FAST DOWNHILL.
Honor’s first letter to her husband--which she despatched the day but
one after she left the Paddocks--was not written without a considerable
amount of thought and caution. It was not in this young creature’s
nature to be false. On the contrary, deceit hung like a chain of lead
upon her mind--a chain that was heavy and galling, and which, save when
she was diverted from the pain it caused her by the excitement of
dissipation, of Arthur Vavasour’s society, and, alas, by the admiration
of which this true daughter of Eve well knew herself to be the object,
Honor’s consciousness of her own disloyalty caused her to feel very
thoroughly unhappy and remorseful. Her letter to John--the first which
she had ever addressed to him--caused her even while she wrote it to
blush for shame. In it--while she carefully avoided, or rather
ingeniously glossed over, the subject of her father’s illness--any acute
observer might have perceived that she was in no hurry to return to
Sandyshire. She had found the Colonel better, she wrote; but he was
looking ill, and complained a good deal of his head. (This, in Honor’s
defence, I may remark, was no invention on her part.) Altogether, she
felt she was a comfort to her father. He was in very different
circumstances from what she (Honor) had imagined him to be. Really quite
poor, she almost thought. They had no house, only a small lodging, and
they lived very poorly--so poorly that Honor was quite sure John would
not like it at all; while as for mother she would not be able to exist
on the kind of food that was served up in Stanwick-street. As regarded
herself, she was--though she could bear it very well for a
time--extremely uncomfortable. A little attic at the very top of the
house!--an attic with a sloping roof, and no closet to hang her dresses
in, and--But there is no occasion to follow Mrs. John in her filling up
of this her first letter with diatribes against her own discomfort, and
with comparisons (flattering, as she hoped, to the old lady’s pride)
between the wretchedness of the furniture and the poverty-stricken
nature of the food in Stanwick-street, and the luxuries and comforts
which she, the writer, had enjoyed at home. She wound up her letter (a
missive in which she had carefully abstained from any allusion to the
amusements, both present and to come, which were in readiness for her
delectation) with a hope that her father’s health would continue to
improve; in which case, in a fortnight or ten days, perhaps, Colonel
Norcott would let her talk of returning to the Paddocks. Both he and his
wife showed her so much kindness and affection that, however much she
would like to be at home again, she could not think just at present of
speaking about her return.
This was the sum and substance of Honor’s letter to her husband, and now
that it has been very frankly laid before the reader, I greatly fear
that his opinion of my poor heroine will not be much raised thereby.
Little enough have I to say in her excuse. She was very human, very
womanly; with the seeds of corruption in her veins, the child of a weak
mother and a wicked father, her infant innocence unshielded by a prayer,
the silent nursery work, the holy secret duties which are a mother’s
province, and hers only to perform, perforce left undone--how can we
wonder then that this child of nature, abandoned to the care of
hirelings, and so early transplanted to a soil in many respects
uncongenial, should prove herself to be no better than hundreds upon
hundreds of her sex and age, who, giving up reality for things hoped
for, find to their cost that their foolish discontent has proved their
deadliest bane!
“Well, John, and what is the letter about? She seems to have written
plenty, any way; but I suppose you won’t care to tell _me_ what all that
heap of writing is about;” and Mrs. Beacham, who, as was usual with her
at letter-delivery time, was busily employed in the housewifely and
popular task of concocting strong tea from a not over liberal allowance
of the herb, endeavoured to look as if she were not in the slightest
degree interested in the queries to which she had just given voice.
John, who had just finished his letter, and was proceeding to read it a
second time, in order to render himself thoroughly master of its
somewhat puzzling contents, pushed the delicate and young-lady-like
looking epistle across the table with rather an impatient gesture.
“I don’t know that you’ll be able to make much more of a hand of it than
I can,” he said gruffly, for his heart felt terribly sore, and with men
of John Beacham’s stamp emotion does not manifest itself in an
especially tender fashion. “The man hasn’t much the matter with him, as
far as I can understand; never had, I daresay,” he added under his
breath, but his mother caught the words, and treasured them in her mind
for future use.
“It ain’t much good,” she said quietly, “giving me the letter now. I
couldn’t read a word of such fiddling writing as that without my specs.
