Honor Ormthwaite. By the author of 'Lady Jean's vagaries'

Chapter I

J^siHE Clays' cottage was one of the poorest liLM and smallest of the tumble-down cottages in the agricultural village of Hayes in the Wolds. Sodden and poverty stricken as the house looked, possessing no greater accommodation than a back and front kitchen and a garret sleepingroom above them, its forlornness was increased by the fact that it had been stripped of furniture this very morning in order to pay the rent. Why Job Clay locked the door behind him when he quitted the house it would be hard to say, unless the act had the origin of many of our acts — habit. A couple stood for a moment with their backs to the locked door. The pair were very I young, a mere boy and girl, though the girl carried a baby, wrapped up in a shepherd's plaid shawl, yellow with age and mangy in the fringe. The girl wore a calico gown, thread bare black cloth jacket, and shabby straw hat.

The man was in moleskins, with a still shabbier and more battered straw hat. The whole dress of the two indicated roughly that they had not two spare pennies between them. The girl was the tidier, the one who clung fiercely to a standard of respectability. Her frock was clean, though it showed patches and darns, her jacket and hat were put on carefully. The lad's moleskins were soiled and frayed, his heavy, uncouth boots had not been cleaned for days, his rag of a necktie was half loose, while it crumpled into his thin, sunburnt neck, the one creditable portion of his shirt collar. He was not more than nineteen, she was barely seventeen ; yet they represented two juvenile parents, the responsible heads of a house broken up within the last twelve hours. Such examples of the burdens of manhood and womanhood appropriated before their time, in spite of the protests of clergymen and the remonstrances of magistrates and political economists, are not unheard of in England.

One member of the precocious couple was prepared to throw down her burden ; she had got enough of it — all the more so, that her companion in imprudence had betrayed every inclination to transfer his half of the load to her already overweighted shoulders. The pair — looking at each other, sullenly and doggedly on the girl's side, and on the lad's part half slinkingly, half shyly, with a few grains of feeble remorse and regret shot from beneath the flickering lids and flaxen lashes — presented two altogether different types of face. The girl's, pear-shaped, spare, and with the skin blanched and parched by poor living and recent illness, was cleanly cut in every feature. The dark eyes were well opened, if a little stony in their stare. The colourless mouth was firm to severity. The chin was not one of those chins which it is a fashion of the day to admire — those square chins which tell of self-indulgence and love of good eating, quite as much as of strong and steadfast will.

This girl's chin was peaked — neither a long peak, nor a short peak, nor a sharp peak, but a well-defined peak, which showed the lower half of the face in entire proportion to the general contour. It reminded the gazer that with fair chances and fitting nourishment, the chin should have rounded off the excellent oval of the whole, and matched with the fine curves of the throat and neck. As it was, the cheeks were hollow, the lips pinched, the eyes haggard, the throat and neck emaciated to skin and bone. The very breast was shrunken and fallen in, and the shoulders bent, so that the original height, tall for a girl, was lost. The complexion had been in harmony with the dark hair — still sufficiently abundant to indicate what its earlier luxuriance must have been — the warm olive of a brunette.

Now it hovered between sallowness and greyness — the last tint not without the lingering shadow of premature death in its dullness. The lad had also manifestly undergone a prolonged process of starvation. But there were other traces in the face and figure for which want did not account. Figure and face had been loosely knit and indistinctly moulded at the best. The legs were too long, the short body was narrow, with tapering shoulders. The full lips hung slightly open, and encroached on a palpably weak chin. The blunt nose ran into a sorehead, broad, high, and curiously white where it lay in the shadow of the brim of the tattered straw hat. This forehead was singu larly vacant and destitute of landmark, from the lightness of the eyebrows. The beard was also light, while it was still in its downy stage, and was as straggling as it was downy.

