Volume 2 — CHAPTER IV. THE HALF-REBUKE.

“I had not the slightest intention of coming back—God knows I had not—when I went away; but I am the weakest fool. I told myself again and again that I was mad, and worse, to come where—where you are, Honor;” and he drew a long breath as the word came hesitatingly from his lips; “but it would not do. The more I tried to forget, the more I remembered; and the oftener I told myself that I must not see you, the more some evil thing within me urged me on to come.”

Honor had listened to him hitherto in silence; partly through surprise, and partly too because of that pitiable shrinking which so many women, especially young women, experience when it becomes their duty to hurt the feelings of men who venture to address them in language that ought to be forbidden. If we could look with any degree of perspicacity into the intricacies of female motives, I think it would be found that there is no inconsiderable amount of selfishness in this fear of wounding the susceptibilities of a too daring admirer. The chances that the hero of a hundred such fights, when wounded and worsted in the last encounter, will betake himself to fresh fields and pastures new, is not altogether an agreeable one. The sternly virtuous female, left alone with the sole reward—not always a sufficing one—of an approving conscience, is (and she looks forward to this dismal fait accompli with no reassuring glance) not precisely in a cheerful position. It is never pleasant to be forsaken—never consoling to be abandoned to the society of a dull, unappreciating husband, or, greater evil still, to the company of a woman’s own thoughts, the more especially when that woman has allowed herself to listen to the voice of the charmer, and has grown accustomed to the flattering attentions of an ever awake and devoted soupirant. So the foolish wife—a well-intentioned one, possibly, in spite of vanity and its consequent shortcomings—temporises, deliberates, puts off till a more convenient season the vindication of her matronly dignity, unconscious meanwhile that her feet are on the brink of a precipice, and that the avenger of guilty thoughts is treading swift behind her.

Neither the absence of moral courage, the dread of giving offence, nor the very natural objection to the loss of an agreeable admirer, are diminished by the fact that the admirer in question is the lady’s superior in the social scale; and it is more than possible that had Arthur Vavasour been a farmer’s son, Honor would have found comparatively little difficulty in expressing the indignation which she was well aware she ought to feel on listening to words which were scarcely less than a declaration of love.

“I haven’t offended you?” he said, looking anxiously at her half-averted face. “I thought we were friends; I am sorry, so sorry, if I have vexed you, but you must forgive me. It is so difficult, so impossible, to see much of anyone—I mean anyone like you—without—without becoming stupidly confidential; and I could not—indeed I could not—help telling you how I had missed you when I was away. You see, I am so strangely situated, so—”

He stopped; it was such dangerous ground that on which he had begun to tread: he on the very verge of matrimony; and, as it appeared on the face of things, so entirely guided to that verge by his own wishes and inclinations. Honor looked up at him in surprise.

“You are going to be married,” she said coldly. “You told me so yourself, and I have seen the young lady that is to be your wife. She is rich and pretty, and looks nice and kind. Why do you say that you are strangely situated?”

“Why,” said Arthur impetuously, “because I should never, no, not for one single moment, have dreamt of marrying Miss Duberly if I had not been driven to it by—but,” he went on with a hard bitter laugh, “it sounds too ridiculous to say by what. You would not believe now, Mrs. Beacham—you, who know so little of the world, and of what is called business, and of human nature—that I, whom people in general think so much to be envied, ‘heir to such a splendid property’—young, prosperous, everything that is most delightful—should be—don’t laugh if you can help it—marrying for money.”

Again she looked at him, but this time with eyes full of pity and distress.

