Matilda Charlotte Houston

“ I declare that if our home had been the least like that—if our mother resembled in anything that jolly old boy at Thanes Court—I, at the unripe age of—under twenty-one—should probably not be about to tie myself for life—a thing to which, at present, I feel not the least inclination—to a young woman for whom at present—well, there is no use in being over-confidential—if Sophy were as lovely as the Calipegean Venus, or even as attractive and charming as John Beacham’s Irish bride, I shall probably not look much at her face when she has been my wife a year. ”

“ Well did the Lady Millicent know—for her girlhood had not all been spent in the seclusion of Gillingham, and at London balls and routs and dinner-parties she had learned something of the level of gold—well did the heiress know that, were she willing to barter her rent-roll for rank, the negotiation would have been only too easily effected. But, all things considered, this young woman was not so willing. Any superiority enjoyed by a husband, any benefit conferred upon her through him, would—so singularly was she constituted—have been as gall and wormwood to her taste. ”

“ Will any of my readers, when I inform them that this was the climax of poor little Honor’s woe, and that at the sight of John’s slumbering form tears welled from her eyelids, be disposed utterly to despise my heroine, and condemn her as one unworthy the interest and sympathy of sensible people? If there be any such—and I am quite prepared to believe in their existence—all I can say is, that their knowledge of female nature is as limited as their charity for human weakness is small and inefficient. ”

“ Well, so she is; and if I were half as good-looking a fellow as Atty, I should look out for a girl a quarter as nice, with an eighth part of Sophy’s expectations; and if she accepted me, I should think myself a deuced lucky dog. Heigh ho! What an age it seems before the examination time! I wonder how long my mother thinks one can endure such a horrible existence as this.”
“It can’t last for ever,” Kate said; “and it is quite as bad for us as it is for you; and yet you never hear either Rhoda or me lamenting over our fate as you do over yours.” ”

“ Jolly—eh?” exclaimed a cheery voice behind the widow, as that grieving woman, with her head bent lower than was usual with her, prepared to take a fourth turn along her favourite walk. “Pretty bobbish—eh?” John repeated, attempting, after the fashion of cheerful strong-nerved persons, to brighten the countenance and enliven the spirits of the sorrowful by a loud voice and unaccustomed sportiveness of language. “Speculating on the crop of gooseberries, eh?” John added, offering his arm to his mother, who accepted the attention with a sigh that boded ill for the success of her son’s efforts. ”

“ It would be a sad thing, indeed, if mischief came of this grand marriage of hers. I should be sorry for John Beacham if it was to,” mumbled the widow Thwaytes, whose mouth was fuller than was altogether becoming of well-salted buttered toast. “I should be sorry as sorry could be for John if trouble was to come upon him that way. Ah well! if the Squire had only lived! Such a gentleman as he was for advising and keeping things straight! There isn’t a day nor yet an hour that the parish doesn’t feel the want of him. ”

“ Clay herself, I never would have believed it! To think that John Beacham, who’s a sensible man as men go, should be marrying an Irishwoman! If Honor Blake was English-born now, one wouldn’t blame him so much; but to choose a girl that comes of people who, as everyone knows, you can’t trust farther than you can see them, is what I call a sin and a shame. ”

“ To anyone accustomed to look inquiringly into human motives, and to those who have gained knowledge of mankind by enlarged association with their fellows, the fact that Cecil Vavasour, with all his excellence, his gentleness and his hospitality, was not generally a favourite, will excite but little surprise. As a rule, the silent and apparently self-conceited man rarely meets with favour, for silence is too often taken for a diagnostic of pride, and pride is of all human qualities the one which both men and women find the most difficult to pardon. ”

“ John was Honor’s first lover—the first that she had ever thought or read of. Marriage—an affair to which she, like every girl of sense, of course looked forward to—seemed a pleasant, an exciting, and an important event in life. ”

“ Honor was far too untaught in the mysteries of our complex human nature to understand, in even a limited degree, why the sunshine of her life—in spite of John’s love, her matronly dignity, and her new clothes—seemed suddenly to have faded out. ”

“ Thwaytes listened and sighed. The subject on which her ally had touched was not one that could be pursued without due thought and deliberation. As yet, though well aware that a mean maternal jealousy had begot something very like hatred to Honor in Mrs. Beacham’s breast, the widow did not feel by any means thoroughly assured that she could safely touch upon the impropriety of Mr. Vavasour’s intimacy with John’s young wife. The old lady had not, in that quiet busy home of hers, marched even ever so laggingly with the times. In a groove, her mind was that of the right woman in the right place. ”

