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-SOUNDS
OF
infi\itY
Lee Morgan

The Witches* Almanac

Newport. Rhode Island
www.redwheelweiser.com
www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter
 First Printing April 2019

Text Copyright © 2019 Lee Morgan

Illustration Copyright © 2019 Lily Collard

Layout and Design Copyright © 2019 The Witches'

Almanac, LTD.

Address all inquiries and information to

The Witches' Almanac, Ltd.
P.O. Box 1292
Newport, Rl 02840-9998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, including photocopying,
recording, or other electronic or mechanical meth­
ods, without the prior written permission of the pub­
lisher, except in the case of brief quotations embod­
ied in critical reviews and certain other noncom­
mercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Softcover:
13-ISBN: 978-1-881098-54-6

EBook
978-1-881098-56-0
On Dalby Mountain, this side of Cronk-yn-
Irree-Laa the old Manx people used to put their
ears to the earth to hear the Sounds of Infinity
(Sheean-ny-Feaynid), which were sounds like
murmurs. They thought these sounds came from
beings in space; for in their belief all space is
filled with invisible beings.
Evan Wentz,
The Faerie Faith in Celtic Countries
5- Death, Sexuality and Gender of Faeries

6. The Faith—Religion of Faeries

7. The Crooked Path and its Crooked Fruit

8. What Do You Want with Me?

9. Faerie Doctors and Magicians

io. The Faerie as Witch's Familiar

11. Faerie Cults

12. Memories of Old Gods

13. Witch's Horse, Devil's Goat and Faerie Cow

14. Serpents and the Fae

15. Faeries and the Grimoire Tradition

16. A Place and a State of Being

16. Conclusion

PART TWO: The Heart

A Poetic Exploration of Faerie

 CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART ONE: The Head

i. Introduction

2. Not from the Seed of Adam Am I

3. The Nature of Faeries

4. The Embodied Life of Elves

PARTTHREE: The Hands

i. An Introduction to the Grimoire of Sibyllan Craft

2. Consecration of the Tools of Art

3. Conjuration of the Death Walk

4. The Conjuration of Luridan

5. To Have Conference with Faeries

6. The Conjuration of Robin Goodfellow

7. The Conjuration of Obreon

8. The Grand Conjuration of Sibylla

CONCLUSION
and set the memory in the bones to singing and the
heart to brewing sanguine epiphanies.

For this reason this book is divided into three

parts, the work of the Head, the work of the Heart
and the work of the Hands. The first is a dissertation
in scholarly tone on the inferences that can be drawn
about the Faerie Faith and its relationship with Tradi­
tional Witchcraft, after close attention to history.

The second is a work of occult fiction that medi­

tates upon the themes discussed in Part One in the
form of a woven narrative which appears sufficient
unto itself, but reveals hidden secrets to any paying
deep attention. Like all of my fiction it intersects with
a larger grand narrative that connects in tangential or
direct ways with all of my published novels.

The final part is a practical grimoire that leads the

reader through the door to physically manifest the vi­
sion they have shared in parts one and two. This is
not just a book, but an experience, one which culmi­
nates not at the end of reading the volume but in the
consummation known in the art of ritual.

This story about faerie began as visions. A ca­

cophony of visions with sharp, bright edges to them
 PREFACE

Every real book begins life as a vision. An airy thing

that gestates in the eye of the mind and sidles its way
down through twisted alleyways to the stews of the
heart. If it has power enough to get this far it ob­
sesses the bearer until it must find expression
through the hands. The vision becomes a fateful
thing, now its owner must find a way to take what
they've seen and make it what you've seen. Through
Art they must attempt to pierce the wall of the skull
as the first tool-wielder, the first man of art... When
our hands are reddened with labour only then do we
touch them in salute to our forehead where this all
began as vision, and magically a still void arises
there. Where once we had a head full of facts, now
we have a whole body full of knowing. Only the work
of the hands can truly reshape the world inside the
head, for Witchcraft is a deed. The hands hold the
true circumference of our Craft and Art. For this rea­
son the third and final part of this book is a grimoire
designed to be read with the heart and hands.

This volume is different to any you have read on

the arcane subject of Faerie up until this moment, for
it is not merely a list of facts and theories about the
condition of Elphame and its denizens, or their inter­
action with the world of Witchcraft, but a three-part
induction into a way of being.
that have lain claim to my heart and hands. I trace
here the intellectual path I walked in trying to under­
stand, it unpacks the story that scholarship and
recorded history can tell us about the denizens of El-
phame and their mind-fracturing numinosity. This is
the work of the head and skull, in which I show what,
with a background in Literary Theory, I can make of
the historical records about faeries, if we treat the
Faerie Faith and Witchcraft itself as a form of narra­
tive...

In the work of the heart we bypass the rational

intellect to experience the touch, scent and feel of the
Faerie Faith through symbol and suggestion. What
we may have merely understood in the work of the
head we come to know in the work of the heart.
Older than the magic of the skull we come to the
heart later because we have to peel back the cluttered
layers of thought to expose deep gnosis. Here is the
black, thick heart magic, full of limbic shadows and
shifting fluids, for the first time... Here is stone-deep
magic of the bone and omens in the guts, the trail of
crumbs we follow back into the heart of the primeval
forest.

It is truly in the work of the hands that we become

 PART I

THE HEAD
now just a form of entertainment. Still we remain en­
veloped by stories, a smaller and more concentrated
set of them as time goes on, and we march towards
monoculture. We have the story of capitalism, the
story of freedom, the story of scientific rationalism...
To the common eyes such things appear to be so
much more than tales we tell, they represent un­
changeable fixations. To step outside of those domi­
nant stories in some way takes a tremendous amount
of will and imagination. It takes a great and powerful
story to overwrite pre-existing competing narratives,
it takes a mind that yearns to be enchanted.
In today's world power has migrated to fewer and
fewer stories and they have great monolithic power,
but this makes them intensely beige, lacking all aes­
thetic appeal. This allows the possibility for other
smaller mythologies to edge in at the sides of things.
Those with wildness still left in their minds prowl
between the familiar words and repetitive phrases,
seeking to see life from a different angle. But such a
thing isn't possible without breaking the fourth wall
of reality. Because real stories, the kind that have the
power to become myths, begin as eruptions of the
sacred, as eruptions of the monstrous. There are
many ways to make war against a story. You can
I NTRODUCTION
‘I am done with great things and big things, great
institutions and big successes, and I am for those
tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from
individual to individual, creeping through the cran­
nies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the
capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them
time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.
-William James
Every edifice of civilization whether vigorous or in a
state of stagnation, originally found its way forth
from a story that became myth, ushered quietly forth
from the inner eye of sorcerous vision. Every day we
are swimming unconsciously in forgotten stories, not
forgotten because they are neglected, but because
their power is such they've become so familiar we
don't even see them anymore. Their invisibility be­
comes part of their power and it is only by drawing
them to the surface of awareness that we can chal­
lenge their autocracy over our lives. Until then they
remain largely unnoticed and invisible, as water to
fish.
Meanwhile we convince ourselves that stories are
merely for children, books have no power to alter
reality, that the Arts are frivolous, that narrative is
Other documents randomly have
different content
 The simple philosophy of the girl of seventeen, though in some respects
rational enough, was, however, based upon very erroneous principles. The
example of her more highly-valued sister might have demonstrated to her
that “patience does its perfect work,” and that the most selfish of mortals,
and those least to be affected by the claims of kindred and the universal
prejudices of consanguinity, can yet be influenced, both as regards their
conduct and their sensibilities, by the deference which real goodness never
fails to obtain for those who, knowing what is right, do, as the poet adds,
“always practise what they know.”
 CHAPTER XVIII.

