Volume 3 — CHAPTER XX. POOR SOPHY!

“I am so glad they have let me see you, though I am only to speak in a whisper, and to stay just one half-hour and no more. You darling thing! How pretty you look in that dear little cap!” And Katie Vavasour, who had been allowed, as a great favour, to visit her much-loved sister-in-law, pressed her fresh young lips to the invalid’s forehead, and took her seat beside the bed preparatory to a “quiet talk.”

“I am glad you came too, dear,” Sophy rejoined. “It is so dull without Arthur, and he has been gone away so long—many hours, I am sure. What o’clock is it now? Three, I am sure; and he left me long before twelve. Where do you think he is?”

“O, I don’t know. Gone somewhere about horses, I daresay,” rejoined Kate, who was rather glad of Arthur’s absence, since it enabled her to have Sophy to herself. “But tell me, does he love the baby very much? Does he often kiss it?”

“No, not often; indeed, I don’t think he ever has; but I shouldn’t mind that, if he would but come back,” said poor Sophy, whose nerves were weak (a malady which her young sister-in-law found it hard to understand), and whose impatience at her husband’s absence was often a little trying to those about her.

“O, never mind him. There is no use ever in wondering what men are about,” said unsympathising Kate. “I want to tell you about poor Rhoda. I am certain she is pining for that stupid Mr. Wallingford. It would not have been a nice match, of course; but as she liked him, that ought to be enough; and Rhoda was never strong, and now she looks like a ghost.”

“Poor thing!” murmured Sophy. “But if I remember right, Mr. Wallingford had straight hair and a long neck, and seemed terribly poky.”

“Exactly; but if Rhoda did not think so, what did it signify?” was Kate’s somewhat involved rejoinder. “All I know is, that if anything bad happens, it will be mamma’s fault. O, she is so dreadfully hard and proud and unfeeling! And she will be worse than ever, if she gets the better of poor Arthur about the property. O, Sophy! is it not too bad that she should have things all her own way like this? Do you know, I would give ten years of my life—”

“To be taken in your old age, of course,” put in Sophy, with something of her former girlish playfulness.

“O, yes; that of course,” said Kate; “and besides—”

But the current of her confidences was at that moment checked by the entrance through the adjoining boudoir of Mrs. Vavasour’s maid, who, in a hesitating voice, made the whispered announcement that a person calling himself Mr. Beacham was below, and was very anxious to have speech with one of the family. Both Mr. Duberly and Mr. Vavasour were out of the way, the woman said, so she had thought it best to come to Miss Catherine about it.

“I will go down directly,” Kate said; but of this, Sophy, with the caprice common to invalids, would not hear. She insisted, for some reason best known to herself, on Mr. Beacham being shown into the boudoir.

“You can see him there, dear,” she said to Kate; “he is a sort of gentleman you know” (poor, poor John!); “and I shall not be left alone, which I hate.”

Foreseeing no reason for objecting to her sister-in-law’s wish, Kate gave the necessary directions, and in a few more moments a man’s strong, vigorous step was heard treading the Aubusson carpet in Sophy’s “morning-room.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Vavasour,” John said aloud—he was totally ignorant of the fact that within earshot lay the sick and nervous wife of the man he had come to seek, the man against whom he felt as an enemy so bitter that blood could neither wash out the offence, nor quench the rage that burnt so madly in his veins—“I beg your pardon, but I require to know if you will have the goodness to tell me where I am likely to find your brother, Mr. Arthur Vavasour. The people down below, the servants, seem too grand to answer questions, so I am driven to the masters for information. He is not, I suppose, in the house, hiding behind his wife’s apron-string? He—”

“Hush! For Heaven’s sake speak lower,” said Kate in an eager whisper. It was so dreadful to think that Sophy might hear, although the rooms were large and there was no great probability of such a catastrophe, but still the sound of John’s angry words might reach the ears of Arthur’s wife; and Kate, girl though she was, could foresee and dread the consequences of such a terrible calamity. “Speak lower,” she said a little proudly, for there was a spice of her mother’s hauteur in her veins, and Kate Vavasour chafed under the familiar brusquerie of one beneath her.

“Speak lower, do you say? And why? Is this man, this base betrayer of—but I beg your pardon once more. You are a young lady, Miss Vavasour; one of a class that is protected from insult and wrong by the shield of position and a great name. A name, forsooth! Why mine was, in its humble way, respected once; respected till your brother came—your brother, whose father was my friend—and dragged the honour of my house, my honour—” and he dealt a savage blow on his broad breast—“in the dust! My wife has left me,” he groaned out; “that can be no secret now—left me for him, although I never knew it was so till to-day. It was yesterday I lost her; lost the poor child I loved so well: and in the evening I inquired for her at her rascal father’s house, but they could, or perhaps would not tell me anything. But to-day I went again, and forced them to be more explicit. Then I learnt how he had, while she was with her father, how he had spent his days, his evenings, all his time, with Honor. I came here three hours ago, and tried to learn something of the man’s movements—something which would guide me to my wife; but all the answer was that he had been out for hours, no one could tell me where; but the rascal that I spoke to grinned, and hinted of a lady’s letter till I was almost driven mad; and here I am, hoping that you, at least, will not—”

He was interrupted by a cry—a cry, feeble it is true, but so piercing and peculiar in its tone that it haunted his brain afterwards for weeks; then there was the sound of a heavy fall—a fall which Kate knew, in the twinkling of an eye, was that of poor Sophy’s lifeless body on the floor. In a moment all was wild confusion; a very Babel of cries and consternation; and John Beacham (awakened, when too late, to a sense of the evil which his intemperate words had wrought) lifted the inanimate form of the poor young wife in his strong arms, and laid her gently on the bed from which a fatal curiosity had roused her. Verily in the old tale of Bluebeard there is much and truthful knowledge of female nature, for to every woman there is a subtle and terrible attraction in the bloody key; and to know that which it is well for their peace that they should ignore, has ever been an insatiable craving amongst the fair daughters of Eve.

