Volume 2 — CHAPTER IX. HONOR FINDS A NEW RELATION.

“Come now, take an egg, and don’t be foolish. They’re not like the Paddocks eggs, to be sure, but you may as well taste a bit—or a slice of ham. John, give Honor a slice of ham—terrible stripy it looks, to be sure, but what can you expect when one is that foolish as to go away from home in this sort of nonsensical way?”

Honor, looking very pale, and with her eyes heavy with weeping, was sitting behind the big bronze tea-urn—an article of furniture coeval, doubtless, with the building of the Bell—and with a trembling hand was performing her accustomed duty of making tea for the family. John had good-naturedly offered to take the affair upon himself, but Mrs. Beacham had at once vetoed the idea.

“Such stuff and nonsense!” she said; “as if making tea had ever been known in this world to do anybody harm! And a man, too, to set about doing such things! No, no. Take my word for it,” the energetic old woman went on to say, “there’s nothing like having something to do for keeping the spirits up, and you’ll see, John, if you don’t make a noodle of Honor, she’ll be herself again in half the time.”

But though the old lady did thus throw cold water on John’s simple plans for his wife’s comfort, she did nevertheless, in her own way and to a certain extent, feel for the girl, whose only relation (and Mrs. Beacham entertained very strong old-fashioned prejudices on the score of consanguinity) was in such deadly peril, and that through her own husband’s hands. If John had not been so very tender over Honor, her mother-in-law would have almost felt inclined, so piteous was the sight of her delicate white face, to, in her fashion, pet and sympathise with the “poor thing,” reminding her that “misfortunes will happen;” that “we are none of us, if we did but know it, more to be pitied than our neighbours;” that it would “all be the same a hundred years hence;” and, in short, recalling to the sufferer’s recollection all the various and stereotyped phrases of consolation which well-intentioned people are apt to din into the unwilling ears of the afflicted.

“You will try an egg, my dear” (the use of this term of endearment was going great lengths for Mrs. Beacham), “and endeavour to make the best of things. It’s a sad thing, as I have known myself, to lose a father; but a father”—and here the excellent woman filled her mouth with the much-vituperated ham—“a father that one has never seen but once ain’t the same thing, in my opinion, as a father that has been a father, and has done his duty by one as a father should.”

“But, mother,” interposed John, “there is no use in telling Honor that.”

“Tut, tut, my dear, you just let me speak. You’re not more fit to manage a wife than you are a baby, but it’s never too late to learn; and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll just order the chaise-cart directly breakfast’s over (such a breakfast as it is too! but I’ll warrant, such as it is, they’ll make us pay dear enough for it); and then, stopping for nothing and nobody, we’ll drive back to the Paddocks.”

John shook his head at this wise proposal. “You can go back yourself, mother, and I think, too, that you’d better take Honor along with you; but it won’t do for me to be out of the way, even if I could bear myself (which to own the truth I could not) to be out of the way of hearing about the Colonel.”

Honor, on hearing John’s proposal, looked at him imploringly over the Britannia-metal teapot. To her also it would be a sore aggravation to leave the place where her father lay between life and death. That his days were endangered, Dr. Kempshall had now openly said. The blow he had received was a very severe one, and there had been considerable injury to the bone, but the immediate cause for apprehension lay in the inflammatory condition of the patient’s blood. The weather was intensely hot, and Colonel Norcott had been indulging, though not to excess, yet a little more freely than was advisable under the circumstances, in the good things provided for the company in the gentlemen’s tent, where Mr. Arthur Vavasour’s health had been drunk with a good deal of enthusiasm by his numerous friends. On the majority, whose heads had not been subsequently broken, the trifling excess had produced no unpleasant consequences. But Colonel Norcott was unfortunately the exception to the rule; his blood had been terribly heated; and inflammation of the brain, and even erysipelas, might too probably be the result of his indiscretion.

“Don’t say that I am to go, John, please,” said Honor, the ready tears springing to her eyes, and in a voice that went straight to John’s heart. His mother, however, was inexorable.