After breakfast, my dear, I’ll see what _I_ can make of it. So the
Colonel’s all right again, is he? Well, well, I never thought, for one,
that there was much cause for fear; but Honor, she was so wild to go,
there was no use trying to stop her. I declare to goodness--I never said
so before, John, for what was the use? it would only have worritted
you--but I declare to goodness, she was like as if she didn’t know
whether her head or her heels was uppermost, when she was packing up.
Glad of a change, I suppose, like all young people. It’s only nat’ral
she should get tired--such a young thing as she is--of the Paddocks--not
nineteen yet; and you--though you don’t look it, that I must say--nearly
old enough to be her father. As for me,” rising leisurely from her
chair, for her morning task was over, and the “specs,” needed for the
perusal of her daughter-in-law’s letter, were to be searched for on the
adjacent work-table,--“as for me, in course your wife’s glad enough to
get out of _my_ sight and hearing. An old body like me, do what she
will, is sure to find herself in the way; and I _have_ found myself in
the way, I don’t deny it, John, though it ain’t a pleasant thing to say,
least of all to you, my dear.” And Mrs. Beacham, after this pleasant
exordium, donned her tortoiseshell spectacles, and commenced what seemed
likely to prove no easy task, namely, the deciphering of Honor’s flowing
but not over-legible caligraphy.
To describe John’s feelings during the long-drawn-out operation would be
impossible. Already deeply hurt and wounded by the mere passing thought
(for his nature was too excellent for the spontaneous breeding therein
of harsh suspicions or dark surmises of evil) that he might have been
the dupe of Colonel Norcott’s (not his wife’s--_that_ conjecture was
reserved for Mrs. Beacham’s less indulgent breast to harbour) underhand
designs, his mother’s preamble--_surgit amari aliquid_--together with
her running comments on poor Honor’s rather confused and disconnected
letter, tried both his feelings and his temper severely.
“Well, mother,” he said at last, his patience giving way as much under
his own troubled thoughts as his mother’s covert hints and very
unpleasant guesses; “well, mother, if you talk till doomsday you won’t
make things different from what they are. It’s as plain to me as it is
to you that Honor wants to stay in London with her father. God knows
that I’d be glad enough to think it wasn’t so; but it is, and there’s an
end of it.”
“But, John, surely you’re not going to let Honor have her way? You’re
never going to allow--”
“Mother,” broke in John impetuously--so impetuously that Mrs. Beacham’s
heart was hardened thereby more than ever against the absent cause of
her son’s very novel act of disrespect; “mother, I repeat what I said
before, that there’s no earthly use either in abusing Honor or in
talking of what can’t be helped. As for sending for her, or writing for
her, or anything of the kind, that I’m not going to do--not yet awhile,
that is. As you said just now, it’s only natural that the poor young
thing should like a change. We’re old people, as you said, mother,” he
added with a very sad smile, “compared to her, and I begin to think you
were right a year and more ago, when you said that Honor was too young a
wife for me. There’s a good many more gray hairs in my head, mother,
than should be owned by my little girl’s husband. And then there’s her
father, d----n him!” and John’s big fist came so heavily down upon the
table that his mother almost trembled for the safety of her cups and
saucers; “I know him to be as great a villain as ever stepped in
shoe-leather; but, as I’ve often said before, he is _her_ father; and
being that he’s about the only relation that she’s got, it’s only
natural, I suppose, that she should hold to him. Ah me! That was a
black day for all of us when he stirred me up to give him the bad blow
that floored him. But for that, I should be a different man, mother,
from what I am this day. If I’d said it at the first, if I hadn’t been a
party to the fellow’s lie, I should stand on the old ground, mother, and
that was better ground than what’s under my feet to-day; but I hoped, so
I did, that the secret--Honor’s secret--would be kept. I little thought
that the fellow had a purpose all the while in what he did; I little
thought that Honor--but I am a fool, a downright idiot, to go on in this
way! I couldn’t be worse if I was a lad of twenty, with nothing to think
of in life but girls and their foolishness!” and John, who during the
utterance of these self-condemning sentences had been pacing with
hurried and heavy footsteps to and fro in the room, suddenly took
himself off to his out-of-door business, letting--contrary to his wont,
for he was rarely deficient in respect to his mother--the door of the
little parlour close with a bang behind his retreating footsteps.
END OF VOL. II.
Robson and Son, Printers, Pancras Road, N.W.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
from governness=> from governess {pg 204}
front drawing-roon=> front drawing-room {pg 232}
scanttily-filled=> scantily-filled {pg 256}
for the persual of=> for the perusal of {pg 285}