Volume 3 — CHAPTER VI. WHAT, SELL ROUGH DIAMOND!

The breakfast meal at No. 13 Stanwick-street, not being either a varied or a luxurious one, did not occupy much of Colonel Fred Norcott’s valuable time. It commenced, however, frequently at so late an hour, owing to the stay-out habits over night of the master of the house, that twelve o’clock often struck before the table was what Mrs. Norcott called “cleared,” and the room ready for company.

Which company consisted usually, at the time of Honor’s stay, but of one visitor—the visitor whom, for reasons best known to himself, Colonel Norcott was ever on the watch to conciliate and flatter. Arthur Vavasour’s appearance in Stanwick-street was usually so timed that his host’s horses—animals chiefly devoted at that period to the use of his daughter—should be walking up and down before the house in readiness for Mrs. Beacham’s appearance. On the eventful Tuesday morning—the Tuesday in Epsom holiday week—which was hereafter to be a strongly marked one in Honor Beacham’s memory, Colonel Norcott, departing somewhat from his accustomed habits, was early astir—so early that at a little after eleven he might have been seen, his cigar between his lips, standing on the steps of the house he occupied, and evidently waiting for some person whose coming was longer delayed than the Colonel found altogether agreeable. At last, walking briskly round a corner, with a very preoccupied expression of countenance, and swinging in the air a light riding-whip with the manner of one lost in thought, Arthur Vavasour, the individual expected by Honor’s impatient parent, appeared in sight.

“By George! you’re late,” Colonel Norcott said, pulling out his watch and displaying it reproachfully before his friend. “I haven’t more than five minutes to spare. Five? I haven’t got three! But if you’ve anything you want particularly to say to me, I—”

“You will wait—you must wait,” Arthur broke in imperiously. “I tell you what, Colonel Norcott, I can’t stand the bother and the wear and tear of this any longer; Rough Diamond, as we know, is all right again, and the odds are—”

“Five to four on the favourite! We all know that. What then?” and Fred replaced his cigar between his lips, and smoked away with a nonchalance which, to an excited man, was not a little provoking.

“What then? Why, simply this: I’d rather sell the horse, upon my soul I would, than go on in this way. If Rough Diamond loses—”

“Well, if he does?”

“Nonsense, man, what’s the use of asking? you know nearly as much of my affairs as I do. You know how devilishly I’m dipped, and how everything depends on my horse winning the Derby to-morrow.”

“Well, and he will win it. Don’t be a fool. I mean don’t be out of heart. I’m sure if I thought there were the ghost of a chance against him, I should be pretty considerably down in the mouth too. Why, man, I’ve backed the favourite with every farthing I’m worth, and—”

“Ah, yes—I know; but my case is different. Only fancy if old Dub was to find out (which he would be almost sure to do if the horse didn’t win) that the brute is mine, and has been all along; what a row there would be! And then there’s that infernal fellow Nathan—it’s ruinous work renewing—so ruinous that, by Jove, I sometimes think—though of course I couldn’t decide anything without speaking to you. I sometimes think whether it wouldn’t be better—you see it would never do for the old fellow to get wind of these confounded bills—I sometimes think whether it wouldn’t be the best thing I could do to let Lord Penshanger have Rough Diamond, and so get out of the infernal bother of the business altogether.”

Fred Norcott, at these words turning a hot and angry face to his companion, looked by no means at his pleasantest. “What, sell the favourite!” he said. “By Jove, you must be mad! I couldn’t allow or hear of such a thing. I must say that—but I beg your pardon, Vavasour; you can understand that when a man has so much at stake he loses his head, and hardly knows what he’s talking about. The fact is that Honor—that poor girl in there” (and he pointed to the house, before which they had been slowly pacing to and fro) “is deuced miserable with that brute of a farmer fellow that she married. She’s staying on with me because he and an old mother that he has bully her so confoundedly between them; and I should be glad to know if any tricks were to be played on Rough Diamond (and I’ll answer for nothing if there’s any change made) what would become of that poor child? I shouldn’t have a home to offer her, and—but, by George, there are the horses! Honor will be down in a minute, and I shall be late,” consulting his watch again, “if I’m not off to Waterloo in double quick time. Not going down to-day, eh? Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. See you at Opera to-night, I suppose?” And on receiving an affirmative nod from Arthur, who already had his foot on the first step of No. 14, Colonel Norcott went his way towards the station, where almost countless crowds were waiting to be conveyed to the same goal—namely, the racecourse on Epsom Downs.

“What a lovely morning! I should like to be out of doors the whole entire day!” exclaimed Honor, as she and Arthur rode along the least frequented road within the precincts of the Regent’s Park, “and what is more, I long to be in the country. Lydia had a holiday on Sunday, and she says that all the beautiful chestnut-trees in Bushy Park are in full blossom, and I should so like to go there! Have you ever seen the avenue? Mrs. Norcott has not, and she would like, she says, to drive there this afternoon better than anything. Mr. Vavasour, couldn’t we do it?” in a pretty tone of beseechment. “I have so little more time; and”—her cheeks flushing, half with anger and half with shame at this betrayal of her home secrets,—“I have had such a letter to-day! so cross—so unfeeling! O, Mr. Vavasour, I am afraid,” looking very piteous, “that it will be all so dreadful when I go home. What shall I do? I almost wish that I had never come to London, the Paddocks will seem so dull, so miserable when I go back!”

