Volume 3 — CHAPTER VII. MEA CULPA.

A villain! Arthur Vavasour—the “fine,” noble-hearted, brilliant gentleman to whom this simple-minded Honor had so looked up, and of the loss of whose friendship she had been so afraid that she had “led him on”—the silly woman knew she had—to fancy that she loved him better than she did her husband—was he in very truth a man to be avoided, shunned, and looked on with contempt? She could not, did not think it possible. He was accusing himself unjustly, working on her compassion, speaking without reflection: anything and everything she could believe possible rather than that her friend should deserve the odious epithet which had just, to her extreme surprise, smote upon her ears. Before, however, she could give words to that surprise, Arthur spoke again, and with an impetuosity which almost seemed to take away his breath poured forth his explanation of the text.

“Yes, a villain! You may well look astonished; and I expect, when you know all, that you will turn your back upon me, Honor, as all the world must; that is, if the world has to be taken into my confidence, which I still trust it will not be. There are extenuating circumstances though, as the juries say; and perhaps, if I had been better raised, I shouldn’t have turned out such an out-and-out bad ’un as I have!”

He stopped for a moment to gulp down a sigh, and then proceeded thus:

“I think I told you once before how awfully I was in debt, and that it was the burden of debt that drove me into marrying poor little Sophy Duberly—the best girl in the world; but I did not love her (more shame for me), and whose affection, poor child, is so much more of a torment than a pleasure to me. Well, enough of that: the worst is to come; and if you can tell me, after hearing it, that I am not a villain, why, I am a luckier dog, that’s all, than I think myself at present!”

Honor, feeling called upon to make some response, muttered at this crisis a few words which sounded like encouragement; but Arthur, too entirely engrossed with his mea culpa to heed this somewhat premature absolution, continued hurriedly to pour forth the history of his sin.

“You would never believe, you who are so young, so ignorant of the world’s wickedness, what the temptations are which beset a man. Pshaw! I was a boy when I began life in London, and there were no bounds to my extravagance, no limits to what you in your unstained purity would call my guilt. I sometimes think that had my poor father lived, or even if I had possessed a dear mother whose heart would have been made sore by the knowledge of my offences, I might (God knows, however; perhaps I was bad in grain) have sinned less heavily, and have been this day unburdened by the weight of shame that oppresses me both by night and day. Darling Honor!—you sweet warm-hearted child! why were there no loving eyes like yours to fill with tears, in the days gone by, for me? In those days only guilty women loved, or seemed to love; and not a single good one prayed for or advised me. And so—God forgive me!—I went on from bad to worse! For them—for those worthless creatures whose names should not be even mentioned in your hearing—I expended, weak vain idiot that I was, thousands upon thousands, which, being under age, I raised from Jews at a rate so usurious that it could scarcely be believed how they could dare to ask, or any greenhorn be such a fool and gull as to accept, the terms. And then, reckless and desperate, afraid to confide in the mother who had never shown me a mother’s tenderness, I played—I betted on the turf—I—in short, there is no madness, no insane extravagance, of which, in my recklessness and almost despair, I have not been guilty. But the worst is yet to come. You remember that I bought Rough Diamond for a large sum of your husband. I gave him a bill at six months’ date, renewable, for the amount; and John—he behaved as well as man could do, I must say that—promised that it should remain a secret that the colt was mine. Well, some little time before my marriage—that marriage being a matter to me of absolute necessity—old Duberly grew anxious and uneasy at my being so much at the Paddocks. He had an idea, poor dear old fellow, that I could only be there on account of matters connected in some way with racing. So he wrote to my mother, of all people in the world, for an explanation, and she naturally enough referred him to me. Then, Honor, came the moment of temptation. I could not—I positively could not, with my expectations, my almost certainty, and John Beacham’s too, of Rough Diamond’s powers—part with him to any man living. So—it was an atrocious thing to do; I felt it at the moment, and Heaven knows I have not changed my opinion since—I allowed Mr. Duberly—allowed! humbug!—I told him that the horse was not mine, and, liar that I was, that I had nothing to do with the turf!”

“It was very bad,” murmured Honor; “but I suppose that if Mr. Duberly had thought the contrary, he might have refused his consent to your marriage, and then his daughter would have been wretched. Still, indeed, indeed, you had better—don’t you think so now?—have been quite open with him. If you had said—”

“Yes, yes, I know; but who ever does the right thing at the right time? And, besides, I could not be sure, as you have just said, and knowing old Duberly as I do now, that he would have allowed his daughter to be my wife if he had been told the truth. His horror of what he calls gambling is stronger than anything you can conceive. I hear him say things sometimes which convince me that he would rather have given Sophy to a beggar—a professional one, I mean—than to me; and if he had acted as I feared, what, in the name of all that is horrible, was to become of me? The tradesmen, the name of whose ‘little accounts’ is legion, only showed me mercy, the cormorants! because of the rich marriage which they believed was to come off; while the Jews, the cent-percent fellows—but what do you know of bills and renewals, of the misery of feeling that a day of reckoning is coming round—a horrible day when you must either put the gold for which those devils would sell their souls into their grasping hands, or by a dash of your pen plunge deeper and deeper into the gulf of ruin and despair? But there are other and more oppressive debts even than these, Honor—debts which I have no hopes of paying, except through one blessed chance, one interposition of Providence or fate—for I don’t suppose that Providence troubles itself much with my miserable concerns—in my behalf.”

