Volume 3 — CHAPTER XXIV. THE USES OF ADVERSITY.

Two more days and nights sped by—a time passed almost literally by Honor in tears and fasting—when the anxiously-looked-for crisis came at last; came in fear, and passed away in tearful hope, and the joyful news went forth that John Beacham was out of danger. Out of danger, and certain (humanly speaking) to walk forth again amongst his fellows; certain too—ay, of that there could be no doubt—that his duty to God and to his neighbours would be, to the best of his powers, as simply and faithfully performed by this honest, simple-hearted man as it had been in the days before sorrow came, and shame had visited his house. Shame, but not guilt. Ah, in that lay John’s best consolation, when, with his head a little lower than had been his wont, he for the first time, with languid step and sadly altered face, sauntered in his garden between the lines of fragrant roses, leaning upon Honor’s arm.

They were serious, as well as sad, those two, between whom there had been so perfect a reconciliation, and on one side a forgiveness so entire and unqualified. Honor’s sweet young face looked older, paler, and far more thoughtful than of yore. She could not forget, neither could the chastened man beside her, that through their faults tribulation had fallen upon the innocent, and that a motherless infant, a bereaved father, were left to bear witness to the terrible fact that they had failed, grievously failed, in their duty to God and to their neighbour. Through all their lives the memory of these calamities would darken their joys, and cast a cloud even while the sun shone brightest, and the sky was bluest above their heads. Never again would Honor be the bright, light-hearted girl who had first won John’s love when she played with the merry children in the woods, laughing and shouting in their joyous mirth. Never again would he, secure in his home happiness, and with a conscience not only void of offence towards God and towards man, but with a heart unburdened by a sense of wrong done to any soul that lived, wear upon his kindly face the genial smile which gladdened his many acquaintances, men as well as women, young as well as old, when he waved them a cordial greeting on his onward way. The zest, the freshness which makes life a thing to be enjoyed as well as endured, was over for ever; over, not only for the man verging on middle-age, but for the woman who, on the very threshold of existence, had looked out on coming storms, and had learned to dread the distant warning of the tempest.

But if not happy—happy, that is to say, with the bliss which, like the joys of childhood, is simply the result of ignorance, and sometimes the consequence of want of feeling or want of sense—there were yet sufficient elements of happiness remaining in John Beacham’s home for hope to crop out greenly from the arid sands of past regret. Not yet had the time, the dreary time when no pleasure is taken in any created thing, arrived for them; not yet had the hour struck when in the voice of Nature there is no joyful sound, when the opening spring, the song of birds, the murmur of the rippling water, appeal to the heart in vain, and when the man who has striven through life to do his duty, and has failed to reap the reward of peace and the fruition of content, tells himself, in bitterness of spirit, that from the first step in life he had chosen the wrong path, and whispers sadly to his heart that it is all too late, alas, to retrace his steps.

“He writes very unhappily, John,” Honor was saying. Her husband had a letter that they had been reading in his hand—a letter to John from Arthur Vavasour. It was the second that they had received from him; the first having been one so touchingly penitent that John Beacham for a long while after reading it was more than usually silent, keeping its contents to himself, and not alluding afterwards, in any way whatsoever, to the young man’s letter. But, if possible, he was after receiving it still more tender to Honor than he had been before; watching her, as she flitted about his sickroom, with eyes that glistened as they looked on her.

As soon as he was equal to the exertion, John answered the humble letter, which, coming as it did from the son of one whose memory was very dear to him, and whose good works were embalmed with the myrrh, aloes, and cassia of deep respect in the righteous man’s heart, gave deep and sincere pain to its recipient; and in his reply to the penitent effusion poor John took, as such an unselfish man was certain to do, a great portion of the blame, the guilt indeed, of all that had occurred upon himself. Had a stranger read John’s simple letter, he would very naturally have believed that the writer was guilty of other and worse offences than that of an impulsive yielding to first impressions, and of speaking hasty words with his tongue.

“I shall never forgive myself,” he wrote. “I was a brute and a fool, and don’t deserve the happiness of having my poor wife at home with me. Would to God, dear Mr. Arthur, that any prayers of mine and Honor’s could bring back yours; but it was God’s will that she should be taken, poor young lady; but I don’t understand how you can make things better by leaving your little one as well. I hope you will excuse my advising you; but I loved your father well, dear Mr. Arthur, as you know; and it grieves me to think that his son is going into banishment like for my fault. Surely the old gentleman would be best pleased for you to stay at home; and besides, from all that I can hear, America is not the best place for a young gentleman to live in. The young ladies, too, at the Castle would find it hard to lose you; and I should be always remembering, seeing your empty place at church, that it was me that was the cause you went. No, no, dear Mr. Arthur, you will think better of it still, I hope; and we shall see you riding with the young ladies about the Chace this summer, not exactly as if nothing had happened—for that could not be, even if it was right—but as your late lamented father would approve of, and as your ancestors did before you. I hope that you will be so good as excuse my boldness, and will believe me, with respect and affection,

“Your obedient servant, “John Beacham.”