“Miserable? Are you quite sure of that?” coming nearer, and resting his hand on the pommel of his companion’s saddle. “Don’t think me very selfish, but I should not like you to be too happy, Honor, not too happy when you are away from me. You sweet, beautiful creature!” gazing passionately on her downcast eyes, “why did not I see you, know you, in the lost time gone by, when you might have loved me, Honor? Am I too bold, too vain, to think, to hope that had we met sooner—met before you were tied and bound to another man—we two might have been happy? Speak to me, Honor. How can you be so cold, so quiet, when I—”

He stopped, half afraid, in that public spot, on the well-frequented road, where the girl’s striking beauty attracted every passer’s eye to gaze upon her lovely face, of the emotions which his words had so evidently aroused within her breast. At that moment, judging from outward signs—from the rapid rise and fall of the bosom, shapely as that of the glorious statue that entranced the world, and from the changing colour of her rounded cheek—the accusation of coldness was not altogether warranted by appearances. And yet from those signs and symptoms the inference which Arthur drew was very decidedly a wrong, or rather an exaggerated, one. Honor was not in the least what is called “in love” with the man whose own passions and wild worship of his neighbour’s wife were making such desperate work within his inner man. Almost utterly reckless had those days of constant communion with her made him. He had cried havoc and let loose the dogs of contending passions within his breast; and if he had ever, when the waves of temptation were beginning to rise and swell, said unto them with an honest and true heart, “So far shalt thou go, and no farther,” that time was long since gone and over, and the submission of Cecil Vavasour’s son to the great enemy of mankind was an accomplished and a melancholy fact. But partly perhaps because the man who really feels an overpowering passion has less chance of moving the object of that passion than has the hypocrite who feigns a devotion which he is far from feeling. Honor Beacham did not, as I said before, love Arthur Vavasour. Like him she did; and greatly did she prize his devotion, his delicate compliments, his evident and irrepressible appreciation of the attractions for which her busy unsophisticated husband, the man whose affections were not for the moment, but for Time, appeared to care so strangely little. But although the eloquent blood that rose to neck and brow had not its source in the inner, and to Arthur the undiscovered, depths of her affection, although the visible palpitations of her heart could not with truth be traced to the consciousness of harbouring one unholy or forbidden thought, still Arthur’s words and sighs and glances produced upon this child of nature effects precisely analogous to those which might have been displayed had the love which he professed and felt been returned tenfold into his bosom.

“I did not mean to be unkind and cold,” she stammered. “Quiet, Nellie!” (to the mare she rode, and whose mild caracoles her own agitation was provoking). “It was all my fault for talking about going home; and, Mr. Vavasour—”

“Call me Arthur,” he broke in impetuously; “even you, who grudge me every word that is not stiff and formal, even you can see no harm in—when we are alone together—calling me by my name? Honor, I—”

She put up a warning finger, smiling as she did so after a fashion that would have turned a steadier head than Arthur Vavasour’s. She did not mean to be “coquettish;” there was no purpose in her heart to lure him into folly and madness. Honor’s were very simple, but at the same time very cowardly, tactics—tactics, however, which have lost ere this more silly giddy women than even vanity itself. In public glad to please, and feeling, really feeling pity for the man whose passion she understood without reciprocating it, Honor would “smile, and smile, and smile,” and seem to love; whilst in private—but then, to the best of her powers, and with an ingenuity of which none but a frightened woman could have been capable, she strove, and with good success, to postpone sine die the evil hour when she would perforce be brought to book, and when the lover whose attentions she would be more loth to lose than she the least suspected would insist on the decided answer which would render further trifling impossible—in private Honor might almost have been mistaken for a prude.

“How can you want me to call you Arthur,” she said, with the bright smile that lit up her countenance like a sunbeam, “when you know it would be wrong—so wrong (and that is the best way to find out what is wrong) that you would, or I should, be always in a most dreadful fright lest I should forget myself, and say it when other people were present? O, how I do hate doing underhand things! I wish now, only it is days and days too late, that I had written everything I was about to the Paddocks. Then they might have abused me for being wilful and fond of London, and plays, and amusing things; but they could not have hated and despised me for being false.”

