Read Ebook: Sink or swim? by Houstoun Mrs Matilda Charlotte

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 282 lines and 64488 words, and 6 pages

CHAP. PAGE

SINK OR SWIM?

"HE COMES TOO NEAR," ETC.

It was now the middle of May, and during a swiftly-passing fortnight Honor Beacham, continuing her course of semi-deception regarding her father's condition, and entirely concealing from the husband whom she believed to be exclusively absorbed in his own pursuits and interests the fact that her days and nights were spent in one continued round of exciting pleasure, went on her way--if not rejoicing, at least in a condition of such delightful mental inebriation, that she found barely sense or time enough to ask herself the serious question, if the life which she was leading indeed were joy.

Poor John! Could Honor have heard the heavy sigh that broke from his full heart as he closed the letter; could she, above all, have looked into that heart and read its secret sorrows, she could not have doubted of her husband's love; and perhaps, removed from the glamour of Arthur Vavasour's presence, from the mesmeric influence of a passion which was becoming terribly overpowering in its hourly-gathering strength, she might have been again a happy woman in the simple fashion and the humble sphere to which she had been brought up. Such a "chance," however, was not for the foolish, beautiful woman who, with half-tender words from her high-bred adorer lingering on her memory, read the simple letter, which it had cost so much pain to write, in anger and in bitterness. Tossing it on her toilet-table with an impatient jerk, she told herself that John did not care for her. It was nothing to him, she said mentally, whether she stayed away or not; but as she inly spoke the words, the fingers of her little gauntleted hand--she had just returned from riding in the Park--dashed away something very like tears that had gathered on her long lashes and nothing short of the recollection that she was going in a few hours' time to dine at Richmond with Arthur Vavasour and a few other friends of her father's prevented her from indulging in the luxury of a "good cry."

"How smart they are!" Honor whispered in dismay to Arthur, as the two caught a glimpse of the lively sisters from behind the muslin curtain of the first-front drawing-room.

"Don't talk in that way," she said, one of her crimson blushes speaking far more eloquently than her words, while she tried to hide her confusion by carefully drawing on finger after finger of her delicate Paris gloves. "Don't talk in that way; I must talk to these people now. You don't know them, of course?" And rising gracefully, she went through the ceremony of introduction which her father deemed it necessary to perform.

"How glad I am that you remembered the Park," Honor said, as they, the carriages following at a foot's pace, sauntered slowly along the beautiful wooded brow beyond Pembroke Lodge; "I would not have missed this view for the world."

They were together now,--those two who had been better far had the wide seas divided them--those two who could not but have owned that so it was, had any put the question to them in the rare sober moments which nineteen and twenty-one, in the heyday of folly and of love, are blessed with. The rest had strolled away in pairs; so that Arthur could speak as well as look his love into the bewildering eyes of his friend's lovely wife.

Arthur could scarcely repress a sigh as the image of poor neglected Sophy, stretched on her luxurious couch in the gorgeously-furnished back drawing-room in Hyde-park-terrace, presented itself to his mind's eye. "She knows nothing, guesses nothing," he said, with an ineffectual effort at carelessness. "Where ignorance is bliss, you know, it's worse than folly to be wise. I suspect there is a Bluebeard's closet in almost every house, and as long as women don't try to look inside, all goes on smoothly."

Very guilty she felt for a second or two, and humbled and odious, as the consciousness of being a vile deceiver sent a blush to her fair cheek, and checked any answering words that had risen to her tongue. Time, however, for useful reflection was denied her. The sound of her father's voice announcing that it was five o'clock, and that the boats were waiting at the Castle-stairs, effectually interrupted a reverie of a more wholesome description than might, under the circumstances, have been expected; and, re?ntering their respective carriages, the party were soon on their way down the hill so loved by Cockney pleasure-seekers, and so be sung by nature-worshipping poets.

"O, I do so hope he'll win!" she exclaimed enthusiastically; "he is such a wonderfully beautiful creature. And he has a brother who, they think, will be more perfect still;--no, not a brother quite, a half-brother, I think he is; and I used to watch him every day led out to exercise, looking so wild and lovely. He is only a year old, and his name is Faust; and they say he is quite sure to be a Derby horse."