As a contrast to the negativeness of the other features, the pale blue eyes were prominent. The signs which did not belong by right to a shallow, nebulous, easily influenced nature, or to protracted privation, were a certain lurch and trail of the gait, conspicuous when the lad had sojourned for any length of time at the ale-house, eventually lingering about him even when he was as sober as a judge, a flabbiness of the flesh, a blue tinge in the colour of the hanging lips, a reddening of the dimpled tip of the nose, the bloodshot white of the prominent eyes. Any personal attractions which Job Clay had boasted before he tarried over the ale mug and the gin-glass, must have centred in a certain lightness and litheness of limb, a fair freshness, even delicacy of colouring, a good natured, unthinking gaiety of expression which had absolutely vanished.

Still, it was just conceivable that he might have been a pretty pink-and-white baby, a not uncomely child, with white teeth and flaxen curls, even a somewhat pleasant, nicish-looking weakling, before his degradation began. Why the two who had come to grief were alone — for the baby did not count — at the climax of their domestic misfortunes, calls for an explanation, since the friendly sociability and charitable good-fellowship of the working class are well known ; equally so is their habit of flocking, invited or uninvited, undeterred by scruples of delicacy or caution, to be in at the death — that is, the disastrous ending of a neighbour's affairs. Honor Clay, Job Clay's wife, had owned relations in a tolerably prosperous way of doing, the father being the village wheelwright, and the mother holding a permanent engagement to do two days' servants' washing a-week at Hayes Hall, where she had formerly been a kitchen-maid.

These circumstances had lasted up to the time of Honor's marriage, which had been against the will and judgment of her parents. Then Honor's mother had caught a chill and an inflammation, and died in the course of a week. Her husband, unable to work at his trade and at the same time to look after the younger children, had been allured by a childless sister, who had married a joiner in a large town several counties off, to unite forces both in the house and in the workshop. The consequence was that all Honor's near relations were swept away from her at a stroke, since the distance of three counties signified a remoteness as great as that of Constantinople or St. Petersburg, to a young woman in her line of life. Job Clay's kindred were on a decidedly lower level, both morally and socially, and they had no sooner become Honor's kindred also, than she had engaged in a bitter feud with them.

She had given them so emphatically what she and they termed "a bit of her mind" and " the back of her door," that, however much they might pity Job, they were not likely to go near Job's wife in her tribulation. As for the neighbours, Honor had deliberately chosen the early afternoon hour for abandoning the empty house. Then the men were still at work. Then the children had eaten their dinner, and gone back to school. Then the women were engaged in "washing up" and tidying their houses, previous to starting in gossiping bands, each gossip carrying a baby, as far as the village allotments, there to study the interesting question of whose potatoes were most flourishing, or whose beans were coming earliest into blossom. Honor argued there had been enough exposure of deplorable conditions when the furniture was seized ; she desired no witnesses to the parting between her and Job Clay.

She had found herself entirely incapable of managing Job as she had meant to do during her single year of married life ; still, hers was the stronger spirit of the two to decide the time and manner of their leave-taking. Husband and wife stood looking at each other for a minute in silence, which Job broke hesitatingly and awkwardly — " Well, wench, ye be goin' o' your own free will." " What else ha' I left to do ? " cried Honor, angrily. " Bite and sup were scarce enough afore, and now there ain't a chair to sit on, or a bed to lie on. Do you mean me to hunker on the floor, like the gypsy women ? Am I to fit mysen into an empty house as a dog snuggles into its kennel ? The bairn's very cradle gone ! " " Nay, now, Honor," remonstrated the man, glad to get the opportunity of contradicting her and saying a word in his own defence, " Simmons would ha' spared ye that, if ye had kep' your temper and spoke him fair.

