and forget and forgive is another—and what’s more, I practise what I preach, eh, Honor? No dwelling upon old grievances with me. I don’t say that I’m exactly saint enough to turn my second cheek to the smiter; and what’s more, I didn’t ask your excellent husband—who’s got a fist like a sledge-hammer—to knock me down a second time; but I don’t bear malice all the same—not a grain of it; and I shouldn’t mind—upon my word I shouldn’t—shaking hands with him to-morrow.” At this conciliatory speech Mrs. Norcott laughed heartily; Honor, on the contrary, looked very grave. There was something in her father’s words that jarred terribly against her sense of what was delicate and becoming. She had not been happy, lately with her husband—he had been cold and hard, and had not seemed to understand or value her; his want of outward refinement too had often offended her taste; but for all that, she both respected his character, and had taught herself to see nothing degrading in his position. When, therefore, she heard the Colonel speak in this slightly supercilious tone of the absent John, Honor felt rather indignant at the liberty taken. It was a very different affair, allowing herself and permitting others to be disrespectful to the man to whom she owed so much; so this girl-wife, whose heart was still in the right place, listened with a countenance from which the smile was momentarily banished, to the Colonel’s half-sneering mention of her husband’s name.

She was glad—for she felt called upon to say something—when Arthur Vavasour, by asking a question connected with the Paddocks, relieved her from the embarrassment of responding to her father’s flippant sally.

“You will ride, of course, Mrs. Beacham, while you are in town,” he said; “you will enjoy it so much, and Lady Meg would be so immensely admired. I don’t think I ever saw so many fine horses, or such a number of pretty women, as there were in the Park to-day; but Lady Meg” (he had the grace not to say her mistress too) “would whip ’em all to nothing, as the Yankees say.”

Again the betraying blush rose to Honor’s cheek, as she explained to Arthur that there was no chance of her joining the equestrians in the Row. She had neither horse nor habit, she said, in London; and besides, John had only allowed her to come up on the plea of nursing her father; and now that he was quite well again, why—she supposed she had only to go home again.

“Nonsense! home again!” the Colonel said in his pleasant, cheerful way; “as if such things were to be allowed! Now we’ve got you here, young lady,” and he patted his daughter’s cheek affectionately, “here we mean to keep you. And if this John of yours says a word, why we’ll have him up too, and give him a taste of London life, which he’ll be the better of.—But I say, Arthur, where are you going to, old fellow? To dine tête-à-tête with the missis, eh? We’re so far from civilised life in these confounded diggings, that I suppose it wouldn’t pay taking pot-luck in this shanty of ours; otherwise, you’re as welcome to what we’ve got as flowers in May.”

“Thank you, I should like nothing better,” Arthur said, his eyes, which were fixed admiringly on Honor, giving ample corroboration of his words; “but there’s a great spread—an awful bore it will be—at old Duberly’s; and then we have to go to something at Lady Guernsey’s—a drum, I believe, they call it—a sort of affair where you get stewed to rags, and pressed like beef-à-la-mode, or some horrid thing of that kind, afterwards.” Of course they all laughed as they said good-bye to him. Honor was especially cheerful on the occasion. Especially cheerful, because her heart was at the moment sinking so heavily within her. Sinking from an undefined and yet miserable sense that all she saw and heard was wrong. Wrong on Colonel Norcott’s side, inasmuch as not only he, but his wife, had, as was almost clear even to Honor’s unsuspicious mind, been in league together to deceive her—wrong on her own because it was patent to herself that the deception excited in her mind neither anger nor regret.

But feeling, as she did, both depressed and frightened at her novel position, Honor summoned one of her brightest smiles to her lip as her hand lay for a moment within Arthur’s. Colonel Norcott followed him to the head of the staircase, and after a short whispered conversation, returned to the drawing-room. He looked harassed and annoyed; and, now that the forced smiles and pleasant look had left his face, Honor could plainly see the marks that age and care had left there.

“Gad, it’s late,” he said, looking at his watch; and then Mrs. Norcott, in obedience to a private signal from her husband, asked Honor if she would not like to see her room.

“It’s a good way up,” she said, as they mounted the steep narrow stairs peculiar to the upper flights of modern-built houses of the calibre of No. 14 Stanwick-street. “The Colonel, of course, does not attempt it; but for young legs like yours and mine it’s a mere nothing.”

Honor, as she toiled after this active middle-aged lady, said something civil and commonplace about London houses being necessarily different from those in the country. She was very desirous not to seem hard to please and troublesomely fastidious, but the style of architecture prevalent in Sandyshire not being of the kind to qualify for alpine climbing, she was thoroughly out of breath and exhausted on her arrival at the journey’s end,—an end which, judging from appearances, was calculated to give rather a poor idea of the means possessed by the gallant Colonel and his soi-disant heiress wife.

