LE PREMIER PAS.
The preparations for Honor’s departure went on rapidly at Pear-tree
House. Her wardrobe, for her station in life, was a tolerably extensive
one; but besides that her stay in London was expected to be short, there
was this simplifying fact as regarded the packing of Mrs. John Beacham’s
things--namely, that she possessed no evening dresses. Handsome silk
gowns (_gownds_, Mrs. Beacham called them) she owned in plenty; but they
were made high, as became a decent female to wear them, and would have
been pronounced ridiculously _rococo_ in a London drawing room, where
the female figure divine is displayed _à toute outrance_, and where
nearly as much (anatomically speaking) may be learned of that
_chef-d’œuvre_ of Nature’s workmanship as may be picked up in the
dissecting-room or in the most _décolleté_ statuary display in Europe.
Honor watched and superintended, and indeed aided, in the packing up of
her belongings like a woman in a dream. It seemed so strange, now the
time was drawing near for her to depart, that she was actually going
away from John. There was such a sense of protection in his
presence--the sense of trust which all women feel, and love to feel, in
the support of a good and brave man--that Honor began to be very
miserable at the thought of bidding good-bye to her husband. Even after
they had left the house, she would have given much, as she sat by his
side in the trap, to have been able to say to him that she was sorry to
leave the Paddocks. Had she seen a token of softness on his countenance,
she would have opened out her heart to her true friend. But there was no
such sign. Stolidly, and with his eyes never turned for a single moment
on the sweet face beside him, John drove along the well-known road. He
little dreamt of the softened thoughts, the half-formed wishes, that
were welling up in Honor’s heart. He only knew that by her own wish she
was about to leave him, about to leave his protection for that of the
father who was so utterly unworthy of the trust. Ah, could he then but
have looked into the vain foolish heart which yet, with all its vanity
and folly, contained in it some elements of good, how changed might have
been poor Honor’s lot, and what a chance of future peace and safety, if
not of the ecstatic happiness of which simple women dream, might have
been hers!
But it was not to be! Not to be, because the wife was shy and silly, and
the husband prejudiced and proud. Not to be, because fate or Providence
had ordered otherwise. Not to be? The words are terribly suggestive, and
hard indeed it seems to believe, that while a poor weak woman is
deliberating, it is a known fact to Him who ruleth the heart and
searcheth out the spirit, that she will be lost.
John had decided not to part with his wife till he saw her safe under
her father’s roof. At the Leigh station, where in less time than was
usually employed in the _trajet_, the pair duly arrived, Will Snelling
was in waiting to drive back the horse and trap to the Paddocks.
“Walk him up and down a bit, Will,” John said, as his faithful henchman
gently stroked the old gray’s quarters, which gave manifest tokens of
hardish driving. “I fancied we were late; clocks at the house too fast,
I suppose. There, take that trunk, my man,” to a porter who seemed to
have nothing more interesting to do than to suck a dirty straw while he
stared at the heaving flanks of John’s thoroughbred steed. “Take that
trunk, and look alive. The up-train’s late to-day, isn’t it?” He seemed
determined not to trust himself with Honor. Like most men, especially
those of a thoroughly manly stamp, he hated scenes, and the sight of a
woman in even the smallest amount of grief or distress was especially
annoying to him. Of what avail, besides, would it be to talk to Honor
now on the only subject which contained interest for him? The die was
cast. She was about to do the thing which he had thought and talked
himself into believing that he most hated upon earth. His wife was to
undergo the contamination of Norcott’s society; to mix with his
associates; to listen to the conversation of men of his stamp and
strain; and to return to him--ah, _that_ was the rub! _There_ was where
the shoe pinched most! How would Honor return to him, and to the dull
country life which alone he had to offer her? Would she be less of a
fine lady, as his mother (and John had begun to think, with some degree
of truth) had so often called her within the last few well-remembered
months? Would she smile upon him more, talk more, be more interested in
her home, and--thought poor John Beacham, with a sigh, as the train
rushed onward at express speed to London, would she shrink less from his
touch--the touch of one who loved her, for all his lack of refinement,
his red hands, and his country-made coat, with a love which was not for
an hour only, not for the brief space of a summer holiday, but for all
the years that should be allotted to him upon the earth?
