Chapter III: Every Dog Has Its Day

The approaching marriage of Mr. John Beacham, whose family had been time out of mind one of the most respected and respectable in the entire parish of Switcham, within the boundaries of which the Beachams had held land to a large extent under many a successive lord of the manor of Gillingham, was a very important event in that quiet locality. In his way, John Beacham might almost be styled a _public_ character. Far and near, whenever a certain highly interesting subject--namely, that of horses--was upon the _tapis_, honest John’s name was pretty certain to be brought prominently forward. It was surprising--in a country and on a matter in which almost every young gentleman, probably, held a first-rate opinion of his own merits as a judge of “cattle”--what weight the fiat of John Beacham, farmer and horse-breeder, was wont to carry with it. The latter vocation--and a highly lucrative one it was--had not been exercised for more than a dozen years or so by the lessees of Shotover Farm, by which name, by the way, the hundreds of broad acres rented by the Beacham family had, for generations past, been known. Some six years before the death of John’s father, the estate called Updown Paddocks, and which consisted of many a broad and fertile meadow, admirably adapted for breeding purposes, was announced to be for sale. It lay in tempting proximity to Mr. Beacham’s farm; the price in that prudent individual’s opinion was a reasonable one; he and his trusted son John were agreed in the matter; so, in due course of time, the tenants of Shotover progressed to the dignity of landowners. Meanwhile, and pending the final arrangements for the purchase, John’s mother, the “old lady” of whom honourable mention has already been made, showed herself anything but favourable to the new plan. Though a Yorkshire woman born and bred, the love of horses and of horse-dealing was not inherent in her septuagenarian breast. She was a tall, large-boned, but, in spite of her seventy years, still a well-favoured woman. John was her only surviving child, infantile complaints of various kinds having carried away four others before they had had time to wind themselves too closely round her heart; and in the said John, therefore--in his present comfort and his future fortunes--all her best affections and her keenest interests were concentrated. Many were the anxious moments endured, and not a few the querulous remarks uttered, by the farmer’s cautious wife before the complete success of the undertaking, so judiciously, and withal so conscientiously, carried on by her husband and son, laid her fears to rest, and effectually put a stop to her gloomy forebodings of loss and ruin. It is true that the excellent woman was kept a little in the dark regarding the details of the business which was already making for the breeding establishment of Beacham and Son a name throughout the land. The “old lady”--for by that title John’s stately mother was known in the neighbourhood of her abode--would have been not a little startled had she chanced to learn the amount of money that had been invested at Updown Paddocks. She seldom, after having become perfectly convinced that the “concern” was a safe investment, alluded to the subject; but it is more than probable that had Mrs. Beacham been required to make a rough guess at the sum-total expended yearly on the “horse-breeding business,” she would, without much hesitation, have named something under half the amount that John, who was no niggard of his cash, thought nothing of paying for the least costly of his pure-blooded “sires.”

Mrs. Beacham was justly proud of the increase of wealth and consideration which had accrued to her family by means--as she was fully justified in believing--of the intelligence and undeviating rectitude of her husband and son. But, most of all, in the simplicity of her feudal zeal, she was boastful of the friendship and unfailing regard evinced for both by the “good Squire,” as he was everywhere denominated (for they were tenants, not of Mr. Vavasour, but of “milady”), by that discriminating and kindly gentleman. A deeply-rooted love of the animal of whose race so many noble specimens were always to be seen at Updown Paddocks would have been alone sufficient to account for Cecil Vavasour’s frequent visits to Mr. Beacham’s establishment; but, in addition to this, there was a genuine liking and sincere respect for the two men who never permitted the desire for gain to triumph over their sense of honour, and who, although they breathed the air which is supposed to be so deleterious to honesty, yet retained a pure and healthy sense of what was due, not only to their customers and themselves, but to the noble animals on whose merits they so successfully traded. Cecil Vavasour thoroughly enjoyed the five miles of pleasant country walk, which had for its end and object a chat with Lady Millicent’s model tenants--the Beachams of Updown Paddocks. He delighted in their shrewd uncommon sense, in their practical equine knowledge, in their cordial welcome, and, above all, in the sight of the young stock gambolling over the sweet short pasture of the Paddocks, whilst their sober mothers cropped the staff of their lives in placid and unmolested enjoyment.

