Chapter XXII: A Touch of the Spur

Many gentlemen, as I have just said--gentlemen, that is, by brevet and by prescriptive right--made themselves conspicuous that day by their open and undisguised admiration for John Beacham’s beautiful wife. Honor was, unfortunately, precisely in the position which of all others renders a young woman the most easy to be beset by this indelicate description of flattery. There is something in the very name of a “horse-breeder’s wife” which at once connects itself in the mind with what is as “fast” and “slangy” and forward as the most fast and free and horsey among the “fine young English ladies” of our day. Those who chanced to know Honor personally might have proclaimed the contrary; but somehow young men in general do not care much to assert that a beautiful girl with whom they are acquainted has betrayed the reverse of the proclivities above alluded to; so, for lack of a champion, those who were not acquainted with Mrs. John Beacham judged of that young woman as it pleased them best.

Amongst the class of “gentlemen” above alluded to--_messieurs qui suivent les femmes_ from rule, from habit, and from inclination--the one that stared the most at, and followed the closest on, Honor’s footsteps was the individual with whom the reader has already made some slight acquaintance in his character of owner of that celebrated yearling yclept Rough Diamond.

Colonel Norcott, whose history in his native county had been for some years “a blank,” was at this period of his life somewhere about five-and-forty years of age. Five-and-forty, _bien sonnées_, nevertheless he looked younger than his age, for his figure, which (whatever else he had lost) he had been fortunate enough to keep, was slight and juvenile; his hair, though less luxuriant than of yore, was still thick and glossy; and his face, which, though always plain, even to ugliness, was singularly attractive and intelligent, had stood so well the wear and tear of years that many pronounced Fred Norcott a better-looking man in middle-age than he had been in the days when a greater amount of personal beauty might fairly have been expected of him.

Frederick Norcott, an only and over-indulged son, was barely seventeen when he commenced his career in life as a light dragoon. He possessed great natural shrewdness, a good memory, and a rare gift of rendering himself agreeable to those whom he desired to please. Principles he had none. To instil any such troublesome things into his son’s youthful mind had been deemed by Fred’s father a work of supererogation. Fred would be well off, had good connections, and was rather a sharp fellow than otherwise; so the country gentleman, who knew but little of the world, and who--his own nature being both a proud and a cold one--had himself kept clear of scrapes, sent his only son forth into “life” with the injunctions to do nothing dishonourable, and never to make a fool of himself.

There are some young men thus ushered into a world of trial and of temptation, for whom the code of honour--in so many respects the Christian code--would stand in stead of what are called higher principles, and would keep them at least tolerably straight in the path which they were fated to tread; but of such exceptional young men as these Frederick Norcott did not, unfortunately for himself and his friends, happen to be one. Cursed with the strongest passions, adoring as well as despising women, utterly selfish, and a gambler to the backbone, who can wonder that Frederick Norcott should very early in life have become bankrupt in fortune, friends, and reputation,--in all, in short, that should make existence valuable to its possessor? But for the wars, which were consecutively so instrumental in the “keeping going” of sundry of England’s impecunious sons and heroes, Fred Norcott would very soon have been laid on an extremely comfortless shelf. How he contrived to live, after his paternal inheritance had been reduced to actual nothingness, was pretty much a secret between the Jews, his creditors, and himself. As a soldier, however, he stood high. As fearless before the foe as he was audacious with the fair, Fred Norcott, as long as shots were flying, and human flesh and bones were required to stop them, kept his head above water tolerably well. But the day of reckoning came at last. Ships came back full instead of empty of soldiers from the East; the last rebel Pandy was scattered to the winds; the dead had buried their dead, and hungry creditors began to think of gathering up the fragments that remained. For a time--why does not appear, except for the reason that some men do possess more than others the gift of softening hearts--Colonel Norcott’s natural enemies seemed disposed to allow him that highly improvable item, time. Perhaps seeing that the Colonel came under the head of that large class, namely, “distinguished officers,” it would scarcely have _paid_, immediately after his retirement from the service, to be hard upon him. To have coarsely insisted upon payment--to have “taken steps” for the “settlement” of their long-standing accounts--might have occasioned the loss to those rapacious tradesmen of the custom of better men; so, as I said before, they waited for a while, with what patience they could muster, for the turning of the tide.

As is generally the case, immunity from punishment was very far from working either reformation or improvement. The iniquities which Fred had committed in the green tree were perpetrated by him still more villanously in the brown. At the age of thirty-six, there were few atrocities, chiefly under the rose, of which he had not been guilty; and it was at that age--an age at which the wild oats are supposed to be sown, and the new leaf lastingly turned over--that the ex-dragoon committed the act of which “old Dub” entertained so vague a recollection, but the consequences of which eventually drove Colonel Fred (with all his debts upon his head, and very little money in his pockets) to Australia.