“P.S. There is one of the beautifullest foals ever dropped, out of Mad Flora by the Old Shekarry, in the five-bar paddock. I should like you to see her, so I should. You’d say you never saw a neater nor a cleaner made one. The stock is good, and no mistake.”

This letter—a letter written from the fulness of a kind and sympathising heart—found Arthur Vavasour at Liverpool, to which city he had resorted for the purpose of taking steam to the great republic—the land of soi-disant liberty—the land of the “stars and stripes,” “unwhipped and unwhippable for ever.” (I wonder, writing of that self-same flag, that some zealous descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers—some red-hot Yankee, friend and supporter of his black-bodied brethren—has not ere this voted for the suppression of the ruled, gingham-suggestive portion of the “glorious flag,” for now that the negro back is free from suffering, and the weary “son of Afric” need no longer toil, the stripes would seem, one might suppose, a worse than unnecessary, because a painful, reminder of the disgraceful past.) But to return to Arthur Vavasour in the half-Americanised city, and in the big hotel to which the love of the turtle has drawn many a man who, like me and, perhaps, you, O gentle reader, has no thought whatever of crossing the broad Atlantic in a Cunard steamer. Had those afflicted ones, who so deeply commiserated the forlorn lot of this poor widower, been enabled at that moment (Asmodeus-like) to look upon his saddened face, and form their own opinions, unbiassed either by prejudice or pity, they could hardly have decided that the events of the past month had told very severely upon this young British Sybarite. At twenty-two it is very easy to forget, and with the world (a considerable portion of it, that is to say) untried and unexplored before him, a young man of good birth, the eventual possessor of such an estate as Gillingham (for even Lady Millicent could not prevent the family property from descending after her death to her eldest son)—with, I repeat, such prospects as these, to say nothing of good health and a handsome person, it is hardly surprising that Arthur Vavasour should have felt very far from utterly cast down by the changes and chances of this mortal life, of which he had lately had such painful as well as mortifying experience. He was not alone, for, seated by the open window in a rocking-chair, and reading the last number of the Field, then a new publication, sat a young man whose name was Godfrey Tremlett, and who, having been a college friend—the fidus Achates of his semi-boyish days—had kindly consented to share the wanderings of the disappointed man in the lands beyond the sea, where the heavy foot of the buffalo tramples the silent prairie, and where, flying slowly but surely before civilisation, the red Indian (baptised with the baptism of the Christian’s “fire-water”) endures his lot with patience, looking, with stolid face and all a wild man’s stupid singleness of heart, to a better, that is, a more sporting country in the happy hunting-grounds where a good savage meets his due reward; in other words, Arthur and his companion’s point was Fort Jasper, and their intentions were to witch the world at home with accounts of their adventures, with details of their narrow escapes, and with the counting over daily of the head of game which they with their bow and spear had bagged.

It was exciting work that talking over their plans, examining maps of the country (rather vague ones, it is true, but not on that account the less interesting to the travellers), and slaying in anticipation countless numbers of harmless animals then roaming unsuspectingly over their native wilds.

Mr. Godfrey Tremlett was a rather heavily-built young man, fresh-complexioned, with a fat, beardless, good-humoured face. His appearance was not precisely that of a sportsman; indeed, that very morning, when he had tried on a certain hunting-suit, very short in the skirts and slightly eccentric in fashion (he had invented it himself, and took much credit to himself for the idea), Arthur, forgetful for the moment of his recent affliction, went off into roars of laughter at the singularity of his friend’s appearance. Neither abashed nor affronted by this proof of intimacy, Godfrey spun round before the glass in an accès of self-satisfaction, which no friendly ridicule had power to check. He was essentially and invariably good-tempered. His high spirits were proof against the normal ills, the daily worries, the hourly contretemps of existence. He had no taste for what is generally called society. Ladies, as a rule, he considered a bore, and “fine ladies” he held in absolute, nay almost physical, dread and horror. He was not extravagant; on the contrary, he made the most of a small patrimony which had descended to him from his deceased father, and contrived to save yearly out of an income of something less than five hundred per annum a sufficient sum to enable him to enjoy in some sporting-fields or other—in Scotland, Norway, or wherever the fancy led him—a few months of excitement and variety.

To Mr. Godfrey Tremlett the idea of accompanying such a “real good fellow” as Arthur Vavasour in the search of the latter after change and a forgetfulness of his troubles was simply delightful. He pitied his poor friend immensely, and did not at all intend that Arthur should give way to the low spirits which are generally supposed to be incidental to his situation. Neither, it must be owned, did the young widower himself betray any signs that the task of consolation would be either an impossible or a difficult one. Already change of scene, of projects, and of mode of life had produced their normal effects (as regards the young, at least) on Arthur Vavasour; and, judging by his frequent laugh, the zest with which he entered into the arrangements for his approaching campaign, and, more than all, his evident enjoyment of the good things that were set before him (namely, the calipash and calipee, which were pronounced by these two young gourmands to be as the nectar and ambrosia of the gods), it would have been easy for the least observant of lookers-on to convince himself that the affliction with which (for his own selfishness, his own want of moral principle, his own vanity and folly) Arthur Vavasour had been visited was but for a season, and only lightly felt by this voluntary exile.