The little attic which Honor was instructed to call her room was tolerably clean; for, as I said before, the house was one of recent construction, and the various defilements incidental to a course of habitation by a succession of fourth-story lodgers had not as yet rendered the guest-chamber of No. 14 utterly unendurable. But although even Honor—fresh as she was from God’s blessed country, from farm-house cleanliness, and from the traditional scents of lavender and roses—could not have justly called that small upper chamber dirty, it was nevertheless anything but inviting to the eye. The roof was sloping and low; the furniture mean and shabby; there was no wardrobe, and the chest of drawers, as Honor saw at a glance, would scarcely hold even the limited supply of garments which she had brought with her to Stanwick-street.

“It is small, as you see,” remarked Mrs. Colonel Norcott deprecatingly; “but I hope you’ll be comfortable. House-rent is uncommonly dear in London in the season—and the Colonel likes to have everything comfortable—and so much expense coming on, you know.”

She spoke the last words in a kind of confidential whisper, throwing a degree of playful significance over the implied suggestion. Honor, who did not know, but who felt that there was a dessus les cartes, could only look with a slightly puzzled air at her mysterious hostess; whereupon that lady, with what was intended for a pretty air of confusion, said:

“Another time, when we know each other better, being both matrons—there need be no secrets between us. Ah, I see, there is hot water—the girl of the house is generally so careless—you will come down when you are ready. The Colonel is particular about his hours: so don’t be long, there’s a dear. The Colonel always goes to his club after dinner, and you wouldn’t like to keep him waiting. Can I do anything for you? No. Well, then, I will leave you to beautify;” and so saying, Mrs. Norcott betook herself to her own, namely, the adjoining and equally unprepossessing-looking sleeping chamber.

Honor sat down on the edge of her narrow iron bedstead, and felt for the moment like one dazed. All that during the last hour had occurred was so widely different from her previous imaginings. Where was the sick-room, the wasted invalid, the atmosphere of physic-bottles and of gloom? Instead, had she not been received with chaff and cheerfulness? Was not her father in apparently perfect health? And already, simultaneously almost with her arrival, had not a visitor appeared, an intimacy with whom her conscience warned her had better be avoided, and regarding whom, as she was well aware, her mother-in-law had already thrown out hints as uncalled for as they were offensive? And then, closely following on these mental communings, there came the more searching questions of, “What would John think of all this mean deceit? Would he not, in his indignation at the trick, instantaneously require her return?” Instantaneously? Yes! Honor felt well assured of that; John Beacham was the last man in the world to suffer patiently such a deception as had been practised upon him. He hated—of that too his wife was well aware—the man who had deceived him, with as much of rancorous feeling as he was capable of entertaining; and therefore any further sojourn on her part under her father’s roof would, were John to become cognisant of the truth, have been indignantly protested against. But, on the other hand, Honor herself, though aware that she had been lured under a false presence to Stanwick-street, was by no means disposed to disclose this fact to one so deeply interested as was John in all that so nearly concerned her safety and well-being. She was conscious, on the contrary, of a very decided inclination to remain, for the present at least, where she was. Of course this inclination—the mere passing of the desire through her heart, to say nothing of the yielding to it—was wrong, selfish, and unwifely to the most unpardonable extent. Honor, too, was well aware that she was guilty in not driving from her, at the very first onslaught, the tempter who assailed her. There was little excuse, save in the weakness of our most imperfect human nature, for the taking of this first dearly-bought step in wrong. It cost but little trouble putting that wrong foot foremost. She had but to be passive, nothing could be easier, and the affair, one might almost say, righted itself. But facile as it all had seemed, and scarcely out of the common order of things, the time came when that poor weak woman would have given all of life that remained to her, could she have, by so doing, annulled the decision of a moment, and thus averted all the terrible consequences that followed thereupon.

She would not write—so Honor, with very little hesitation, decided—to inform John Beacham that her father was well in health, and that her longer stay in London was uncalled for. It was wonderful, whilst acting thus, how many specious arguments she made use of to persuade herself that she was less guilty than she seemed. No one could imagine—so she told herself (sitting before the small painted mirror, with her fair hair hanging loosely about her neck and shoulders)—no one could by any possibility imagine that she could be there for her own pleasure. Such a wretched room as they had given her! Room, indeed! Would anyone in his or her senses at Peartree-house have called that closet of a place by such an inappropriate name? And then her father, though his bodily health was acknowledged to be satisfactory, yet betrayed, in Honor’s opinion, evident symptoms of a mind ill at ease at least, if not diseased. His pecuniary affairs, too, struck his inexperienced daughter as being in no flourishing condition. The smallness and mesquinerie of the house (a part of which only was occupied by her relations); the absence of a man-servant—for Honor had picked up a good deal of the knowledge of “life” from the pages of three-volume novels; to say nothing of the dress, cheap though showy, of her hostess, betrayed to Honor the fact that either money was far less plentiful in her father’s than her husband’s home, or that penuriousness was a vice indulged in to a large extent among her newly-found connections.

