Volume 3 — CHAPTER XVI. OUT AT SEA.

The sun rose bright and cloudless on the day following Honor’s return; and John Beacham, whose hands were, as usual, brimful of business, and who moreover had decided, after a short consultation with himself, that his womankind were more likely to come to a good understanding without him, betook himself, immediately after breakfast, to the hay-fields, which were ripe for the scythe, and only waited the master’s fiat to lie in promising swaths upon the rich meadow-land which called John Beacham owner.

Honor saw him depart with a weary sigh. The prospect of a lengthened tête-à-tête with the stern old lady, whose brow never relaxed for a passing moment from its rigidity, and who had not even vouchsafed a distant “good-morning” in answer to her civil greeting, was a penance which it almost made her blood run cold to think of. Her own courage—the temporary boldness which was the offspring of hurt feeling and great but temporary excitement—had oozed out either at the ends of her taper fingers, or with the tears with which she had watered her morning pillow. When she found herself alone with her dreaded foe, poor Honor had not—as the saying goes—a word to throw at a dog; she was in the mood to cry her eyes out, and in the temper to long earnestly for pity and tenderness. One kind and encouraging word, one look even of sympathy, would have brought the poor thing on her knees before her natural enemy, and all might have been well between the pair whom God had joined together in bonds that nought save sin could sever.

For three days—three miserable days—during which John, engrossed by business cares, and hoping, as sanguine men in spite of appearances will, that all would come right at last, appeared to take no notice of the silence only broken by sarcastic speeches, and by the “talking at” (which to some women is a positive accomplishment) on his mother’s part, which reigned between her and Honor—during those three miserable days, the seeds destined to produce very bitter fruit were being sown with terrible certainty in Honor Beacham’s breast. She was the last woman in the world to endure without evil consequences the description of torture to which she was being subjected. Fond of popularity—eager to be loved—impulsive—passionate if you will, this girl, who could only be what she called angry for a passing moment, would, for anyone who, to use her own expression, have been “kind to her,” have been the most docile and tenderest of friends and dependents.

But unfortunately—most unfortunately, as the sequel will prove—it was not in Mrs. Beacham’s nature to forgive. She believed herself to be a Christian; she thought, so little did she know her own feelings, that she harboured neither malice nor hatred in her heart, but all the while there was scarcely a harder (and certainly there could scarcely be a harder seeming) idiosyncrasy than that which was owned by this soi-disant believer in the Christian faith. Mercy for Honor—pity for the wicked wife who had shown herself so false and flighty—she had none. The pale delicate face, bending over her woman’s-work, appealed to this unrelenting woman’s heart in vain. The days—even supposing them ever to have existed—when Mrs. Beacham knew what temptation was, had long since passed away, and were forgotten; all she remembered was that she had through all her married life been blameless, industrious, and submissive, and that these virtues endowed her with the right to be the judge and condemner of others was neither to be removed nor shaken. Poor Honor, poor little impressionable, impulsive girl! Her spirits felt very heavy, and her heart beat with almost painful quickness when, on the fourth morning after her compulsory return, Mrs. Beacham brought her work (it was her first time of doing so) and established herself alarmingly near to the broad old-fashioned window-seat, Honor’s favorite and accustomed working-place. Dragging after her the big sheet on which she was about to perform the housewifely operation of “turning,” her tortoiseshell spectacles fixed on her keen hawklike nose, John’s mother did indeed appear in the light of a terrible object to her timid and easily-subdued daughter-in-law. Honor did not possess (and well she knew her weakness) the courage requisite for self-defence; and during the short period of silence which followed on Mrs. Beacham’s establishment of herself in front of her own special little work-table, Honor, had she dared, would gladly have taken flight, and betaking herself to her room, have there waited in silence and solitude for her husband’s return. But to make this move required an amount of hardihood of which poor Honor was utterly incapable. She felt entirely subdued—oppressed beyond the power of description, by the very presence of her mother-in-law. Whatever resolutions—whatever plans of resistance she might have formed whilst alone, or in the presence only of her husband, faded away entirely when those light-gray, aged, but still penetrating eyes were fixed upon her, and when she knew with the intuition of fear that Mrs. Beacham was about to give her what is vulgarly called a “piece of her mind.”