“How strange!” she said softly. “No, indeed, I never should have thought that; I always believed—I always fancied—”

“That I was one of those jolly fellows that can do what they like, and have everything their own way. How wonderfully you, and everyone else are mistaken! I should just like—no, I shouldn’t, it would be such a bitter shame—to have the whole business shown up. I know I must seem such an awful screw sometimes, such a confounded cur! People must wonder why I don’t subscribe to charities and asylums, and to the hounds; and, now—why I marry this girl,—this heiress, who,” he continued as if talking to himself, “is no connection, has no beauty; while I—well, in the common course of nature, may expect to live a few years longer—to a rational age that is—for what is called ‘settling down.’ The truth is”—and here he lowered his voice, although there was no one within hearing, to a whisper—“the truth is, that I have no inclination, no ‘call,’ as they say, to marry. If Miss Duberly were the most beautiful creature that ever breathed, I should feel the same. It is now three months since I engaged myself to Sophy Duberly, and since then”—with a glance full of meaning at his companion—“I have had time to discover that on her account, as well as my own, I have made a grievous and fatal mistake.”

Arthur had truly said that Honor knew but little of the world. She had heard and read scarcely anything of love and lovers, but her woman’s instinct warned her, as it would have warned any delicate-minded woman, that this confidence on Vavasour’s part was one of which he ought to be ashamed. Nature had given her a loyal heart, and it was not loyal—there especially, and almost as it were within earshot of the girl who trusted him—to confide to her his repugnance to a marriage from which he owned he was to “suck out no small advantage.” Her judgment might be warped by her pity and by the pride she took in Arthur’s companionship, but nothing could, in her eyes, totally excuse him; and moreover she was too thoroughly womanly not to feel some compassion for the girl who was to be the joint victim of Mr. Vavasour’s necessities.

It was this compassion, this truly feminine feeling for one whose sorrows she was so well able to understand, that prompted Honor’s reply, and encouraged her to be brave.

“I don’t like to hear you talk in this way, Mr. Vavasour,” she said, her heart beating rather quickly as she summoned all her resolution to her aid. “It isn’t right—indeed, indeed it isn’t. If you do not love this poor young lady, you ought never to have said it—to me—to anyone—not even to yourself. What good can it do now to say such things? Nothing—you know it can’t; and besides, you will be happy, I am sure you will, after you are married—I—”

“Are you so very happy?” he said meaningly, and stopping in his walk to look into the depths of her violet eyes. “Are you certain, from your own experience, that happiness must follow after marriage?”

She turned away. “You have no right to ask these questions,” she said hurriedly. “Mr. Vavasour, I ask you—beg you not to say such things to me! Why will you do it,” she added imploringly, “when you know how much it vexes and annoys me?”

He was quieted in a moment; brought for the nonce, by the sight of her unfeigned distress, to a sense of his misconduct, and said quite humbly:

“I am very sorry; I will not offend you again—never! But at least let us part friends. We are quite near the people and the tent now. Give me one moment before you go back to be happy. Only say that you forgive me; say that you will think kindly of me, and wish me well when I am far away.”

“I shall think of you—I do wish you well,” she stammered out, not relaxing her pace, but advancing steadily towards the place where, about ten minutes before (for her interview with Vavasour, long as it has taken to relate, had occupied no greater space of time), she had left that, in her own opinion, important personage, Mrs. Beacham, seated under the branches of a spreading lime-tree, listening to village scandal from the lips of a congenial gossip.

“O, there is milady at last,” the former exclaimed, as Honor, escorted by Mr. Vavasour, advanced slowly towards them. “You’ve been a pretty time away, Mrs. John; and here ’ave I been looking for you everywhere.”

She spoke very crossly, an irritability occasioned not only by Honor’s short absence, which the old lady had magnified into five times its actual length, but by the “incivility,” as she called it, of Mr. Arthur, who, instead of staying to say something “pretty,” had, after making what she supposed he considered a “fine bow,” taken himself off to some of his “great acquaintances;” a slight which Mrs. Beacham did not appear very likely soon to look over.

“I’m sorry I went away, and sorrier still if you’ve been wanting me,” Honor said good-humouredly. “Mr. Vavasour wanted to show me a tree—such a beautiful one!—I forget its name; but if you would like to see it, I could find the way again. The branches all feather down to the ground, and the leaves are so wonderfully green! I shall ask John to have some at the Paddocks.”

“Humph! I don’t fancy that John will care to indulge you much with anything when he hears of your goings-on.”