This climax in the career of the ex-dragoon took place about a dozen years before the opening of my story; and Colonel Norcott, after spending ten of those years in banishment, had returned to his native land a wiser if not a better man. Nor had he, as we already know, returned alone; for there was a Mrs. Norcott--a colonial heiress, it was said--who had taken pity on Fred’s poverty and loneliness, and endowed him with her hand and fortune. At the time my story opens, two years, or nearly so, had elapsed since Colonel Norcott--gay, agreeable, but slightly under a cloud--made his reappearance on the stage of the London world. How or at what period terms had been made with the creditors to whose former leniency the prodigal owed so much, history deponeth not. That they were satisfied with the turn affairs had taken was evidenced by the fact that “the Colonel” roamed, with a free step and _jarret tendre_, about his former haunts; while for the nonce--whether such a state of things would last remained to be seen--a veil seemed by common consent (amongst the laxest portion of Colonel Norcott’s former acquaintances) to be thrown over his past delinquencies, and _non mi ricordo_, save amongst the ultra strict, was as regarded his errors the order of the day.

* * * * *

“Who is that gentleman, John?” asked Honor, her face still flushed with the crimson tide that a prolonged stare from Colonel Norcott’s bold insinuating eyes had thrown into it. “I fancy I have seen him before. Did not he come to the Paddocks one day about buying a horse?”

“A great many people do that, my dear,” responded John absently. “Came to buy a horse, did he? And which of all these gentlemen is it that you mean?”

“Which? O, that one! there he goes--the tall man in the light coat; you can see him now between the trees, talking to the person that you call Jack Winthrop.”

John Beacham, who had a moment before been intensely amused by watching an animated game at “Aunt Sally,” turned in the direction indicated, but at first without being able to discover the object of his wife’s curiosity. The hand that rested on his arm positively trembled with impatience. Honor could not account for the strange interest which she seemed to take in that middle-aged, distinguished-looking man. To her, Colonel Norcott, erect and soldier-like, with his grand military bearing, and his five-and-forty years so bravely carried, seemed almost an old man, or rather an old prince. Somebody very remarkable he was--of that Honor had no doubt; and the fact of his having noticed _her_ did not tend to lessen the interest that he had excited.

“O John, can’t you see him?” she said eagerly. “There, he is out of sight now! Why _wouldn’t_ you look before? I _know_ he is somebody great--a foreign prince, or something of that kind.”

John laughed gaily. “Why, child,” he said, “what do _you_ know about foreign princes? Do you suppose there’s anything in the cut of their jib different from other people’s? Why, if you want to see an article of that sort, I’ll bring you a mustachioed fellow up to lunch one of these days. There’s plenty of all sorts come, one way or the other, to the Paddocks. They speak pretty good English, do most of the mounseers, or there ain’t many words would pass between me and them. But about this gent, Honey, that you’re so anxious to know the name of. Is that him, coming back again, and looking this way?”

By this time the tall figure of Colonel Norcott was again in sight, swinging his cane, and sauntering slowly towards the spot where John Beacham, with those two very different specimens of womankind--one leaning upon either arm--was standing. It must have been evident to any looker-on whose attention was not otherwise engrossed that the Colonel manifested a decided inclination to haunt the spot where that beautiful face and _élancée_ girlish figure were to be seen and admired. Honor, perceiving his return, _felt_ that so it was; and the shy blush rose again to her cheek as she answered John’s question in the affirmative.

Rather to her surprise, the latter turned away abruptly, thus avoiding the meeting with the gallant Fred which must otherwise have taken place.

“O,” he began, and Honor knew by his heightened colour that her husband’s naturally quick temper had received a touch of the spur, “so that’s the party, is it? Well, Honey, I won’t promise to bring _him_ up to the house--that is, at least, unless I’m obliged to, which I don’t think likely. Why, my dear, that’s Colonel Norcott, a man who--but never mind; _you’ve_ nothing to do with what he is, nor I neither, excepting that he bought Rough Diamond of Arthur Vavasour, and--well, I never thought to care so little whether a colt of my breeding proved a winning horse or not.”

“They were great people once in the county were the Norcotts,” put in Mrs. Beacham. “I’ve heard old Mrs. Parsons--she that was mother to the fly-away thing that keeps the shop at Leigh now--say, times and over, that Madam Norcott--which she’s nothing better than Mrs. Baker now--used to buy gownds of her that a duchess might have wored; and she could afford it too; and it was a pity that this young man made ducks and drakes of everything, for it was him, warn’t it, John, that brought the family down to what it is?”

Before her son could answer, which he was about to do in the affirmative, the well-known proverb having reference to a certain gentleman in black who shall be nameless, was once more unsatisfactorily illustrated by the reappearance on the scene of the spendthrift in question. Coming this time totally unawares upon the unsuspecting trio, it was impossible for John to evade, as he had before done, the meeting with a man of whose character and principles he entertained the worst possible opinion. The object of his dislike came forward with a _dégagée_ air, and after nodding in a patronising manner to John, stopped in the middle of the broad turf-covered walk, thus effectually barring the passage.

“Fine day! Looked like rain this morning. Your wife, eh, Beacham? Happy to be introduced. We’re kinder pardners now, as the Yankees say, and you must wish me good luck, Mrs. Beacham, with Rough Diamond. Ladies have all the luck in racing, and I shall expect you’ll remember me in your prayers.”