“If my father were rich and prosperous,” she said to herself—and, to do her only justice, this ingenious though unconscious sophist firmly believed in the honesty of her excuses—“if my father were rich and prosperous, I should act differently, and write at once to tell John he is well. I should mind in that case less, I think, the making him have a still worse opinion of my poor father than I know he has at present. If I could hope that John would make excuses for them, I should know better what to do; but he would be simply furious. I know that he would never have let me come, if he had not believed that my father was suffering from the effects of that horrid blow; and perhaps, after all, he was; and besides, if he did make the worst of his illness for the purpose of having me with him, where was the mighty harm? It only shows that my poor father loves me,” added Honor, sadly, to the wilful tender little heart, which was, alas, so likely to be led astray by its own warm womanly impulses.

It was with such false reasonings as these, that Honor persuaded herself to keep the real state of things a secret, pro tem. at least, from her husband. He would never, she decided—even if he lived to the age of Methuselah—understand her feelings, or see things (even if she wrote to him about her father) as she saw them; and so, after sighing a little over her husband’s small amount of solicitude and comprehension regarding the trifling things that so much make or mar the happiness of a young and childless woman, Honor entered on her course of deception. She was interrupted in her cogitations—cogitations which so materially affected the future happiness of one who, albeit he wore his heart, as the saying is, on his sleeve, Honor had proved herself to be so little capable of comprehending—by a hasty knock from the “girl of the house”—the “young person,” whose back hair was thrust into a greasy net, and whose upper woman was clothed in a red Garibaldi that had evidently seen service, which warned the visitor from the country that by indulging herself in reflection, she was doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Dinner was “on table,” as the parlour-maid (to whom Colonel Fred was in the habit of saying civil things) with no great show of respect informed her; and Honor, in some trepidation—for she did not feel exactly at home in her father’s house—hastily put the finishing touches to her simple toilette, and hurriedly, two steps at a time, in very unmatronly fashion, descended the many flights of stairs to the drawing-room. Colonel Norcott was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fireless grate, when his daughter entered with an apology on her lips, and a pretty deprecating smile lighting up her face. Mrs. Norcott had already taken her seat at the round table, which had been cleared for dinner, and was gazing with large anxious eyes, anticipative of evil, on the pewter dish-cover, not one of the brightest specimens of its kind, that graced the simple board.

“I am so sorry,” Honor was beginning; “I had my trunk to unpack; and my hair was so tumbled that I was obliged to undo it, and—”

“And you couldn’t have been quicker if you’d done it for a bet,” said the Colonel good humouredly. “So now for the miserable meal we call dinner. You’ll wish yourself back at the farm-house, I suspect, when you taste the nastiness that Mrs. Thingummy treats us with. You get rather different grub at home—eh, Miss Honor?”

His daughter laughed lightly as she took her place beside him. It amused her greatly to be called “Miss Honor,” just as if she were a girl. And then he looked at, and spoke so kindly to her that she was already beginning to feel at home in the Stanwick-street lodging. With the large-boned, youthfully-dressed matron, dispensing with an air that was intended to be genteel, the ill-dressed, London-flavoured whiting from the scantily-filled dish before her, Honor did not expect to feel much kindred sympathy. Mrs. Norcott was, however, to judge from external appearances at least, good-natured, and facile à vivre. If she had ever enjoyed the prestige of being that often self-reliant and arrogant character yclept an heiress (a fact of the truth of which Honor began to doubt), there had as yet cropped out no signs either of a love of domination or a purse-proud spirit. A harmless vanity, joined to a blind worship for the Colonel, had hitherto struck Honor as the most distinguishing feature in the Australian lady’s idiosyncrasy.

“If you can eat that stuff it’s more than I can,” said the master of the house, pushing away his plate with disgust. “You see, my dear child, what it is to have a father who hasn’t one shilling to rub against another. I—”

“Now, Colonel, I am surprised to hear you talk in this way,” put in his wife. “There are a precious good many shillings in three hundred pounds a-year, or I am a good deal more out in my arithmetic than I think I am. The idea of talking in this way before your daughter! Why, she’ll think she’s come among beggars, to hear the way you’re going on.”