The dreaded exordium began after this fashion:

“When you was a child, Mrs. John,” the old lady said, pushing up her spectacles and peering at Honor through her half-closed eyelids—“when you was a child, did you get any Bible learning? and was anybody good enough to teach you your catechism?”

“They were,” Honor replied, opening her large blue eyes in wonder, and using, to the old lady’s disgust, the peculiar Irish form of assent which, singularly enough, seemed indigenous in this girl who had had so little experience of her fatherland—“they were;” and then she stopped, poor child, marvelling greatly to what these singular opening questions were about to lead.

“Well, then,” continued Mrs. Beacham, spreading out two bony hands in simulated horror, “all I can say is, that I can see no excuse for you. If, besides being what I won’t defile my lips by naming, you had been turned out into the streets, as many of them creatures are, without eddication, and without knowing how to read your Bible, I might have, and so might John have, passed over something; but when a gell has been taught her dooty, and, more than that, when a gentleman as is respectable is good enough to make an honest woman of her, all I can say is, that when she can behave as you have done, when she can lie and deceive, and act light with other men, why she ought—and there ain’t a decent person that wouldn’t say as much—she ought to be ashamed of herself!”

To this coarse attack Honor vouchsafed no reply. The violence of invective employed by the determined old woman positively stunned her. The only feeling of which she was at all conscious was one of anger, of anger stirred up by grievous words in as gentle a breast as ever belonged to woman. The silence with which her words were received was very irritating to the speaker. She had looked forward, with very considerable satisfaction, to the moment when she should overwhelm her recreant daughter-in-law with a fire of well-merited reproaches; and now, to her infinite annoyance, her shots seemed to miss fire, and not a single one was returned as a proof that the volley had in any way been felt by the enemy.

“If anyone had told me,” the old lady went on to say, speaking very calmly and deliberately now, and as if determined that every word should tell—“if anyone had told me, fifteen months ago, that my son’s wife would bring his family—my family, that is to say, that has lived respectable time out of mind—to disgrace, I wouldn’t, no, I wouldn’t have believed it! It’s the first time (though I say it, as perhaps shouldn’t) that a Turton or a Beacham has numbered such a one as you among them; and I never thought to live to see the day when folks could point at one as bears my name, and even her to a wanton!”

The word was out at last, the ugly shocking word that struck through Honor’s brain like a knife, and which, when it had passed the lips that spoke it, the irritated woman, when it was too late, possibly wished unsaid. In very truth, there was something startling in the sight of Honor’s livid face and flashing eyes, something almost painful even to the unsympathising witness of her agony in the change which a few outspoken syllables had wrought in that young girl’s countenance.

Rising suddenly from her chair, tossing aside with reckless hand the woman’s-work with which she had been occupied, her pretty taper fingers pressed against her throat (for there was a tightening there that felt like suffocation), Honor Beacham stood erect before her stepmother.

“You are wicked!” she stammered forth. “A wicked, cruel woman! John would not have used me so—John knows I do not deserve such words. I will go to him—to my husband—I will—”

“You will do nothing of the kind. If you do not know your duty, I must teach it to you,” almost shrieked the passionate old woman, losing all command over herself, as the idea of Honor’s appealing to John against his mother presented itself to her mind. “You think, do you, that John—that my son is going to indulge you in all your good-for-nothing ways? Why, girl, he said to me himself that it was high time something was done to bring milady to her senses; he said—”

But Honor—nervous, excited, and scarcely mistress of her actions—waited to hear no more. With a cry like that of a hare hard pressed by the hounds, she rushed from the room, leaving the startled old woman to ponder with some trepidation on the mischief she had wrought. Long, and not very comfortably, did she think over her words; but after a considerable amount of putting two and two together, and no little leaning towards herself as an oracle to be respected, the balance of opinion being on the whole decidedly in favour of her own proceedings, Mrs. Beacham arrived at the conclusion that she was fully justified in speaking as she had done to the erring Honor. Judging that strong-minded woman according to the average truthfulness of her sex, John’s respected parent could not, on the whole, be accused, while quoting John’s indignant words, of the sin of mendacity. According to the letter of those words, she was justified in repeating as a fact her son’s awful threat—the one which more than any other of her angry vituperations had told upon Honor’s feelings—the threat, namely, that her husband would, instigated thereto by his mother, bring his pretty young wife “to her senses.”