“Goings-on!” repeated Honor almost mechanically, for she was too much astonished by this sudden attack to answer coherently. “I don’t quite understand—really I don’t. I did not know I was doing wrong when I walked a little way with Mr. Vavasour. I would not have gone for anything in the world if I had thought that you or John would have minded it.”

At that moment John himself, looking a little warm and discomposed, strode up the rising ground towards the spreading lime-trees under which the old lady, hugging closely her wrath and jealousy, was grimly waiting his approach. John was the kindest-hearted man alive. He would not wantonly hurt the feelings even of an enemy (always supposing him to have owned such a commodity); but Honor had not been married three months without discovering that her husband was what is called “hasty,” and that in those exceptional moments when he was a trifle “put about,” the wisest plan was to leave him alone till he should have recovered himself. Mrs. Beacham, however—whether owing to the absence of perceptive qualities, or from an idea that her son was not too old to be spoilt by over-indulgence—went on different tactics, and generally (at least so it appeared to Honor) chose the occasions when poor John was not quite himself to “touch him up,” as the good man would himself have said, “on the raw.”

“Well, John, I must say you’ve taken your time,” the old lady, in conformity with this judicious practice, was beginning; but her son, who, as a rule, was accustomed to let his mother “have her fling,” stopped her further speech by an authoritative wave of his hand, while he said in a louder voice than he had ever yet used to Honor (they were comparatively alone, for the gossip had moved away when matters begun to look serious between Mrs. John and the old lady):

“I’ve had a pretty dance, I have, this hour and more. Catch me, that’s all, ever coming to their tomfooleries again! Not I, indeed—no, not even if the Queen upon her throne was to be at the head of ’em!” And, in corroboration of this spirited resolve, John Beacham struck his stout stick into the ground with rather more of the strength of his good right arm than the occasion warranted.

“Why, what’s the matter, John?” Honor said, amused, as any girl of her age might have been at his words and action. “What has anyone done to put you in such a pet?” And, half in reparation of the wrongs, slight though they were, which she was conscious of having done him, she stole her arm through his, and looked up with an air of pretty entreaty into his face.

The sight was gall and wormwood to his mother. To do her justice, she really had talked and thought herself into the belief that Honor—this girl taken, as it pleased her to say, out of charity, and without so much as a “smock” to her back—was behaving undutifully and ungratefully to the husband who had bestowed upon her so many and such unmerited blessings. Her unjust prejudice did not go the length of persuading her that there was anything “really wrong” in her daughter-in-law’s conduct; but that Honor was vain, fond of admiration, and given to the liking of having “men about her,” Mrs. Beacham entertained no doubt. It was high time too that John, who was so ridiculous about Honor, should have a little idea of what she really was. Not that she wished to cause anything of disagreeableness between them. John was married—more was the pity—and he must make the best of it; but it did not follow that something mightn’t be done to put poor John upon his guard, and to show “milady” (the satirical old lady’s ironical petit nom for her daughter-in-law) that she wasn’t going to lead that unsuspecting John altogether by the nose.

“What has been done now, John, to put you in such a pet?” Honor said, little surmising that she had either act or part in her husband’s evident annoyance.

He looked for a moment searchingly into her honest eyes—eyes that had never deceived him yet, and in which he had yet to learn distrust. Something that he read there reassured him, for he softly patted, before he answered her, the hand that rested on his arm.

“It isn’t much that you have to do with it, my dear, I reckon, after all,” he said, drawing a long pouf of satisfaction, after which, for his still further solace, he wiped his hot forehead with his handkerchief. “To tell you the truth, though, I thought at one time you had; and the man is such an unmitigated scamp!”

