THE ELEMENTS WERE IN FAULT.
From the time of that chance meeting, Arthur Vavasour became a very
frequent visitor at the Paddocks. Ostensibly there was generally some
business excuses for the “calls” that were made so often, and lasted so
long. There was so frequently an ailing or an unsound horse, concerning
which an opinion was required; and then, as we already know, the
Paddocks lay so conveniently on the road to Fairleigh, that it was
hardly surprising that poor Sophy’s somewhat fickle lover should stop to
rest him on the way.
There is no denying the truth that young Mrs. Beacham did greatly enjoy
Mr. Vavasour’s society. They had so many (the old reason!) tastes in
common. He had read the books _she_ liked, and he delighted in less
commonplace and more classic music than “The soldier’s tear,” and that
old, old “Banks of Allan Waters,” which Honor was so tired of. His voice
too, when he spoke, was so soft and low--an “excellent thing” in man as
well as woman--and that same voice sounded doubly pleasant after a
morning spent in listening to Mrs. Beacham’s querulous tones and harsh
Yorkshire dialect.
It was surprising to herself how soon Honor felt at her ease with Arthur
Vavasour, and how short a time had been necessary to make her forget
that he was the son of that formidable Lady Millicent; while she--but
what had been _her_ origin Honor believed herself never destined to
learn--it was enough that she had been but a humble teacher to some
farm-house children, and that John, that best and kindest of created
beings, had taken her, penniless and almost friendless as she was, to
his home and to his heart.
There is something not altogether unsuggestive in the fact that John
Beacham’s bride was, at that period of her short married life, for ever
reminding herself that she “owed everything to John.” It almost seemed
as though she were throwing up a line of defence, a formidable battery,
to guard against any future attacks upon his peace. He was so really
kind to her, not tenderly demonstrative certainly, and anything but
sentimental; but she could _trust_ him so entirely. John was never
capricious, and rarely hasty or rough of speech; he never “bothered”
either about trifles--a delightful negative quality which many wives
never appreciate properly till they have experienced the bore of having
a womanly, housekeeping kind of helpmate “worrying” about a home, the
space and means of which are necessarily limited. That John Beacham was
all, and more than all, this, Honor was constantly repeating to herself.
Perhaps--it was more than likely--she was anxious to hide, under this
heap of estimable qualities, the aggravation of some of poor John’s
trifling defects of _manner_, his few uncourtly habits, his sometimes
ill-pronounced words. Be this as it may, Honor betrayed no sign, even to
herself, that she would have desired any change in one so excellent and
unselfish as her husband; it is even probable that, had not the peccant
places been pointed by force of contrast, she would have found little to
regret in John’s cheery voice and genial, though untutored, manners.
One great pleasure--_the_ pleasure of which Honor had spoken with such
girlish glee to Arthur Vavasour--that, namely, of riding on
horseback--had been without loss of time vouchsafed to the breeder’s
wife. She had a “wonderful figure for a horse” he had said from the
first, and when to that was added the conviction that, though she had
not been in the “saddle from a child,” his wife’s seat and hand were
perfect, John’s delight was extreme. The “teaching” proved a
comparatively easy matter; Lady Meg was quiet as a lamb; and very soon
(for John was often too busy to accompany her) Honor was trusted on
horseback, with only a small farm-boy as attendant, to take her
equestrian pleasure where she chose.
The only individual to whom this new state of affairs gave any umbrage
was old Mrs. Beacham, who, when John did not happen to be present, grew
very bitter on the subject of Honor’s favourite pleasure.
“It’s more than I ever had--and I a Yorkshire-woman born--is a horse of
my own,” she said one day to Honor, as the latter stood waiting for Lady
Meg, and looking very pretty and graceful at the window, her long green
habit trailing on the floor, and her gauntleted hand (John had _got her
up_ beautifully) playing with her little dandified whip. “I wonder John
can allow of such a thing as your riding about the country in this way.
Things _have_ got turned upside down with a vengeance since I was
young.”
“John likes it,” Honor said, turning round with a smile that disclosed
two rows of pearly teeth, and which ought to have mollified the sour old
lady’s temper. “I never should have thought of riding if it hadn’t been
for John, and now I do love it so! I don’t think I ever liked anything
half so much.”
“You’d like anything that kep you idle, that’s my belief. You’d leave
everything for other people to do, you would. Anybody else may slave
themselves to death, so as you keep your hands white and don’t bend your
back to work.”