And there's t'Owd Lamb, where my uncle would take you and the bairn in, for. my sake, till ye — till us could look about." " Niver, Job Clay, niver ! " cried Honor, furiously. " I ha' not been used to take charity. As to going to that hole where ye ha' drunk away your wits and sold your soul — for your sake, I'd sooner tramp the roads till I dropped. I'd a deal rather lie down and die of cold and hunger in the fields." " Then ye mun take your way, for ye winna be hindered, and if ye mun pay the piper, the reckonin' is yourn." His brow darkened ; but the next instant there was the recoil from the irreparable, the clutch at a straw of reprieve, which was likely to happen with a man of his temperament. " If ye mun go, Honor, without telling me where to, and me not standin' in your way, or contradictin' ye, though ye are my wife " " Ye ha' no right," she interrupted him again indignantly.

"If ye had worked for me as other men work for their wives ; if ye had not been a lazy, heartless ne'er-do-well, who forsook me when I were swimmin' for my life, and sat boozin' in your precious uncle's public among other little worthscamps, soakin' the sma' brains you ha' been gifted wi', and spendin' the money as should ha' bought me medicine and nursin' and a sup to keep in my miserable life, ye might ha' had a title to dictate to me what I should do." He winced perceptibly at her fiery words, but not sufficiently to signify that they were a novelty. Clearly custom had deadened their blistering power, therefore he still clung to his straw. " Leastways, Honor, we'll part friends, after what ha' been atween us, and seein' we cannot tell what lies afore us." " An' ye will," she said, scornfully ; " but mind, it ain't because of any love I bear ye now.

Whatever kindness I might ha' for ye in the past were killed stone dead nine or ten months agone. It is because I would not be at the pains to quarrel wi' the likes of a mean-spirited, white-livered hound. And as to what lies afore us, I hope never to see your silly, false face again, Job Clay. It was the blackest day as ever befell me when you, a cat-witted bairn, were put in my charge for our plays, and me a wee lispin' thing not half your size." He shrugged his narrow shoulders with a quickly passing gesture ; a faint colour came into the sickly, waxen white of his flaccid face. Nevertheless, he did not let go the last fragment of his straw. " Let me see the chile. She is my chile as well as yourn," he said with more assurance, and with a touch of his lost manliness. He moved a step nearer to her and put a limp, nerveless, working-man's hand on the shepherd's-plaid shawl.

" If I may not kiss good-bye to my wife, I'll ha' a kiss o' my chile. I'm her father, as ye winna deny, and it's my due, and no more than is nat'ral." She tore the shawl and the burden it con tained from his loose grasp. "Then that's just what ye shan't ha'," she told him in white wrath, " father or no father, nat'ral or oonnat'ral. If ye had made a place for the bairn as ye were bund to make ; if ye had done a hand's-turn for it, in place o' throwin' it on me, and me younger than you by a couple o' year, to drag me down into the dirt where ye ha' sunk up to the neck, ye might ha' gone through the farce o' cuddlin' and kissin' it ; but now, ye shan't put a finger on the bairn, an' that is the last word I ha' to say to ye, Job Clay." With that she turned her back, and started down the vacant village street, in an approach to a run, with a spasmodic speed which she had not the strength to keep up.

He did not attempt to follow her. He gave another protesting shrug to his shoulders ; again a tinge of red wavered across his pale face; He took off his hat, and wiped his face with his screwed-up blue cotton ball of a handkerchief, as if oppressed with heat, though the afternoon was cool. A scowl flitted across the blank expanse of his forehead, wrinkling it up for a few seconds. "The ill-tongued young jade," he muttered, " the oonfeelin' vixen ! Ay, that's what ha' druv me from workin' and sittin' still in the house wi' she. A man mun ha' peace and quiet if he cannot ha' company." He thrust his hands into the tattered pockets which Honor had refused to mend for him, and lounged back, after the fashion of the dog and the sow, to the gratification of his base appetites in the noisy public-house.