There was something very vague and terrible in this menace; and Honor, after locking the door of the pretty bedroom which John, little more than one short year before, had taken such pleasure in making ready for his darling, brooded over them with a sick heart and miserably. She was utterly in the dark, as I have already and more than once endeavoured to explain, regarding her husband’s character generally, and his feelings towards herself in particular. Could anyone at that particular moment—when she was brooding over her wrongs—over her husband’s coldness of heart and heat of temper; over his cruelty in delivering her over to the tormentor, id est, the mother who bore him, and her own misery in being condemned to live en tiers with two people who disliked and despised her—had anyone, I repeat, at that especial moment whispered in Honor Beacham’s ear that John the in-compris possessed in reality the very tenderest of hearts; that his apparent coldness towards herself was the result of a keen sense of personal and educational inferiority; and that a few sweet smiles on her dear lips, and a few kind loving words whispered in his ear, would make poor John not only the happiest, but the most demonstrative of husbands, Honor would simply have told that well-intentioned comforter that he knew not what he said, and, turning on her restless pillow, would have sternly refused to credit the fact that she was otherwise than a victim.

I fear me much that the behaviour of Honor at this crisis of her life will find few to excuse it; and yet to the thinking of the lenient there will be found some plausible reasons for her folly. In the first place, she was both mentally and bodily out of health. Of neither truths, patent though they were, had she any real or wholesome suspicion. She was too young, too ignorant of cause and effect, to be aware that the life she had been leading had thrown her into a mental fever, the which, seeing that it was a malady of weakness, required the nicest care and the most judicious of treatments in order to effect its cure. Neither could she give a name to the malaise, showing itself in languor, in nervous headaches, and in occasional heart-palpitations; all of which, with the carelessness so common to the young, she had hitherto allowed to pass unnoticed. That she was in no frame, either of mind or body, to do battle successfully against the violence of her own feelings and forebodings is very certain; and as certain is it that, though she did not yet what is called love the man who had conspired so selfishly against her peace, the image and the memory of Arthur Vavasour formed no small portion of her troubled thoughts, as she lay sobbing on her bed, and repeating to herself that she could not, would not bear the lot that lay before her.

“To the old,” as someone—I know not who—has truthfully said, “sorrow is sorrow, while to the young it is despair.” Despair at least as they to whom sorrow is new count the extreme of human suffering. The smallest insect, as the inspired poet tells us, “feels a pang as great as when a giant dies;” and Honor, frail little vessel as she was, could, she believed, endure no heavier or more wearing woe than that of submitting in her fresh young beauty—the beauty that Arthur Vavasour worshipped—to the tyranny of her mother-in-law, and the cold displeasure of a husband who loved her not.