“ She was not unhappy—no, and a thousand times no—she could not be sorrowful with the love of a good man assured to her, and with the promise of such a home as it was in John Beacham’s power to give. She was certainly not unhappy. She had promised to be John’s wife unhesitatingly, and with a grateful heart. He had only done his promised bride justice when he had declared that she was neither vain nor aspiring. Honor could not be ignorant of the fact that she was beautiful, but of the power and the advantages of beauty she knew as little as did Mrs. Clay’s two-year-old child. ”

“ Two daughters, Rhoda and Katherine—of whom more hereafter—completed the family, to the care and education of which Cecil Vavasour, both from a high sense of duty and following the dictates of his own heart, greatly devoted himself. Perfectly alive to the injury done to the children by the absence on their mother’s part of either the appearance or the reality of maternal tenderness, he did all that lay in his power to remedy the evil; but with the best intentions, a man cannot in such a case, to any effectual purpose, play a woman’s part. ”

“ She had enjoyed to a degree, which only to look back{227} upon was a delight, those delicious rides in evening-time through the shady lanes, those canters over the springy turf in the beautiful “Chace” which Arthur already talked of as his own, those strolls about the pleasant Paddock garden, when just a tinge of sentiment—of sentiment guessed at rather than expressed—mingled with Arthur’s more commonplace words, and lent the charm of charms, although she knew it not, to all that Honor gathered from her companion’s lips. ”

“ In more ways than one is the breath of man poisonous to his fellows. Well did Arthur Vavasour know that while he—the heir-apparent to wealth and honour—he, the strong man, armed at all points for the battle of life—would come unscathed out of the tainted atmosphere of suspicion, she, the tender bird{196} exposed to its baneful influence, would flutter her feeble wings, and fall killed morally by the strong insidious poison. Of this melancholy truth Sophy Duberly’s affianced husband was as cognisant as the oldest sage that lives ”

“ Honor said in a very low tone; but Arthur caught the words and replied to them:
“I’m sure you didn’t, Mrs. Beacham, and John will be forgetting his out-of-door amusements altogether, now that he’s got something better than kith and kin at home. I only wish that we were half as well off at the Castle. The old house has grown more melancholy than ever since I went away. By Jove, what a county it is! No hunting—no neighbourhood—nothing earthly to be done!”
“Why don’t you take to breeding?” John asked; “there’s an interest for you at once. ”

“ As for Sophy, I can tell you, I’ve had a pretty time with her! I wish you joy of that young lady, Arthur!” and he laughed heartily, the good old man, at the excellence and originality of his joke. “And so you’re off to the Pembertons? old family friends, you say—All right; just as well to keep those sort of people up, I daresay, though I can’t say I have many of the kind to trouble me. No young ladies there though, eh, to worry Sophy? You young London fellows are not always to be trusted,” and again he laughed—a genial hearty laugh that did one good to hear. ”

“ For years they had grown up in the faith of her prudence, her large-mindedness, her liberality, and her cleverness; and it was not till long after they were fatherless that either Horace or Arthur became entirely convinced that Lady Millicent had shone with reflected lustre only, and that the good gifts for which the world had given her credit were not hers, but those of the husband who had borne his faculties through life with such a meek and unobtrusive grace. ”

“ Seriously now, Atty, can you in your sober senses think that the way you are going on is either right or prudent? Here you are, within a few weeks of marrying the girl you are engaged to—a nice girl, too, and you thought so yourself before you got spooney (nay, hear me out, for it is true, and you know it is) on John Beacham’s wife,—here you are, I say, making her (I mean Sophy Duberly) miserable; and what is far worse—for girls soon get over that kind of thing—you are sowing the seeds of lasting wretchedness in another man’s house. ”

“ Honor, remembering his engagement, would often marvel at his fits of absence, his look—so strange in one so young—of brooding care; for during the many weeks which Arthur Vavasour had spent either at the Castle or as a guest of his future father-in-law, Honor had seen a great deal of Miss Duberly’s intended husband. There had been nothing conspicuous or curiosity-rousing in their intimacy. Other gentlemen came and went, and were offered lunch (that meal at the Paddocks was famed far and wide for excellence) by hospitable John Beacham ”

“ 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. ”

“ Honor made what haste she could, gathering together her full skirts to save them as best she might from the dusty wheel, and feeling,{288} she scarcely knew why, a something in her husband’s tone that jarred against her sense of what was delicate and becoming; jarred too against her own consciousness of beauty, of being well-dressed; of being, in short, a little woman worthy to be petted and admired. She was not cross—far from it—as she shook out her ample drapery and took John’s sturdy arm, while Mrs. Beacham held firm possession of the other ”