Poor Honor! In her eagerness on the subject, and her intense love of the animal whose varied charms and excellences were to be seen in such perfection in her husband's home, she had been inadvertently "talking shop" for the amusement of the spurious fine ladies, whose supercilious glances at each other were not, even by such a novice as Honor Beacham, to be mistaken. In a moment--for the poison of such glances is as rapid as it is insidious--two evil spirits, the spirits of anger and of a keen desire to be avenged, took possession of our heroine. She saw herself despised, and--so true is it that we cannot scarcely commit the smallest sin without doing an injury as well to our neighbours as to ourselves--she resolved, to the utter extinction of the very inferior beauties near her, to make the most of the wondrous gift of loveliness which she was conscious of possessing. Hitherto she had "borne her faculties meekly;" the consciousness that she was, by marriage, without the pale of the "upper ten thousand" had, together with an innate modesty which was one of her rarest charms, kept her silent and somewhat subdued when in what is called "company." It had required the looks of contempt which she had seen passing between the well-got-up sisters to rouse the spirit of display in Honor Beacham's heart; but, once aroused, the intoxication of success encouraged her to proceed, and the demon of Coquetry was found hard indeed to crush.

The row, slow and dreamy, up-stream to Teddington-lock, would, even had there been no unlawful and much-prized lover--of whom, explain it as you will, Honor was more than half afraid--by her side, have been simply delightful. The river was so purely clear that the water-weeds beneath its pellucid surface showed brightly, freshly green; and then the long low islets, with the graceful willow-boughs, vivid with the hues of early spring, dipping their last-opened buds into the laving stream, and the banks, verdant and fair, and cattle-sprinkled--all combined to make a Breughal-like picture of spring verdure and beauty.

The hour of ten had struck by the town clocks, and the many wine-bottles on the table of No. 3 room were near to emptying, before it occurred to any of the party therein assembled that the night was fine and warm and starlight, and that in the gardens of the hotel a fresher, purer air could be imbibed than that which reminded them somewhat too forcibly of the good things they had been imbibing.

At a conjugal hint from the Colonel, his watchful and obedient wife suggested that the moon had risen, and was looking lovely over the river. A turn on the terrace would be delightful, she thought; and as her proposal met with no opposition, they made themselves an impromptu drawing-room under the starry canopy of heaven.

"What a lovely night! how glad I am to have seen this! The moonlight never looked to me so soft and beautiful before!"

"Never? I am glad of that," Arthur said, his face very near to Honor's as they leant over the stone balustrade and gazed out upon the tranquil scene. "I may hope then that, for a little while at least, the memory of this night will linger with you. It is a day that I at least shall find it very hard to forget. You smile and shake your head. Perhaps you take me for one who knows nothing of his own mind,--one whom a fresh face can stir into new and soon-to-be-changed feelings. But, Honor, listen to me--listen while we have these few moments we can call our own. I tell you that the love I feel for you is one that will defy all time and space and change. You have never been loved, my beautiful one, with such a love as this. You would tell me, were you not an angel, and too pure and good for such a world as this, that your husband--"

He seized both her little hands in his strong grasp, and held them there as in a vice.

A LOVER FOUND AND LOST.

Standing droopingly in the august presence, and without a word to say either in her own behalf or that of her co-delinquent, the poor girl listened in silence to the stern and very bitter words of reprobation which fell from her mother's lips. Perhaps until she so listened--until she contrasted the hard unsympathising nature of the woman to whom she owed her birth with that of the good, thoroughly-to-be-relied-on character of the man whose letter, with dimmed eyes and a very pitying heart, she had just contrived to read and comprehend--she had never rightly known how necessary the love of him, who for so many months had been her only object and point of interest at uncongenial Gillingham, had become to her.