“Pleasant day for the end of April,” John remarked; “an east wind that
cuts through you like a knife. Pin your shawl, Honor; you’d better;” and
he drew up the railway-carriage window with an impatient jerk.
If they had but been alone, those two, if there had not been seated
opposite to them a garrulous old woman and her maid, Honor might have
said her say; John might have softened at the sight of her swollen
eyelids, and all might have been well, or at least better, between them.
The fellow-traveller, however, proved an effectual barrier to any such
beneficial result. She did not come under the head of a strong-minded
female, but was, on the contrary, one of the numerous unprotected
travellers who divide their interests between their sherry-flask and the
anticipation of an immediate and dreadful railway accident.
“I suppose there won’t be any signals, sir,” she said, addressing John
nervously, for, as they neared London, the smoke floating on the
breezeless air bore a striking and disagreeable resemblance to a
November fog. “The railway people are so terribly careless. I declare,
there’s no punishment too bad for them. We might all be robbed and
murdered, and not one among ’em would trouble his head about the
matter.”
In this way the old lady, after the fashion of her kind, maundered on,
while nearer and more near to the head-quarters of dirt and smoke and
crime the travellers rushed.
Honor sat mute, and with a sad and troubled countenance, by her
husband’s side. She dreaded and yet longed for the moment when she would
be freed from the miserable restraint, the almost unendurable combat
within her, which was induced by his presence. Once alone--once safe in
the cab which was to convey her far from him and from the associations
connected with the painful past--she would breathe, she thought, more
freely, and would be better able to prepare herself for the interview
with her father and her father’s wife which was now so very near at
hand. Honor now knew (none could have known better) that she had not
done, in the spirit as well as to the letter, her duty to her husband.
In thought she had strayed from him; in her daily life she had not cared
to study his wishes; and above all--but that was happily, long ago now,
and over--she had allowed the image of another man to stand between her
and the husband who so loved and trusted her. To confess all this would
have been more than Honor would have found moral strength and courage
for, so she came to a compromise, after the fashion of the cowardly,
with her conscience, and made an inward resolve that on her return, at a
convenient season she would--not exactly make a clean breast of it to
John, but that she would show him by her conduct, ay by her words if
necessary, that she repented of her past proceedings, and intended, as
much as in her lay, to make ample amends for it in the time to come.
She was roused from the train of thought into which these resolutions
had led her by the sudden stopping of the train, the throwing open of
doors, and the inquiry for tickets. The midday was very chill and
sunless, and a striking contrast to the bright May morning--twelve
months, minus a day, before--when the village children strewed fresh
roses in her path, and the jocund sun shone out so brightly on her
bridal!
John too had been, she recollected, a very different John in those days.
The companion of that vividly-remembered wedding journey would not, she
felt, have bustled her out so brusquely on the platform, and would have
handled her small belongings with a far gentler hand. Life, however, is
compounded amongst its countless atom-like events of so many contrasts,
and so many memories of contrasts, that comparisons of the present are
often as unsatisfactory as they are odious.
“Non c’è maggior stupidità
Che di recordarsi del tempo passato,”
when the current of our lives is running roughly over scattered stones,
and when we need our best wisdom, patience, and tact, to carry us safely
through a perilous crisis.
By an insignificant, but at the same time a somewhat singular,
coincidence, the family from the Castle chanced to be in the same train,
and in a carriage immediately behind that in which our travellers from
Peartree-house had placed themselves. The fact of their near
neighbourhood was patent to John: he was, however, in no mood to listen
hat in hand, and with the old-fashioned show of respect--a remnant of
the not wholly extinct feudal system which had descended to him from his
grandsires--whilst Lady Millicent condescendingly acted the part of
suzerain lady for his benefit. Hoping to evade altogether the notice of
the mighty dame, John, after the fashion mutely objected to by his wife,
hustled that young person in rather unseemly haste from the carriage.