“I hear the colt is looking well,” John said stiffly. “I’ve no interest in him myself now he’s out of Mr. Vavasour’s hands;” and he was moving on, when Colonel Norcott, stepping on one side, joined himself (walking on Honor’s side) to the party.

“Been riding lately, Mrs. Beacham?” he said coolly. “That little mare of yours is a pretty goer; but then, who should be well mounted if you are not? Of course you had the pick of your husband’s stables, and there’s nothing like them, I always say. Such luck, too, Beacham, your stock have. By George! I expect to make a pot of money out of Rough Diamond.”

“I hope you won’t be disappointed, sir,” said John drily. “And now,” stopping dead short, and looking resolutely at a turn in the road which led (at right-angles) in another direction, “and now I believe that we must wish you good-morning. I am a business man; and as I don’t often afford myself a day’s leisure, I wish to make the most of it;” and having so said, he bowed with grave civility to the Colonel, and drew his womankind away.

Fred Norcott was not the kind of man to be easily repulsed. He did not stand in the slightest awe of John. “A low fellow of a horse-breeder, you know,” is the way he would have described the man whose watchwords were truth and honesty, and whose palm was as pure as a sucking child’s from bribes. “A fellow who ought to be obliged to a gentleman for noticing him, which one wouldn’t do, you know, except for his wife. By Jove! _such_ a pretty creature! Such eyes! and a foot--”

But there is no need to follow this unchartered libertine in his (imagined) unseemly rhapsodies. That he did intensely admire the wife of the man he affected to despise had been made quite sufficiently evident during that short colloquy, not only to the object of that admiration, but to honest John himself. The latter was not either of a quarrelsome or a susceptible temperament. It was not in his nature to take umbrage at any respectfully evinced appreciation of his wife’s beauty. Anything so pretty as Honor was of course made to be looked at; but looked at, not with eyes of _convoitise_--not with the bold, much-meaning, purity-tainting stare with which men of the stamp of dissolute Fred Norcott bring burning blushes to the cheeks of girlish beauty. John’s blood had boiled within him when the colour, stirred by the bad man’s gaze, had risen to his fair wife’s brow. He could have felled that slight, delicate-looking libertine to the ground with one blow of his powerful right arm, and the act would have done good, perhaps, to both men; but John had, for the moment at least, his passions under control, and the quondam soldier was left standing scathless upon the greensward, and gazing vacantly at Honor’s retreating figure.

The abruptness--not to call it rudeness--with which John Beacham had given him his _congé_ seemed to have produced very little effect in rousing Fred Norcott’s indignation. The impression that the sight of Honor had made upon him was far too powerful for any other emotion either to lessen or to remove it. The fact was that in the Celtic beauty he had traced, or fancied he could trace, one of those extraordinary resemblances which sometimes, in our walk through life--looking back, it may be, along the “wondrous track of dreams”--startle us into retrospective thought.

“How like! My G--d! how like!” he said to himself. “The same fair hair, and long dark eyelashes. The same--”

“I beg your pardon, Colonel Norcott; but I believe you are thinking of Mrs. John Beacham?” and a middle-aged woman, neatly but plainly dressed, who had approached unperceived (so constant was the hum of voices, and so soft and thick the turf beneath her tread), dropped a curtsey to the gentleman, and begged to say that her name was Bridget Bainbridge.

As is the frequent case with intriguing persons, Colonel Norcott’s first idea, when he chanced to find himself accosted by a stranger, was, that he was about to be imposed upon; he therefore--albeit a little taken aback by the sound of a name which he had not heard for many a bygone year--commenced an immediate scrutiny of the woman’s features, in order the better to secure himself against the evil of being “done.” Apparently the investigation was corroborative, for after a moment or two he said in a hurried whisper:

“It is a long time since we met, and you have chosen rather a public place in which to make yourself known. If you have anything to say, go in that direction,” and he pointed to a narrow pathway, leading to a dense shrubbery of evergreens. “Go,” he continued authoratively; “and I will join you in a few moments.”

The woman who had called herself Bridget Bainbridge seemed about to speak, then stopped, hesitated a little, as if unable to make up her mind as to the best course to be pursued, and finally decided on following the Colonel’s directions. The latter, after waiting--with a strange look of perplexity in his face--for a few brief moments, turned away in an opposite direction, but in one which, for he knew the “lay” of the Danescourt grounds well, would conduct him eventually to the place where Mrs. Bainbridge was waiting for his coming. His step was far slower now, and infinitely less assured, than when he had advanced with that _air conquérant_ of his to damage with a word and look the peace of mind of that bright rustic beauty. There was evidence of thought in his lowered head, and of a nameless anxiety in his knitted brow. _Something_ had tamed his spirits since he had caught sight of that quiet-looking middle-aged female, and as he approached the place where she was waiting for him, the pulsations of his heart grew quicker, and large beads of sweat stood out upon his forehead.

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

spent in the secluson=> spent in the seclusion {pg 18}

succesfully combated=> successfully combated {pg 101}

gossipped about=> gossiped about {pg 184}

change your gownd afore=> change your gown afore {pg 201}

She was girl=> She was a girl {pg 284}