DISAPPOINTMENT.
The first sight of No. 23 Bolton-square proved rather disenchantant to the
two young ladies, who for the last five weeks had talked and thought of but
little else than the coming glories of the season. As they approached the
sights and scents of London, a dense fog, as it appeared to the novices, but
which was, in fact, simply an easterly wind laden with dull yellow smoke,
shrouded as with a veil every distant object on which they looked.
“This never can be London; and London, too, in the month of May,”
thought Kate, as she looked out from the window of the railway-carriage on
an atmosphere thick with discoloured smoke, through the mists of which
the summits of sundry towers and steeples, together with the outlines of
some nearer buildings, were dimly visible.
London in the month of May! And as Miss Katharine Vavasour realised
the melancholy fact, it required all the counterbalancing comfort to be
found in the recollection that Rhoda was at last “coming out,” to make
amends to her for the lost country pleasures to which distance now lent a
hitherto undiscovered charm. But if the time-worn, smoke-stained walls of
the family mansion struck the imagination of Lady Millicent’s young
daughters as gloomy and uninviting, what could be said of the interior,
where the wear and tear of years was everywhere visible? In the spacious
suite of drawing-rooms, the furniture of which had not been renewed for
more years than Lady Millicent had ever cared to count, and where, “dingy
yellow” vying with “dirty red,” everywhere displayed tokens that the letting
of the town mansion of the Vavasours had been very promiscuously carried
on, poor Rhoda (for Kate was too overjoyed at the change to take any
lasting notice of the surroundings) stood in mute dismay. The last tenant
had been an American—a wealthy New-Yorkian—who, following the
“common and unclean” habits peculiar to his country, had not improved
either the outward appearance or the intrinsic value, in a delicate female
point of view, of the carpets. Probably Mr. John B. Foy, or whatever might
have been the gentleman’s multifold cognomen, would have scorned the
meanness of letting his house in the Fifth Avenue, or in University-square,
to any Britisher or other foreigner desirous to witness the humours of “York
City;” but, having paid a good many almighty dollars to an individual (a
“female,” as the said New-Yorker might possibly have designated the
superb Lady Millicent), he very naturally concluded that, viewing the
matter commercially, he had a right to abuse as well as to use, in aristocratic
Bolton-square, the privileges of his sex and country.
“Did you ever see anything so dirty, so shabby, so faded?” Rhoda
remarked to her brother Horace, the first moment after their arrival when
she found herself alone with him. “Mamma could have had no idea of how
bad it was. Just look at the paint and the curtains! If they were but clean!
But really, these are too horrid!”
“Wait till you make acquaintance with some of the other great houses
that fine ladies give their balls and drums in!” Horace said. “It isn’t
everyone who finds money for everything; and you will amuse yourself just
as well in a room where the paint is dingy and the hangings old-fashioned,
as you have any chance of doing in places that are kept in apple-pie order.
In my opinion, and as far as I can judge, it’s rather chique to be shabby in
this kind of way, as well as in some others that I could mention.”
“But, Horace,” said Kate, who had joined her brother and sister, as they
stood, the one philosophising and the other listening disconsolately, in the
midst of the much-reprobated family furniture,—“but, Horace, tell me
about Arthur. We are to call this afternoon on dear Sophy. Mamma seems
terribly afraid of being over-civil; and it seems a little bit unbrotherly of
Atty not to have come last night to see us, so many months as it is since he
and Sophy married. But I suppose it’s out of sight out of mind with them.”
And Kate, laughter-loving Kate, heaved a little sigh as she quoted the well-
worn proverb.
“Nonsense, it’s nothing of the kind; but women are so awfully fond of
jumping at conclusions. Arthur would have been here fast enough, if he had
hoped that any good could come of his putting himself in Lady Mill’s way;
but it wouldn’t, and that is a truth, poor fellow, that he has not got at this
time of day to learn.”
“But, Horace dear, do tell me what it is all about! I should have thought
that marrying Sophy Duberly would have put everything to rights. The old
man seemed so very fond of Atty, and Sophy, too. I should have imagined
that all would have gone smoothly with poor Arthur when once he was one
of them—once he was Sophy’s husband; and a baby coming besides, which
Mr. Duberly was so anxious for. Really, Horace, I am puzzled, and that is
the truth. You always talk as if something dreadful was hanging over
Arthur’s head, and—”
“Do I? Then I am a fool for not being able to keep my own and other
people’s counsel. But,” lowering his voice, although Rhoda, who knew
herself to be less trusted by her brother than his younger sister Kate, had
discreetly walked away,—“there is no use in talking about it. Have you seen
—”
“But, Horace, there may be use in talking about it,” interposed his sister.
“We might do something, if we were able to put our heads together, to get
Arthur out of his trouble. Union is strength, they say; and though the bundle
of sticks is a pretty tough one—”
“And will therefore take time to break,” put in Horace sadly, “which is
precisely the reason why there is no use trying to do it; for time is
everything to Atty. If you knew old Duberly as well as I do, Kate, you
would say the same.”
“But what has Mr. Duberly to do with it?” asked Kate.
“Everything. If anything should happen, which isn’t the least likely, to
old Dub, all would be smooth as velvet for Arthur; but as it is—”
“As it is! O, do go on, Horace; how provoking you are!”
“Well, as it is—But here comes milady. I say, Katie, not a word! But I
needn’t repeat that to you, for, considering you are of the feebler sex, you
are one of the most reliable young persons with whom I happen to be
acquainted.”
 CHAPTER XIX.