“Be quick,” he said, as he hurried her away to a cab. “Don’t look that
way; her ladyship is there, with the young ladies, and I have no time
for stopping if I am to go back by the next train.”
There was not a grain (as I am sure must be by this time apparent to the
reader) of that very common weakness popularly known as flunkyism in
John Beacham’s honest, unaspiring nature. His wife, who was not, in
ordinary cases, a mean judge of character, might have felt well
satisfied, could she have often chanced to be present during John’s
familiar interviews with men of rank and note, that subserviency was
foreign to his nature, and that he was equally at his ease with the peer
as with the peasant. It was only with the female sex--when that sex
happened to be represented by an arrogant fine lady--that John Beacham,
feeling completely out of his element, seemed awkward and constrained;
so awkward and constrained that Honor, disposed to see everything _en
noir_ as regarded her husband’s manners, rashly decided him to be
vulgarly in awe of the haughty grandeur of her friend Arthur’s mother.
That honest John would at any time have willingly gone a mile or two out
of his way to avoid a chance meeting with the great lady of Gillingham,
was undoubtedly true. Want of habit--for fine ladies of any stamp came
very little in his way--was quite sufficient to account for this
peculiarity; but the moral cowardice betrayed by this shrinking from a
subjection to Lady Millicent’s queenly airs and condescending
graciousness had often been a source of mortification to Honor. Since
the memorable epoch of the Danescourt fête the foolish girl had thought
herself into the irrational belief that she might aspire to visit on
terms of equality the upper ten thousand of the county. Before the most
unfortunate discovery which had so fully developed the germs of ambition
lying latent in her breast, Honor had more than once felt inclined to
resent Lady Millicent’s supercilious notice--her over-civil inquiries,
when church was over, after Mrs. Beacham’s health; and, worse than all,
the occasional patronising calls at the Paddocks, when any heavy-on-hand
visitors among the rare guests at the Castle chanced to express a wish
for an introduction to Mr. John Beacham’s far-famed breeding stud. But
if such had been Mrs. John’s feelings when stirred thereto partly by Mr.
Vavasour’s head-turning attentions, and partly by the entirely vague but
pleasingly deluding surmise that she was a “lady” born, how much more
was she inclined to chafe against Lady Millicent’s offensive
condescension when the to her blissful truth was no longer doubtful, and
when Honor knew herself to be the daughter of a well-born gentleman, and
the great-granddaughter (it was wonderful how soon she made herself
acquainted with the family pedigree) of a baronet!
Very few words passed between John Beacham and his wife as they were
rattled along the busy thoroughfares leading from the Waterloo station
to quiet Stanwick-street. A station cab is never a favourable locality
for dialogue, and the fares on the present occasion appeared better
pleased to be silent than to talk. Jingle, jingle went the wheels, and
clatter, clatter, the ill-fitting window-frames, whilst every jerking,
jolting moment brought them nearer to what would be alike a pain and a
relief to both--separation!
At last--the time had seemed both long and short--the cab, leaving the
northern precincts of the Park, turned into the dull, respectable little
street where Honor was to find a temporary home.
“No. 14!” John shouted, with his head out of the window, and in another
moment they pulled up before the Colonel’s door.
The last adieux were made--as such final farewells usually are--very
hurriedly, and in a decidedly unsatisfactory fashion. It had been
Honor’s settled purpose to give utterance to some kind words ere they
parted--to say something--what, she knew not--that would be regretful
and conciliatory; something that would make her own heart lighter when
_he_ should be far away. But partings, hasty partings especially, are
something like death-bed repentances. There is hurry and flurry, there
is alarm and confusion, there is the consciousness of having so much to
do, and so short a time in which to do it. At that moment, when poor
John pressed his wife’s delicate fingers with a hand moist with heat and
emotion, the presence of the parlour-maid, and the duty of seeing to
Honor’s various belongings, checked any loving words that might have
been hovering on his tongue, and almost before the object of his anxious
solicitude had responded to his final “God bless you!” the vehicle, with
John inside, had driven off, and Honor was left alone.