HONOR SHOWS A LIKING FOR THE “BELL.”
Ten days--long and anxious ones--have elapsed since Honor’s instalment
by her father’s bed (for, as may already have been surmised, old Mrs.
Beacham and later John himself had been constrained, much against their
respective wills, to return to the Paddocks without her), and Colonel
Norcott, pronounced out of danger by Dr. Kempshall, has already
partially recovered his normal tone of mind. By that time the mystery of
Honor’s birth had ceased to exist, and all the little world of
Gawthorpe, including the equally important and more extended one of
Switcham and the surrounding farms, knew her for what she was--namely,
the illegitimate daughter of Colonel Frederick Norcott, formerly of West
Lowe Court, Sandyshire. Very little--_nothing_, it may almost be
said--was ever addressed to John Beacham on the subject of his wife’s
parentage. Of comparatively humble birth though they were, an
instinctive delicacy warned the major part of his friends, that to John
any allusion to the subject would be distasteful at least, if not
positively offensive. The undefined suspicion also--strengthened by the
fact that, during all the days spent in attendance on her father, John
never was known to enter even for a single moment Colonel Norcott’s sick
room--that he, John Beacham, was no stranger to the accident from which
the gallant Fred was suffering, did not tend to render the shrewd
Sandyshire yeomen particularly desirous of probing any hidden mental
wounds which he might be desirous of concealing.
But in addition to all these causes for silence, there was a change--a
trifling one, perhaps, and an alteration more to be felt than
explained--in John himself. That he should have been preoccupied and
taciturn whilst his wife’s father was lying between life and death was
easily to be understood; but the dread of a fatal result was over now,
and yet John’s brow was moody, and his laugh was heard far less
frequently, was likewise far less hearty than of yore. The truth was
that John Beacham, loving his wife with an entire and all-absorbing
devotion, was repining, not only at her absence, but at the changes
which, with the clear-sightedness of jealous affection, he foresaw
would take place in his relations with Honor. Other feelings too,
connected with his recent act, were perplexing, and rendering him
ashamed. In proportion as his deadly fear of being a self-condemned
murderer diminished, so did his softened feelings towards his late
antagonist subside likewise. With the conviction that Colonel Norcott
was no longer a sufferer from that burst of passion at first so truly
repented of, there returned with redoubled force John’s antipathy to the
man whom he rightly believed to be dead to every feeling of honour,
every elevating sentiment of justice or of pity. From the moment when
Colonel Norcott was pronounced out of danger, he had endeavoured,
without exactly expressing his desire in words, to make Honor understand
his wish that she should return to the Paddocks.
“It’s lonely without you, my dear,” he said more than once, standing
with Honor in the summer twilight among the hollyhocks and
scarlet-runners, in the old-fashioned inn-garden. “It’s very lonely,
especially in the evenings; you know I’m not much of a reader, and I get
very tired of the old lady’s knitting-needles--click, click, click! by
the hour together. O, Honor, it will be very pleasant, dear, when you
come home again!”
And Honor thought so too; at least, she comforted John by saying
something of the kind, sending that honest farmer home with a lightened
heart because of the awakened hope within him that very soon his wife
would be again under the shelter of his roof.
“She’ll be here to-morrow, mother, or at farthest next day,” he said
cheerily to the old lady on his return home, after the ninth day of
Honor’s absence. “The Colonel is going on all right, thank God! Ah,
mother, if you only knew what a relief that is! I never speak to Honor
about what passed. I couldn’t well, seeing that he’s her father, worse
luck! But I can tell you that I never slept--no, not a wink, that I can
safely say--till he was out of danger; and what would have become of me,
if so be he’d died, the Lord in heaven only knows!”
Mrs. Beacham laid down her knitting-needles, and looked at her son with
eyes full of loving pity. Her nature seemed to have undergone a change
since the eventful day of the Danescourt discovery. The mere fact of
being once more alone as of yore, with John, had a softening effect, not
only on her feelings towards him, but towards Honor. Her manner of
speaking, therefore, towards her daughter-in-law was far more pleasant
and tolerant than usual.
“It’s been a sore trial, John, I’m sure of that,” she said; “but Honor
won’t be the one, I’m sure, not to forget and forgive.”