As she dwelt—with the pleasure which under twenty is so often felt in the indulgence of a mournful self-pity—on her unmitigated woes, the idea, once before entertained, and never wholly forgotten, of finding a home for herself—of working for her bread—of escaping from the tyranny, the evil-speaking, the taunts and evil suspicions of her mother-in-law, flashed through her mind. At first, with something very like a shock—for to Honor the leaving of her husband’s house and home appeared (distinction without a difference though it was) a far more adventurous and desperate act than that which she had before, with tolerable calmness, contemplated—the act, that is to say, of separating herself whilst under her father’s roof from the husband who, in her opinion, neither loved, appreciated, nor understood her; from the man who could see her wronged, insulted, and put upon by the hard-tempered old woman, who, from the hour of her introduction to Updown Paddocks, had never ceased to make Honor’s life a misery and a burden to her;—the act and deed of remaining hidden in some obscure London lodging, had, as I said before, seemed simple and easy enough to the young wife when, encouraged and buoyed-up by the devoted attentions of Arthur Vavasour, she vaguely contemplated a future in which Mrs. Beacham had no share, but which was to be cheered by the unfailing friendship (Honor knew so little of men’s nature that she had faith in constancy, and dreamed of friendship as a delicious possibility) of her kind and disinterested adviser. But the prospect before her was a trifle changed by the point of view from which she now contemplated it; and far greater courage and strength of mind seemed required to induce her to leave her husband’s home than had been needed to enable her to stay away from it. As her fever of passion cooled, so did the power within her to take a step so decided and so desperate fade away likewise. Honor’s nature was naturally an indolent one—indolent and yielding. Should she be led, by the force of her own rebellious temper, to do that which would blight her name and ruin her hopes of future happiness, the guilt of that act would lie—as such guilts so often do—more at the door of another than at her own. Already the quiet tears of self-pity and womanly submission were taking the place of hysterical sobs and passionate ejaculations; already she was subsiding into the dull calm which is the natural consequence of over-excitement, when the voice, harsh-sounding and dreaded, of the domestic tyrant—whose will had grown to be law, and whose ways were not as the ways of her young daughter-in-law—smote suddenly on Honor’s sensitive ear, and awoke again within her the evil spirit of resistance. Mrs. Beacham was only, at that unlucky moment, in the exercise of her right; she was but scolding the girl-of-all-work, the female “odd boy” of the establishment, for some trifling neglect of her multifarious duties; but the evil done by that loud high-pitched voice was as surely effected, and its baneful influence on the listener’s mind was as great and fatal, as though the most inexcusable deed of injustice and cruelty had been then and there by John’s hasty-tempered parent committed. Rising in a sitting posture on her bed, Honor, with shaking fingers, pushed the hair back from her aching forehead, and repeating to herself more than once, as if in excuse for her premeditated sin, that she could not, could not bear her life at Updown, she slowly slid down her feet upon the floor, and (half mechanically at first) commenced her preparations for departure. For departure? Yes; but to what place, and with what ulterior end, she knew not. All she cared for was escape—escape from the sight and sound of the woman who had always hated her, and who, as Honor firmly believed, had begun to undermine her husband’s love and trust, and would eventually succeed in turning his heart against her. To live any longer under the same roof with one who had accused her of the vilest sin—who had reproached her in the coarsest terms, for acts of which she was utterly incapable—was, as Honor kept repeating to herself, more than she could endure. More unhappy, the foolish child believed she could not be. It might be hard, trying at first, and humiliating, to work as a servant, or in other ways, for her bread; but anything, to her then thinking, was better than her present life; and Arthur Vavasour—(it is to be feared that, innocent though in truth she was, that young gentleman played rather a conspicuous part in the programme of her future plans)—Arthur Vavasour would be ever at hand to aid, advise, and encourage her. On one subject only did Honor from the first, and wholly without reservation, make up her disturbed and rather bewildered mind. She would not, under any circumstances, take refuge under her father’s roof. That John would immediately commence the strictest search to discover her whereabouts Honor was well assured, and therefore it was above all things necessary for the preservation of her secret, that in Stanwick-street they should know positively nothing of her proceedings.

The only individual—alas, for this poor silly girl—this frail, weak vessel about to put to sea without a pilot, and with no chart or compass to guide it on its way—the only individual to whom the mystery of her setting sail on her adventurous cruise was to be no mystery, was the last person in the world to whom she should have confided the secrets of her life. To Arthur Vavasour—to the man whose “brotherly” kindness (he had been very cautious in his love-making of late, and Honor had in consequence grown proportionally off her guard)—to Arthur Vavasour only would she at once apply in this emergency for counsel and support. From him, she was well assured, she would never fail to meet with gentleness and respect. When she looked back upon his deferential manner—on his unceasing kindness, as Honor in her simplicity considered it—above all, when she compared that kindness and that deference with the aggressive treatment which from John’s unendurable parent had so greatly angered her, and also with the absence, for reasons which she knew not, of demonstrative affection from her husband—it is scarcely matter for surprise that Honor Beacham should have loved and cherished the man who gave to her—such was her woman’s faith—the offering which she prized the most; the offering, that is to say, of an affection on which, through evil report and through good report, and while life should last, she could confidently rely.