“He does not recover his spirits,” Honor said to her husband, after reading the short farewell letter in which Arthur had recapitulated his reasons for leaving England, and had dwelt in touching terms on his loneliness and his repentance. They little thought, that husband and wife, whose peace had been blighted, and whose mutual confidence shaken, if not destroyed, by this man’s indulgence in vile and selfish passions, how little call there really existed in this case for compassion, and how easy it had been for Arthur Vavasour to feign a sorrow he had ceased to feel.

But while the man who had been the chief cause (humanly speaking) of this one amongst the thousand tragedies wrought by human selfishness and frailty bore his burden with such a light and unreflecting spirit, the chief sufferer by the calamity was he who was in no way—as far, that is, as short-sighted mortal eyes can see—deserving of punishment. The grief of poor Sophy’s bereaved father was for life. For him, for the aged man, who could no longer look to new ties, new hopes to bind him to this earthly tabernacle, the loss of his child was a blow from the effects of which he never could recover. He was a Christian in thought as well as in outward belief and conduct, and he strove earnestly not only to forgive, but to manifest the forgiveness which he tried, not with entire success, to feel not only towards Arthur Vavasour, but towards the beautiful woman whom he ever considered, with the tenacity of faith that is characteristic of old age, as the fellow-culprit of poor Sophy’s faithless husband. It is a hard thing even for the young to have their belief in all human excellence, in all human honesty, destroyed; but it is harder still upon the old, when faith and trust, the virginities of the soul, are for ever taken away, and when in loneliness of heart, with mistrust and suspicion usurping the place of former confidence and unquestioning credulity, they wend their weary way towards the grave in silence and in gloom. Nor was that unhappy father the only one who, mourning for the child who would not return to him, became a changed and saddened character. Mrs. Beacham, though, as might have been supposed, rather too old to learn, had yet, during the anxious days and nights when John lay between life and death, laid her shortcomings to heart, and, making some allowance for a stiff-neckedness, which had become a chronic evil of her idiosyncrasy, had reviewed the past without a certain proper sense of her own sins regarding her daughter-in-law. To confess those sins was more than could be expected of one who had arrived at the age of seventy with the conviction that all she said and did was right, beyond the possibility of question; but Mrs. Beacham did endeavour, as much as in her lay, to make amends for the past; and although she could not wholly overcome her former jealousy of Honor’s influence over her son, she kept her temper in tolerable subjection, and instead of (as was the case with Arthur) throwing the occurrences of the painful past into the waste-basket of memory, she—it was the woman’s nature so to do—kept them alive with persevering industry in her breast, knowing well that with forgetfulness might come a relaxation of her constant efforts to obliterate the evil she had wrought—evil to the son she loved, and to the woman with whom, come what come might, the happiness of his future life was bound up.

Happily, both for the peace—such peace as they could henceforth hope for—of John Beacham and his wife, the little world of Sandyshire remained in ignorance of the main facts attendant on the death of young Mrs. Vavasour. She had died in childbed it was reported, and unhappily such deaths are of too common occurrence for especial wonder to be created thereby. Any reports of a close connection between John Beacham’s domestic affairs and those of Arthur Vavasour and his dead wife were put a stop to by Honor’s return, and by the restored affection and trust which, after John’s recovery, were seen to exist, not only between the husband and wife, but between Honor and her hitherto implacable mother-in-law. They left the Paddocks for a time, a few not unhappy weeks, change of air and scene having been recommended by the doctors for the perfecting of John’s recovery; and during that absence from their home the bonds of affection, strengthened by the ties of a great sorrow shared between them, were knit very closely together. The dawn of their wedded life had been overcast with clouds; the morning had been dull, and doubts of whether fine weather would even come at noon had strengthened as the day grew older. But the “morning gray,” according to the old shepherd’s adage, will not, let us hope, fail to end in the “fine day” that ofttimes follows. The grieving over love’s decay is of all griefs the gloomiest. To be shedding—I speak of a wife now (men’s eyes are not formed for weeping)—to be shedding secret tears over the memory of an affection passed away is a very hopeless form of sorrow. The

formed, however, no part of the trials to which Honor Beacham was henceforth exposed. Her duty was, by undying efforts to efface the memory of past error, and to strive by every act and word to render herself worthy of a good man’s love. The memory of the bitter past—of the past, unconnected by any lack of love on John’s part—could never, never be washed away; but to “redeem the time,” the present that was left to her, became, because of the evil of the days that were past, a still more sacred duty. Sorrow had done good service in forming while it humbled the character of our poor little impulsive heroine, for “la vertù è simile ai perfumi, che rendono più grato odore quando-riturati.” Heaviness had indeed endured for the morning, but content, if not joy, had come to her and hers with the quiet evening light.