“Forget and forgive!” John repeated warmly. “Why, in Heaven’s name, what
or who has she got, I should like to know, to forget and to forgive? Is
it the man who behaved like a brute and a scoundrel to the poor soul her
mother, or is it me, that gave him only what he deserved, the villain,
that Honor’s to be forgetting and forgiving?”
Poor Mrs. Beacham, completely taken aback by this unexpected outburst,
could, in the impossibility of excusing herself, only resume her
knitting in dignified silence. She had not the remotest idea how she had
offended John--John, whom she had never in her life before known to be
so cranky. If he could not talk to Honor about the “crack” on the head
that he had given her “papa,” why, surely, that was as much as to say
she had a right to be offended. So argued to herself this sensible old
lady; nor were her reasonings, all things considered, entirely without
their modicum of common sense.
Meanwhile, Honor herself, as we have just hinted, was by no means
fretting after a return to the Paddocks. She had been made a great deal
of during her absence; and Honor was a young lady to whom the process of
being made much of was especially agreeable. Perhaps the one of her new
connections by whom she had been the most petted was (and the
circumstance is very characteristic of the woman’s character) Colonel
Norcott’s colonial wife. It was through Mrs. Baker’s advice that the
person who was, next to herself, the most deeply interested in the
Colonel’s recovery, was, without loss of time, telegraphed to of his
danger. Honor, who, as the reader may already have perceived, was not
remarkable for moral courage, betrayed some faint symptoms of alarm at
the measure. Her grandmother, however (Mrs. Baker always insisted upon
her rights of relationship, and _would_ be called grandmamma, however
much shy Honor endeavoured to escape the duty), her grandmother strove
as best she might to steady Mrs. John’s nerves on the occasion.
“You will find my son’s wife one of the best and unpretending of women;
but that, my dear, has nothing to do with the question. If she were the
least good-natured and the worst of human beings, our duty would remain
the same, and that duty would be to have no secrets from Mrs. Norcott.
Even if Fred were certain to recover, I should still repeat the same.
Let everything be above-board and open. I don’t know whether you
understand French. You do? So much the better, for there is a motto in
that language which, to my thinking, should be written in letters of
gold on ivory: _Fais ce que dois, avenne que pourra_. And now, my dear,
be so good as to ring the bell, and we will despatch the message without
loss of time to Mrs. Fred, who is staying with some friends at Ryde. On
all accounts, it will be better for her to be here, for Mr. Baker is
very uncomfortable at the cottage without me; and you, too, should your
father give signs of amendment, which, please God, may be the case, will
not be sorry, I am sure, to return to your husband and your home.”
To this very natural supposition Honor made no reply, save by a little
inward shiver, which was patent only to herself. At that moment, the
appalling fact that the home _for life_ which she had made for herself
was one thoroughly unsuited to her tastes as well as feelings, broke
with its fullest force upon John Beacham’s wife. She felt--God forgive
her for her ingratitude!--that she positively loathed the idea of
returning to the companionship of her mother-in-law--to the _mesquin_,
wearisome talk of household economies, of the shortcomings of
serving-maids, the failure of a “baking,” or the “coming in two,” in
careless Jane’s or Sally’s hands, of jug or basin. How soon, or if ever,
but for _two_ adventitious contingencies (the contingencies, namely, of
her mother-in-law’s disagreeableness, and the converse as regarded her
friend Arthur Vavasour), Honor would have made the discovery that her
life was a spoiled and miserable one, it would be hard to say. Not for
any imaginable consideration would she have been willing that the dear
old lady, whose kindness and gentleness and refinement had so won upon
her heart and fancy, should obtain any, even the faintest, inkling of
her state of mind. It was bad enough to be discontented, vile enough to
wish the past undone, her marriage with that devoted and excellent John
a dream of the past, and herself free to love and wed in a sphere more
congenial to her tastes--_the_ sphere, in short, to which she was in a
manner born. All this, I repeat, was odious and wicked enough; and
Honor, feeling it to be thus wicked and odious, was naturally desirous
of being herself the only confidante of the sad secrets of her untamed
and inexperienced heart.