Honor Beacham would have been no true woman if she had not, before making the first commonplace preparations for flight (which, of course, she being pro tem. a heroine, included counting out the money, and putting on the inevitable cloak and bonnet), written a few lines to announce her resolution to the person whom she deemed, in her insane delusion, to be the most deeply interested therein. There is something, to many of the softer sex, very reassuring in wielding that dangerous instrument of feeble woman, the one to which it is so fatally easy in moments of passionate excitement to have recourse—to wit, the pen; and Honor, with the following note written, stamped, and ready for posting in her pocket, felt far more prepared than she had done (previous to its production) for the difficulties and dangers with which her path was strewed:

“Dear Mr. Vavasour,—I am afraid you will think me foolish” (Honor did not entertain any such alarm, but the sentence appeared to her in the light of the proper thing, so she allowed it to stand), “but since my return home—which was very sudden, as Mr. Beacham would not even allow me to say good-bye to my father—I have been made too unhappy and too angry to stay here any longer. It is not so much because of my husband, who would be good to me if he was allowed, but on account of old Mrs. Beacham, who has grown crosser than ever, and who quite hates me now, I am sure. I would bear it if I could, but I cannot; so to-day I go up to London, and shall soon, I hope, get a place of some kind through your help. I should like to be nursery governess best, as I was before, at the Clays’, and should like to begin directly, as I have not much money. I shall be called Honor Blake, as I was before; and John will know nothing, any more than my father or other friends, excepting you, where I am. When I am in London, I will write again to you, to say where I am. Please to burn this; and believe, with a great many thanks, that I am your grateful friend,

“Honor Beacham.

“P.S.—I was so sorry to leave the play; you will tell me when we meet how it ended.”

After writing this letter, the child of impulse by whom it was penned felt, for the time requisite to perfect her arrangements, equal to any emergency. With the letter directed to Arthur Vavasour in her pocket, a something of his actual presence seemed to support and strengthen her. That letter, she doubted not, would bring joy—not guilty joy—that, to do her only justice, Honor never suspected—to the heart that desired her happiness, and was glad to sun itself in her presence. That any wrong was done to the trusting wife of her friend, by that friend’s kindly feelings towards herself, Honor was innocent of imagining. She believed in this young man’s virtuous attachment, and gratefully enjoyed the comfort of her convictions.

The hardest task which she had to perform—for she could not wholly divest herself of the idea that John, in his blundering, unattractive way, did cherish, and would for a time grieve over her loss—was the inditing of a farewell missive to her husband. Two attempts did she make ere she could express in a few words the contradictory sentiments which caused, in spite of herself, the tears to fall over the paper, and which made the pen with which she wrote look misty between her agitated fingers. At last the painful duty was over, and the words that were so soon to shake the frame of the strong man who read them like a reed, ran as follows:

“Dear John,—I hope you will forgive me for not being able to stay at the Paddocks any longer. I could have lived with you, and perhaps have been happy; for I know you are good, and you would not have been hard upon my silliness. What drives me away I leave it to yourself to guess. I have had a good deal to bear; but what hurt me the most was your mother telling me that you meant to be hard upon me too. Do not, please, try to find out where I am. I shall go into service, and try to keep an honest name, though your mother says I have brought disgrace on hers. I should like to think that you forgave me, John. Perhaps I shall some day; or I may not till we are both in another world, where I pray that we may meet, and that you may be happier without me than they say I have made you here. I cannot keep from crying over this letter; for, John, we might have been happy, if only your mother had not had bad thoughts of me from the beginning. God bless you, John; and believe that I am your foolish, but not your wicked wife, as your mother says I am,

“Honor Beacham.”

