Sink or Swim? , Volume II

Sink or Swim? , Volume II

Volume II of *Sink or Swim?* by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun opens at a garden fête at Danescourt, where Colonel Frederick Norcott corners Mrs. Bainbridge, an Irish innkeeper's widow, and forces from her the truth he had begun to suspect: John Beacham's beautiful young wife, Honor, is his own illegitimate daughter by Bainbridge's late sister, Winifred Moriarty, whom Norcott seduced and abandoned in Ireland nearly twenty years earlier. Norcott, a charming but thoroughly mercenary and dishonorable man now married for money to a plain colonial heiress, calculates at once that acknowledging so lovely a "connection" may prove useful to him rather than shameful. Also present at the fête is Arthur Vavasour, heir to Gillingham, who is newly and unhappily engaged to the wealthy but unremarkable Sophy Duberly. Arthur is secretly infatuated with Honor and contrives to meet her alone among the grounds, confessing that he is marrying only for money and hinting at his misery — a confidence Honor, loyal but flattered and inexperienced, knows she should not have permitted. Their lingering, much-observed walk together arouses the jealous suspicion of John's mother and, indirectly, of John himself. Norcott, seeking to establish a hold over both Arthur and John for his own future advantage, insists on a private interview with John and brutally, boastfully reveals himself as Honor's father, mocking the dead Winifred in the process. Enraged past endurance by the man's callousness, John strikes Norcott with his stick, felling him. Believing he has killed his wife's father, John is overwhelmed with horror; Norcott, though badly hurt, regains consciousness enough to insist the injury was "an accident," sparing John from public disgrace. Honor is brought, appalled, to her wounded father's side, and the newly discovered bond of blood instantly awakens in her deep, if untested, filial feeling — feeling that overshadows, in that moment, all thought of her anxious husband. Norcott is carried to the Bell Inn at Gawthorpe to recover under Dr. Kempshall's care, and word of the "accident" spreads through the county, though no one openly connects it with John. Norcott's long-suffering mother, the gentle and pious Mrs. Baker — twice widowed and marked by a lifetime of grief over her son's misdeeds — hurries to his bedside and there meets Honor for the first time. Instantly drawn to her, Mrs. Baker embraces her as a granddaughter, offering the tenderness, refinement, and unconditional welcome Honor has never known at the plain, hard-working Beacham farm. During the ten days Honor spends nursing her father back to health, she is petted and courted by her new-found "quality" relations, including Norcott's meek, devoted wife Bessie, and grows increasingly conscious of the social gulf between the Norcott/Baker world and her own humble married life. When Honor finally returns to Updown Paddocks, she is a changed woman — languid, dreamy, and quietly discontented, unable to forget the polish and ease of her father's circle. John, sensing the change but unable to name its cause, grows correspondingly reserved and moody; neither he nor his censorious mother will speak plainly with Honor about what happened, and the silence widens into estrangement. Mrs. Beacham alternates between jealous sniping at her daughter-in-law's supposed "fine-lady" airs and grudging softening, while John suppresses his own resentment of Norcott and his fear that Honor's affections are being weaned away from him and toward her disreputable but seductive father and — more dangerously — toward Arthur Vavasour. Meanwhile Arthur marries Sophy Duberly in a fashionable London wedding and departs for a long Continental tour, though rumor has it he remains as extravagant and restless as ever. His younger brother Horace, newly released to a clerkship in town, confides to their sister Kate that their formidable mother, Lady Millicent, is secretly pursuing legal means to break the entail in their late father's will that transfers control of the Gillingham estate to Arthur at twenty-five — a scheme that, if it becomes known, threatens further to unsettle Arthur's already precarious finances and temper. By the following Christmas, the narrative returns to the strained Beacham household, where John's efforts to please Honor with books, music, and small refinements cannot fully dispel the gloom fostered by his mother's temper and Honor's inward restlessness. The following spring finds Colonel Norcott and his wife established in shabby-genteel lodgings in London, living beyond their means. Norcott, ever scheming, dictates a letter — sent in his wife's hand — urging Honor to visit them under the pretext of his own dangerous illness, a fabrication designed solely to lure Honor to town, where he intends to display her striking beauty in society (and, calculatedly, before the now-married Arthur Vavasour) for his own future profit. Honor, longing for any escape from the farm's dullness and eager to see her father, presses John for permission to go, while John — torn between suspicion of Norcott's motives and his own inability to refuse his wife — reluctantly consents. The volume closes on the eve of Honor's departure for London, with the reader left to anticipate the renewed and now more perilous proximity between Honor, Arthur, and her scheming father.

By Matilda Charlotte Houstoun · First published 1868 · Genre: Victorian Domestic Drama, Romance/Romantic Fiction, Melodrama · 24 chapters · 87,281 words

First lines

"I had nothing to do with it! By the God that made me! by the -- "

"O sir, pray don't talk in that way. I never said -- I -- I never / thought -- no, no; things would have been different, must have been / different, if I had. " And the flush on Mrs. Bainbridge's pale cheeks / (she was a sickly-looking woman) grew deeper still, through the violence / of her protest.

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Sink or Swim? , Volume II is listed on Textopian as a novel by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, dated 1868 CE.

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Victorian fiction · English literature · nineteenth-century novel · domestic drama · romance · social commentary · family relationships · marriage · inheritance · class society · women's lives · moral dilemmas

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