The deaths, under very different circumstances, of the Squire and John’s greatly-regretted father took place within three months of each other. The illness of the latter was a lingering one, induced by imprudent self-exposure to wet and cold; and when at last the news went forth that the old man was no more, deep and general was the regret expressed by all ranks for his loss. His widow, too, mourned very sincerely for one who had been a good husband for the space of near upon forty years to her; but then she was so fortunate as to have “John” to comfort her, and he, as all the neighbours round would have been ready to acknowledge, was “a host in himself.”

* * * * *

It was the last day of April, the eve of “the maddest, merriest day in all the glad new year,” and the eve, besides, of John Beacham’s wedding-day--the day that was to make him, according to his own belief, the happiest of human beings. The weather was lovely. The spring had been a forward one, so that there were not wanting lilacs and laburnums, Gueldres roses and hawthorn blossom, to deck the maypoles and adorn the floral arch which it was the gallant purpose of the Switcham youths to erect over the churchyard gate, through which the bridal party had to pass.

The exceeding beauty of the girl who had won what was universally considered by her _peers_ a prize in the matrimonial market, and a certain mystery which hung about her origin, would alone have been sufficient, without reckoning John Beacham’s well-deserved popularity, to account for the interest and curiosity created by the approaching nuptials. Honor Blake certainly was very lovely; that could not be denied. Fresh and sweet as a rose in June, with a profusion of light-brown wavy hair, melting blue eyes (had they in very truth a “look,” as Mrs. Tamfrey averred, in their languid depths?), and cherry lips that seemed pouting to be kissed; but for all this beauty, and partly, perhaps, because of her rich personal endowments, women--ay, and men likewise--were very curious to learn something certain and tangible regarding the quondam nursery governess at Clay’s Farm. All that was positively known regarding John’s _fiancée_ amounted to this--namely, that her early childhood had been passed at a superior description of farm-house in the far west of Ireland, and, moreover, it was very apparent that she had been delicately as well as tenderly reared. At the age of seven, a person calling herself the child’s aunt had removed the little Honor from the affectionate care of the “widow Moriarty,” the “snug woman” who had hitherto acted a mother’s part by the blue-eyed Irish maiden; and the next important event in the little girl’s life was the being placed in a respectable country boarding-school, where she completed an education that was more solid than ornamental. Eventually, and when she had reached the age of sixteen, Miss Blake, through the medium of the above-spoken-of relation, whose name was Bainbridge, and who had been for many years in the service, as housekeeper, of a wealthy Sandyshire family, obtained the situation of nursery governess at Clay’s Farm. The Clays were excellent people in their line, and they neither overworked nor underfed the young person, who did her best, though she was still, as good-natured Mrs. Clay often said, “but a giddy thing,” to please them.

John Beacham, although he had not been behindhand in admiring Honor’s beauty, was too busy, and owned too little of a sentimental nature, to fall in love with her at first sight. She was such a mere child, too, compared to himself. He, a man of thirty-five, weather-beaten, and with lines upon his brow, to say nothing of a rare gray hair or two that his old mother viewed with pain cropping out in his thick brown whiskers, was many a year too old to mate himself with that bright bud of beauty. But though steady John Beacham was wise enough in his calmer moments, and when safe from the glamour of Honor Blake’s blue eyes, to remember these salutary facts, it was altogether a different affair when he chanced to meet her, looking so brightly pretty, walking with the farmer’s children in the shady lanes, or when the little lake, on the borders of Clay’s Farm, was ice-bound in the cold December weather, making a sunny spot where her sweet radiant face was seen amongst the busy skaters. There is no need to dwell upon the not very remarkable particulars of this rustic courtship. John was Honor’s first lover--the first that she had ever thought or read of. Marriage--an affair to which she, like every girl of sense, of course looked forward to--seemed a pleasant, an exciting, and an important event in life. It would be delightful to have new clothes, and a home and children of her own; for Honor was very fond of, as well as patient with, little people; and perhaps her satisfaction at her approaching marriage was more closely connected with thoughts of baby-smiles and “waxen touches” than the girl herself, in her pure and perfect innocence, suspected. Be that as it may, she did not hesitate, no, not for a single moment, ere she said “yes” in answer to John Beacham’s offer; nor afterwards, when the hour for reflection came, did she feel one pang of regret for the unqualified assent that she had given.