By the time that this letter was finished it wanted but an hour of noon (they kept old farmhouse hours at the Paddocks), and the striking by the big hall-clock of the time o’ day warned Honor that if she wished to catch a certain train that touched, on its way to London, for a few minutes at the small station of Switcham, she must waste no more time, either in thinking over her plans, or in making ready for her journey. Accordingly, with a steadiness which, under the circumstances, was surprising, she put together a very few articles of dress—and leaving behind her the simple ornaments, poor John’s wedding-gifts—over which she was so little of a heroine that she heaved a faint sigh of regret—this wife of little more than a year left the shelter of her husband’s roof, and, apparently with the intention of taking one of the quiet country walks to which she was accustomed, sauntered slowly, till she was out of sight of the Peartree-house occupants, across the fields that lay between them and the village.

Once the station reached, she cared little either for notice or discovery. The desperate step she had taken could not long remain a secret from the neighbourhood at large; but by the time that John received her letter, she would—according to her present expectations—be already lost to him, and far beyond reach of discovery, in some well-chosen but, of course, very humble retreat, which Arthur Vavasour’s thoughtful kindness would, she doubted not, speedily provide for her. With her mind full of these projects, but with a heart only half rejoicing over her newly-found freedom, Honor went on her way. Her head ached, and a strange sense of weariness rendered her steps slow and lagging; but, for all that she both felt and looked ill, there was about her air and walk (her face was too hidden by a thick veil for strangers’ eyes to gaze upon it) that nameless charm which commands attention, and excites the notice of the curious. Unconscious of, and at the moment utterly indifferent to, admiration, Honor turned her eyes neither to the right hand nor to the left as she passed slowly along the village-street. On her arrival at the post-office, she dropped—without allowing herself a moment’s reflection—the two letters she had written into the box; and then feeling a little more frightened and bewildered than she had done before—for there was a sense of the inexorable in this apparently unimportant act—she walked forward, erect, and outwardly with something of defiance in her mien, towards the station.

There may be some among my readers who perhaps will consider that Honor’s proceedings—her intemperate conduct in thus suddenly giving up home-ties and the respectability attendant thereon, and her apparent absence of womanly feeling regarding her husband—are overstrained and unnatural. But let it be remembered that she was young—young and inexperienced—impulsive too, as well as a little vain and exacting. To understand the young, however, the investigator into character must be young himself. When youth has passed, we forget not only the feelings that dwelt within us in the days of the long-ago past, but the excuses for our sins and follies, which then seemed to us as sands by the sea-shore in number. We forget the craving after the storms of life, the desire to be “for ever climbing after the climbing wave,” together with the loathing of sad satiety, the satiety which a quiet and unbroken existence awakens in the breast of those who are yet idle and untried enough to talk of indulging in grief, and who have still to learn the bitter truth that to endure is hard enough. Honor Beacham was so romantic and simple that she could hug to her breast the discontent which she had dignified into despair. Very like a heroine she felt as the swift train bore her onwards into the unknown regions of the future. With the sharp and scolding voice of her mother-in-law still ringing in her ears, and with the certainty (for Honor was of an age and nature to believe in every result she wished for) of having escaped from Mrs. Beacham’s tyrannic rule, it was surely natural that she should feel a keen sense of triumph at her own success, and that an involuntary smile should flit over her lips as she thought of the old woman’s face of discomfiture when the startling and unwelcome discovery would be made, that her victim was already far beyond the precincts of her power.

Of John—of the husband who, excepting in rare moments of anger, had always been kind to her, and considerate, as far as he comprehended them, of her feelings, it was not quite so pleasant to think; and Honor endeavoured to the best of her ability to put aside the obtrusive reflections connected with his probable regret by repeating to herself the scarcely-believed truth that her husband would soon forget her. “His mother is all in all to him,” the young wife told herself: “had she not been, he never would have allowed me to be so tormented; and besides, he is so busy, so always, always busy;” and Honor heaved a little sigh over the enjoyment by honest John of one of the greatest blessings that can fall to the lot of any human being, whether he or she be young or old, rich or poor, gentle or simple. If idleness be, as the Book of books informs us, the root of all evil, so surely is work, wholesome, needful work, the surest and best safeguard against the ills of life. It is the idleness of the rich which, more than any other cause, renders it harder for them than for their fellows to “enter into the kingdom of heaven.”