"O, mamma!" began poor Rhoda, whose delicacy was severely wounded by this exordium,--"O, mamma, I did nothing! Indeed, indeed, I gave no--I mean--I did not lead--"

To convince Lady Millicent of this truth would, however, have required eloquence far greater than that possessed by the lowly-born clergyman, who certainly had not chosen the very likeliest way in the world to gain his ends. As milady had truly said, there were but two ways of accounting for the reverend gentleman's preposterous conduct, and neither of those two ways was calculated to throw a roseate hue over the matter. That Rhoda--her favourite, because her most submissive, daughter--had degraded herself to the degree of giving encouragement to "the man" for whose audacity no words were sufficiently severe, caused as much surprise and indignation to the magnificent widow as if she had systematically and kindly encouraged her child to pour out into the maternal breast her cares, her sorrows, and her joys. That a heart, young and love-requiring, will, in default of home aliment, seek elsewhere for its natural, and in some cases even necessary, food, this mother, engrossed by her own plans and projects for personal aggrandisement and power, had never yet suspected. Lady Millicent--a stay-at-home, "domestic" woman, a "widow indeed," and one of those constitutionally prudent matrons against whom the tongue of scandal never had for a single instant wagged--was precisely one of those individuals with whom self-deception is the very easiest thing in life. Her hopes and wishes, her thoughts and fancies, never--that she could truly have said--soared above or beyond the boundaries of her own property; and the interests of her children, she had taught herself to believe, were the groundwork and the motive power of all the hard, unwomanly business that she had set herself to do.

The cold eyes fixed upon the now tearful face before her seemed to command as well as to expect an answer. None, however, came; so, still more authoritatively, Lady Millicent--could she find no better way of improving her talents and of showing her appreciation of the legacy committed to her charge, than by thus torturing the feelings of Cecil Vavasour's young daughter?--Lady Millicent pressed the question to which she had hitherto received none but the least comprehensible of replies.

"Answer me. Really I have no more time to waste. Had you any idea that this Mr. Wallingford intended making the application which strikes me as so extraordinary?"

With some difficulty, Rhoda managed to stammer forth a negative. "Indeed no," she said; "and, mamma, Kate knew no more about it than I did. I never told her--I mean, I--"

She stopped suddenly, her face the colour of the setting sun when, "cradled in vermilion," it throws its red reflection over slope and mountain, land and river. On her cheek and brow and slender neck the tell-tale witness rushed; and Lady Millicent--well aware that her guileless daughter knew and felt that she had committed herself--said, even more coldly than before:

"At his doing one of the most unprincipled acts of which a man can be capable," sneered Lady Millicent. "He was perfectly well aware--he says so in his letter--that I should be intensely angry at his presumption; and yet--really, Rhoda, I have no patience with your folly and wrongheadedness--you stand up for this priggish, formal, underhand--"

Lady Millicent laughed scornfully.

The head and eyes resolutely bent upon the folio before her, the decided tone of a voice whose stern, determined accents Rhoda knew and understood full well, convinced the timid girl that appeal there was none, and that nothing remained for her but to obey. With a heavy heart she ascended the stairs to the chamber that she called her own, and which, opening into a smaller one appropriated to Kate, enabled that lighter-spirited young lady to overhear through the keyhole of the door the hardly suppressed sobs which broke from the breast of the unhappy Rhoda.

"Of course you didn't," her brother said, as he settled his cravat in the pier-glass over the mantelshelf ,--"of course you didn't. Girls when they are in love will deceive even other women,--a very different affair, I can tell you, from taking in a man; and if you think, my dear Katie--"

"Glad, to be sure," said Arthur, taking up his gloves, and troubling himself less than was altogether brotherly about poor Rhoda's first and, as the preoccupied young man considered, thoroughly uninteresting love-affair,--"glad! Why it's the most disgusting piece of folly I ever heard of. Such bad taste too! But it's all my mother's fault. If a gushing young woman like Rhoda had seen some good-looking young fellows every now and then, she would never have got spooney on such a slow prig of a parson as George Wallingford. An excellent young man, I daresay, in his way; but excellent young men haven't much of a pull in these days, except when girls haven't anyone else to talk to. Trust me, it won't be long, if I know anything about such matters, before Miss Rhoda finds another lover ready to knock this spooney fellow out of her head." And Arthur Vavasour, satisfied with this summary settlement of a question which probably appeared to him in the light of a very commonplace affair indeed, hurried away to his appointment in Stanwick-street--hurried to the presence of the still pure-hearted woman, for the love of whose bright eyes the silly young man was ready to lose his all of peace on earth, the goodwill of friends and kindred, and that much-prized but unexplainable thing for which no other nation save our own can boast even the simple name--the name, that is, of Respectability.