“Now, Honor, I won’t have you foolish. If John is to stay, which I must own I think a great piece of extravagance and folly, there’s no reason why you should remain, to be a trouble and an expense to him. And, John, the more I think of it, the more I can’t understand what risks you are likely to run in the matter. You were quite alone, you two, you say, and after what Colonel Norcott said—”

“Mother,” broke in John a little impatiently, “what he said, poor fellow, has nothing, or next to nothing, to do with it. If the worst comes to the worst,” he added in a lower tone, and very gravely, “I shall be questioned; and then I shall, as a matter of course, tell the whole truth from beginning to end.”

For the first time, on hearing this expression of her husband’s resolution, the idea of danger to him flashed across her mind; and with it a sudden pang of self-reproach curdled her blood painfully. Rising from her chair, she laid her hand gently on his shoulder. She knew, felt also, how good and true he was, and at that moment he seemed of more value to her than a hundred fathers.

“O, John,” she said, “dear John! they couldn’t hurt you for it! That would be worse than everything;” and overcome by vague visions of imprisonment, transportation, and even (for she was very young and ignorant) of death, she burst into a passion of tears, and lay with her fair head on John’s broad breast, sobbing like a child.

He soothed her as best he could, stroking her glossy golden hair with a touch tender as a woman’s. There was little to fear for him, he said; there was no malice on his part, no intention, that would be easily proved, to kill. At the worst it would be “manslaughter,” and, he thought, probably no punishment. No punishment—ah, poor John!—save that of the gnawing worm within which never dies, and the torturing fire that not rivers of remorseful tears can quench!

But for all John’s love and pity for Honor, and both were very great, he could not be brought to say that it was in any respect advisable that Honor should remain at Gawthorpe. The telegraph, he argued, both could and should bring her constant intelligence of Colonel Norcott’s condition, and in the mean time she (a point on which John was more anxious than he allowed to appear) would be secure from public observation, and from the remarks, ill-natured or otherwise, of the curious. The idea that his wife’s close relationship to the man lying in danger of death so very near to them might by some possibility transpire was very painful to the former. In that relationship he saw nothing but disgrace both to Honor and to himself, and he was, therefore, almost morbidly desirous of removing her from the spot where at any moment observation might be turned towards her, and she might be spoken of, ex hypothesi at least, if not openly and decidedly, as the illegitimate daughter of a gambler and a reprobate.

That there were reasons which John could not well bring to bear on his wife’s powers of comprehension, the reader will readily understand. Setting aside the fact that he was not the man to throw a stone at his prostrate enemy, there was the wholesome old-fashioned faith in the divine right of parents to be set aside; a faith in which John Beacham, and his fathers before him, had been born and bred. Disowned and deserted—unrecognised as well by the laws of the land as by the man to whom she owed her birth, owing him nothing save the inheritance of shame—John would yet have shrunk, now that excitement had subsided and his blood was cooled, from saying aught to Honor that could lessen either her respect or her newly-born affection for her father.

“It’s only natural, my dear,” he said, “that you should be uneasy; and it isn’t for me to say ‘do this,’ or ‘don’t do it.’ Hush, mother, please; it’s a trying time for Honor, and—”

But before he could descant further—either on the nature of, or the palliations for, his young wife’s trials—a loud tap was heard at the door, a tap which was immediately followed up by the intrusion of a waiter’s head, the said waiter being the bearer, as speedily became apparent, of a note.

“From Mrs. Baker, sir,” the man said, presenting it to Mr. Beacham on a japanned waiter, “and the favour of an answer is requested.”

It was a small unportentous-looking missive, directed in an uncertain feminine hand. Yet John opened it with strong forebodings of evil, forebodings which were to a certain extent justified, since the writer—one of the gentlest and most charitable, by the way, of Christian matrons—imparted to him, in a few agitated lines, the fact that her son, believing himself to be lying on his bed of death, had disclosed to her one of the heaviest of his past offences against his God, and had declared himself to be the penitent father of John Beacham’s wife.

“The most earnest wish of my poor guilty son,” wrote the unhappy mother, “appears to be that he may see again the child whom he has so long neglected and forsaken. May God forgive me if I am doing wrong in urging you to grant this prayer. At the eleventh hour there was forgiveness for even one of the worst of sinners. May I not hope that, as a sign and hope of that forgiveness, you may be led to grant the prayer not only of my son, but of one whom the judgments of God have followed all the days of her life.”