He would no longer be so welcome there, though he was kin to the rowdy landlord and landlady. He had ceased to own an accusing young randy whom these worthies could have the satisfaction of " spiting." He would furnish no more entertainment to the ale-house circle by his tales of her naeeinotyranny and the niggardliness which could grudge him a drop of beer or gin. Why, he was allowed to score that up and no settlement of the account asked, unless in the singular event of his getting an odd job of work thrust into his hands, and being paid for it. His earnings were always precarious, being those of an odd man on a farm, or a jobbing gardener when no better could be found. As it happened, Honor had spoken the absolute truth to Job Clay without knowing it. She had said her last word to him. Husband and wife were to see each other's faces never more on this side of time.

Chapter II

0~ONOR CLAY'S feet might stumble, and _ her breath come in fluttering gasps, but her determination never slackened. She trudged painfully along the straggling street and out into a country lane, where she was free from inquisitive eyes, glistening with pity, or glittering with censure. Pity and censure were alike repugnant to her in her high-strung pride and defiance. She crouched down be hind some pollard willows, where even the roving eye of a stray wayfarer could hardly detect her, for the brief rest which Avas absolutely needful for her, if she was to go farther. She took the opportunity of feeding the child — a puny, fretful little creature, as might have been expected under the circum stances. Nature's springs were dried up in Honor. She had no nourishment for the child in her shrunken breast.

She had to feed it from the bottle of milk with which she had supplied herself. Perhaps that was one reason why all a mother's instincts lay dormant in her. She could only look on the infant as Job Clay's child, though she had inconsistently denied his right in it, after he had with cruel injustice — from which the very law, not re nowned for its tender mercies, would have protected her — thrown it upon her, to be an almost intolerable drag on her, a heavy hin drance to her making her way in the world, and providing for herself decently. Yet it never for a second crossed Honor's mind, distempered as it was, not to do the best she could for the child. To have laid violent hands upon it, to have abandoned it to cold and hunger, or to have cast it down at a stranger's door on the mere chance of its being taken in, probably only to be sent off to the workhouse and reared a little pauper, with out the necessity of marring Honor's already clouded career, was as far from her thought as from that of the most loving mother in the country.

She fed the child carefully, and wrapped it up methodically against the chill of coming rain in the wind, though she did not hug it in the sheer delight of possession, or gather it to her breast with the fondness of a miser hovering over and clasping his treasure. She was still very young, and she had no girlish passion for babies. The hard unripe ness of a nature slow to develop its sweeter, more generous and gentle qualities, had been arrested and accentuated by her early unhappy marriage. The chances were against her ever ripening, softening, and mellowing in the un propitious destiny which was all that could be expected for her, which was all that she ex pected for herself. Honor took up the child again, groaning under the irksome fatigue of carrying it, and yet holding it as well as she knew how, in the manner in which it would have the most comfort, in which its wailing whimper would sink soonest into the silence of sleep, and where it would be most effectually screened from a sudden shower.

She had a clear purpose in her mind of what she was going to do, though she had not chosen to impart it to her husband. If her ability to walk would hold out till she reached the nearest railway-station, she had in her pocket the hoarded railway fare which would take her and the baby well out of sight and sound of Job Clay. She was not going to steal away to her father — that was what Job and his friends would at once suspect her of doing. If she had, they would not have followed after her, or sought to bring her and her incubus back under present circumstances. They would have said poor Job was well quit of her and her tongue. Who should look after a young child, and be accountable for its wel fare, save its mother ? Moreover, it was all her doing. She had gone off on her own wild impulse, without consulting older and wiser people, as to the how and the where of her going.

Better let her cool down and come to her senses at her leisure, suffering the unlucky chap who had the ill fortune to be tied to her to rest a bit and recover his spirit. Honor had no objections, but she had also a malicious satisfaction in doubling upon Job and his champions, and putting them on a wrong scent. She was not going home to her father to eat her leek, to tell him it had all turned out as he had prophesied, and in proof of her re pentance to burden him gratuitously with the support of Job Clay's child. Besides, short as the time was since Honor's mother's death, her father had found it long enough to recognize that his married sister was not sufficient for the post she had undertaken as mistress of a joint establishment, and mother and aunt in one to his children. He had taken to himself a second wife.