Honor coloured to the roots of her fair hair at this uncompromising epithet. For a single instant she thought that John was speaking of Arthur Vavasour; and, despite the corroborative evidence of her own ears, a sudden pang of anger against her plain outspoken husband shot through her brain. In another second, however, the current of her ideas was checked; for John continued: “How these fine people can allow such a fellow as Colonel Norcott to come inside their doors passes my understanding! A man that has a way of looking at ’em that no modest woman ought to bear; and then there’s the things he’s known to have done, and the—But I’m not going into all that. Someone told me he was married and going to reform—a thing I won’t believe till I see it; but in the mean time he’s trying it on to scrape acquaintance with me. Sent me a message by Clay’s eldest little chap, to say he should be glad before I left Danescourt to have a few minutes conversation with me—the impudence of the fellow! And yet I’m curious now, bad as I think of him, to know what he can have to say. I wasn’t over civil an hour or two ago to the fellow, so it’s odd, ain’t it, altogether? He never said where he’d be neither, nor where I should be likely to find him; and the odd thing is—and what did put me out till I came to think for certain it wasn’t true—one of the little chaps that I asked if he’d seen the Colonel said that—hang him! you may well look alive, mother—he had been walking about among the trees with Honor there!”

“How absurd!” Honor said. “My dear John, I never set eyes on him after you told me who he was.”

“Yes, indeed, I can answer for that,” put in Mrs. Beacham. “Honor has been better amused, John, by a good deal than in looking after Colonel Norcott.”

“Looking after” and “better amused”—what did it all mean? John was not the most perspicacious of mortals, yet even he could perceive the something in his mother’s speech which meant more than met the ear. After all, what is easier than to stir into a blaze an already well-laid fire? while to “hint a fault, and hesitate dislike,” are means well suited to raise a storm; and is it not too sadly true that in the simplest sounding words, the kindest and least-designing nature can, if his mood he attuned to suspicion, sometimes read a volume?

Intensely as John Beacham admired his wife’s beauty, he had, somewhat strange to say, been awake for the first time that day to a sense of its effect on others. His wrath—the natural wrath of a man and a husband—had been grievously stirred within him at the sight of Fred Norcott’s bold stare into Honor’s modest eyes. He had noted the crimson flush that made her look so passing lovely, and feared—not without good cause—that the hardened profligate, who had never had the grace to hide under a bushel his solitary talent (the truly Mephistophelian one of beguiling fond and foolish women to their own destruction), would discover in Honor’s rising colour only another proof, if proof were wanting, of his own irresistible power to fascinate. At that moment—so unjust does personal annoyance often render even the best amongst us—John felt half angry with his wife for this additional proof, had proof been wanting, of a delicacy and reserve which repelled with indignation the coarse incense offered for her acceptance. It certainly was wrong on John’s part; but then you must remember that he was not a fashionable husband—was, in fact, only a clod, as Colonel Norcott’s might have said; and being only a clod, he may be excused for holding certain anti-Mormon and old-world ideas. For instance, this stupid, selfish fellow, entertaining the barbaric notion of keeping his wife’s beauty for his own delectation, would, I fear, have strongly objected to seeing that well-conducted young woman join in the “voluptuous waltz”—

while the faintest suspicion that, even in a dream (an involuntary indiscretion suggested by the example of the upper ten thousand), wife of his might be capable of putting in an appearance at opera or ball in the dress à la mode, which, for want of a proper name, we will call costume de Paradis, would have taken away honest John’s breath to entertain. An exhibition des beaux arts, in the shape of his fair young wife’s bust and shoulders, for the benefit of amateurs, would have been simply shameful in the eyes of that unsophisticated horse-breeder; and this being the good man’s turn of mind, it was with something of irritated jealousy that he took up his mother’s words, inquiring of her thus by implication what Honor had been about.

“Looking after Colonel Norcott! I don’t understand what you can mean, mother; I—”

But before he could proceed any further in his inquiries, he was interrupted by a slight tap on the shoulder, and by the voice of the man whose name he had just uttered, whispering in his ear:

“I am glad to have found you at last, Mr. Beacham; and I shall be glad if you will step this way, and allow me the favour of a few minutes’ conversation.”

The words in themselves were courteous enough—too courteous, perhaps, as spoken to one whom Colonel Norcott believed to be his inferior. There was condescension mingled with their graciousness; and John, despising as he did from the bottom of his heart the man who uttered them, followed very unwillingly, and with a tolerably ungracious air, this agreeable profligate to a short distance under the branching trees.