They were to be married in May--as John arranged before he left the small old-fashioned “company” parlour at Mr. Clay’s farm, in which this important chapter in the joint lives of himself and Honor had been opened. To be married in May,--that is to say, in two months’ time,--and not a word imparted as yet to the one so vitally interested in the matter--not a hint of what was going on dropped to the “old lady” at Updown Paddocks!

Mrs. Beacham, who had kept house for her well-beloved John from the hour when the old man had departed for a world where seed-time and harvest are no more, was a woman acknowledged by all who knew her (and, indeed, she had, for that matter, been known to boast of the peculiarity herself) to have not only a “will” but “ways” of her own. She was a bustling busy personage, one whom no one in her household would have ventured to “answer;” while as for interference with any of her orders or arrangements, why not even John himself would have dreamt of such a thing. The love of power and rule was in her plebeian breast fully as firmly implanted as in that of the autocratic mistress of the Castle--the division of her kingdom would have been as unpleasant a disintegration to the one as to the other; and it therefore required some little courage on John Beacham’s part to enable him to go through with credit the duty of imparting to his mother that he was about to take unto himself a wife.

Between Mrs. Beacham and her son there had always existed a sincere, though not a demonstrative, affection. They had, moreover, no secrets from one another, and nothing in John’s previous life and conversation had ever tended to awaken in the susceptible mind of the “old lady” the natural jealousy of a mother. It was wonderful during his twenty years or thereabouts of manhood how very little the straightforward fully-occupied fellow had had to tell. On his first emerging from hobbledehoyhood, that discreet body, his mother, had not been without her fears that John would play, after the example of other lads, the lover and the fool. Anxiously, and much as a fussy trembling hen watches, when they seem likely to get into troubled waters, the erratic movements of a brood of ducklings, so did the parent of honest unsentimental John torment herself with the fear that some “silly useless chit,” some “forward wasteful hussy,” was alluring her precious son into the hot waters of a love-scrape. Time wore on, however; the down gave place to bristles on the young farmer’s chin, his voice grew manly, and he took his place as one having authority in the family councils, while as yet he betrayed no symptoms calculated to justify his mother’s alarm.

The neighbours (for a single young man in John’s position is, to a certain extent, public property) began at length to grow alarmed at the apparently phlegmatic character of Mr. Beacham’s idiosyncrasy. It seemed to them so terribly likely that he would live and die a bachelor; and then what a throwing away of advantages, what a loss to some young woman or other of the many who would have said “yes” to John of such a house and home as would be provided for her at the Paddocks!

These lamentations and prognostics, when they reached the ears of Mrs. Beacham, were met not only with ridicule, but with an indignant protest. “What could they, a set of ignorant busybodies, know of what was passing in the mind of a sensible man like John? She had no patience, not she, with that everlasting talk about getting married, putting thoughts into young men’s heads that wouldn’t be there without, and interfering in a way that no decent person ought to do with other people’s sons. If John meant to marry he would, and if he didn’t why he wouldn’t, and that was all about it; and for her part, she just wished that everybody would leave him alone and mind their own business.”

At length, and by the time that Mrs. Beacham had almost, if not quite, ceased to think of her son as a possibly marrying man, he--the hitherto practical and prudent bachelor--began to manifest certain symptoms, which, but for the sense of security into which she had rocked herself, could scarcely have failed to awaken the spirit of suspicion in the old lady’s breast. It was again owing to the hints of her neighbours, and the more outspoken words of that agreeable gossip the widow Thwaytes, that certain eccentricities perpetrated by her son reached his mother’s ears. Among the most suggestive of these eccentricities was the purchase in London of a “booky” of hothouse flowers, and the driving of his big black horse “like mad” to Clay’s Farm, in order that the gardenias and the Cape jasmines might be fresh and sweet when they met the eyes of pretty Honor Blake.