Honor would have had to encounter a strange stepmother, to whom her miserable story would have been decidedly unwelcome. The girl was therefore bound for the house of a more distant relative, a cousin of her mother's, the recollection of whom had recurred to her lately with a glimmering spark of hope. Lyddy Atkins would take her in for all the time she wished to stay, were it but for the gratification of turning Honor's story outside in, loudly blaming and loudly deploring all round, and chattering to her heart's content over a fine bit of family scandal. Through Lyddy Atkins — scheming, inventive, unhesitating Lyddy, with a craving to have her finger in all her acquaintances' pies — some arrangement might be made for the disposal of the child, and the finding of employment for the mother ; at least, Lyddy was not stuck-up or exclusive, or chary of burning her fingers in those neighbours' pies of hers.

Her husband, Henry Atkins, a builder by trade and necessity, a public agitator airing the people's wrongs and his own aspirations by choice, was far too busy to interfere with his wife's proceedings. If only Honor's exhausted muscle and nerve would carry her to the station ! They did stand the strain, though the only sustenance they got was from the hunch of dry bread she gnawed with feverish ravenous ness as she tottered along, till she entered the station gate as night was beginning to fall, took out her ticket at the office, made her way, half blind with weariness, through the groups of her fellow-passengers, and sank, on the verge of fainting, in the corner of a third-class carriage. She did not faint, however ; she was too ex hilarated by having gained her end. When the train began to move, and the light from a lamp fell on her wan face, the motherly woman next Honor looked anxiously at her, and offered to take the infant from her.

She gave up the baby without demur ; indeed, she pulled herself together to nod reassuringly to her companion, with the best imitation of a smile the girl had attempted for months. The tension of her body and mind relaxed, and she fell into a heavy sleep, while the good Samaritan by her side minded the baby. When Honor awoke, there was many a mile between her and the village of Hayes, and the first sun's rays were striking on the blue roofs of the little town of Burntwood, which was Lyddy Atkins' present abidingplace, for Lyddy, partly from the pressure of circum stances, partly on account of her husband's mission, was somewhat of a peripatetic philo sopher. Honor fed the baby, washed and tidied herself in the waiting-room, and smoothed down the child's calico nightgown before she again wrapped it in the shawl.

But it was characteristic that, though she had a small bundle of clothes, as well as the child, wound up in the shawl, she did not take from it a single article— such as a gay cotton hood, or a pair of red woollen boots — which could brighten the uncompromising bareness and poverty of the child's dress. The morning was fine, so that the little walk in the outskirts of the town, to which the address of Lyddy Atkins carried her, was not in itself unpleasant, though it was taken fasting, by a young woman just off a railway journey, and lately risen from a sick-bed, whose principal refreshment had been the deep sleep of ex haustion. The air itself revived Honor, who till her marriage with Job had been a robust youncr creature. The little birds were twittering and chirping in their nests in the villa shrubberies, calling on their mothers to be quick with their breakfasts.

Honor heard them with a vague sense of pleasure, but with not the slightest inclination to regard it as an allegory. She was equally insensible to the lessons conveyed by a pet Alderney cow, industriously licking over its calf in a paddock, and to a mother cat fondly purring and performing the same elaborate toilet to a family of kittens, comfort ably ensconced in a dilapidated basket just within the open door of a shed. Honor looked at them all with great, grey, lack-lustre eyes, in so far as any sympathy with their animal tenderness went. She did not grasp the living core of that bundle of hers more tightly, or press it once to the breast which felt so spent. Lyddy Atkins' cottage, fresh with new paint, and bright with the glitter of clean windows, presented quite a thriving appearance. So did Lyddy herself — a plump, red-cheeked little woman in a trim stuff gown, with her brown hair showing very few streaks of grey, tidily knotted up and fastened with a comb behind, while in front it was fluffed into a cheerful bounce of a fringe.