“Now, that _is_ hard,” replied Honor, trying to laugh off the old
woman’s irritation. “I won’t bear any more of John’s sins! Why, don’t
you remember, mother”--she called her so, to please John--“don’t you
remember how he came home one day and found me rubbing the table, and
how angry he was, and how he said that neither you nor I were ever to do
such things again, for that, thank God, he was rich enough to pay for
servants to do the housework? Dear John! he always tries to please
everybody.”
“More fool he! Everybody indeed! That’s the sort of thing that brings
people to the workhouse. _I_ was brought up different. _I_ never could
see, not I, the good of young people being idle. Work keeps ’em out of
mischief, and hinders white hands, which ain’t of no use as far as I can
see, except to make the gentlemen stare at ’em.”
It was perhaps fortunate for Honor that the old lady could not see the
crimson blush that mantled over cheek and brow at this coarse and
uncalled-for remark. Had that been the case, Mrs. Beacham would have
suspected--what was indeed the truth--that her daughter-in-law was quite
conscious of, and felt indeed rather gratified by, the fact that one
gentleman at least had both looked at and admired the taper fingers,
white and soft as those of the finest lady in the land, to which Mrs.
Beacham alluded.
At that moment, and while Honor’s face was still turned towards the
window, a few heavy drops were seen to fall against the panes, and the
prolonged roll of distant thunder gave tokens of a coming tempest.
“O, there’s the rain! How dreadfully provoking! Just when I was going
out! What shall I do?”
“What will you do? Why, bear it to be sure, and be thankful you’ve
nothing worse to bear. I’m going across the meadow to see James Stokes’
whitlow. It will be long enough before such a helpless thing as you has
the stomach for such sights;” and so, grumbling as she went, the busy
old soul departed--to do her justice, she was always ready to _help_--on
her errand of mercy.
Honor sat down before the work-table, which was strewed all over with
the marks of woman’s industry and handicraft--men’s lambswool stockings
in readiness for mending, a corner of hideous patchwork protruding from
an open basket, and a general aspect around of rather unpicturesque
disorder. It was part of Honor’s daily employment to “tidy the tables”
after one of Mrs. Beacham’s mending mornings was brought to a close,
and, but for the rattling thunder overhead, she would have proceeded to
her task at once. The noise of the storm, however, together with the
solitude of the room, overcame and oppressed her--the vivid flashes of
lightning, darting across her face, dazzled her eyes; so resting her
face upon her outspread arms, she endeavoured, as best she could, to
shut out the startling tokens of the tempest. But all in vain. Honor,
though not (as it is called in common parlance) _afraid_ of thunder and
lightning, had it in her to be morbidly sensitive to an atmosphere
heavily laden, as was the case at present, with electric fluid. Her
head, which had begun to ache violently, seemed as if bound with a
circlet of iron, and she felt miserably depressed and nervous--so
nervous, that for almost the first time in her life she experienced a
dread of being alone. It was intensely foolish and cowardly and
absurd--of _that_ Honor would have been the first, in her sober senses,
to acknowledge the truth; but she was hardly herself just then, the
thunder boomed with such startling violence over the old house, and the
wind, which had commenced with a warning murmur, was howling amidst the
trees, as it seemed, in very rage and fury. Truly it was an awful storm.
Each thunderclap sounded louder and more vengeful than the last, till
gathering, as it would appear, its forces for a final outburst, such a
volley rattled over Honor’s bent-down head, that in a perfect agony of
terror she sprang upon her feet, and was rushing from the room when her
steps were arrested by the sight of a human figure advancing rapidly
from the open doorway.
A real cordial, even in that moment of bewilderment and fear, the
cheerful voice of Arthur Vavasour seemed to Honor when he said lightly--
“What, all alone in the storm? No joke, is it? By Jove, I don’t know
that I was ever out in a worse.”
She tried to recover herself; it was mortifying, hateful, to be
thought such a silly coward; but her nerves were overwrought
(meteorological influences have a peculiar effect sometimes on certain
delicately-organised constitutions); and when another thunderclap, still
fiercer than the preceding one, crashed over the old-tiled roof, and the
room was all ablaze with dazzling light, Honor, pale and trembling, and
utterly bereft, for the moment, of self-command, uttered a faint cry of
terror, and hid her white face against the nearest screen--that screen
chancing, unluckily, to be Arthur Vavasour’s shoulder!