“ A little womanly vanity—could anything be more natural?—came to the aid of John Beacham’s fiancée as she braided the soft brown tresses that the honest gentleman farmer was never weary of admiring. It would never do, she thought, to look dull and ugly on her wedding-day; so she threw melancholy to the winds, and decked her face with smiles, and called that busy little Jenny in, to hinder rather than to help the important business of the toilet. ”

“ To whatsoever extent she might dislike her daughter-in-law, and though it is to be feared that she would have welcomed any occasion of either humbling or annoying her son’s petted wife, the proud old woman would have shrunk sensitively from any open scandal, and would have stoutly denied any assertion calculated to bring discredit on the honour of her son. The idea of Honor being spoken of in the manner hinted by the widow Thwaytes, was positively hateful to her, and she parried the affront in her haughtiest and grandest manner. ”

“ Throw away all chance of that blessed home at Fairleigh, that the poor girls have built upon so much; and all because you haven’t the courage, or rather because you are too self-indulgent, to give up a little momentary amusement,—or rather, if you like it better, though I confess to considering it a distinction without a difference, because you happen to be a little—as I said before—spooney on John Beacham’s wife. ”

“ But although in some respects Cecil Vavasour might fall short in his exalted aims, though the young people at the Castle might and probably did miss the invaluable advantage of which they were deprived by Lady Millicent’s natural hardness of character, they were nevertheless, in one respect at least, highly favoured. On their father’s unchangeable justice they could ever and always implicitly rely, as well as on that entire absence of caprice which is one of the most precious negative gifts with which those in power, whether great or limited, can be endowed. ”

“ Seeing then that the female mind is, both from nature and habit, loth to believe in the “glaring impotence” of “dress,” we may excuse this poor Honor for her petulance, and for the little angry jerk with which she threw open the old mahogany wardrobe, and drew from it the contemned and faded specimen of bygone finery. ”

“ Beacham’s future daughter-in-law. The worthy woman forgot—as who would not have done under the circumstances?—that beauty is a dangerous gift, and that a “fair woman,” should she chance to be without “discretion,” is often very inconveniently placed in a sober and quiet man’s household. For the moment too the old lady, who loved rule so well, forgot that the more attractive in person was her son’s bride, the less chance did there exist that she herself could “hold her own” against this new and overwhelming influence. ”

“ The girl—so soon to be that thing which man has made—a woman (it was simply a female that the hand of God created) —gazed out upon the peaceful scene—on the budding trees in which the loving birds were twittering, on the path through the meadows, trod so often by the merry children when she—scarcely more than a child herself—had headed their joyous company in merry search{75} of the dab-chicks’ nests lying peaceably in the reeds beside the Bram, or of wild flowers, fresh and sweet, cropping up through the long grass in the sunny meadows. ”

“ John Beacham, although he had not been behindhand in admiring Honor’s beauty, was too busy, and owned too little of a sentimental nature, to fall in love with her at first sight. She was such a mere child, too, compared to himself. He, a{47} man of thirty-five, weather-beaten, and with lines upon his brow, to say nothing of a rare gray hair or two that his old mother viewed with pain cropping out in his thick brown whiskers, was many a year too old to mate himself with that bright bud of beauty. ”

“ No one but his mother thought much of John as he stood side by side with “the Irish gurl,” and in a clear manly voice pronounced the vows that bound him to her{101} whilst life should last. To the elderly woman, about to sink into the mild dignity of dowagerhood, that tall, broad-shouldered man, with his thick wavy hair, his clear blue eyes, and, as the worthy woman often boasted, his “wholesome” skin, was a far more important personage than that “slip of a girl” who had, at an age when he ought to have known better, made such a fool and “ninny” of her only son. ”

“ Arthur said after a pause; “I’m a wonderful fellow to get fond of a place. Do you get fond of a place? I mean a place one lives much in, you know.”
“I think it depends very much upon the people we are with,” Honor said, and the next moment regretted her thoughtless words; for Arthur said eagerly:
“Exactly! just my feeling. It is not the ‘where,’ but the ‘who.’ I should never have grown so fond of the Paddocks if—but you are{232} not going in, Mrs. Beacham? Do take one more turn—only one. ”

“ It was, considering this proximity, rather a behindhand village. Progress had not hitherto made any gigantic strides in the old-world-looking place, where not a single house was less than a century old, and where the aged inhabitants of the quiet spot had not as yet ceased to speak of crinoline as an abomination, and the absence (on young women’s heads) of that decent article called a cap as a sign and symbol of a lost and abandoned soul. ”

“ Beacham—to the habitually “busy”—the enforced idleness of Sunday hangs terribly heavy on the folded hands. When an active-minded and energetic female has nothing to do, there is a terrible temptation to be cantankerous. With John’s restless, vigorous-bodied parent the Sabbath was anything but a favourite time. ”