Lyddy's fat old fox-terrier, Punch, too lazy and well off to do more than grunt rather than growl his challenge to an intruder, was another harmonious detail in the picture. Lyddy Atkins was one of those women who contrive to be well housed, well clad and well fed, whatever betide. She and her husband were a childless couple, and Henry Atkins was a good workman in receipt of good wages when he chose to work ; but then, as everybody knew, he did not often choose, and it was equally well understood that " agitating " was a "thankless," that is, a profitless vocation in reference to the coin of the realm. The Atkins' frequent change of dwelling within a certain circuit was suspicious ; but the fact remained that Lyddy had not a wrinkle of care on her rosy face, and always appeared well-to-do.

Chapter III

" IfljlY stars! where 'ave you dropped from, lEU Honor Clay?" Lyddy cried, as she opened the door to Honor, her little round eyes distending as far as the fat in which they were enclosed would let them ; " and you seem fit to drop. Sit down this minent, and 'ave a sup of port wine, till I can get you a cup of tea and a hegg, and then you'll tell me your news." Lyddy was always hospitable, whether strictly at her own expense, or in a loose way at her neighbour's ; but that was a mystery into which nobody who had not a special right was entitled to pry. " An' I see you 'ave brought your bairn " — looking at the bundle from a safe distance as she bustled about, with the doubtful, slightly scared expression with which spinsters, bachelors, and childless husbands and wives are apt to contemplate that wonder of wonders, an infant of days, or weeks.

Honor thankfully swallowed the freely be stowed food and drink, which moistened her parched lips and throat, appeased the pitiful craving at her stomach — which survived what had been her dire poverty, like a doleful echo, for months to come — and loosened her tongue The listener to Honor's tale was keenly interested, and showed herself loud in com miseration and reprobation, but she made a protest at one item of the story. " I ha' had it in my head to leave him," Honor was saying with a calmness which was startling, " since afore baby, here, corned. I ha' been saving up and hiding away pennies, and a threepenny bit at a time, though it weren't easy, Cousin Lyddy, I can tell 'ee, and me sick wi' hunger the most of the time." "Poor Honor! poor lass! Oh, the wastrel, the idle, neglectful scoundrel !

He'll come to want hisself, 'e'll die in a ditch, and serve him right ! " pronounced Lyddy with much fervour. " He's come to want already," replied the girl-wife, with the same well-nigh appalling composure, " and it's like his friends — t'owd sinners — will desert him in the long run." Then she came to the point at which Lyddy had felt compelled to interpose. " I counted summat on baby's being dead-born. I were that done for ; and then there would ha' been less expense and trouble." "Ye must not speak like that, Honor! I never 'eard the like ! " cried the childless woman in active condemnation. " A mother wishin' her bairn, her first-born bairn, out of the way ! Why, to 'ear the most of them speak, they would go distracted at the bare thought." " I do not care," said Honor, sullenly. " They may be a parcel o' hypocrites for aught I can tell — though mother were fond enough on us, to the end, for all the work we cost her," she added with reluctant repentance, throwing back the head, from which she had removed the hat, against the bar of the rocking-chair — a favourite piece of furniture with Lyddy, in which she had installed her guest.

" But what do I want wi' a bairn, me as was a bairn mysen only the other day, as you said a minent agone ? An' it's Job Clay's bairn, as he's bound to provide for, which he leaves on my hands." "Then what do ye think to do, Honor?" asked Lyddy, more soberly than was her wont. " Them Clays never oughter to burden you with the sole keep of the bairn. The couple at t'Owd Lamb were rips, but there was a brother of young Job's, steadier than 'im. Your mother wished you 'ad kep company with he instead of Job. He left the place, but he may be found, more by token that he came in this direction. I 'eard tell on 'im a year agone, when we was livin' at Birdcup." " He ha' left this world, then, sin' that," said Honor, not so much sarcastically as in the same unmoved tone ; the very foundations of her soul might have been ice-bound, but for a strain of scorn in her voice.