It was the wrong place for the wrong head certainly; nor did it rest
there long. A slight, the very faintest, pressure of the hand that had
in all loyalty taken hers, to reassure and strengthen the failing
nerves, was sufficient to recall the trembling girl to a sense of the
error into which the wild instinct born of alarm had led her. The storm,
too, had suddenly abated in violence, the thunder was already dying away
in the distance; and Honor, viewing her conduct from a commonsense as
well as a commonplace point of view, felt thoroughly ashamed of herself.
“I can’t think how I could be so foolish,” she said, with a blush that
made her look, Arthur thought, more beautiful than ever.
He laughed. He was very anxious to make her feel comfortable as regarded
that quite unintentional act of trifling familiarity.
“I don’t know what you call foolish, Mrs. Beacham,” he said. “It strikes
me that a woman who could stand such a row as that must be a very
strong-minded party indeed. I didn’t above half like it myself, and
having a lively recollection of the day when I was a small boy--when the
big oak in your husband’s meadow was struck with lightning, and a man
killed under it--I thought that a wetting was better than that, so I cut
along through the rain and--here I am.”
He had scarcely finished when another step, a _masterful_ and heavy one,
was heard in the passage, and John Beacham, out of breath and wet to the
skin (a calamity concerning which, greatly to his mother’s displeasure,
he was never known to trouble himself), hurried into the room.
After shaking hands heartily with Mr. Vavasour, the master of the house
set about accounting for his sudden return and the plight in which he
found himself.
“I was away at Leigh,” he said, wiping his face and head with a large
coloured-silk pocket handkerchief, “when the storm began, and I saw at
once it was going to be a sneezer. Says I to myself, ‘The missus won’t
like this;’ not that I had any particular reason for thinking so.
There’s been no thunderstorm since we knew each other--eh, Honor? But
somehow it struck me that you might be frightened, so I told the ostler,
though it was raining cats and dogs by that time, to bring out
Scrapegrace in a jiffy. Tim thought I was mad, I do believe. You see,”
he added with an arch glance at his audience, “he hadn’t a little wife
at home to trouble his head about and make an old fool of him. Says he,
‘You’ll be wet through, sir, before you’ve been out five minutes;’ and
so, of course, I was. But what did it matter? I never troubled myself
about a wet jacket, and Scrapegrace isn’t the boy to be afraid of a
flash of lightning, so I threw my leg over the saddle and--here I am.”
“Here I am!” the very words (a singularity, trifling as it may appear,
which struck Honor’s sensitive imagination at once) that Arthur Vavasour
had used while accounting for _his_ opportune presence at the farm. The
two men were standing one on either side of her, and the marked contrast
between them impressed itself for the first time on Honor’s mind and
heart. There was John, large-framed and strong of bone; his rather
massive features redeemed from plainness by the frank and kind
expression which softened and almost idealised them; his skin roughened
by exposure to the weather; and his hands, usually guiltless of gloves,
brown, muscular, and manly. His very dress, moist and rain-stained, and
his shirt-collar limp and blackened with the dingy drippings from the
good man’s “wideawake,” told against his personal appearance; whilst, on
the contrary, Arthur’s _tout ensemble_, from the crown of his dark
waving hair to the tips of his well-made, though not by any means
dandified, boots, was as perfect as care and money and taste, to say
nothing of an excellent _material_, in the shape of his own handsome
face and graceful figure, could make it.
Honor _felt_ the contrast, and a pang of self-reproach darted through
her breast: of self-reproach and shame; shame that her head had rested,
though only for a moment, against that well-made coat; and ah, far more
fatal impulse than that which shame can give--the impulse that closed
her lips against the avowal of the deed!
And yet, in very truth, there was nothing to tell; and, moreover, it
would have given the matter far more importance than it deserved, had
Honor made a small descriptive narrative, for her husband’s benefit, of
what had occurred. And so, for a second time, where her relations with
Arthur Vavasour were concerned, she held her peace; and the
consciousness that there was this secret between them, albeit that
secret was one of so very trivial a description, lent the kind of charm
to the intercourse between Honor and Arthur Vavasour which is never
without its fruits. Arthur had a sincere regard for John Beacham. The
former was what is called an honourable man, but he was only twenty-one,
and at that age, though flesh is in one sense weak, it is terribly
strong too. Honor was wonderfully fair, and the man had not courage to
flee the temptation which the woman, beguiling him in her simple
ignorance, was daily so unfortunate as to set before him.
Verily it was time that interference came; time that Horace, strong in
brotherly affection, spoke his mind without fear of consequences to
Arthur Vavasour.