John laid down the letter with something very like despair tugging at his heartstrings. The worst that he had, as regarded Honor, ventured to anticipate, had come to pass. To refuse the entreaty of the aged lady, so soon perhaps, by his act and deed, to be bereaved of her only son, was simply impossible, but that prayer granted, and Honor permitted to take her place by her father’s dying pillow, all hope of concealing the terrible secret—which John would have willingly given all that he possessed to hide—was at an end.

With a heavy heart he made the contents of the missive known to his womankind.

“You see, Honey,” he said, as his wife’s eyes glanced, almost without taking in their sense, over the hurriedly-written lines, “you see, Honey, we might have saved ourselves all this bother. Here’s Mrs. Baker, poor soul, knows all about it, and wants to see you, child. It isn’t what I should have wished; but what is to be must be; and so I suppose I must just send word that you’ll wait on Mrs. Baker in the room she has to sit in. Ah me, it’s a great change! And who’d a thought, when we left home only so late as yesterday, that such things would come about!”

The revolution that was taking place seemed indeed a startling one to that quiet stay-at-home family. To Honor, now that her vague wishes seemed on the point of being gratified, now that she was not to return to her tranquil home at the Paddocks, but, instead, was to be suddenly thrown into the presence and society of strangers, the variety in her life did not appear in quite so attractive a light as she had anticipated. She knew nothing whatever of Mrs. Baker; nothing, that is to say, beyond the fact that she was old, religious, and a lady; none of which qualities tended, it must be confessed, to render the prospect of the approaching, and now not to be evaded, meeting particularly agreeable in Honor’s sight. To make matters worse, Mrs. Beacham—her short-lived compassion for her daughter-in-law being brought to a sudden conclusion—took it into her head to be more than usually jealous and hard to manage on the occasion. Now that Honor was about to be “taken up,” as the cantankerous old lady phrased it, “by the grandees,” all the milk of human kindness in Mrs. Beacham’s breast seemed turned to gall; and very short and snappish were the only replies that either her son or Honor could extract from her.

“Well, mother,” John said, with a poor attempt at sportiveness, “here we are together again!” He had just returned from leaving his agitated wife at the door of Mrs. Baker’s sitting-room; and—it was morbid, foolish, perhaps, on his part—he could not wholly divest himself of a very miserable, but quite undefinable, sensation that the curtain had fallen on the first act of his married life, and that the happiest portion of it was at an end for ever.

Leaving him to bear as best he could both his own sorrowful reflections and the perpetual nagging of the old lady, one of whose weaknesses it was never to endure patiently what she in her jealous susceptibility denominated being “kept out” of what was going on, we will follow Honor to her interview with Colonel Norcott’s long-suffering mother. Mrs. Baker was one of those women—and they are not a few—who seem from their earliest girlhood marked out for suffering. Her home-life—owing to circumstances needless here to mention—had been so wearying and unendurable, that she had at eighteen married a man for whom she entertained no stronger feeling than an absence of dislike. Mr. Norcott, who, as we already know, was a country squire of good estate, had endeared himself to her by his sterling qualities, and by his unfailing affection for herself. During his lifetime they were, however, rendered for many years unhappy by the illness and deaths of five children successively born to them. In early infancy the little Norcotts were much, as other beings of their age, subject to occasional illnesses, but not apparently deficient in vigour and stamina. To what the mysterious ailment was owing that, one after the other, as they attained the age of twelve or thereabouts, cut off those till then seemingly healthy children, and condemned them to an early tomb, the doctors found it hard to say. It had been very hard to see them die; very, very grievous to watch the fading of the healthy colour, the weakening of the vigorous limbs, the slow and stealthy, but too sure, advance of death. As each of her beloved ones was removed from the little place that it had filled on earth to a happier home above, Mrs. Norcott—weeping as one that would not be comforted—had complained in bitterness of spirit that there was no sorrow like unto her sorrow, and that the burden that had been laid upon her was greater than she could bear. And yet she lived through it—lived through it to the wonder of those who, not having so suffered, are ignorant how much the human heart can endure, and yet exist—lived also to confess, in the solitude of her own chamber, where no eye but God’s could look into her heart, that death was not the bitterest of mortal woes; for that a wounded spirit—a spirit crushed by a sense of shame, and bowed down by the burden of a loved one’s sin—is of all earthly evils the most difficult of endurance.