WHAT WAS HONOR DOING?

It was Sunday at the Paddocks,--Sunday afternoon,--rather a ponderous season in the old silent house; and John was, sooth to say, a trifle tired of his own thoughts, to say nothing of the sight of his respectable parent poring, spectacles on nose, over the heavy sermon , that kept her in a blissful doze through two hours at least of that long afternoon of rest.

The early dinner was over; and the house being very quiet--no sound more startling than the buzz of the flies upon the window-pane breaking the stillness of the restful time--John Beacham, who had ensconced himself in his big arm-chair, feeling dull enough, poor fellow, without Honor, began to experience not only the influence of the heat but of the Sabbath beef and pudding; and his eyelids, "drawing straws," as the saying is, closed gradually over the tranquil scenes before him, and the deserted husband found himself in the land of dreams.

"Hallo, old fellow! taking a snooze, eh?" was Jack's jovial greeting; and then the two men shook hands, while Mrs. Beacham, adjusting her spectacles, and with rather a scared look in her sharp old eyes, endeavoured, under the appearance of being still more wideawake than usual, to hide the fact that she had been asleep.

Jack was not much--as he often remarked himself--of a ladies' man. He was far more at home in the stable than the drawing-room. Nevertheless, and especially when he had on his go-to-meeting coat and hat, he could shuffle through the usual forms of social good breeding with tolerable success. Of these forms, a short dissertation on the weather, past, present, and to come, together with a few polite inquiries regarding the health and whereabouts of the members of their respective families, stood first in importance. It was to the last of these conversational duties that Mrs. Beacham was indebted for some valuable information regarding the proceedings of the erratic young woman whose continued absence was to the old lady a perpetual source of mingled anger and satisfaction.

"Well, and how do you get along without the missus; eh, John?" asked the visitor. And then, with a rather meaning wink and a jerk of his smoothly-brushed yellow head, "I expect I've seen Mrs. John since you have; caught sight of her yesterday morning as I was tooling through the Park. She was a-horseback, looking like paint,--so she was, with such a colour,--and the young Squire along with her. There was a servant behind 'em on a screwed bay horse; and I didn't think much of the one the missus rode either--a leggy brute! She wouldn't think much of him, I fancy, after Lady Meg. But you'll have her--the missus, I mean--back again soon, I doubt." And the worthy, stupid fellow--stupid, that is, in everything but what regarded horse-flesh--pulled up at last, entirely unconscious that he had applied the match to a train, and that a "blowing-up" of some kind or other would be the inevitable consequence of his thoughtlessly-spoken words.

"John, John!" she said, lifting up a stubborn finger warningly; "if I hadn't heerd and seen this myself, I never could--and that's the truth--have believed it. To think that you, a man grown and with a man's blood in your veins, should let a woman lead you by the nose like this!"

"Nonsense, mother!" with an unsuccessful effort to laugh the matter off. "No one is leading me, or thinking of leading me, by the nose, as you call it. Honor is a silly girl, I don't say she isn't, and she's fond of a horse; and if her father--gad! how I hate to speak of the fellow!--if her father put it into her foolish head to ride, why ride she would, nor I don't blame her neither. So, mother, let you and I hear the rights of it before we blame her; and what's more--you'll forgive my speaking"--approaching nearer, and his breath coming shorter as he spoke--"but if you would remember, mother dear, not to speak to anyone in the village about this--story--of Honor and the--the Park, I should esteem it very kind, and--"