“And that chance?” put in Honor, imagining that he waited to be questioned.

“That chance is the winning of the Derby to-morrow by Rough Diamond. I have no bets, at least nothing but trifling ones, on the race; but if the horse wins, his value will, as of course you know, rise immeasurably, and with the money I can sell him for I shall be able, for a time, to set myself tolerably straight. Your father—whose horse you have, I suppose, hitherto fancied Rough Diamond to be—has, he tells me, backed him for all that he is worth. My reason for not doing so has been that I am not up to making a book, and that the debts of honour I already groan under are sufficiently burdensome without incurring others which I might not be able to pay.”

“How anxious you must be and unhappy!” Honor said pityingly. “But there is one thing which puzzles me, and that is, how you could keep all this a secret from your wife. Surely she would have been silent; surely she might have softened her father, and made all smooth between you.”

“She might; but I could not risk it. Sophy is very delicate; and then there has been such entire confidence between her and her father, that it would have been almost impossible for her to keep anything from him. No; as I have brewed, so I must bake. I can only hope the best; and that, or the worst, will very soon be no longer matter for speculation. The devil of it is—I beg your pardon, I am always saying something inexcusable—but really the worst of it is, that the fact of my mother’s intention of fighting my grandfather’s will is no longer a mystery. Old Duberly’s fortune is, as all the world believes, very large; but at the same time he is known to be what is called a ‘character,’ and that his eccentricities take the turn of an extraordinary mixture of penuriousness and liberality has been often the subject both of comment and reproach with people who have nothing to do but to talk over the proceedings of their neighbours. In short—for I am sure you must be dreadfully tired of hearing me talk about myself—the world, my cursed creditors included, would be pretty well justified in believing that my worthy father-in-law would flatly refuse to pay a sum of something very like fourteen thousand pounds for a fellow whose extravagance and love of play were alone accountable for the debt; one, too, who has nothing—no, not even a ‘whistle’—to show of all the things that he has paid so dear for. Disgusting, is it not? And now that you have heard the story,—I warned you, remember, that it was a vile one,—what comfort have you to bestow on me? And can you, do you wonder at my calling the world—my world, that is—a miserable one? and is it surprising that, in spite of outward prosperity, of apparent riches, and what you call good gifts, I should sometimes almost wish to exchange my lot with that of the poorest of the poor, provided that the man in whose shoes I stood had never falsified his word, or lived as I have done and do, with a skeleton in the cupboard, of which another—one, too (forgive me, dear, for saying so), whom I not greatly trust—keeps, and must ever keep, the key?”

Honor paused for a moment ere she answered, and then said, in a gentle and half-hesitating way (they had turned their horses’ heads some time before, and had nearly arrived at Honor’s temporary home), “I almost wish you had not told me this; but we are neither of us very happy, Mr. Vavasour, and must learn to pity one another. Perhaps—I don’t know much about such things—but perhaps I ought to say that you were wrong; only, I am sure of this, that, tempted as you were, I should have done no better. It must have been so very difficult—so very, very frightening! In your place I should never have had courage enough to speak the truth; and I hope—O, how I hope!—both for your sake and my father’s, that your horse may win! But am I to say,” she whispered, as with his arms clasped round her slender waist he lifted her from the saddle, “am I to say to him, to my father, that I know about Rough Diamond? I should be so sorry, from thoughtlessness, to repeat anything you might wish unsaid.”

He followed her into the narrow passage, where for a single moment they were alone, and the craving within him to hold her to his heart was almost beyond his power to conquer. Perhaps,—we owe so much sometimes to simple adventitious circumstances,—but for the chance opening of a door on the landing-place above, Honor would at last have been awakened to the danger of treating Arthur Vavasour as a friend. She was very sorry for him; but she would have been more distressed than gratified had he pressed her to his heart with all the fervour of youthful passion, and implored her to trust herself entirely to his tender guardianship. On the contrary, seeing that he simply asked if Mrs. Norcott were at home, and reminded Honor of her wish to see the famous chestnut avenue, and of the practicability of realising her wishes, pretty Mrs. John Beacham tripped upstairs before him with a lightened heart, in search of the chaperone who was ever so good-naturedly ready to contribute to her pleasures.