Mrs. Norcott had been five years a widow, and her only surviving child was eighteen when she decided—chiefly that he might have the advantage of a stepfather’s counsel and control—to marry again. The step, unfortunately, did not prove a successful one. Frederick Norcott from the first “set himself,” as the nurses say, against his medicine; and Mr. Baker—a sensible, unassuming, but quietly proud man—did not persevere in the up-hill work imposed upon him. Happily Mrs. Baker’s jointure, with the addition of the small but comfortable patrimony, on the strength of which the retired solicitor had ventured on aspiring to the hand of the still handsome Mrs. Norcott, were safe from the all-devouring maw of her reckless and selfish son. To what extent he had in secret, and without even the knowledge of her less-easy-to-be-persuaded husband, mulcted the anxious woman of her little-prized gold, no one but the greedy spendthrift and his unselfish parent could have told. For years, whether at home or abroad, in the army or out of it, in youth and in middle-age, this only son of one of the best of women had never ceased being to her a source of trouble and of trial. Her most peaceful days concerning him had been those which had elapsed since his marriage, since for more than twelve months there had been no call upon her purse, no appeal to her motherly sympathy for distresses which she had at last begun to believe were frequently fictitious. On Fred’s return to England, which event occurred about a year before his introduction to the reader, Mrs. Baker had made, with some satisfaction, the acquaintance of her son’s wife. The colonial so-called heiress, was a fade, sentimental, well-meaning woman; very much inclined to worship the husband who in birth and breeding was so greatly her superior, and little disposed to regret the loss through advancing years of such small claims to beauty as nature had endowed her with.

Colonel Norcott’s first visit (since his return) to his stepfather’s house had not been hailed with much satisfaction by that gentleman. Mr. Baker’s habits, despite his twenty-seven years or so of married life, were decidedly those of an old bachelor; his hours for meals and family prayers, his times for rising up and lying down, were fixed and immutable; and the erratic proceedings of his stepson, though they were not allowed to actually interfere with those arrangements, did decidedly prevent their being carried through with that staid decorum which was so precious in the sight of the ci-devant solicitor. The principles too, or rather the lack of principles, evidenced by the gallant Colonel were very obnoxious to Mr. Baker. He was a man utterly without toleration for the weaknesses of others; and, the power of self-command being inherent in his own nature, he could not understand that power being either impossible or even difficult of attainment in others. To do right was so entirely his intention, that he was misled by that very sincerity of desire into the belief that he was doing right. His leanings were also so completely towards the proper behaved and virtuous, that, while he would have been a pattern stepfather to a prudent, sensible young man, “who needed no repentance,” he turned with feelings of absolute dislike and repulsion from the sinner whom a more forbearing, or rather a more judiciously controlling, course of conduct might possibly have assisted in turning from the error of his ways.

The intelligence that Colonel Norcott had met with an accident that would probably end fatally flew on the wings of rumour to Lingfield Cottage, preceding by half an hour, at the least, the judicious message sent by kind-hearted Lady Guernsey to the mother of the injured man. Mrs. Baker, notwithstanding her many trials, was still for her age, which was under seventy, an active and a healthy woman. Habit had likewise, to a certain degree, hardened her to suffering; and moreover, that unlucky Fred—who, as a pretty blue-eyed boy, used to keep “her heart in her mouth,” to use a simple mother’s phrase, with his daring tricks and perilous escapades—was probably not quite so dear to her, when a hardened, battered roué of forty-five, as he had been in his days of comparative, but still highly troublesome, innocence.

There was of course no choice, as even Mr. Baker was obliged to allow, but to go at once to Gawthorpe. It was intensely annoying, and that he was seriously displeased was made manifest by Mr. Baker, after the fashion of gentlemen of his stamp and principles. It was an opportunity, however, to make his light—the light of a self-denying, right-minded, God-fearing man—shine before the world; the world, that is, of his well-ordered home; the home where Godfrey Baker, Esq., whilom of New-square, Lincoln’s-Inn, and now churchwarden of the parish of Bigglesworth, and one of its most respected and influential inhabitants, reigned in calm and undisputed authority.

“A most unpleasant and troublesome affair indeed,” remarked Mr. Baker, as, with his sorrowing wife seated beside him in their little pony-carriage, he drove with an air of especial dignity through the well-painted iron gates that guarded his trim, citizen, box-like “front garden” from the incursions of the profane.