At first, Mrs. Beacham positively declined to entertain the idea that at his time of life John would be that foolish as to be made an idiot of by a “gel.” As long as blindness to her son’s weakness was possible, she shut her eyes resolutely to facts, and refused to believe even the evidence of her senses. The neighbours might, and indeed at this interesting crisis they _did_, come about her daily like bees, buzzing restlessly about the tempting honey-pot, in which was silently fermenting a domestic event, in the boiling-point of which all felt themselves to be more or less intimately concerned; but busy though they were, and curious, as well as tolerably well informed withal, his mother, trusting to John’s good sense, and being herself either ignorant or forgetful of the power of the tender passion, remained tranquil in her fancied security.

But at last the storm burst, and the hour for full confession came. On one blustering March night, when the shutters of the old farm-house were closed against the wild north wind--when the mother and son were sitting at the sturdy well-polished mahogany table, he, with his account-books before him, while Mrs. Beacham, on thrifty thoughts intent, was engaged heart and soul in turning the heel of a gray lambswool stocking--John, after much debating in his own mind as to the manner in which his communication could best be made, stammered forth the few initiatory words that rendered the after disclosure comparatively easy.

“Mother, you know Honor Blake?” and having so said, with his big manly heart beating a trifle faster than usual, John Beacham leant back in his chair, and thrust his two hands into his waistcoat-pockets.

The old woman dropped her knitting-needles in the extremity of her surprise and consternation.

“Know the girl!” she repeated, looking up blankly at John’s troubled face; whereupon he, taking heart of grace, entered upon his confession.

“Mother, it’s a long story, and I don’t know exactly where to begin.”

“Then you had better commence at the end,” said the old lady crossly. John, however, took her up at once. His hesitation and timidity had been terrible barriers to fluency so long as his mother’s _feelings_ were to be soothed, and her jealousy of his affection laid to rest; but directly it became a question of _temper_--when once the old lady, as was her wont on rare occasions of irritation, began to take her son “up short”--then hesitation vanished as if by magic, and John Beacham found comparatively no difficulty in telling his news.

“Come, come, mother,” he said cheerfully, “don’t take what I’m going to say that way. You couldn’t surely have expected--it wasn’t in human nature, you know--that I should go on all my life like this.”

“Like this! and what, I should be glad to know, do you mean by ‘this’? _This_, indeed! Why, John, haven’t you been done for, and cared for, and looked to? and haven’t you had a mother that’s kep house for you as careful and as regular, though I say it, as ever a house was? Haven’t I seen to the linen, and made sure you wasn’t cheated, as most lads are, by the woman servants, which they take advantage of their foolishness, and--and,” with a little quiet whimper that went to John’s heart, “what more--I only ask you that, John--can you want of a woman than what your poor old mother has done for you?”

This appeal, absurd and utterly unreasonable though it was, touched John; so rising briskly from his chair, he, to the manifest detriment of the crimpest of ruffs, threw his arm round the old woman’s neck, and kissed her withered but still rosy cheek fondly.

“Dear old mother,” he said cheerily, “as if I didn’t know all that! You’ve been everything to me, God knows, and I should be a brute if I could forget it; but, mammy,” he went on coaxingly, and with a scarcely conscious use of the old and half-forgotten name which was hers in the long-past days of his troublesome boyhood, “you must remember that I am getting on; and if I’m ever to think about finding a wife at all, it’s time I set about it. Besides, there’s Honor, who--”

“Why, John, she’s Irish!” broke in the old lady, in a tone well calculated to convey the impression that she, at least, considered Miss Blake’s birthplace as an insuperable bar to any closer connection with himself. “She’s Irish, which is bad enough of itself, dear knows, without it’s being said of her, as it is said, which well you know, John, that she’s a young woman as hasn’t friends. In my time, which they say everything’s changed now, and more’s the pity--if folks was respectable they’d friends of some sort or another to show, which this Miss Blake seemingly has not; and, John,” lowering her voice to a whisper, although they were far enough removed from human ears, she and John in fact being the only two persons still up and about in the old house, “John, do you know, between ourselves, I shouldn’t wonder, that I shouldn’t, if the girl was to turn out to be a love-child!”