Poor Kate proved herself fully equal to the emergency in which she found herself. Forgetful of John Beacham’s hasty and passionate revelations, she could only think of him in the light of an able-bodied man, ready and willing to do good service to the helpless.

“Try and find her father,” she said imploringly; while the monthly nurse, who had already despatched a messenger for the physician in attendance, was endeavouring, with no apparent result, to restore animation to poor Sophy’s apparently lifeless body. “Try and find Mr. Duberly. Perhaps he will be at the Union Club; and Arthur, poor Arthur! he ought to be here. Mr. Beacham,” she continued with imploring eagerness, the thought of her brother bringing back the memory of the man’s desperate words, “Mr. Beacham, at such a moment you cannot, will not, think of yourself. You see what your words have done. Poor, poor Sophy!” And the tears fell in torrents from her blinded eyes. “You will find Arthur for her. I do not believe in his wickedness. He may have been foolish, but he loved his wife and little child; you have been deceived; and it is all a dreadful, dreadful mistake.”

John shook his head gloomily. He was too convinced of his former friend’s share in his wife’s flight for any words to alter his convictions. Men who are habitually unsuspicious are often the most tenacious of a dark idea when once it has taken root within their breasts; and John’s present belief was, he then felt assured, for life. But certain although he was of Arthur Vavasour’s guilt, he could not view, without the bitterest remorse, the wreck that his untamed passion had wrought in that so lately happy and prosperous home. There was no need now for Kate to press upon him the duty of forbearance. God, the Judge of sinners, had taken the task of retribution into His own hands; for if it were indeed true, as Miss Vavasour had asserted, that Arthur loved his wife, why, in that pale corse lying lifeless before him, his own wrongs, the wrongs inflicted by the bereaved husband, would indeed be fearfully and terribly avenged. Well he knew that to himself, as the acting cause of that dire catastrophe, poor Sophy’s death (if, as seemed only too probable, her pale head was never to be raised in life again) might be traced; and it was with his already heavily-burdened spirit weighted with another load, that John Beacham, with the purpose of fulfilling Kate Vavasour’s behest, and endeavouring to seek out poor Sophy’s father, prepared to leave the house where his presence had been productive of results as unexpected as they were deplorable. But he was not destined to go many steps before a fresh call was made upon his patience and his temper. On the threshold of that splendid mansion, drawing forth the latch-key with which he had just opened the door, there stood, confronting the departing visitor, no less important a personage than Arthur Vavasour himself. On seeing John, he started visibly and turned pale—not with the pallor of fear, for at that instant very thankful was the younger man that he had no serious wrongs, as regarded his father’s friend, with which to reproach himself; but the sight of John Beacham perplexed and startled him. It was connected, of course, with Honor’s flight from home; and there existed, undoubtedly, a certain awkwardness in the fact that he, Arthur, was so much better informed regarding Honor’s whereabouts than was the husband from whom that misguided young woman ought, in the opinion of sticklers for marital rights, have had no secrets of any kind whatsoever.

“You here! Beacham, how is this?” Arthur said, holding out a hand which was not taken; and then the anger of the older man, a moment controlled by the sight he had just witnessed above-stairs, burst out afresh. Drawing Arthur Vavasour’s slender form back into the house, and holding the arm of his enemy with the fixedness of a vice, he said in a voice tremulous with concentrated passion,

“You ask me, do you, why I am here? What if, in return, I call you scoundrel, and ask you where you have taken my wife? for you have been with her; I see it in your face—your white, cowardly face. God, that I should live to speak so to your father’s son!” And, half-overpowered with contending emotions, John sank upon a chair that stood in the large empty hall, and gazed for a moment helplessly upon the young handsome features, which at that terrible moment reminded him strangely of Cecil Vavasour, of the man whom in all his life he had most loved and respected.

“John,” Arthur exclaimed, “do not, for God’s sake, talk in this way. I declare before Heaven that you are mistaken. I swear to you that your wife—”

“Have you seen her? Do you know where she is?” cried John impetuously. Poor fellow! he would have caught only too gladly at the belief that his suspicions were unfounded, and that his still dearly loved Honor had been foolish only, but not guilty. O no, not guilty! the thought of that evil was too dreadful to be endured; so he said very eagerly, and with a touching entreaty in his tone, “Mr. Vavasour, only say—swear it to me by your father’s memory—that within these three days you have neither seen nor heard from my wife, and I will thank and bless you to my dying day.”

But Arthur could not, dared not, swear to this. With all his longing, not only to save Honor, but to console and reassure the excellent man who had ever treated him with such frank and cordial kindness, he could not take the oath required of him. He could not, even for the woman whom he loved, quite drag what he called his honour in the dirt.

The sight of his hesitation was enough, and more than enough, to confirm the husband’s worst apprehensions; and to what lengths his passion would have carried him, had not this stormy interview been interrupted, it would be hard to say. Already John had begun to pour a torrent of invectives on the young man’s head, when the sight of Kate Vavasour running, almost flying, down the broad marble staircase, arrested his words.

“Arthur, Arthur!” she screamed, “for the love of Heaven, for poor Sophy’s sake, come away. She is dying—dead, they think,” she added distractedly, for, in very truth, she scarcely knew what she said; “and you have killed her!”