“A most unpleasant and troublesome affair, but one for which I cannot say that I at least was not prepared. A disreputable life is very likely—ve-ry likely, indeed—as I have often noticed, to end in a violent death, and—”

“But, Mr. Baker,” began the unhappy mother, whose affection for her only child no amount of misconduct on his part had ever been able to succeed in effectually alienating; “but, Mr. Baker, there is no reason yet, thank God! to imagine that anything—anything dreadful—has happened to Frederick. Lady Guernsey mentioned an accident—a fall—an injury to the head; but nothing serious, at least nothing to make one fear that—”

“One should always fear the worst, my dear Mary, when the person so situated has led the life, and tempted Providence to the extent, that Colonel Norcott has. I do not wish to be severe, and, above all, I do not desire at such a time to aggravate your sufferings; but Frederick Norcott has—as we all unfortunately know—been a thoroughly bad man. God grant that, even at the eleventh hour, he may be brought to a sense of his misconduct, and may repent, before it is too late, of his many and grievous sins!”

He whipped the pony up vigorously after this conventional prayer; suggestive strokes they were, as though to imply that, according to his belief, a good and efficient scourging would be aptly bestowed on the recreant body of his guilty son-in-law. Mrs. Baker, to whom prayers for her erring son—heartfelt and sincere—had been familiar from the hour when the reprobate Fred first began to break the laws both of God and man, sat very still and silent by the side of her respected helpmate. She had nothing—could have nothing—to say for Fred; and, moreover, her spirit was terribly sore and sad within her at the thought of his sickness and his danger. Sickness to which he was so unused; danger which he was so ill-prepared to meet.

At last—the way seemed a long one, and the pony, always slow and measured in his movements, appeared more than usually addicted to his besetting sin of taking his own time upon the road—at last the houses of Gawthorpe came in sight, the High-street was gained, and the Bell Inn, a flat-faced red-bricked building of imposing dimensions, rose up before the elderly pair of anxious and troubled visitors, in all the busy dulness of a county town’s best inn.

It was long past eight o’clock—a soft sweet summer’s evening—the daylight fading gradually away, and the sounds of active life dying on the ear as the solemn shades of night crept slowly onward. There were but few persons in the street, or crowding (as they had done an hour before) round the entrance of the hotel. For the present, at least, there seemed nothing new to learn concerning the great and absorbing topic of the day—namely, the mysterious “accident” which had happened to Colonel Frederick Norcott. The public—that very curious as well as impertinent many-headed monster—had already begun to put forth certain likely as well as unlikely surmises on the occasion; and in those surmises, had not the owner of Updown Paddocks been the respected John Beacham that he was, he would probably have played a somewhat conspicuous part. There were not a few (their remarks, however, as not likely to be received in good part, were made sotto voce) who considered it as a suggestive circumstance that Mr. John Beacham, though the first to give the alarm, had never either to man, woman or child—so far at least as was generally known—mentioned any particulars of the accident; or, which was still more remarkable, seeing that the said John was very far from being of an uncommunicative temperament, had he given utterance to any surmises, any suggestive hints, which might have guided the gossip-lovers to a discovery of the truth. For a long period—a period lengthened into hours through the undisguised curiosity of the neighbourhood—the avenues to the hotel were thronged with persons desirous of learning something “authentic” before their return to the quiet of their respective homes. That there did remain behind something more to learn, everyone seemed instinctively to feel; and the few persevering ones that still lingered round the hotel-doors would probably have felt amply rewarded for their pains could they have stood behind the dingy curtain of the big inn-bed, and overheard a long and whispered converse which the object of their curiosity, pale, excited, and contrary to the orders of Dr. Kempshall, held soon after her arrival with his distressed and agitated mother. In that interview—moved thereto chiefly by an unaccountable desire (the offspring, probably, of a fevered imagination) to see by his bedside the daughter of one whom for a brief season he had passionately loved—Frederick Norcott revealed to his long-enduring parent the sad episode of his life, which, by so exciting the wrath of John Beacham of Updown Paddocks, had led to the calamitous blow from the effects of which he (the delinquent) was now suffering. How far the guilty man was justified in believing that his mother’s tender charity to sinners—a charity born of Christian humility—would cause her to view not only his fault, but the innocent victim of another’s sin, with eyes of compassion rather than those of severity and wrath, the following chapter will tend to make apparent.