Fred laughed sardonically. “Not much need to talk about it, I think. Those horrible whitings fried in black grease render all further explanation on the subject nugatory. I don’t suppose that any affectation of superfluity is likely to deceive Mrs. Beacham; and, in my opinion, it is always better to be plain-spoken. You’ve got a poor devil of a father, my dear child, who finds it hard enough, I can assure you, to make both ends meet. Of course you will be uncomfortable here, I expect that; but I do flatter myself that you won’t throw me over, Honor, because I’m a poor man. I’ve trusted in women all my life, and never had cause to repent it yet; so here’s your health, my dear, and may you enjoy health and wealth and happiness long after your poor old father has been laid under the sod.”

He had taken advantage of Lydia’s momentary absence to utter this pathetic speech, and as the red Garibaldi was not there to mar by force of contrast the Colonel’s paternal platitudes, he got through his toast swimmingly. In another moment, and before Honor’s hand, which had been lovingly extended to meet her father’s, could be withdrawn, the parlour-maid, in whose roguish black eyes the “first-floor front” was certainly no hero, had bounced back into the room, bearing before her a large specimen of that economical and succulent dish known to housekeepers as a juicy leg of mutton. Nothing overcome at the sight of this delicacy, Mrs. Norcott pressed a slice, cut with the gravy in, on Honor’s acceptance.

“What, not a mouthful? Dear me now, how sorry I am! Is there nothing we could tempt you with? It’s because the mutton’s raw, perhaps, that your stomach turns a little at it. Lydia, can you get nothing from the larder for Mrs. John Beacham? That knuckle of ham, now—”

Miss Lydia grinned broadly. “You’ll never see that there mouthful of ’am again, ’m,” she said pertly, and after the fashion of one accustomed to speak her mind. “The Kunnle he ate that for his breakfast this morning afore he went out;” and having so said, she went on briskly with the important duties of her calling.

To Honor, accustomed as she was to “the land flowing with milk and honey” of the old farm-house at Updown Paddocks, the state of the Stanwick-street larder appeared a most deplorable affair indeed. As for her father—her high-bred, distinguished-looking father, with his delicate aristocratic hands, his dainty golden sleeve-buttons, and, in her opinion, his warm paternal heart—she could hardly refrain from tears as she looked upon his futile efforts to eat the nauseous food that was set before him. She had not been reared, as we know, in the school of over-refinement, and to do violence to her own feelings in order to spare the self-love of another was one of the consequences on an advanced state of civilisation which had not, as yet, made itself felt in the somewhat arrière parish of Switcham. To feign an appetite if she had it not was not therefore amongst the small deceptions which Mrs. Beacham felt called upon to practise, and for that reason the poor girl rose dinnerless, or, as she would in her ignorance have called it, supperless, from that untempting board. No sooner had the energetic Lydia retired, closing the door upon all (save its unwelcome perfume) that remained of that highly-unsatisfactory repast, than Colonel Norcott, taking his hat from a side table, announced his intention of going out.

“Only for an hour or so—just to smoke a cigar in the open,” he said carelessly. “You’ll be in bed though, Honor, I suppose, before I come back? Beauty-sleep, eh? We mustn’t lose those country roses sooner than we can help, or we shall have John looking us up with that stout stick of his. Gad, how quick he struck, and how it tingled! I can feel it now;” passing his hand playfully over his forehead. “Took one so deucedly by surprise, you know. Hadn’t an idea, of course, that he was going to do anything of the kind. Nothing but a light cane in my hand, talking quietly about old times, when, without a word, down comes the sledge-hammer, and, by Jove! I was floored.”

“He was very sorry afterwards, indeed he was,” Honor said pleadingly. “I have heard him say so often. He hardly knew what he did. If he had not been sorry, he would never have let me leave the Paddocks to-day.”

“Wouldn’t he?” chucking her under the chin. “Looks sharp after his pretty wife, eh? But as to being sorry, I can believe as much of that as I like. If he had been, he would have answered a letter that I wrote to him some time ago about Rough Diamond; but as he didn’t,” and a very vindictive expression flitted across his bearded face, “I know what to think, and, what is more, shall probably act upon the conviction I have come to.”

Honor could only look her surprise at this wholly unexpected outburst. Before, however, she could utter a syllable in extenuation of her husband’s sin against politeness, Colonel Norcott had taken his departure, leaving her to spend the hours till welcome bedtime came in listening to the uncongenial gossip of the woman whose society was by himself so evidently unprized. Honor’s first experience of genteel life in London was certainly neither an amusing nor an instructive one.