“But,” said Arthur with a caress in his voice, which Honor, novice though she was, was at no loss to feel and understand—“but there are so many things which pass, that one cannot say to everyone—many things which are not wrong, as you call it, but which people at a distance would not enter into, and had better therefore know nothing about. And so they have been worrying you with letters, you poor darling, have they? Wanting you to go back, and—”

“O, yes,” Honor cried, brimming over with her wrongs, her yearning for kind sympathy, and with the self-pity which ever exaggerates the misfortunes which our precious self is called upon to endure—“O, yes, and Mrs. Beacham—she is so disagreeable; you don’t know half how disagreeable she can be, orders me to come home, and threatens me with all sorts of horrid things. I am to be scolded and taught my duty, and,” blushing beautifully, “someone has told them that I have been riding in the Park with you, and—Ah, Mr. Vavasour, I feel quite frightened, and I would rather do anything in the world almost than go back again to the Paddocks!”

“Anything?” he asked, throwing as much meaning into the word as the human voice was capable of expressing; but Honor, who was far as the poles from comprehending the evil that was in his thoughts, said eagerly,

“Indeed yes! anything! I would be a governess—you know I was a governess before—I would go out to service—be a ‘Lydia,’” and she smiled a little bitterly, “if I could only never, never see Mrs. Beacham’s face again.”

An expression which she took for amusement, but which was in reality indicative of very unholy triumph, passed over Arthur Vavasour’s dark, handsome face.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Honor said plaintively. “You can have no idea how hard it is to live with John’s mother. Nothing I do is right, and—and,” in a lower voice, “I know she sets him against me. She has written to tell me that I must go home to-day; but my father says I am to lay our not going upon him, so here I shall stay! I know I shall be in a dreadful scrape, and that it is only a case of putting off, and—”

“But why only a case of putting off, as you call it? My darling Honor—forgive me; the words slipt out unawares—you know I would not offend you willingly; but the best as well as the worst men are liable to mistakes. Only tell me why you, so young, so beautiful, so formed for the enjoyment of everything that is bright and happy, should be condemned to pass your days in such an existence as the one you describe at the Paddocks? It has always seemed to me,” he went on, leaning towards her, and looking with eyes of eager passion into her face—“it has always seemed to me an act of the most miserable folly for people—married people—who do not suit, remaining together: both would often be equally glad to part, to go their respective ways, to live another and a more congenial life; and yet from some foolish unreasoning scruple, from fear of what the world would say, or from want of courage to take the first step, they go on through all their lives, making each other’s existence a burden, ‘when both might separately have been as happy’ as we are any of us fated to be in this ill-managed world of ours, where happiness is so rare a thing.”

Honor glanced at him with rather a puzzled look in her blue eyes. Strange as it may seem, she did not even now comprehend his meaning. That he was advising her to leave her home was too plain to be mistaken, but that there was to be sin—sin, that is to say, greater than that which she could not but feel would be incurred by deserting her husband and her duties—never occurred to this poor foolish child of nature. But although she did not comprehend, and could not fathom, the depths of her false friend’s guilt, yet her womanly instinct led her to evade the responding to his suggestion. His last words also, and the tone of sadness in which they were spoken, riveted her attention, and, catching almost gladly at an excuse for changing the conversation, she said sympathisingly,

“What do you mean by ill-managed? Surely you can have no reason to think this world an unhappy one! If there exists one person in it who ought to be happy, it is you—you and your wife,” she added, with a little sigh which again misled her companion into a blind and senseless belief in his own power over her affections. “You have everything, it seems to me, that human beings can hope for or desire—youth and health and riches, living where you like, and always seeing and enjoying the beautiful things that money can buy; and then going abroad, seeing foreign countries, and—and—”

“And what? Tell me some more of my privileges, my delights; make me contented, if you can, with my lot. At present it seems dark enough, God knows; and if—but I am a fool, and worse, to talk to you of these things; only, if I thought that you—you, who are an angel of purity and love and peace—would sometimes think of me with pity, why, it would give me courage, Honor, would make me feel that I have still something to live for, something to bind me to an existence which I have begun to loathe!”

Honor listened to this outpouring of real or fancied sorrows like one who is not sure whether she dreams or is awake.

“Mr. Vavasour!” she exclaimed, “what can you mean? At your age, with a young wife who loves you, and with” (blushing slightly) “the hope of the dear little child that will so soon be born, it seems so wonderful to hear you talk in this way! What is it?” warming with pity as she watched the young worn face prematurely marked with lines of care—“would you like to tell me?—I am very safe. I have no one” (sadly) “to confide in; and you have just said that my sympathy would be a comfort to you.”

She laid her little ungloved hand—she had taken off her gauntlet to caress the arched neck of the pretty thoroughbred screw she rode—upon her companion’s arm as she spoke, and so fully occupied was she with her object (namely, that of inducing Arthur to trust her with his sorrows), that she was scarcely conscious of the warmth with which he, pressing his hand upon the caressing fingers, mutely accepted the tribute of her sympathy.

“Ah, then,” she said—the slight soupçon of a brogue, as was often the case when she was eager or excited, making itself apparent—“ah, then, you will remember I am your friend, and say what it is that lies so heavy on your heart?”

For a moment he looked at her doubtingly; and then, as though the words broke from him as in his own despite, he said in a low husky tone:

“What purpose would it answer, what good would it effect either for you or me, were you to learn that I am a villain?”