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.
 CHAPTER XX.

SILENT SORROW.
A good deal to her surprise, as well as not a little to her relief, Honor was
informed by the parlour-maid—who struck her, even at a cursory glance, to
be rather pert and forward—that neither Colonel Norcott nor his wife were
at home. Mrs. Norcott was “gone for a walk,” Miss Lydia said (she was
only Polly to the gentleman lodger). Mrs. Beacham had not been expected
by such an early train, and she (Lydia) knowed—at least, so she had heard
the Colonel say—that he was obliged to go out on business.
Greatly reassured by this information on the score of her father’s health,
Honor, who did not feel much inclined to encourage the young person’s
familiarity by questioning her on the subject, entered the drawing-room,
and seating herself on the comfortless-looking little sofa, covered with
cheap highly glazed chintz, and stuffed with some material very
antagonistic to repose, betook herself to not-over-cheerful reflections. For
the first few minutes, grief—positive and unmistakeable, at being separated
from her husband—filled not only Honor’s heart, but the blue eyes that
looked vacantly through the confusing mist at the cheap toys and worthless
ornaments with which Mrs. Norcott’s work-table was crowded. Only a few
short hours before, how Honor would have ridiculed the supposition that
her first act under her father’s roof would be—to cry! In the distance, the
coming change had seemed to her a roseate opening between two parted
clouds. To escape, though only for a season, from Mrs. Beacham’s despotic
rule—to leave behind her the monotony and the dulness, the daily routine of
uninteresting duties, and the hourly remindings that her married life had
been a blunder—had all in their turn been subjects of rejoicing to Honor.
But above all, far and away above all, there was the near prospect that the
dream of her life would be at last realised, and that she would take her
rightful place amongst the ladies of the land!
It is just possible that her introduction to that delusion-expelling front
drawing-room in Stanwick-street, was not without its effect in causing a
reaction in this aspiring young woman’s mind. Widely different, certainly,
from anything that she had previously imagined, was that small, cheaply-
furnished chamber! The faded carpet, in the centre of which was spread a
brown-holland abomination, called—I have reason to believe—a crumb-
cloth; frail painted chairs, whose appearance alone was a wholesome
warning to the unwary, that a seat à la Turk upon the floor would be safer
than trusting to their frail support; and above all, the cottage piano, with its
once rose-coloured silk front discoloured by time and exposure to the
blacks and flies of a London lodging-house, formed a tout ensemble widely
different from any which Honor’s discursive imagination had hitherto
called up.
For the moment the unpleasant reality produced on her mind a sobering
effect, and with the natural lessening of her former desire to pay a
lengthened visit in Stanwick-street, there came an increase of regret that she
had allowed her husband to part from her in coldness and estrangement. It
was partly—partly, indeed! why it was more than half—John’s fault that
there was disunion between them; his fault and his mother’s; for who could
—Honor asked herself, as she had done a hundred times before—who
could, unless she were an angel born and bred, put up with the daily
aggravations of Mrs. Beacham’s temper?
The young wife’s heart, as she sat alone upon the hard sofa, pondering,
amongst other things, on the unreliableness of the father who had, to all
appearance, inveigled her to his house on false pretences, softened greatly
towards her straightforward and true-hearted husband; and could she have
known him better, could she have looked into the manly honest breast, and
read in it all that there was of pain, remorse, and wounded pride, she must
—the woman within her being, though vain and foolish, not ignobly
constituted—have humbled herself before his better, higher nature, and,
owning her many faults, she would have meekly prayed for leave to share
his sorrows, as she had once gladly shared his joys. Such a diminishing,
however, of John Beacham’s vexations it would not have been easy in this
case to have allowed himself. The injury that he had inflicted on Colonel
Norcott had, as we are already aware, ever since its perpetration, hung very
heavily on his mind; and vile as he justly judged the victim of his
ungovernable passion to be, he was none the less the father of his wife; and
the conviction that he was bound to make all the reparation in his power for
the offence that he had committed did not tend to make John Beacham’s life
a happier one.
 Of all things calculated to injure the temper and depress the cheerful
spirit on which the comfort of daily life depends, there is nothing more
certain to produce this deplorable result than the retention within the breast
of a deep-seated and a painful secret. John Beacham was not the kind of
man to talk even to his wife of the inner feelings which he was not
sufficiently of a physiologist to understand. His life was one of action—a
simple, above-board existence; and till that fatal blow (a blow fatal, that is,
to his own peace) was struck, there had been no hidden spot, no closet
within closed doors, the chance opening of which caused the man’s heart
within him to beat with quickened pulse, or kept him sleepless through the
watches of the night. But now, alas! there did exist for his misfortune, in his
hidden life, a secret—a secret the preservation of which was not precisely
necessary to his reputation, and certainly not expedient for his safety; and
yet John Beacham (why, for he was no casuist, he could not have explained)
would not, for six at least of the best yearlings gaining bone and muscle in
his paddocks, have had it known in Sandyshire that it was by a blow from
his right-arm that Colonel Norcott had been so nearly sent to his last dread
account; and this act of concealment—concealment, too, carried on for
months—was revolting to his inborn sense of honour, and jarred against
every habit of his previous life.
How far these, perhaps morbid, feelings reacted on those which he was
beginning to entertain for his young wife, it would be hard to say; that they
rendered him outwardly cold, and even irritable towards the woman whom
he loved with such a devoted and unselfish love, was unfortunately but too
true. Men of John Beacham’s stamp are poor dissemblers. He was ill at
ease, provoked both with himself and her, and in some way or other needs
must that the discontent caused by this weight of care cropped out, and that
Honor, ignorant of the cause of his maussaderie, attributed it to any other
than the right one. Very frigid indeed and stern he often seemed, when a
word or a smile from her might have dispelled the gathering clouds—might,
perhaps, have caused him to forget the mortifying truth that it was her
father who shared his mortifying secret—her father, who, though base and
unprincipled, was, compared to him, a high-born gentleman, and whose
well-bred air, together with the potent charm of manner (a charm which,
without comprehending, John was still capable of appreciating) had
descended with added grace to his neglected child.
 I have dwelt perhaps too long, and returned with perhaps too much
pertinacity to the causes of an estrangement which may appear to some
(who are not in the habit of considering the vast power of apparently trifling
causes) as, under the circumstances, to be unnatural, if not indeed
impossible. But I have wished in some decree to extenuate the faults and
mistakes of my poor heroine. I have done so from a conviction that in
judging others we not only see but often suspect little of the latent causes of
the sins which seem to us, and which in truth are, so flagrant and so
disastrous. Blessed be He who seeth into the darkest places of the hearts of
his failing creatures, and who, being himself perfect, can yet find pardon
and mercy for those whom erring man forgiveth not!
 CHAPTER XXI.

HONOR DECEIVES HERSELF.

Honor Beacham was, as I think has been pretty clearly shown, a very
woman in her faults and follies—her quick impulses—her yearning for love
and admiration—her small ambitions—and her dainty phantasies. “Fine by
degrees, and delicately weak”—like Pope’s inferior man—this semi-Celtic
woman was evidently no philosopher at all; and, left to her own guidance,
the chances were terribly in favour of her coming—to use the not
inexpressive nineteenth-century slang—“to grief.”
How long those exquisite blue eyes of hers would have betrayed tokens
of sorrow, had they not been quickly dried by a double-knock at the door of
No. 14, must ever remain a problem. To be seen with red eyelids is an act of
lèse loveliness, which Honor would never, could she avoid it, have been
guilty of committing. Her little coquettish veil, too, was ready at hand to
hide any traces of past emotion that might have been visible on her
countenance; so that Mrs. Norcott, who entered the room trippingly, and
with the attempt at juvenile grace peculiar to that colonial lady of forty-two,
saw no reason to suppose that her country guest was otherwise than
cheerfully and contentedly disposed.
Mrs. Norcott, in her London walking-dress, was not a person to be
passed by without attracting due notice and comment. Attired in light
delicate muslin, of a pattern and make better befitting a demoiselle in her
teens, the fair Elizabeth probably imagined that she looked the character to
which she evidently aspired—namely, a youthful matron in the pride and
glory of early wifehood. A sash, tied behind à l’enfant, and a small hat of
the species known as turban, served, doubtless, in her opinion, to complete
the illusion.
“How long have you been here?” she exclaimed, coming forward with a
rush, and embracing poor Honor with the impulsiveness popularly known
as gushing. “You’ll be glad to hear that the Colonel is better—really quite
another person than when I wrote to you. But sit down, do. We didn’t
expect you just yet. The trains must be changed, I think, or the Bradshaw, or
something. But how’s your good husband? So kind of him to let you come!”
And Mrs. Norcott, having established her guest by her side upon the
slippery sofa, pressed, in token of matronly sympathy, the little hand which
she still retained within her own. “I am afraid,” she went on to say, “that
you’ll think the Colonel looking ill. When I wrote to you on Monday he
was terribly low, poor fellow; quite depressed, you may say, about himself.
Men are such cowards, you know, when there is anything the matter with
them. Brave as a lion the Colonel is before the enemy, at least so I’ve heard
—but on a sick-bed as troublesome, and more so, I may say, than a child.”
“You must have had a trying time of it, I am sure,” Honor said
sympathisingly. “I am not much of a nurse, I am afraid, but I will do my
best; and as for sitting up at night, I am sure, though I don’t look very
strong, I should not mind, it in the least; that is, I mean—” colouring with a
recollection of Mrs. Beacham’s jealous guarding over her rights—“if you
and my father would like me to be with him.”
Mrs. Norcott laughed—a little foolishly Honor thought.
“Why, happily for all parties unconcerned,” she said, “the worst is over
now, and no more nursing required for one while. As I told you just now,
Honor—I must call you ‘Honor,’ you know—the Colonel is better—quite
himself, indeed, I may say. Has gone out for the first time to-day since his
illness. I expect him back every moment. Ah! there he is; I know his way of
shutting the hall-door by this time. He never knocks, the Colonel doesn’t.
Gentlemen always will have their latch-keys, you know,” she added
playfully (a joke, by the way, which was lost upon the young wife, who had
so much in the modern Gomorrah to learn and to unlearn); “and the
Colonel, I suspect—there are secrets in all families—has been a bit of a
rake; and—Ah, Colonel,” interrupting herself as the object of her
complimentary remarks threw open the door en maître, and strode towards
the sofa; “ah, Colonel, here you are! And here’s Honor come—looking so
well; and—”
He did not allow her to proceed, for, putting her obtruding figure with
scant ceremony aside, he kissed his daughter (who had risen to greet him)
with rather more than necessary warmth. The fervent salute, administered
on both cheeks, brought the ever-ready crimson flush to Honor’s lovely
face. It was a blush that owed its being not to the demonstrativeness of the
paternal embrace, but to the unexpected presence of one whose advent had
never failed in days gone by to call up that often false tell-tale witness.
Close behind Colonel Norcott followed Arthur Vavasour, the man whose
image still lingered in Honor Beacham’s memory—the agreeable,
handsome profligate, who appeared in no way changed since in the grounds
of Danescourt, she, nearly ten months before, had bidden him a not easily
forgotten and rather emotional farewell.
They shook hands, and at the touch of his, Honor’s colour deepened, and
she bowed her head in very conscious shame that so it was. There are no
outward evidences of internal emotion so apt to mislead, and that
dangerously, as the simple and beautiful, yet alas too rare, effort of nature
which is called a blush. It is very intelligible that so it must be. Men who,
like Arthur Vavasour, live only (as they estimate living) in the light of
women’s smiles—men who dearly delight in discovering proofs of their
own power to please—will always see in a pretty woman’s heightened
colour a tribute to their sure fascinations. Instinct—the instinct of self-
preservation, bestowed for the protection of the weak—warned Honor, as it
has warned other women before her, of the existence of this very popular
delusion; and the premonition did not tend to moderate the carnation-hue
that Arthur Vavasour gazed at with even more than the passionate
admiration of the days gone by. Nor was his manner to her—the manner
that she had always felt to be so winning—in any fashion altered; and when
he spoke, his voice was as soft, and his words as full of gentle meaning.
“I heard you were expected, Mrs. Beacham,” he said, and the slow
lingering pressure of his hand, sent, as he intended that it should, a thrill
through Honor’s delicate frame. “How long it is since we have met!”
“Very long,” Honor contrived to say; and then addressing her father, she
said something that was not very coherent about her pleasure in seeing him
so much recovered from his recent illness.
“Well, yes, I am better,” he said carelessly. “It wasn’t much besides a
cold; but women are so easily frightened: Mrs. Norcott thought I was going
to die, I believe, when she wrote, and was glad enough when your husband
—by the bye, what an uncommon good fellow he must be!—allowed you to
come and nurse me. Nurse me? You will laugh at that. I don’t look much
like an invalid, do I?”
“No, indeed!” Honor said, with the pretty laugh, “restrained by
gracefulness,” and yet which was so thoroughly Hibernian in its character;
“I didn’t think, any more than John did, that you’d be up and about.”
 “I daresay not; but I really was most uncommonly seedy for a week or so
—ask Mrs. N. if I wasn’t; fever at night, and all that kind of thing.”
“Fever? I believe you!” responded his wife, who had been keeping up a
not very well-sustained conversation with Arthur Vavasour; but who, like a
true wife, was ready to endorse any and everything that fell from her
husband’s lips. “You haven’t an idea how ill the Colonel has been. I declare,
the day I wrote to you, Honor—I’m going to call her Honor, Colonel, from
this out—I was that frightened, I didn’t know which way to turn. Says I,
surely his friends ought to know—and then I thought of you; says I—”
But Colonel Norcott cut short all further reminiscence by a laugh.
“It’s one of my rules,” he said, “and you ought to know it by this time—
never to go back to anything that’s disagreeable. Live and let live’s my
motto, and forget and forgive is another—and what’s more, I practise what I
preach, eh, Honor? No dwelling upon old grievances with me. I don’t say
that I’m exactly saint enough to turn my second cheek to the smiter; and
what’s more, I didn’t ask your excellent husband—who’s got a fist like a
sledge-hammer—to knock me down a second time; but I don’t bear malice
all the same—not a grain of it; and I shouldn’t mind—upon my word I
shouldn’t—shaking hands with him to-morrow.” At this conciliatory speech
Mrs. Norcott laughed heartily; Honor, on the contrary, looked very grave.
There was something in her father’s words that jarred terribly against her
sense of what was delicate and becoming. She had not been happy, lately
with her husband—he had been cold and hard, and had not seemed to
understand or value her; his want of outward refinement too had often
offended her taste; but for all that, she both respected his character, and had
taught herself to see nothing degrading in his position. When, therefore, she
heard the Colonel speak in this slightly supercilious tone of the absent John,
Honor felt rather indignant at the liberty taken. It was a very different affair,
allowing herself and permitting others to be disrespectful to the man to
whom she owed so much; so this girl-wife, whose heart was still in the right
place, listened with a countenance from which the smile was momentarily
banished, to the Colonel’s half-sneering mention of her husband’s name.
She was glad—for she felt called upon to say something—when Arthur
Vavasour, by asking a question connected with the Paddocks, relieved her
from the embarrassment of responding to her father’s flippant sally.
 “You will ride, of course, Mrs. Beacham, while you are in town,” he
said; “you will enjoy it so much, and Lady Meg would be so immensely
admired. I don’t think I ever saw so many fine horses, or such a number of
pretty women, as there were in the Park to-day; but Lady Meg” (he had the
grace not to say her mistress too) “would whip ’em all to nothing, as the
Yankees say.”
Again the betraying blush rose to Honor’s cheek, as she explained to
Arthur that there was no chance of her joining the equestrians in the Row.
She had neither horse nor habit, she said, in London; and besides, John had
only allowed her to come up on the plea of nursing her father; and now that
he was quite well again, why—she supposed she had only to go home
again.
“Nonsense! home again!” the Colonel said in his pleasant, cheerful way;
“as if such things were to be allowed! Now we’ve got you here, young
lady,” and he patted his daughter’s cheek affectionately, “here we mean to
keep you. And if this John of yours says a word, why we’ll have him up too,
and give him a taste of London life, which he’ll be the better of.—But I say,
Arthur, where are you going to, old fellow? To dine tête-à-tête with the
missis, eh? We’re so far from civilised life in these confounded diggings,
that I suppose it wouldn’t pay taking pot-luck in this shanty of ours;
otherwise, you’re as welcome to what we’ve got as flowers in May.”
“Thank you, I should like nothing better,” Arthur said, his eyes, which
were fixed admiringly on Honor, giving ample corroboration of his words;
“but there’s a great spread—an awful bore it will be—at old Duberly’s; and
then we have to go to something at Lady Guernsey’s—a drum, I believe,
they call it—a sort of affair where you get stewed to rags, and pressed like
beef-à-la-mode, or some horrid thing of that kind, afterwards.” Of course
they all laughed as they said good-bye to him. Honor was especially
cheerful on the occasion. Especially cheerful, because her heart was at the
moment sinking so heavily within her. Sinking from an undefined and yet
miserable sense that all she saw and heard was wrong. Wrong on Colonel
Norcott’s side, inasmuch as not only he, but his wife, had, as was almost
clear even to Honor’s unsuspicious mind, been in league together to deceive
her—wrong on her own because it was patent to herself that the deception
excited in her mind neither anger nor regret.
 But feeling, as she did, both depressed and frightened at her novel
position, Honor summoned one of her brightest smiles to her lip as her hand
lay for a moment within Arthur’s. Colonel Norcott followed him to the head
of the staircase, and after a short whispered conversation, returned to the
drawing-room. He looked harassed and annoyed; and, now that the forced
smiles and pleasant look had left his face, Honor could plainly see the
marks that age and care had left there.
“Gad, it’s late,” he said, looking at his watch; and then Mrs. Norcott, in
obedience to a private signal from her husband, asked Honor if she would
not like to see her room.
“It’s a good way up,” she said, as they mounted the steep narrow stairs
peculiar to the upper flights of modern-built houses of the calibre of No. 14
Stanwick-street. “The Colonel, of course, does not attempt it; but for young
legs like yours and mine it’s a mere nothing.”
Honor, as she toiled after this active middle-aged lady, said something
civil and commonplace about London houses being necessarily different
from those in the country. She was very desirous not to seem hard to please
and troublesomely fastidious, but the style of architecture prevalent in
Sandyshire not being of the kind to qualify for alpine climbing, she was
thoroughly out of breath and exhausted on her arrival at the journey’s end,
—an end which, judging from appearances, was calculated to give rather a
poor idea of the means possessed by the gallant Colonel and his soi-disant
heiress wife.
The little attic which Honor was instructed to call her room was
tolerably clean; for, as I said before, the house was one of recent
construction, and the various defilements incidental to a course of
habitation by a succession of fourth-story lodgers had not as yet rendered
the guest-chamber of No. 14 utterly unendurable. But although even Honor
—fresh as she was from God’s blessed country, from farm-house
cleanliness, and from the traditional scents of lavender and roses—could
not have justly called that small upper chamber dirty, it was nevertheless
anything but inviting to the eye. The roof was sloping and low; the furniture
mean and shabby; there was no wardrobe, and the chest of drawers, as
Honor saw at a glance, would scarcely hold even the limited supply of
garments which she had brought with her to Stanwick-street.
 “It is small, as you see,” remarked Mrs. Colonel Norcott deprecatingly;
“but I hope you’ll be comfortable. House-rent is uncommonly dear in
London in the season—and the Colonel likes to have everything
comfortable—and so much expense coming on, you know.”
She spoke the last words in a kind of confidential whisper, throwing a
degree of playful significance over the implied suggestion. Honor, who did
not know, but who felt that there was a dessus les cartes, could only look
with a slightly puzzled air at her mysterious hostess; whereupon that lady,
with what was intended for a pretty air of confusion, said:
“Another time, when we know each other better, being both matrons—
there need be no secrets between us. Ah, I see, there is hot water—the girl
of the house is generally so careless—you will come down when you are
ready. The Colonel is particular about his hours: so don’t be long, there’s a
dear. The Colonel always goes to his club after dinner, and you wouldn’t
like to keep him waiting. Can I do anything for you? No. Well, then, I will
leave you to beautify;” and so saying, Mrs. Norcott betook herself to her
own, namely, the adjoining and equally unprepossessing-looking sleeping
chamber.
Honor sat down on the edge of her narrow iron bedstead, and felt for the
moment like one dazed. All that during the last hour had occurred was so
widely different from her previous imaginings. Where was the sick-room,
the wasted invalid, the atmosphere of physic-bottles and of gloom? Instead,
had she not been received with chaff and cheerfulness? Was not her father
in apparently perfect health? And already, simultaneously almost with her
arrival, had not a visitor appeared, an intimacy with whom her conscience
warned her had better be avoided, and regarding whom, as she was well
aware, her mother-in-law had already thrown out hints as uncalled for as
they were offensive? And then, closely following on these mental
communings, there came the more searching questions of, “What would
John think of all this mean deceit? Would he not, in his indignation at the
trick, instantaneously require her return?” Instantaneously? Yes! Honor felt
well assured of that; John Beacham was the last man in the world to suffer
patiently such a deception as had been practised upon him. He hated—of
that too his wife was well aware—the man who had deceived him, with as
much of rancorous feeling as he was capable of entertaining; and therefore
any further sojourn on her part under her father’s roof would, were John to
become cognisant of the truth, have been indignantly protested against. But,
on the other hand, Honor herself, though aware that she had been lured
under a false presence to Stanwick-street, was by no means disposed to
disclose this fact to one so deeply interested as was John in all that so nearly
concerned her safety and well-being. She was conscious, on the contrary, of
a very decided inclination to remain, for the present at least, where she was.
Of course this inclination—the mere passing of the desire through her heart,
to say nothing of the yielding to it—was wrong, selfish, and unwifely to the
most unpardonable extent. Honor, too, was well aware that she was guilty
in not driving from her, at the very first onslaught, the tempter who assailed
her. There was little excuse, save in the weakness of our most imperfect
human nature, for the taking of this first dearly-bought step in wrong. It cost
but little trouble putting that wrong foot foremost. She had but to be
passive, nothing could be easier, and the affair, one might almost say,
righted itself. But facile as it all had seemed, and scarcely out of the
common order of things, the time came when that poor weak woman would
have given all of life that remained to her, could she have, by so doing,
annulled the decision of a moment, and thus averted all the terrible
consequences that followed thereupon.
She would not write—so Honor, with very little hesitation, decided—to
inform John Beacham that her father was well in health, and that her longer
stay in London was uncalled for. It was wonderful, whilst acting thus, how
many specious arguments she made use of to persuade herself that she was
less guilty than she seemed. No one could imagine—so she told herself
(sitting before the small painted mirror, with her fair hair hanging loosely
about her neck and shoulders)—no one could by any possibility imagine
that she could be there for her own pleasure. Such a wretched room as they
had given her! Room, indeed! Would anyone in his or her senses at
Peartree-house have called that closet of a place by such an inappropriate
name? And then her father, though his bodily health was acknowledged to
be satisfactory, yet betrayed, in Honor’s opinion, evident symptoms of a
mind ill at ease at least, if not diseased. His pecuniary affairs, too, struck his
inexperienced daughter as being in no flourishing condition. The smallness
and mesquinerie of the house (a part of which only was occupied by her
relations); the absence of a man-servant—for Honor had picked up a good
deal of the knowledge of “life” from the pages of three-volume novels; to
say nothing of the dress, cheap though showy, of her hostess, betrayed to
Honor the fact that either money was far less plentiful in her father’s than
her husband’s home, or that penuriousness was a vice indulged in to a large
extent among her newly-found connections.
“If my father were rich and prosperous,” she said to herself—and, to do
her only justice, this ingenious though unconscious sophist firmly believed
in the honesty of her excuses—“if my father were rich and prosperous, I
should act differently, and write at once to tell John he is well. I should
mind in that case less, I think, the making him have a still worse opinion of
my poor father than I know he has at present. If I could hope that John
would make excuses for them, I should know better what to do; but he
would be simply furious. I know that he would never have let me come, if
he had not believed that my father was suffering from the effects of that
horrid blow; and perhaps, after all, he was; and besides, if he did make the
worst of his illness for the purpose of having me with him, where was the
mighty harm? It only shows that my poor father loves me,” added Honor,
sadly, to the wilful tender little heart, which was, alas, so likely to be led
astray by its own warm womanly impulses.
It was with such false reasonings as these, that Honor persuaded herself
to keep the real state of things a secret, pro tem. at least, from her husband.
He would never, she decided—even if he lived to the age of Methuselah—
understand her feelings, or see things (even if she wrote to him about her
father) as she saw them; and so, after sighing a little over her husband’s
small amount of solicitude and comprehension regarding the trifling things
that so much make or mar the happiness of a young and childless woman,
Honor entered on her course of deception. She was interrupted in her
cogitations—cogitations which so materially affected the future happiness
of one who, albeit he wore his heart, as the saying is, on his sleeve, Honor
had proved herself to be so little capable of comprehending—by a hasty
knock from the “girl of the house”—the “young person,” whose back hair
was thrust into a greasy net, and whose upper woman was clothed in a red
Garibaldi that had evidently seen service, which warned the visitor from the
country that by indulging herself in reflection, she was doing the wrong
thing at the wrong time. Dinner was “on table,” as the parlour-maid (to
whom Colonel Fred was in the habit of saying civil things) with no great
show of respect informed her; and Honor, in some trepidation—for she did
not feel exactly at home in her father’s house—hastily put the finishing
touches to her simple toilette, and hurriedly, two steps at a time, in very
unmatronly fashion, descended the many flights of stairs to the drawing-
room. Colonel Norcott was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the
fireless grate, when his daughter entered with an apology on her lips, and a
pretty deprecating smile lighting up her face. Mrs. Norcott had already
taken her seat at the round table, which had been cleared for dinner, and
was gazing with large anxious eyes, anticipative of evil, on the pewter dish-
cover, not one of the brightest specimens of its kind, that graced the simple
board.
“I am so sorry,” Honor was beginning; “I had my trunk to unpack; and
my hair was so tumbled that I was obliged to undo it, and—”
“And you couldn’t have been quicker if you’d done it for a bet,” said the
Colonel good humouredly. “So now for the miserable meal we call dinner.
You’ll wish yourself back at the farm-house, I suspect, when you taste the
nastiness that Mrs. Thingummy treats us with. You get rather different grub
at home—eh, Miss Honor?”
His daughter laughed lightly as she took her place beside him. It amused
her greatly to be called “Miss Honor,” just as if she were a girl. And then he
looked at, and spoke so kindly to her that she was already beginning to feel
at home in the Stanwick-street lodging. With the large-boned, youthfully-
dressed matron, dispensing with an air that was intended to be genteel, the
ill-dressed, London-flavoured whiting from the scantily-filled dish before
her, Honor did not expect to feel much kindred sympathy. Mrs. Norcott
was, however, to judge from external appearances at least, good-natured,
and facile à vivre. If she had ever enjoyed the prestige of being that often
self-reliant and arrogant character yclept an heiress (a fact of the truth of
which Honor began to doubt), there had as yet cropped out no signs either
of a love of domination or a purse-proud spirit. A harmless vanity, joined to
a blind worship for the Colonel, had hitherto struck Honor as the most
distinguishing feature in the Australian lady’s idiosyncrasy.
“If you can eat that stuff it’s more than I can,” said the master of the
house, pushing away his plate with disgust. “You see, my dear child, what it
is to have a father who hasn’t one shilling to rub against another. I—”
“Now, Colonel, I am surprised to hear you talk in this way,” put in his
wife. “There are a precious good many shillings in three hundred pounds a-
year, or I am a good deal more out in my arithmetic than I think I am. The
idea of talking in this way before your daughter! Why, she’ll think she’s
come among beggars, to hear the way you’re going on.”
 Fred laughed sardonically. “Not much need to talk about it, I think.
Those horrible whitings fried in black grease render all further explanation
on the subject nugatory. I don’t suppose that any affectation of superfluity is
likely to deceive Mrs. Beacham; and, in my opinion, it is always better to be
plain-spoken. You’ve got a poor devil of a father, my dear child, who finds
it hard enough, I can assure you, to make both ends meet. Of course you
will be uncomfortable here, I expect that; but I do flatter myself that you
won’t throw me over, Honor, because I’m a poor man. I’ve trusted in
women all my life, and never had cause to repent it yet; so here’s your
health, my dear, and may you enjoy health and wealth and happiness long
after your poor old father has been laid under the sod.”
He had taken advantage of Lydia’s momentary absence to utter this
pathetic speech, and as the red Garibaldi was not there to mar by force of
contrast the Colonel’s paternal platitudes, he got through his toast
swimmingly. In another moment, and before Honor’s hand, which had been
lovingly extended to meet her father’s, could be withdrawn, the parlour-
maid, in whose roguish black eyes the “first-floor front” was certainly no
hero, had bounced back into the room, bearing before her a large specimen
of that economical and succulent dish known to housekeepers as a juicy leg
of mutton. Nothing overcome at the sight of this delicacy, Mrs. Norcott
pressed a slice, cut with the gravy in, on Honor’s acceptance.
“What, not a mouthful? Dear me now, how sorry I am! Is there nothing
we could tempt you with? It’s because the mutton’s raw, perhaps, that your
stomach turns a little at it. Lydia, can you get nothing from the larder for
Mrs. John Beacham? That knuckle of ham, now—”
Miss Lydia grinned broadly. “You’ll never see that there mouthful of ’am
again, ’m,” she said pertly, and after the fashion of one accustomed to speak
her mind. “The Kunnle he ate that for his breakfast this morning afore he
went out;” and having so said, she went on briskly with the important duties
of her calling.
To Honor, accustomed as she was to “the land flowing with milk and
honey” of the old farm-house at Updown Paddocks, the state of the
Stanwick-street larder appeared a most deplorable affair indeed. As for her
father—her high-bred, distinguished-looking father, with his delicate
aristocratic hands, his dainty golden sleeve-buttons, and, in her opinion, his
warm paternal heart—she could hardly refrain from tears as she looked
upon his futile efforts to eat the nauseous food that was set before him. She
had not been reared, as we know, in the school of over-refinement, and to
do violence to her own feelings in order to spare the self-love of another
was one of the consequences on an advanced state of civilisation which had
not, as yet, made itself felt in the somewhat arrière parish of Switcham. To
feign an appetite if she had it not was not therefore amongst the small
deceptions which Mrs. Beacham felt called upon to practise, and for that
reason the poor girl rose dinnerless, or, as she would in her ignorance have
called it, supperless, from that untempting board. No sooner had the
energetic Lydia retired, closing the door upon all (save its unwelcome
perfume) that remained of that highly-unsatisfactory repast, than Colonel
Norcott, taking his hat from a side table, announced his intention of going
out.
“Only for an hour or so—just to smoke a cigar in the open,” he said
carelessly. “You’ll be in bed though, Honor, I suppose, before I come back?
Beauty-sleep, eh? We mustn’t lose those country roses sooner than we can
help, or we shall have John looking us up with that stout stick of his. Gad,
how quick he struck, and how it tingled! I can feel it now;” passing his hand
playfully over his forehead. “Took one so deucedly by surprise, you know.
Hadn’t an idea, of course, that he was going to do anything of the kind.
Nothing but a light cane in my hand, talking quietly about old times, when,
without a word, down comes the sledge-hammer, and, by Jove! I was
floored.”
“He was very sorry afterwards, indeed he was,” Honor said pleadingly.
“I have heard him say so often. He hardly knew what he did. If he had not
been sorry, he would never have let me leave the Paddocks to-day.”
“Wouldn’t he?” chucking her under the chin. “Looks sharp after his
pretty wife, eh? But as to being sorry, I can believe as much of that as I like.
If he had been, he would have answered a letter that I wrote to him some
time ago about Rough Diamond; but as he didn’t,” and a very vindictive
expression flitted across his bearded face, “I know what to think, and, what
is more, shall probably act upon the conviction I have come to.”
Honor could only look her surprise at this wholly unexpected outburst.
Before, however, she could utter a syllable in extenuation of her husband’s
sin against politeness, Colonel Norcott had taken his departure, leaving her
to spend the hours till welcome bedtime came in listening to the
uncongenial gossip of the woman whose society was by himself so
evidently unprized. Honor’s first experience of genteel life in London was
certainly neither an amusing nor an instructive one.
 CHAPTER XXII.

THE TURNING OF THE HEAD.

“How pretty Rhoda is looking! Arthur, I am sure, in spite of what you say,
that she will make a sensation in London. Her features are so regular, and
her complexion, though she is pale, is so wonderfully clear and pure.
Besides she looks so good, so—”
“She had better look bad,” growled old Mr. Duberly, in response to his
daughter’s sisterly remarks on the personal recommendations of the
debutante from Sandyshire. “She had far better look as wicked as the evil
one himself if she wants to nobble the young Lunnon gents. A gell who
‘looks good’ has no more chance of what you call getting on there than my
Soph,” and he winked at his daughter facetiously, “would have had, if she
hadn’t happened to have a few thousand pounds in her pocket, poor gell!
There’s that Lady Fy, as they call her, with her dead eyes and painted hair; I
wonder where she would be if looking good was the order of the day, and if
whalebone didn’t make the woman, and—”
“And want of it the stick,” laughed Arthur. “But you are quite right, sir,
and Sophy is making a great mistake about Rhoda; she won’t have a chance
in London. The ugliest girl going, if she were only chaffy and got herself up
well, would cut her out at once, knock her into smithereens, if she set about
having a try with poor Rhoda. And then the entourage, the home, I
mean”—explaining the foreign word for the benefit of his father-in-law,
who understood about as much of the French language as he did of that of
the twelve tribes—“the home in which my unfortunate sisters live is the last
one in the world to tempt a man to commit matrimony in their behalf. In my
opinion there is nothing like a jolly, genial mamma—the kind of mamma
exactly that milady is not—for getting girls well married. By the bye,
Sophy, my child—now don’t agitate yourself, or we may have to send
prematurely for Mrs. Gamp—Lady Mill intends doing you the honour of
calling here, and—”
“O, Arthur, don’t say so! How horrid! I would so much rather go there. It
is so much nicer to be able to go away when one has had enough—when
one has nothing more to say, I mean, and—and I know I shall hate it so.”
 Old Dub, who formed a component part, and a greatly valued one by his
daughter, of Arthur Vavasour’s family, had left the room the moment that
the conversation turned, which it often did, on Lady Millicent and her
shortcomings. The good old man, conscious of harbouring (a very
unwelcome guest) in his inner man a decidedly unchristian dislike to the
lady in question, abstained, as far as lay in his power, from the gratification
—for such it undoubtedly was—of hearing her abused and ridiculed. His
sense of honour, too, which was singularly keen, revolted from any secret
attacks, any stabs in the dark, any—even the most well deserved—
accusations, when the individual so accused was, from absence or
ignorance, deprived not only of the opportunity of self-justification, but of
bringing en evidence the “other side of the question.”
“You’ll be so good, Master Arthur,” he had once remarked, and that in
his most decided manner, to his thoughtless son-in-law, “as not to say
anything in my presence about your mother which you wouldn’t say before
her face. I don’t pretend to much liking for milady, nor do I suppose there’s
much love lost between us. She thinks me an old snob (isn’t that your new
word for fogeyism?) and I—well, it don’t much matter what I think. I’m an
old fellow, and an old-fashioned fellow, and in my time—don’t laugh, you
rogue—young men and women honoured their fathers and mothers in a way
they don’t seem to do nowadays. You may say that the parents don’t always
deserve to be respected; but that’s neither here nor there, and God A’mighty
said nothing about that,” added the old man reverently, “when He gave the
two tables of the law to Moses. One of these days, my boy,” and he laid his
hand kindly upon Arthur’s shoulder, “you’ll be glad if your own sons have
been brought up in my way of thinking. In the mean time, remember that
it’s a bargain between us that you are to be mum in my presence about my
Lady Mill.”
But we must return to Mrs. Arthur Vavasour, and to her anything but
joyful anticipations as regarded the expected visit of her uncongenial
mother-in-law.
“O Arthur, what shall I do? I could bear anything better than a formal
call from Lady Millicent. What am I to say to her? She has such a
dreadfully cold way of looking into and at one. She shows so plainly that
she despises papa and me. I don’t mind it so much for myself, for of course
I know that you might have married anybody; but it does vex me when she
behaves so about poor papa. I know he feels it, though he says nothing.
Papa is so odd, dear old man, about some things; he is so chivalrous, so
innately courtly, like the old knights. Don’t laugh, Arthur; I know he does
not look much like them, with his round face and dear bald head; but I
think, I do indeed, that they, when they fought for their ladies, must have
felt something like my poor father. He places woman so high. I can
remember how courteous and tender—though I daresay Lady Millicent
thinks him vulgar—he always was to poor mamma. He has a horror of fast
girls; they are the only creatures in the shape of women that I ever hear him
severe upon; but he would love Rhoda dearly. O Arthur, how nice it would
be if we could see a good deal of her! But of course Lady Millicent would
never allow that; she would think her daughter would be contaminated by
living with such vulgarians as papa and me.”
Arthur during this plaintive speech had been standing with his back to
the speaker, tapping impatiently on the plate-glass window-pane, having a
view upon the now tolerably crowded park, for it was five o’clock, and Mr.
Duberly’s grand town mansion was one of the finest in Hyde-park-gardens.
He turned round hastily at the cessation of his wife’s voice, and said a little
impatiently:
“How silly you are, dear, to vex yourself in this way! Because my
mother happens to be a vulgar fine lady—and believe me, Sophy pet, that
no genuine lady (the kind of lady that your friends the knights worshipped),
is ever rude—because my mother happens not to know how to behave
herself, it behoves you to give her a lesson.”
“Give her a lesson! Me!” exclaimed Sophy, in amazement.
“Yes, you! Why not? Only be your own dear, merry, unaffected self, only
show that you, tremendous heiress that you are (and which I never can get
you to remember), are not to be put down and tyrannised over and
browbeaten, and, believe me, Lady Millicent, like all bullies, will draw in
her horns, and treat you with the respect that is your due.”
“I don’t want respect,” sighed Sophy; “all I long for is affection. I should
so like your mother to love me, Arthur. Just now, too,” and she blushed
prettily, “I feel more than ever reminded that I have no mother of my own.”
“And no great loss, either, if all mothers are like the only one that I have
any experience of,” said Arthur lightly, while endeavouring to divert his
wife’s thoughts into a more lively channel. “But, Sophy darling, if it bores
you too much, you sha’n’t see milady. There is no positive necessity for it. I