John was silent for a moment, being in fact utterly at a loss how best to reply to these decidedly unpleasant suggestions. He had himself--but that was prior to the time when he had become so blindly and irrevocably in love--he had himself felt some misgivings, in addition to some little curiosity, regarding Honor Blake’s birth and parentage. Not, as he had since taught himself to think, that the matter was one of primary importance. To be sure, if he _had_ a rather strong prejudice regarding such things, it was in favour of legitimate birth. He certainly would not be exactly gratified by the tardy discovery that his dearly beloved Honor was a “love-child;” but then, on the other hand, if his bride did chance to be that reprobated being, a friendless girl, why there was comfort after all to be picked out of _that_. Having no near and acknowledged kinsfolk of her own, she would be the more likely to devote herself exclusively to her husband; and it was this comforting reflection which enabled him to respond with tolerable boldness to Mrs. Beacham’s hypothesis.

“As to Honor’s being Irish, mother, I don’t think that matters much one way or the other. There’s good and bad in all countries, and in my opinion she’s as much too good for me, even if she was to turn out what you call a ‘love-child,’ as she is too young and too pretty.”

“Too good!” retorted the old woman angrily; “I should just like to hear anybody else say such a word as that! I’d pretty soon show ’em what I thought of their opinion!”

John Beacham laughed. “There’d be plenty,” he rejoined, “if they were only bold enough, that you’d hear say that same, mother; for Honor is far and away too good for a man of my age, who has got somehow into bachelor ways, and who’s a rough out-of-doors kind of man compared to her. Yes, she’s far and away too good, and so you’ll think, mother, when you come to know her better. She’s as gentle as a lamb, and as playful, pretty creature! as a kitten, and not a bit vain nor stuck up, for all that she must know how beautiful she is. So very beautiful and delicate! Why she’s like a precious bit of china, or one of the sweet pink-and-white flowers in the Castle conservatory. I don’t wonder that people talk of her, or that they come from miles away to Switcham church just to get a look at the blue-eyed Irish girl--the darling that, with your leave, dear mother, I hope on May-day next to call my wife.”

John Beacham was certainly not intended by nature for a diplomatist; nevertheless, he showed some knowledge of human nature, and of his mother’s nature in particular, when he adduced the fact that the fame of Honor’s beauty had spread far and wide, as an argument in favour of his marriage. If Mrs. Beacham possessed one ingrained weakness more patent than the rest, it was that very common one of steadfastly believing each and all of her belongings to be incalculably superior to those of a similar nature owned by anyone else. That her son’s wife would be beautiful beyond the average loveliness of womankind was a great point in favour of Mrs. Beacham’s future daughter-in-law. The worthy woman forgot--as who would not have done under the circumstances?--that beauty is a dangerous gift, and that a “fair woman,” should she chance to be without “discretion,” is often very inconveniently placed in a sober and quiet man’s household. For the moment too the old lady, who loved rule so well, forgot that the more attractive in person was her son’s bride, the less chance did there exist that she herself could “hold her own” against this new and overwhelming influence. For the hour, however, maternal love and a certain sense of gratified pride being in the ascendant, she replied to John’s eulogium in a manner which, notwithstanding the tone of plaintive resignation that marked her words, sent John reassured and comforted to bed.

“Well, well,” she said, with the sigh peculiar to elderly ladies when they are about to _se poser en victimes_,--“well, well! I suppose that what is to be will be. In course, it isn’t for old folks like me to give advice to young ones. The weak must go to the wall, as it’s only right, I suppose, and nat’ral they should; and them as has had their day must just make room, like the trees and the plants as is withered away, for others. I only hope, that’s all I have to say, that she’ll make you a good wife, John; and if so be she does, why I’m not one--be sure of that--to be set against her. But it’s hard lines all the same, so it is. ‘A son’s not your son,’ as the saying goes, ‘when he takes him a wife.’ No, he’s not your son--come what come may.”

And Mrs. Beacham, after solacing herself with the utterance of this soothing reflection, took herself off quietly to bed.