"Come, come, mother," broke in her son; "I must not have my wife spoken of, before she deserves it, as if she was a--a gay woman. I beg your pardon, but you make me more angry than I ought to be; and it isn't right, mother, God's book says it ain't. 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' we are told, and grievous words only stir up anger, they do; so let's keep from 'em while we can. I'm expecting to hear from Honor to-morrow, and if she says she's coming home and writes about this foolish ride of hers, why we shall be sorry then, poor pretty creature, that we said a word against her." And John, perfectly unconscious of the strangely mixed feelings, the half fear--a dread unadmitted even to his own breast--that Honor both deserved and would be visited with punishment, wished his mother "good-night," and left her to her reflections.

MRS. BEACHAM WRITES A LETTER.

The late post on Monday , the second post, brought no letter from the truant, and John's brow grew ominously dark as he turned over his numerous business-like-looking epistles, and amongst them found no dainty missive in a fair running hand, and adorned with an entwined H. B. in mingled shades of brown and blue, by way of monogram.

"There now! What did I tell you?" exclaimed his mother triumphantly. "I was as sure as sure could be, she wouldn't write. Guilty consciences never do. And another time, my dear, I hope you'll attend to your mother, old as she is, and act accordingly."

Finding him still silent, Mrs. Beacham, accustomed from long habit to watch the changes on her son's countenance, glanced up at it from her eternal knitting, and was startled, strong-nerved woman though she was, at its stern rigidity, and at the colour--that of a livid leaden hue--which had taken place of the usual ruddy brownness of his cheeks.

The old woman had risen hastily from her chair, and, standing before him, had laid her two hands upon his arms, holding him thus, while with anxious motherly eyes she peered into the face of him who, being all the world to her, she loved with such a jealous and exacting devotion. For the first time in his life, John answered her shortly, and with what his mother, making scant allowance for the condition of his mind, chafed under as disrespect.

After his departure Mrs. Beacham picked up the ball of gray worsted that she had in her agitation allowed to roll away upon the carpet, and recommenced the task of turning the heel of John's lambswool sock. Click, click went the knitting-needles, and steadily jerked the bony wrinkled hands that held the pins; but, contrary to custom, the thoughts of the aged woman were wandering far away from the work in hand--away with the son whose fiery passions she had helped to rouse--away with the thoughtless girl whose "cunning ways" and artful, "flirty goings on were hurrying her poor John into his grave."

When a woman--especially one of unrefined mind--sits down under the influence of wrathful passions to write a letter, the chances are greatly in favour of her pen running away with her discretion--that is to say, of her using stronger expressions; and of her doing a good deal more mischief, than she had intended. The not-over-well-concocted missive, which occupied the worthy old lady who penned it during two good hours of the afternoon, and was posted in time for the early morning delivery in Stanwick-street, proved, as the reader will hereafter learn, no poor exemplification of the truth of this not very novel remark. There are moods of mind in which the receipt of even a judiciously-penned letter irritates and offends the weak vessel that requires both tender and tactful handling. The missive of autocratic Mrs. Beacham was neither tender nor tactful, and pretty Honor's fate and conduct were terribly influenced for evil by what appeared at first sight to be one of the most every-day occurrences of every-day life.

HONOR TURNS REBELLIOUS.

That letter, as the reader will have no difficulty in guessing, was the one mentioned in the conclusion of the last chapter as the happy result of old Mrs. Beacham's interference with the connubial relations of her children. It took the well-meaning woman, as we already know, two hours in its concoction, and ran as follows:

"I cannot do it!" she said half aloud. "And John, too! What will he say to me?" And at the thought of her husband's displeasure, the wife who had lacked moral courage to speak the truth began to feel that, rather than face those two outraged and indignant spirits, she would gladly flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, and be at rest. To be alone--to work for her bread--to suffer hardship in every miserable and even degrading fashion--all this appeared to Honor infinitely, ay, a thousand thousand times, preferable to putting her pretty neck again under the yoke of angry Mrs. Beacham's thrall, and to the endurance, from morning's dawn to evening's light, of that unpleasant old lady's disagreeable form of being good and useful.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet