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Title: Sons of fire, Vol. I.
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release date: January 22, 2025 [eBook #75173]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1895
Credits: Peter Becker, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONS OF FIRE, VOL. I. ***
SONS OF FIRE
A Novel
By Mary Elizabeth Braddon
THE AUTHOR OF
"LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN,"
"ISHMAEL," ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOL. I.
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO.
LIMITED
STATIONERS' HALL COURT
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
I. A STRIKING LIKENESS
II. ALLAN CAREW'S PEOPLE
III. "A HOME OF ANCIENT PEACE"
IV. "IN THE ALL-GOLDEN AFTERNOON"
V. MORE NEW-COMERS
VI. LIKE THE MOTH TO THE FLAME
VII. "O THE RARE SPRING-TIME!"
VIII. NOT YET
IX. "SO GREW MY OWN SMALL LIFE COMPLETE"
X. "OUR DREAMS PURSUE OUR DEAD, AND DO NOT FIND"
XI. THE MASTER OF DISCOMBE
SONS OF FIRE.
CHAPTER I.
A STRIKING LIKENESS.
The meet was at the Pig and Whistle, at Melbury, nine miles off. Rather
a near meet--compared with the usual appointments of the South Sarum
hounds--the ostler remarked, as Allan Carew mounted a hired hunter in
the yard of the Duke's Head, chief, and indeed only possible inn for a
gentleman to put up at, in the little village of Matcham, a small but
prosperous hamlet, lying in a hollow of the hills between Salisbury
and Andover. He had only arrived on the previous afternoon, and he was
sallying forth in the crisp March morning, on an unknown horse in an
unfamiliar country, to hunt with a pack whose master's name he had
heard for the first time that day.
"Can he jump?" asked Allan, as he scrutinized the lean, upstanding
bay; not a bad kind of horse by any means, but with that shabby,
under-groomed and over-worked appearance common to hirelings.
"Can't he, sir? There ain't a better lepper in Wiltshire. And as
clever as a cat! We had a lady staying here in the winter, Mrs.
Colonel Parkyn, brought two 'acks of her own, besides the colonel's
two 'unters, and liked this here horse better than any of 'em. She was
right down mashed on him, as the young gents say."
"I wonder she didn't buy him," said Allan.
"She couldn't, sir. Money wouldn't buy such a hunter as this off my
master. He's a fortune to us."
"I hope I may be of Mrs. Parkyn's opinion when I come home," said
Allan. "Now then, ostler, just tell me which way I am to ride to get to
the Pig and Whistle by eleven o'clock."
The ostler gave elaborate instructions. A public-house here, an
accommodation lane there--a common to cross--a copse to skirt--three
villages--one church--a post-office--and several cross-roads.
"You're safe to fall in with company before you get there," concluded
the ostler, whisking a bit of straw out of the bay's off hind hoof, and
eyeing him critically, previous to departure.
"If I don't, I doubt if I ever shall get there," said Allan, as he rode
out of the yard.
He was a stranger in Matcham, a "foreigner," as the villagers called
such alien visitors. He had never been in the village before,
knew nothing of its inhabitants or its surroundings, its customs,
ways, local prejudices, produce, trade, scandals, hates, loves,
subserviencies, gods, or devils. And yet henceforward he was to be
closely allied with Matcham, for a certain bachelor uncle had lately
died and left him a small estate within a mile of the village--a
relative with whom Allan Carew had held slightest commune, lunching or
dining with him perhaps once in a summer, at an old family hotel in
Albemarle Street, never honoured by so much as a hint at an invitation
to his rural retreat, and not cherishing any expectation of a legacy,
much less the bequest of all the gentleman's worldly possessions,
comprising a snug, well-built house, in pretty and spacious grounds,
with good and ample stabling, and with farms and homesteads covering
something like fifteen hundred acres, and producing an income of a
little over two thousand a year.
It need hardly be stated that Allan Carew was not a poor man when this
unexpected property fell into his lap.
The children of this world are rarely false to the gospel precept--to
every one which hath shall be given. Allan's father had changed his
name, ten years before, from Beresford to Carew, upon his succession
to a respectable estate in Suffolk, an inheritance from his maternal
grandfather, old Squire Carew, of Fendyke Hall, Millfield.
Allan, an only son, was not by any means ill provided for when his
maternal uncle, Admiral the Honourable Allan Darnleigh, took it into
his head to leave him his Wiltshire property; but this bequest raised
him at once to independence, and altogether dispensed with any further
care about that gentleman-like profession, the Bar, which had so far
repaid Mr. Carew's collegiate studies, labours, outlays, and solicitude
by fees amounting in all to seven pounds seven shillings, which sum
represented the gross earnings of three years.
So, riding along the rustic high-road, in the clear morning air, under
a sapphire sky, just gently flecked with fleecy cloudlets, Allan Carew
told himself that it was a blessed escape to have done with chambers,
and reading law, and waiting for briefs; and that it was a good thing
to be a country gentleman; to have his own house and his own stable;
not to be obliged to ride another man's horses, even though that other
man were his very father; not to be told after every stiffish day
across country that he had done for the grey, or that the chestnut's
legs had filled as never horse's legs filled before, nor to hear any
other reproachful utterances of an old and privileged stud-groom, who
knew the horses he rode were not his own property. Henceforth his
stable would be his own kingdom, and he would reign there absolute and
unquestioned. He could choose his own horses, and they should be good
ones. He naturally shared the common creed of sons, and looked upon
all animals of his father's buying as "screws" and "duffers." His own
stables would be something altogether different from the drowsy old
stables at home, where horses were kept and cherished because they were
familiar friends, rather than with a view to locomotion. His stud and
his stable should be as different as if horses and grooms had been bred
upon another planet.
He loved field-sports. He felt that it was in him to make a model
squire, albeit two thousand a year was not a large revenue in these
days of elegant living and Continental holidays, and eclectic tastes.
He felt that among his numerous nephews, old Admiral Darnleigh had
made a wise selection in choosing his god-son, Allan Carew, to inherit
his Wiltshire estate. He meant to be prudent and economical. He had
spent the previous afternoon in a leisurely inspection of Beechhurst.
He had gone over house and stables, and had found all things so well
planned, and in such perfect order, that he was assailed by none of
those temptations to pull down and to build, to alter and to improve,
which often inaugurate ruin in the very dawn of possession. He thought
he might build two or three loose boxes on one side of the spacious
stable-yard. There were two packs within easy reach of Matcham, to say
nothing of packs accessible by rail, and he would naturally want more
hunters than had sufficed for the old sailor, who had jogged out on his
clever cob two or three times a week, and had gone home early, after
artful riding and waiting about the lanes, or to leeward of the great
bare hills, and in snug corners, where a profound knowledge of the
country enabled him to make sure of the hounds. Allan's hunting-stable
would be on a very different footing; and although Beechhurst provided
ample accommodation for a stud of eight, Allan told himself that one of
his first duties would be to build loose boxes.
"I shall often have to put up a couple of horses for a friend," he
thought.
The morning was lovely, more like April than March. The bay trotted
along complacently, neither lazy nor feverishly active, but with an air
of knowing what he had to do for his day's wage, and meaning honestly
to do it. Allan was glad that his road took him past Beechhurst.
Possession had still all the charm of novelty. His heart thrilled with
pride as he slackened his pace to gaze fondly at the pretty white
house, low and long, with a verandah running all along the southern
front, admirably placed upon a gentle elevation, against the swelling
shoulder of a broad down, facing south-west, and looking over garden
and shrubbery, and across a stretch of common, that lay between
Beechhurst and the high-road, and gave a dignified aloofness to the
situation; seclusion without dulness, a house and grounds remote, but
not buried or hidden.
"Nothing manorial about it," mused Allan; "but it certainly looks a
gentleman's place."
He would naturally have preferred something less essentially modern. He
would have liked Tudor chimneys, panelled walls, and a family ghost.
He would have liked to know that his race had taken deep root in the
soil, had been lords of the manor centuries and centuries ago, when
Wamba was keeping pigs in the woods, and when the jester's bells mixed
with the merry music of hawk and hound. Admiral Darnleigh, so far as
Wiltshire was concerned, had been a new man. He had made his money in
China, speculating in tea-gardens, and other property, while pursuing
his naval career with considerable distinction. He had retired from
active service soon after the Chinese war, a C.B. and a rich man, had
bought Beechhurst a bargain--during a period of depression--and had
settled down in yonder pretty white house, with a small but admirable
establishment, each member thereof a pearl of price among servants,
and had there spent the tranquil even-tide of an honourable and
consistently selfish life. He had never married. As a single man, he
had always felt himself rich; as a married man he might often have
felt himself poor. He had heard Allan at five and twenty declare that
he had done with the romance of life, and that he, too, meant to be a
bachelor; and it may be that this boyish assertion, carelessly made
over a bottle of Lafitte, did in some measure influence the Admiral's
choice of an heir.
Allan's father and mother were of a more liberal mind.
"You are in a better position than your father was at your age," said
Lady Emily Carew, on her son's accession to fortune. "I hope you will
marry well--and soon."
There was no thought of woman's love, or of married bliss, in Allan
Carew's mind, as he rode through the lanes and over a common, and
across a broad stretch of open down to the Pig and Whistle. He was
full, not of his inner self, but of the outer world around and about
him, pleased with the pleasant country in which his lot was cast,
wondering what his new neighbours were like, and how they would receive
him.
"I wonder whether the South Sarum is a hospitable hunt, or whether the
members are a surly lot, and look upon every stranger as a sponge and
an interloper," he mused.
He had ridden alone for about half the way, when a man in grey fustian
and leather gaiters, who looked like a small tenant farmer, trotted
past him, turned and stared at him with obvious astonishment, touched
his hat and rode on, after a few words of greeting, which were lost in
the clatter of hoofs.
He had ridden right so far by the aid of memory; he now followed
the man in grey, and, taking care to keep this pioneer in view,
duly arrived at a small rustic inn, standing upon high ground, and
overlooking an undulating sweep of woodland and common, marsh and
plain, one of those picturesque oases which diversify the breadth of
wind-swept downs. The inn was an isolated building, the few labourers'
cottages within reach being hidden by a turn of the road.
Hounds and hunt-servants were clustered on a level green on the other
side of the road, but there was no one else upon the ground.
Allan looked at his watch, and found that it was ten minutes to eleven.
The man in grey had dismounted from his serviceable cob, and was
standing on the greensward, talking to the huntsman. Huntsman and whips
had taken off their caps to Allan as he rode up, and it seemed to
him that there was at once more respect and more friendliness in the
salutation than a stranger usually receives--above all a stranger in
heather cloth and butcher boots, and not in the orthodox pink and tops.
The man in grey, and the hunt-servants, were evidently talking of him
as he sat solitary in front of the inn. Their furtive glances in his
direction fully indicated that he was the subject of their discourse.
"They take a curious interest in strangers in these parts," thought
Allan.
Two minutes afterwards, a stout man, with a weather-beaten red face
showing above a weather-beaten red coat, rode up with two other men.
Evidently the master and his satellites.
"Hulloa!" cried the jovial man, "what the deuce brings you back so much
sooner than Mrs. Wornock expected you? She told me there was no chance
of our seeing you for the next year. When did you arrive? I never heard
a word about it."
The master's broad doeskin palm was extended to Allan in the most
cordial way, and the master's broad red face irradiated kindliest
feelings.
"You are under a misapprehension, sir," said Allan, smiling at the
frank, friendly face, amused at the eager rapidity of speech which had
made it impossible for him to interrupt the speaker. "I have never yet
enjoyed the privilege of a day with the South Sarum, and this is my
first appearance in your neighbourhood."
"And you ain't Geoffrey Wornock," exclaimed the master, utterly
discomfited.
"My name is Carew."
"Ah, your voice is different. I should have known you were not Geoff if
I had heard you speak. And now, of course, when one looks deliberately,
there is a difference--a difference which would be more marked, I dare
say, if Wornock were here. Are you a relation of Wornock's?"
"I never heard the name of Wornock in my life until I heard it from
you."
"Well, I'm--dashed," cried the master, suppressing a stronger word as
premature so early in the day. "Did you see the likeness, Champion?"
asked the master, appealing to one of his satellites.
"Of course I did," replied Captain Champion. "I was just as much
under a delusion as you were--and yet--Mr. Carew's features are not
the same as Wornock's--and his eyes are a different colour. It's the
outlook, the expression, the character in the face that is so like our
friend's--and I think that kind of likeness impresses one more than
mere form and outline."
"Hang me if I know anything about it, except that I took one man for
the other," said the master, bluntly. "Well, Mr. Carew, I hope you will
excuse my blunder, and that we may be able to show you some sport on
your first day in our country. We'll draw Wellout's Wood, Hamper, and
if we don't find there we'll go on to Holiday Hill."
Hounds and servants went off merrily across the down, and dipped into
a winding lane. A good many horsemen had ridden up by this time, with
half a dozen ladies among them. Some skirmished across the fields,
others crowded the lane, and in this latter contingent rode the master,
with his hounds in front of him, and Carew at his side.
"Are you staying in the neighbourhood?" he asked; "or did you come by
rail this morning? A long ride from Matcham Road station, if you did."
"I am staying at the Duke's Head, at Matcham; but I only arrived
yesterday. I am going to settle in your neighbourhood."
"Indeed! Have you bought a place?"
"No."
"Ah, going to rent one. Wiser, perhaps, till you see how you like this
part of the country."
"I have had a place left me by my uncle, Admiral Darnleigh."
"What! are you Darnleigh's heir? Yes, by-the-by, I heard that
Beechhurst was left to a Mr. Carew; but I've a bad memory for names.
So you have got Beechhurst, have you? I congratulate you. A charming
place, compact, snug, warm, and in perfect order. Stables a trifle
small, perhaps, for a hunting man."
"I am going to extend them," said Allan, with suppressed pride.
"Then you are going to do the right thing, sir. The only part in
which Beechhurst falls short of perfection is in the stables. Capital
stables, as far as they go, but it isn't far enough for a man who wants
to hunt five days a week, and accommodate his hunting friends. Besides,
the owner of Beechhurst ought to be in a position to take the hounds at
a push."
"I hope it may be long before that push comes," said Allan.
"Ah, you're very kind; but I'm not so young as I was once, nor so rich
as I was once--and--the Preacher says there's a time for all things. My
time is very nearly past, and your time is coming, Mr. Carew. When do
you establish yourself at Beechhurst?"
"I am going back to London to-morrow to settle a few matters, and
perhaps have a look round at Tattersall's, and I hope to be at
Beechhurst in less than a fortnight."
"I shall do myself the pleasure of calling upon you. Any wife?"
"I am still in the enviable position my uncle enjoyed till his death."
"A bachelor? Ah! that won't last long. It's all very well for a
sun-dried old sailor to keep the fair sex at arm's length; but
_you_ won't be able to do it, Mr. Carew. I give you till our
next hunt-ball for a free man. You've no notion what complexions our
Wiltshire women have--Devon can't beat 'em--or what a lot of pretty
girls there are within a fifteen-mile drive of Matcham."
"I look forward with a thrill of mingled rapture and apprehension to
your next hunt-ball."
"It'll be here before you know where you are. We have postponed it till
the first of May. We shall kill our May fox on the thirtieth of April,
and dance on his grave on the first."
"I shall be there, my lord," said Allan, as Lord Hambury galloped off
after his huntsman, who had just put the hounds into the covert.
A whimper proclaimed that there was something on foot, five minutes
afterwards, and the business of the day began--a goodish day, and a
long one--two foxes run to earth, and one killed in the twilight. It
was seven o'clock when Allan Carew arrived at the Duke's Head, hungry
and thirsty, and not a little bored by having been obliged to explain
to various people that he was no relation to Geoffrey Wornock.
He had been too much bored at this enforced reiteration to make any
inquiries about this double of his in the course of the day, or during
the long homeward ride; but when he had taken the edge off his appetite
in his cosy sitting-room at the Duke's Head, he began to question the
waiter, as he trifled with the customary hotel tart, a hollow cavern of
short crust roofing in half a bottle of overgrown gooseberries.
"Do you know Mr. Wornock?"
"Yes, sir; know him uncommonly well. Wonderful likeness between him and
you, sir; thought you was him till I heard you speak."
"Our voices are different, I am told."
"Yes, sir, there's a difference. It ain't much--but it's just enough to
make one doubtful like. Your voice, begging your pardon, sir, ain't as
musical as his. Mr. Wornock's is a voice that would charm a bird off a
tree, as the saying is. And then, after the first glance, one can see
it ain't the same face," pursued the waiter, thoughtfully. "You've got
such a look of him, you see, sir. That's what it is. One don't stop
to think of the shape of a nose or a chin. It's the look that catches
the eye. I suppose that's what people means by a speaking countenance,
sir," added the waiter, garrulous, but not disrespectful.
"Has Mr. Wornock any land in the county?" asked Allan.
"Land, sir? Yes, sir," replied the waiter, with a touch of wonder at
being asked such a question. "Mr. Wornock is Lord of the Manor of
Discombe, sir--a very large estate--and a fine old house, added to by
Mr. Wornock's grandfather. The old part was built in the time of King
Charles, sir, and the new part is very fine and picturesque--and the
gardens are celebrated in these parts, sir--quite a show place--but
Mrs. Wornock never allows it to be shown. She lives very secluded,
don't give no entertainments herself, nor visit scarce anywheres. They
do say that she was not right in her mind for some years after Mr.
Wornock's birth, but that's six and twenty years ago, and there may not
be any truth in the report. Gongozorla, sir, or cheddar?"
"Neither, thanks. Are the Wornocks an old family?"
"Very old family, sir. Old Saxon name. Came over with Edward the
Confessor."
"And who was Mrs. Wornock?"
"Ah, there's a little 'itch there, sir. Nobody knows who Mrs. Wornock
was, or where she came from--and they do say she wasn't county, which
is a pity, seeing that the Wornocks had always married county prior to
that marriage," added the waiter, proud of his concluding phrase.
"Mr. Wornock is abroad, I understand. Where?"
"Inja, sir. Cavalry regiment, the Eighteenth South Sarum Lancers."
"Strange for a man owning so fine a property to go into the army."
"Well, sir, don't you see, the life at the Manor must have been a
very dull one for a young gentleman. No entertainments. No staying
company. Mrs. Wornock, she don't care for nothink but music--and,
after all, sir, music ain't everythink to a young man. He 'unted, and
he 'unted, and he 'unted, from the time he 'ad legs to cross a pony.
Wherever there was 'ounds to be follered, he follered 'em. But hunting
ain't everythink in life, and it don't last long," added the waiter,
philosophically.
"Mrs. Wornock, as dowager, should have withdrawn to her Dower-house,
and left the young man free to be as jovial as he liked at the Manor."
"Ah, that may come to pass when he marries, sir, but not before.
Mr. Wornock is a devoted son. He'd be the last to turn his mother
out-of-doors. And he's almost as keen on music as his mother, I've
heard say; plays the fiddle just like a professional--and the organ."
"Well," sighed Carew, having heard all he wanted to hear, "I bear no
grudge against Mr. Geoffrey Wornock because he happens to resemble me;
but I wish with all my heart that he could have made it convenient to
live in any other neighbourhood than that in which my lot is cast. That
will do, waiter; I don't want any more wine. You may clear the table,
and bring me some tea at nine o'clock."
The waiter cleared the table, in a leisurely way, made up the fire,
also in a leisurely way, and contrived to spend a quarter of an
hour upon work that might have been done in five minutes; but Allan
questioned him no further. He flung himself back in an easy-chair,
rested his slippered feet upon the fender, and meditated with closed
eyes.
Yes, it was a bore, a decided bore, to have a double in the
neighbourhood. A double richer, more important, and altogether better
placed than himself; a double in a Lancer regiment--there is at once
chic and attractiveness in a cavalry soldier--a double who owned just
the fine old manorial estate, and fine old manorial mansion which he,
Allan, would have liked to possess.
Beechhurst might be a snug little property; the house might be
perfection, as Lord Hambury had averred; but when a house of that
calibre is said to be perfect, the adjective rarely means anything more
than a good kitchen, and a convenient butler's pantry, roomy cellars,
and a well-planned staircase; whereas, to praise a fine old manor house
implies that it contains a panelled hall, and a spacious ballroom, a
library with a groined roof, and a music gallery in the dining-room.
After hearing of Wornock's old house, Allan felt that Beechhurst was
distinctly middle-class, and that his sailor uncle must have been
a poor creature to have found pride and pleasure in such a cockney
paradise.
He jumped up out of his easy-chair, shook himself, and laughed aloud at
his own pettiness.
"What an envious brute I am!" he said to himself. "I dare say, when
Wornock comes home, I shall find him a decent fellow, and we shall get
to be good friends. If we do, I'll tell him how I was gnawed with envy
of his better fortune before ever I saw his face."
CHAPTER II.
ALLAN CAREW'S PEOPLE.
Allan Carew spent the best part of the following day at Beechhurst,
better pleased with his inheritance than he would confess even to
himself. The Admiral's Chinese experiences had not been without
tangible result. The hall was decorated with curios whose value
their present possessor could only guess, and if the greater part
of the house was prim and commonplace, there was one room which
was both handsome and original--this was the smoking-room and
library, a spacious apartment which the Admiral had added to the
original structure, and which was built on the model of a Mandarin's
reception-room. Yes, on the whole, Allan was inclined to think his lot
had fallen on a pleasant heritage. He went up to town in good spirits;
spent ten days in looking at hunting studs at Tattersall's, and made
his modest selection with care and prudence, content to start his
stable with four good hunters, a dog-cart horse, a pony to fetch and
carry, two grooms and a stable-help.
The all-important business of the stable concluded, he went back to
Suffolk to spend Easter in the bosom of his family, and to tell his
father what he had done. There was perfect harmony of feeling, and
frankest confidence between father and son, and the son's regard
for the father was all the stronger because, under that quiet and
somewhat languid bearing of the Squire of Fendyke, Allan suspected
hidden depths. Of the history of his father's youth, or the history
of his father's heart, the son knew nothing; yet, fondly as he loved
his mother, the excellent and popular Lady Emily, he had a shrewd
suspicion that she was not the kind of woman to have won his father's
heart in the days when love means romance rather than reason. That
she possessed her husband's warm affection now, he, the son, was
fully assured; but he was equally assured that the alliance had been
passionless, a union of two honourable minds, rather than of two loving
hearts.
There was that in his father's manner of life which to Allan's mind
told of a youth overshadowed by some unhappy experience; and a word
dropped now and then, in the father's talk of his son's prospects and
hopes, a hint, a sigh, had suggested an unfortunate love-affair.
His mother was more communicative, and had told her son frankly that
she was not his father's first love.
"You remember your grandmother, Allan?" she said.
Yes, Allan remembered her distinctly--an elderly woman dressed in some
rich silken fabric, always black, with a silver chatelaine at her side,
on which there hung a curious old enamelled watch that he loved to look
at. A tall slender figure, a thin aquiline countenance, with silvery
hair arrayed in feathery curls under a honiton cap. She had been always
kind to him; but no kindness could dispel the awe which she inspired.
"I used to dream of her," he said. "Had she a frightening voice, do you
think? She was mixed up in most of my childish nightmares."
"Poor Allan!" laughed his mother. "She was an excellent woman, but
she loved to command; and one can't command affection, not even the
affection of a child. It was she who made your father marry me.
He liked me, and I liked him, and we had been playfellows; but we
should never have thought of marrying if your grandmother had not,
in a manner, insisted upon it. She told George that I was deeply in
love with him; and she told me that George was devoted to me; and so
we could not help ourselves. And, after all," she went on, with a
comfortable sigh, "it has answered very well. I don't think we could
possibly be fonder of our home, or of each other, than we are. And
your father has his books, and his shooting and fishing, and I have my
farm and my schools--and," with a sudden gush of tenderness, "we both
have you. You ought to be fond of us, Allan. You are the link that
makes us one in heart and mind."
Allan was fond of them. Both parents had been undeviating in their
indulgence, and he had given them love without stint. But it may be
that he loved the somewhat silent and reserved father with a profounder
affection than he gave to the open-hearted and loquacious mother.
That vague consciousness of a secret in his father's life, of sorrows
unforgotten, but never told, had evoked the son's warmest sympathy. All
that Allan had ever felt of sentiment or romantic feeling hitherto, he
had felt for his father. It is not to be supposed that he had reached
five and twenty without some commerce with Cupid, but his loves had
been only passing fancies, sunbeams glancing on the surface of life's
current, not those deep forces which change the course of the river.
The characters of father and mother were distinctly marked in their
acceptance of Allan's good fortune. Lady Emily saw only the sunny
side of the inheritance. She was delighted that her son should have
ample means and perfect independence in the morning of life. She was
full of matrimonial schemes on his behalf. Decidedly he ought to
marry, well and quickly. An only son, with an estate in possession,
and another--his patrimonial estate--in prospective. It was his duty
to found a family. She marshalled all the young women she knew in a
mental review. There must be good family--a pure race, untarnished by
the taint of commerce, unshadowed by hushed-up disgrace--divorces,
bankruptcies, turf scandals. There should be money, because even the
two estates would not make Allan a rich man, as the world reckons
wealth nowadays; but they would give him a respectable platform from
which to demand the hand of an heiress. He could woo the wealthiest
without fear of being considered a fortune-hunter.
"It is sad to think you will like your own place better than this,"
said Lady Emily in her cheerfullest voice, "and that we shall hardly
see you except at Christmas and Easter; but it is so nice to know that
you are in a position to marry as early as you like without being under
any obligation to your father; for, indeed, dear, what with his library
and my farm, there would have been very little margin for a proper
establishment for you."
"My dearest mother, why harp upon matrimony? I have made up my mind to
follow my uncle's excellent example."
"My poor brother!" sighed Lady Emily. "He was in love with the belle
of the season--a foolish pink and white thing, with one long curl
streaming over her left shoulder, and a frock that you would laugh at,
if you could see her to-day. Of course Allan's chances were hopeless--a
younger son, with a commander's pay, eked out by a pittance from his
father. She used to ride in the Row with a plume in her hat--half a
Spanish fowl--quite the right thing, I assure you, at that time.
Your uncle was twelve years older than I, you know, Allan; and I was
still in short petticoats when he went off to China broken-hearted.
Of course she wouldn't have him, though she said he was the best
waltzer in London. Her people wouldn't let her look at him even, from a
matrimonial point of view."
Allan went to church with his mother on Easter morning--attended two
services in the fine old church, which seemed much too grand and too
big for the tiny town--her loving heart swelling with pride at having
such an admirable son. Her friends had always been fond of him; but now
it seemed to her there was a touch of deference in their kindness. They
had liked him as _her_ son, and the inheritor of Fendyke Hall; but
perhaps they liked him even a little better now that he was his own
master, a man of independent means.
He accompanied Lady Emily in her weekly visit to the schools; he
assisted in dealing out Easter gifts to the school-children, and
distributed half a dozen pounds of the very strongest obtainable
tobacco among his male acquaintance in the village of Fendyke--a
village consisting of a rectory, three picturesque farmhouses, a still
more picturesque water-mill and miller's house, a roomy old barn-like
inn, said to have once given shelter to good Queen Bess, and a good
many decent cottages grouped in threes and fours along the broad, level
road, or scattered in side lanes.
The morning of Easter Monday was given to an inspection of Lady
Emily's white farm--that farm which, next to her son, was the greatest
pride and delight of her innocent and strictly rural life. Here,
all buildings and all creatures were of an almost dazzling purity.
White horses at the plough, a white fox-terrier running beside it,
white birds in the poultry-yard, white cows in the meadow--cows from
Lord Cawdor's old white Pembroke breed, cows from Blickling Park and
Woodbastwick--white cottages for bailiff and farm-labourers, white
palings, white pigs, and white donkeys, a white peacock sunning
himself on the top of the clipped yew-hedge in the bailiff's garden,
white tulips, white hyacinths in the flower-beds. To procure all this
whiteness had cost trouble and money; but there are few home-farms
which give as much delight to their possessors as this white farm gave
to Lady Emily Carew. She had as much pride in its perfection as the
connoisseur who collects only Wedgwood, or only Florentine Majolica,
has in his collection. It is not so much the actual value of the thing
as the fact that the thing is unique, and has cost the possessor years
of patience and labour. Lady Emily would take a long journey to look at
a white cow, or to secure the whitest thing in Brahmas or Cochin Chinas.
It was a harmless, simple, womanly hobby, and although Lady Emily's
farm was a somewhat costly toy, it served to give her status in the
neighbourhood, and it provided labour for a good many people, who
were well housed and well looked after, and whose children astonished
the school-inspectors by the thoroughness of their education. No
incompetent master or mistress could have held on in the schools where
Lady Emily was a power. She cultivated a friendly familiarity with the
man and woman who taught her cottage children; she asked them to quiet,
confidential luncheons three or four times in a quarter; she sounded
their opinions, plucked out the heart of their mystery, lent them
books, stuffed them with her own ideas, and, in a manner, made them her
mouthpiece. Intensely conservative as to her opinions and prejudices,
and with an absolute loathing for all radical and revolutionary
principles; she was yet, by the beneficence of her nature, more liberal
than many a professing demagogue, and would fain have admitted all
her fellow-creatures to an equal share in the good things of this
life. Her warm heart was full of compassion for the hard lives she saw
around her--hard even where the condition of the agricultural labourer
was at its best--and it was her delight to introduce into these hard
lives occasional glimpses of a happier world--a world of pleasure
and gaiety, laughter and frolic. Lady Emily's Christmas and Whitsun
balls for the villagers and servants; Lady Emily's May-day feast for
the children; Lady Emily's midsummer picnic and harvest-home; and Lady
Emily's fairy fir-tree, which reached to the ceiling of the boy's
schoolroom, every branch laden with benefits--these were events which
broke the slow monotony of each laborious year, joys to dream of and
to remember in many a dull week of toil. Second only to these festive
gatherings in helpfulness were Lady Emily's coal and blanket society,
savings bank, and mothers' meeting--the last a friendly, familiar
gathering held in a spacious old building which had been a brewery in
the days when every country gentleman's household brewed its own beer.
Once a week, through the winter season, Lady Emily sat in the old
brewery, with a circle of cottagers' wives sewing industriously, while
she talked and read to them. Tea and bread-and-butter, a roaring wood
fire, and a bright lamp, were the only material comforts provided; but
these and Lady Emily's friendly welcome and pleasant talk, with the
short story chosen out of a magazine, and the familiar chapter of the
New Testament, read far better than vicar or curate read it in church,
sufficed to make the mothers' meeting a cheerful break in the cottage
matron's busy week. She went back to her homely hearth cheered and
encouraged. Lady Emily had told her the latest news of the great busy
world outside Fendyke, had given her a recipe for a new savoury pie of
ox-cheek and twopenny rice, or a new way of making barley broth; or
had given her a "cutting" for her tiny flower-garden, or had cut out
her new Gari_bawl_di. Lady Emily had been to her as a friend and
counsellor.
The village remembered with a shudder that long dreary winter when
the great house was empty, while Mr. Carew and his wife were in
Egypt--ordered there by the doctors, after a serious illness of the
squire's.
Much had been done for the sick and the poor even in that desolate
winter, for the housekeeper had been given a free hand; but no
one could replace Lady Emily, and the gaiety of Fendyke had been
extinguished.
CHAPTER III.
"A HOME OF ANCIENT PEACE."
The hunting was nearly over by the time Allan Carew had established
himself at Beechhurst and completed his stud. The selection of half a
dozen hunters had given him an excuse for running up to London once or
twice a week; and he had revelled in the convenience of express trains
between Salisbury and Waterloo as compared with the slow and scanty
train service between Fendyke and Cambridge, which made a journey from
his native village a trial of youthful patience.
London was full of pleasant people at this after-Easter season, so
Allan took his time at Tattersall's, saw his friends, dined them, or
dined with them, at those clubs which young men most affect, went to
his favourite theatres, rode in the Park, and saw a race or two at
Sandown, all in the process of buying his horses; but at last the stud
was complete, and his stud-groom, a man he had brought from Suffolk,
the man who taught him to ride, had shaken a wise head, and told his
young master to stop buying.
"You've got just as many as you can use, Mr. Allan," he said, "and if
you buy another one, it 'ud mean another b'y, and we shall have b'ys
enough for me to keep in order as it is."
So Allan held his hand. "And now I am a country gentleman," he said,
"and I must go and live on my acres."
Everybody in the neighbourhood wanted to know him. He was under none
of the disadvantages of the new man about whom people have to ask
each other, "Who is he?" He came to Matcham with the best possible
credentials. His father was a man of old family, against whose name no
evil thing had ever been written. His mother was an earl's daughter;
and the estate which was his had been left him by a man whose memory
was respected in the neighbourhood--a man of easy temper and open hand,
a kind master, and a staunch friend.
Allan found his hall-table covered with cards when he returned from his
London holiday, and he was occupied for the next fortnight in returning
the calls that had been made for the most part in his absence. To a
shy young man this business of returning calls in an unknown land
would have been terrible--invading unfamiliar drawing-rooms, and
seeing strange faces, wondering which of two matrons was his hostess
and which the friend or sister-in-law--an ordeal as awful as any
mediæval torture; but Allan was not shy, and he accepted the situation
with a winning ease which pleased everybody. When he blundered--and
his blunders were rare--he laughed at his mistake, and turned it
into a jest that served to help him through the first five minutes
of small-talk. He had a quick eye, and in a room full of people saw
at a glance the welcoming smile and extended hand which marked his
hostess. "Quite an acquisition to the neighbourhood," said everybody;
and the mothers of marriageable daughters were as eager to improve the
acquaintance as Jane Austen's inimitable Mrs. Bennett was to cultivate
the irreproachable Bingley.
In the course of that round of visits Allan contrived to find out a
good deal about the neighbourhood which was henceforward to be his home.
He discovered that it was, above all, a hunting neighbourhood; but that
it was also a shooting neighbourhood; and that there was bad blood
between the men who wanted to preserve pheasants and the men who wanted
to hunt foxes. From the point of view of the rights of property, the
shooters would appear to be in their right, since they only wanted to
feed and foster birds on their own land; while the hunting-man--were
he but the season-ticket-holding solicitor from Bloomsbury--wanted to
hunt his fox over land which belonged to another man, and to spoil that
other man's costly sport in the pursuit of a pleasure which cost him,
the season-ticket holder, at most a stingy subscription to the hunt he
affected. But, on the other hand, hunting is a strictly national sport,
and shooting is a selfish, hole-and-corner kind of pleasure; so the
hunting men claimed immemorial rights and privileges as against the
owners of woods and copses, and the hatchers of pheasants.
Allan found another and more universal sport also in the ascendant at
Matcham. The neighbourhood had taken lately to golf, and that game
had found favour with old and young of both sexes. Everybody could
not hunt, but everybody could play golf, or fancy that he or she was
playing golf, or, at least, look on from a respectful distance while
golf was being played. The golf-links on Matcham Common had therefore
become the most popular institution in the neighbourhood, and the
scarlet coat of the golfer was oftener seen than the fox-hunter in
pink, and people came from afar to see the young ladies of Matcham
contest for the bangles and photograph-frames which the golf club
offered as the reward of the strong arm and the accurate eye.
Allan, who could turn his hand to most things in the way of physical
exercise, was able to hold his own with the members of the golf club,
and speedily became a familiar figure on the links. Here, as elsewhere,
he met people who told him he was like Geoffrey Wornock, and who
praised Wornock's skill at golf just as other people had praised his
riding or his shooting.
"He seems to be something of a Crichton, this Wornock of yours," Allan
said sometimes, with a suspicion of annoyance.
He was sick of being told of his likeness to this man whom he had never
seen--weary of hearing the likeness discussed in his presence; weary of
being told that the resemblance was in expression rather than in actual
feature; that there was an indefinable something in his face which
recalled Wornock in an absolutely startling manner; while the details
of that face taken separately were in many respects unlike Wornock's
face.
"Yet it is more than what is generally called a family likeness,"
said Mrs. Mornington of the Grove, a personage in the neighbourhood,
and the cleverest woman among Allan's new acquaintances. "It is the
individuality, the life and movement of the face, that are the same.
The likeness is a likeness of light and shade rather than of line and
colour."
There was a curious feeling in Allan's mind by the time this kind of
thing had been said to him in different forms of speech by nearly
everybody he knew in Matcham--a feeling which was partly irritation,
partly interest in the man whose outward likeness to himself might be
allied with some identity of mind and inclinations.
"I wonder whether I shall like him very much, or hate him very much,"
he said to Mrs. Mornington. "I feel sure I must do one or the other."
"You are sure to like him. He is not the kind of man for anybody
to hate," answered the lady quickly; and then, growing suddenly
thoughtful, she added, "You may find a something wanting in his
character, perhaps; but you cannot dislike him. He is thoroughly
likeable."
"What is the something wanting which you have found?"
"I did not say I had found----"
"Oh, but you would not have suggested that I might discover the weak
spot if you had not found it yourself!"
"You are as searching as a cross-examining counsel," said Mrs.
Mornington, laughing at him. "Well, I will be perfectly frank with
you. To my mind, Geoffrey's character suffers from the fault which
doctors--speaking of a patient's physical condition--call want of tone.
There is a want of mental tone in Geoffrey. I have known him from a
boy. I like him; I admire his talents. He and my sons were at Eton
together. I have seen more of him perhaps than any one else in this
neighbourhood. I like him--I am sorry for him."
"Why sorry? Has he not all the good things of this world?"
"Not all. He lost his father before he was five years old; and his
mother is, I fear, a poor creature."
"Eccentric, I understand."
"Lamentably so--a woman who isolates herself from all the people whose
society would do her good, and who opens her door to any spirit-rapping
charlatan whose tricks become public talk. Poor thing! One ought not to
be angry with her, but it is provoking to see such a place as Discombe
in the possession of a woman who is utterly unable to fill the position
to which she has been elevated."
"Who _was_ Mrs. Wornock before she became Mrs. Wornock? I have
heard hints----"
"Yes, and you are never likely to hear more than hints," retorted
Mrs. Mornington, impatiently. "Nobody in this neighbourhood knows
who Mrs. Wornock was. No creature of her kith or kin has ever been
seen at Discombe. I don't suppose her son knows anything more of her
antecedents than you or I. Old Squire Wornock left Discombe about
seven and twenty years ago to drink the waters of some obscure spring
in Bohemia--a place nobody hereabouts had ever heard of. He was past
sixty when he set out on that journey, a confirmed bachelor. One would
as soon have expected him to bring back the moon as to bring a wife,
but to the utter stupefaction of all his friends and acquaintance, he
returned with a pretty-looking delicate young creature he had married
in Germany--at Dresden, I believe--and who looked much more like dying
within the next five years than he did."
"Did he introduce her to his neighbours? Was she well received?"
"Oh, she was received well enough. Mr. Wornock was not the kind of man
to marry a disreputable person. People took her on trust. She seemed
painfully shy, and her only merit in society was that she sang very
prettily. Everybody called upon her, but she did not respond warmly
to our advances; and about six months after her marriage there were
rumours of an alarming kind about her health--her mental health. Our
own good little doctor, dear old Mr. Podmore, who had attended three
generations of Wornocks, shook his head when he was questioned about
her. 'Was it serious?' people asked--for I suppose you know that in
a neighbourhood as rustic as ours, if the doctor's carriage is seen
at a particular house very often, people _will_ ask questions
of that doctor. Yes, it was very serious. We never got beyond that.
Mr. Podmore was loyal to his patient, fondly as he loves a gossip.
By-and-by we heard that Mr. Wornock had taken his young wife off to
Switzerland. He who in his earlier life had seemed rooted to the soil
was off again to the Continent, and Discombe was shut up once more. I'm
afraid we all hated Mrs. Wornock. In a neighbourhood like ours, one
detests anybody who disturbs the pleasant order of daily life. Dinners
and hunting-breakfasts at Discombe were an element in our daily lives,
and we resented their cessation. When I say we, I mean, of course, our
men-folk."
"Were your men-folk long deprived of Mr. Wornock's hospitalities?"
"For ever," answered Mrs. Mornington, solemnly. "The Wornocks had only
been gone half a year or so when we read the announcement of a son and
heir, born at Grindelwald in the depth of winter. A nice place for the
future owner of Discombe to be born in--Grindelwald--at the sign of
the Bear! We were all indignant at the absurdity of the thing. This
comes of an old man marrying a nobody, we said. Well, Mr. Carew, it was
ages before we saw anything more of the Wornocks. Geoffrey must have
been three or four years old when his father and mother brought him to
the house in which he ought to have been born--a poor little fragile
Frenchified object, hanging on to a French _bonne_, and speaking
nothing but French. Not one sentence of his native tongue did the
little wretch utter for a year or two after he appeared among us!"
Allan laughed heartily at Mrs. Mornington's indignant recital of this
ancient history. Her disgust was as fresh and as vigorous as if she
were describing the events of yesterday.
"Was he a nice child?" he asked, when they had both had their laugh.
"Nice? Well, yes, he was nice, just as a French poodle is nice. He
was very active and intelligent--hyper-active, hyper-intelligent. He
frightened me. But the Wornocks and the Morningtons had been close
friends from generation to generation, so I could not help taking
an interest in the brat, and I would have been a cordial friend of
the brat's mother, for poor old Wornock's sake, if she would have
let me. But she wouldn't, or she couldn't, respond to a sensible,
matter-of-fact woman's friendly advances. The poor thing was in the
clouds then, and she is in the clouds now. She has never come down
to earth. Music, spirit-rapping, thought-reading, slate-writing--what
can one expect of a woman who gives all her mind to such things as
those?--a woman who lets her housekeeper manage everything from cellar
to garret, and who has no will of her own in her garden and hot-houses?
I have known Mrs. Wornock seven and twenty years, and I know no more of
her now than I knew when she came a stranger to Discombe. I call upon
her three or four times a year, and she returns my calls, and sits in
my drawing-room for twenty minutes or so looking miserable and longing
to go. What can one do with such a woman?"
"Is it sheer stupidity, do you think?"
"Stupidity! No, I think not. She has anything but a stupid expression
of countenance. She has an air of spirituality, as of a nature above
the common world, which cannot come down to common things. I am told
that in music she is really a genius; that her powers of criticism and
appreciation are of the highest order. She plays exquisitely, both
organ and piano. She has, or had, a heavenly soprano voice; but I have
not heard her sing since Geoffrey's birth."
"She must be interesting," said Allan, with conviction.
"She is interesting--only she won't let one be interested in her."
"Can one get a look at her? Does she go to Matcham Church?"
"Never. That is another of her eccentricities. She either goes to
that funny little old church you may have noticed right among the
fields--Filbury parish church--nearly six miles from Discombe, or she
drives thirteen miles to Salisbury Cathedral. I believe she sometimes
plays the organ at Filbury. That organ was her gift, by the way. They
had only a wretched harmonium when she came to Discombe."
"I shall go to Filbury Church next Sunday," said Allan.
"Shall you? I hope you are not forgetting the lapse of time. This
interesting widow is only interesting from a psychological standpoint,
remember. She must be five and forty years of age. Not even Cleopatra
would have been interesting at forty-five."
"I am under no hallucination as to the lady's age. I want to see
the mother of Geoffrey Wornock. It is Geoffrey Wornock in whom I am
interested."
"Egotistical person! Only because Geoffrey is like you."
"Is there any man living who would not be interested in his double?"
"Ah, but he is not your double! The village mind is given to
exaggeration. He has not your firm chin, nor your thoughtful brow. His
face is a reminiscence of yours. It is weaker in every characteristic,
in every line. You are the substance, he the reflection."
"Now, you are laughing at my egotism, and developing my vanity."
"No, believe me, no!" protested Mrs. Mornington, gaily. "I see you both
with all your defects and qualities. You have the stronger character,
but you have not Geoffrey's fascinating personality. His very faults
are attractive. He is by no means effeminate; yet there is a something
womanish in his nature which makes women fond of him. He has inherited
his mother's sensitive, dreamy temperament. I feel sure he would see
a ghost if there were one in his neighbourhood. The ghost would go to
him instinctively, as dogs go unbidden to certain people--sometimes
to people who don't care about them; while the genuine dog-lover
may be doing his best to attract bow-wow's attention, and failing
ignominiously."
"Every word you say increases my interest in Mr. Wornock. In a
neighbourhood like this, where everybody is sensible and commonplace
and conventional, excepting always your brilliant self"--Mrs.
Mornington nodded, and put her feet on the fender--"it is so delightful
to meet some one who does not move just on the common lines, and is not
worked by the common machinery."
"You will find nothing common about Geoffrey," said the lady. "I have
known him since he was a little white boy in a black velvet suit, and
he was just as enigmatical to me the day he left for Bombay as he was
on his seventh birthday. I know that he has winning manners, and that I
am very fond of him; and that is all I know about him."
* * * * *
Allan drove to Filbury on the following Sunday, and was in his place
in the little old parish church ten minutes before the service began.
The high oak pews were not favourable to his getting a good view of the
congregation, since, when seated, the top of his head was only on a
level with the top of his pew; but by leaving the door of the pew ajar
he contrived to see Mrs. Wornock as she went up the narrow aisle--nave
there was none, the pews forming a solid square in the centre of the
church. Yes, he was assured that slim, graceful figure in a plain
grey cashmere gown and grey straw bonnet must be Mrs. Wornock and no
other. Indeed, the inference was easily arrived at, for the rest of
the congregation belonged obviously to the small tenant-farmer and
agricultural-labourer class--the women-folk homely and ruddy-cheeked,
the men ponderous, and ill at ease in their Sunday clothes.
The lady in the grey gown made her way quietly to a pew that occupied
the angle of the church nearest the pulpit and reading-desk--the old
three-decker arrangement, for clerk, parson, and preacher. Mr. Wornock
was patron of the living of Filbury and Discombe, and this large,
square pew had belonged to the Wornocks ever since the rebuilding of
the church in Charles the Second's reign, a year or two after the
manor-house was built, when the estate, which had hitherto been an
outlying possession of the Wornocks, became their place of residence,
and most important property.
Allan could see only the lady's profile from his place in the body
of the church--a delicate profile, worn as if with long years of
thoughtfulness; a sweet, sad face that had lost all freshness of
colouring, but had gained the spiritual beauty which grows in thought
and solitude, where there are no vulgar cares to harass and vex the
mind. A pensive peacefulness was the chief characteristic of the face,
Allan thought, when the lady turned towards the organ during the _Te
Deum_, listening to the village voices, which sang truer than
village voices generally do.
Allan submitted to the slow torture of a very long sermon about
nothing particular, on a text in Nehemiah, which suggested not the
faintest bearing on the Christian life--a sermon preached by an elderly
gentleman in a black silk gown, whose eloquence would have been more
impressive had his false teeth been a better fit. After the sermon
there was a hymn, and the old-fashioned plate was carried round by
a blacksmith, whom Allan recognized as a man who had fastened his
hunter's shoe one day at a forge on the outskirts of Filbury, in the
midst of a run; and then the little congregation quietly dispersed,
after an exchange of friendly greetings between the church door and the
lych-gate.
Allan's gig was waiting for him near the gate, and a victoria, on
which he recognized the Wornock crest--a dolphin crowned--stood in the
shade of a row of limes, which marked the boundary of the Vicarage
garden. Allan waited a little, expecting to see Mrs. Wornock come out;
and then, as she did not appear, he re-entered the churchyard, and
strayed among moss-mantled tomb-stones, reading the village names, the
village histories of birth and death, musing, as he read, upon the long
eventless years which make the sum of rustic lives.
The blue pure sky, the perfume of a bean-field in flower, the hawthorns
in undulating masses of snowy blossom, and here and there, in the
angles of the meadows, the heaped-up gold of furze-bushes that were
more bloom than bush--all these made life to-day a sensuous delight
which exacted no questionings of the intellect, suggested no doubt as
to the bliss of living. If it were always thus--a crust of bread and
cheese under such a sky, a bed in the hollow of yonder bank between
bean-field and clover, would suffice for a man's content, Allan
thought, as he stood on a knoll in God's acre, and looked down upon
the meadows that rose and fell over ridge and hollow with gentle
undulations between Filbury and Discombe.
What had become of Mrs. Wornock? He had made the circuit of the
burial-ground, pausing often to read an epitaph, but never relaxing
his watchfulness of the carriage yonder, waiting under the limes. The
carriage was there still, and there was no sign of Mrs. Wornock. Was
there a celebration? No; he had seen all the congregation leave the
church, except the mistress of that curtained pew in the corner near
the pulpit.
Presently the broad strong chords of a prelude were poured out upon the
still air--a prelude by Sebastian Bach, masterful, imposing, followed
by a fugue, whose delicate intricacies were exquisitely rendered by
the player. Standing in the sunshine listening to that music, Allan
remembered what Mrs. Mornington had told him. The player was Mrs.
Wornock. He had seen the professional organist and schoolmaster leave
the church with his flock of village boys. Mrs. Wornock had lingered
after the service to gratify herself with the music she loved. He
sauntered and loitered near the open window, listening to the music
for nearly an hour. Then the organ sounds melted away in one last long
rallentando, and presently he heard the heavy old key turn in the
heavy old lock, and the lady in grey came slowly along the path to the
lych-gate, followed by a clumsy boy, who looked like a smaller edition
of the blacksmith. Allan stood within a few yards of the pathway to
see her go by, hoping to be himself unobserved, screened by the angle
of an old monument, where rust had eaten away the railing, and moss
and lichen had encrusted the pompous Latin epitaph, while the dense
growth of ivy had muffled the funeral urn. Here, in the shadow of
ostentation's unenduring monument, he waited for that slender and still
youthful form to pass.
In figure the widow of twenty years looked a girl, and the face which
turned quickly towards Allan, her keen ear having caught the rustle
of the long grass under his tread, had the delicacy of outline and
transparency of youth. The cheek had lost its girlish roundness, and
the large grey eye was somewhat sunken beneath the thoughtful brow.
Involuntarily Allan recalled a familiar line--
"Thy cheek is pale with thought and not with care."
That expression of tranquil thoughtfulness changed in an instant as
she looked at him; changed to astonishment, interrogation, which
gradually softened to a grave curiosity, an anxious scrutiny. Then, as
if becoming suddenly aware of her breach of good manners, the heavy
eyelids sank, a faint blush coloured the thin cheeks, and she hurried
onward to the gate where her carriage had drawn up in readiness for her.
Her footman, in a sober brown livery, was holding the gate open for
her. Her horses were shaking their bridles. She stepped lightly into
the victoria, nodded an adieu to the schoolboy who had blown the organ
bellows, and vanished into the leafy distance of the lane.
"So that is my double's mother. An interesting face, a graceful figure,
and a lady to the tips of her fingers. Whether she is county, or not
county, Geoffrey Wornock has no cause to be ashamed of his mother.
Nothing would induce me to think ill of that woman."
He brooded on that startled expression which had flashed across Mrs.
Wornock's face as she looked at him. Clearly she, too, had seen the
likeness which he bore to her son.
"I wonder whether it pains her to be reminded of him when he is so far
away," speculated Allan, "or whether she feels kindly towards me for
the sake of that absent son?"
This question of his was answered three days later by the lady's own
hand. Among the letters on Allan's breakfast-table on Wednesday morning
there was one in a strange penmanship, which took his breath away, for
on the envelope, in bold brown letters, appeared the address, Discombe
Manor.
He thrust all his other letters aside--those uninteresting letters
which besiege the man who is supposed to have money to spend, from
tradesmen who want to work for him, charities who want to do good for
him, stock-jobbers who want to speculate for him--the whole race of
spiders that harassed the well-feathered fly. He tore open the letter
from Discombe Manor, and his eye ran eagerly over the following lines:--
"DEAR SIR,
"People tell me that you are kind and amiable, and I am emboldened
by this assurance to ask you a favour. Etiquette forbids me to call
upon you, and as I rarely visit anybody, it might be long before we
should meet casually in the houses of other people; but you can,
if you like, gratify a solitary woman by letting her make your
acquaintance in her own house; and perhaps when my son comes home
on leave, the acquaintance, so begun, may ripen into friendship. I
dare say people have told you that you are like him, and you will
hardly wonder at my wishing to see more of a face that reminds me
of my nearest and dearest.
"I am generally at home in the afternoon.
"Very truly yours,
"E. WORNOCK."
"E. Wornock!" he repeated, studying the signature. "Why no
Christian name? And what is the name which that initial represents?
Eliza, perhaps--and she sinks it, thinking it common and
housemaidish--forgetting how Ben Jonson, by that housemaidish name,
does designate the most glorious of queens. Possibly Ellen--a
milk-and-waterish name, with less of dignity than Eliza; or Emily, my
mother's name--graceful but colourless. I have never thought it good
enough for so fine a character as my mother. She should have been
Katherine or Margaret, Gertrude or Barbara, names that have a fulness
of sound which implies fulness of meaning. I will call at Discombe
Manor this afternoon. Delay would be churlish--and I want to see what
Geoffrey Wornock's home is like."
The afternoon was warm and sunny, and Allan made a leisurely circuit of
the chase and park of Discombe on his way to Mrs. Wornock's house.
The beauty of the Manor consisted as much in the perfection of detail
as in the grandeur of the mansion or the extent of gardens and park.
The mansion was not strikingly architectural nor even strikingly
picturesque. It was a sober red brick house, with a high, tiled
roof, and level rows of windows--those of the upper story were the
original lattices of 1664, the date of the house; but on the lower
floors mullions and lattices had given place to long French windows,
of a uniform unpicturesque flatness, opening on a broad gravel walk,
beyond which the smooth shaven grass sloped gently to the edge of a
moat, for Mrs. Wornock's house was one of those moated manor-houses
of which there are so few left in the south of England. The gardens
surrounding that grave-looking Carolian house had attained the ideal
of horticultural beauty under many generations of garden-lovers, the
ideal of old-fashioned beauty, be it understood; the beauty of clipped
hedges and sunk lawns, walls of ilex and of yew, solemn avenues of
obelisk-shaped conifers, labyrinths, arches, temples and arcades of
roses, tennis-lawns and bowling-greens, broad borders of old-fashioned
perennials, clumps and masses of vivid colour, placed with art that
seemed accidental wherever vivid colour was wanted to relieve the
verdant monotony.
If the gardens were perfect, the house, farm, and cottages were even
more attractive in their arcadian grace, the grace of a day that is
dead. Quaint roofs and massive chimney-stacks, lattices, porches,
sun-dials, gardens brimming over with flowers, trim pathways, shining
panes, everywhere a spotless cleanliness, a wealth of foliage, an
air of prosperous fatness, bee-hives, poultry, cattle, all the signs
and tokens of dependents for whom much is done, and whose dwellings
flourish at somebody else's expense.
Allan noted the cottages which bore the Wornock "W" above the date of
the building--he noted them, but lost count of their number--keepers'
lodges in the woodland which skirted the park--gardeners' or
dairy-men's cottages at every park gate; farmhouse and bailiff's house;
cottages for coachmen and helpers. At every available angle where
gable, roof, and quaint old chimney-stack could make a picturesque
feature in the landscape, a cottage had been placed, and the number of
these ideal dwellings suggested territorial importance in a manner more
obvious than any effect made by the mere extent of acreage, a thing
that is talked about but not seen. Discombe Chase, the Discombe lodges,
and the village and school-houses of Discombe were obvious facts which
impressed the stranger.
That sweetly pensive face of Mrs. Wornock's had slain the viper envy
in Allan's breast. When first he rode through those woods and over
those undulating pastures and by those gables embowered in roses and
wisteria, or starred with the pale blue clematis, he had felt a certain
sour discontent with his own good fortune, about which people, from
his mother down to the acquaintance of yesterday, prattled and prosed
so officiously. He was sick of hearing himself called a lucky fellow.
Luck, forsooth! what was his luck compared with Geoffrey Wornock's?
That a bachelor uncle of his, having scraped together a modest little
fortune, and not being able to carry it with him to the nether-world,
should have passed it on to him, Allan, was not such a strange event as
to warrant the running commentary of congratulation that had assailed
his ear ever since he came to Matcham. No one congratulated Geoffrey
Wornock. Nobody talked of _his_ good luck. He had been born in
the purple, and people spoke of him as of one having a divine right
to the best things that this earth can give--to a Carolian mansion,
and chase and park, and wide-spreading farms. There seemed to Allan
Carew's self-consciousness an implied disparagement of himself in
the tone which Matcham people took about Geoffrey Wornock. They in a
manner congratulated him on his likeness to the Lord of Discombe Manor,
and insinuated that he ought to be proud of himself because of this
resemblance to the local magnate.
To-day, however, Allan forgot all those infinitesimal vexations which
in the beginning of his residence at Matcham had made the name of
Wornock odious to him. His thoughts were full of that pale sad face,
the wasted cheeks, the heavy eyelids, the somewhat sickly transparency
of complexion, the large violet eyes, which lit up the whole face as
with a light that is not of this world. It was the most spiritual
countenance he had ever seen--the first face which had ever suggested
to him the epithet ethereal.
He remembered what society had told him about Mrs. Wornock; her
encouragement of spirit-rapping people and thought-reading people,
and every phase of modern super-naturalism; her passion for music--a
passion so absorbing as almost to pass the border-line of sanity;
at least in the opinion of the commonplace sane. He wondered no
longer that such a woman had held herself aloof from the hunting, and
shooting, and dinner-giving, and tea-drinking population scattered
within a radius of eight or ten miles of Discombe; the people with
whom, had she lived the conventional life of the conventional rural
lady, she should have been on intimate terms. She was among them, but
not of them, Allan told himself.
"Surely I am not in love with a woman old enough to be my mother!" he
thought, between jest and earnest, as he drove up to the house. "I have
not thought so persistently of any woman since I was sick for love of
the dean's pretty daughter, fairest and last of my calf-loves."
He was not wholly in jest, for during the last three days the lady's
image had haunted him with an insistency that bordered on "possession."
It was as if those dark grey eyes had cast a spell upon him, and as
if he must needs wait until the enchantress who held him in her mystic
bands should unweave her mystery and set his thoughts at liberty.
The hall door stood open to the summer air and the afternoon sun. A
large black poodle, with an air of ineffable wisdom, was stretched near
the threshold; a liver-and-white St. Bernard sunned his hairy bulk upon
the grass in front of the steps; and on the broad terrace to the right
of the house a peacock spread the rainbow splendour of his tail, and
strutted in stately slowness towards the sun.
"House and garden belong to fairyland," thought Allan. "The enchantress
has but to wave her wand and fix the picture for a century. We may
have extended the limit of human life a hundred years hence, and
Mrs. Wornock's age may count as girlhood, when some gay young prince
of fifty-five shall ride through the tangled woodland to awaken the
sleeper. Who can tell? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we
may be.'"
CHAPTER IV.
"IN THE ALL-GOLDEN AFTERNOON."
The hall door stood wide open to the sunlight, sufficiently guarded by
that splendid brute, the St. Bernard.
A middle-aged footman in the sober Wornock livery came at the sound of
the bell, the St. Bernard watching the visitor with grave but friendly
eyes, and evidently perfectly aware of his respectability.
Mrs. Wornock was at home. A slow and solemn butler now appeared upon
the scene, and led the way to a corridor which opened out of the hall;
and at the end of this corridor, like Vandyke's famous portrait of
Charles the First at Warwick Castle, the full-length portrait of a
young man in a hunting-coat looked Allan Carew in the face.
In spite of all he had been told about his likeness to the owner of
Discombe, the sight of that frank young face looking at him under the
bright white light fairly startled him. For the moment it seemed to him
as if he had seen his own reflection in a cheval-glass; but as he drew
nearer the canvas the likeness lessened, the difference in the features
came out, and he saw that the resemblance was less a likeness than a
reminiscence. Distance was needed to make the illusion, and he could
understand now why his new friends of the hunting-field should have
taken him for Wornock on that first morning when he rode up to them as
a stranger.
The portrait was by Millais, painted with as much _brio_ and
vigour as the better-known picture of the young Marchioness of Huntley.
Mr. Wornock was standing in an old stone doorway, leaning in an easy
attitude against the deep arch of the door, hunting-crop, cigar-case,
and hat on a table in the background, standing where he had stood on
many a winter morning, waiting for his horse.
There was a skylight over this end of the corridor, and the portrait of
the master of the house shone out brilliantly under the clear top-light.
The butler stopped within a few paces of the portrait, opened a low,
old-fashioned door, and ushered Mr. Carew into a spacious room, at
the further end of which a lady was sitting by an open window, beyond
which he saw the long vista of an Italian garden, a cypress avenue,
where statues were gleaming here and there in the sunshine. There was
a grand piano on one side of the room, an organ on the other; books
filled every recess. This spacious apartment was evidently music-room
and library rather than drawing-room, and here, amidst books and music,
lived the lonely lady of the house.
She came to meet him with a friendly smile as he advanced into the
room, holding out her hand.
"It was very good of you to come so soon," she said, in her low,
musical voice. "I wanted so much to see you--to know you. Yes, you are
very like him. One of those accidental likenesses which are so common,
and yet seem so strange. My husband had a friend who was murdered
because he was like Sir Robert Peel; but my son is not a public man,
and he has no enemies. You will run no risks on account of your
likeness to him.
"I am grateful to the likeness which has given me the honour of knowing
Mrs. Wornock," said Allan, taking the seat to which she motioned him,
as she resumed her low chair by the window.
"Indeed, you have no reason. I am a very stupid person. I go nowhere, I
see very few people; and the people I do see are people whom you would
think unworthy of your interest."
"Not if you are interested in them. They cannot be unworthy."
"Oh, I am easily interested! I like strange people. I like to believe
strange things. Your friend, Mrs. Mornington, will tell you that I am a
foolish person."
"You have seen Mrs. Mornington lately?" questioned Allan.
"Yes; she was here yesterday afternoon. She is always bright and
amusing, and I always feel particularly stupid in her society. She is
always bright and amusing, and I always feel particularly stupid in her
society. She talked of you, but I did not tell her I wanted to make
your acquaintance. She would have offered to make a luncheon-party for
me to meet you--or something dreadful of that kind."
"You have a great dislike to society, Mrs. Wornock?" he asked, keenly
interested.
Her manner was so fresh and simple, almost childlike in its confiding
candour, and her appearance was no less interesting than her manner.
It is the fashion of our day for women of five and forty to look
young, even to girlishness; but most women of five and forty are
considerably indebted to modern art for that advantage. Here there was
no art. The pale, clear fairness of the complexion owed nothing to the
perfumer's palette. No _poudre des fées_ blanched the delicate
brow; no _rose d'amour_ flushed the cheek; no _eau de Medée_
brightened the large violet eyes. The lines which thought and sorrow
had drawn upon the fair brow were undisguised, and in the soft, pale
gold of the hair there were threads of silver. The youthfulness of the
face was in its colouring and expression--the complexion so delicately
fair, the countenance so trustful and pleading. It was the countenance
of a woman to whom the conventionalities and jargon of modern life were
unknown.
"You saw my son's portrait in the corridor?" said Mrs. Wornock.
"Yes. It struck my untutored eye as a very fine picture--almost as
powerful as the Gladstone and the Salisbury, which I remember in the
Millais collection at the Grosvenor."
"But as for the likeness to yourself, now--did that strike you as
forcibly as it has struck other people?"
"I confess that as I stood in the hall I was inclined to exclaim, 'That
is I or my brother!' But as I came nearer the picture I saw there was
considerable diversity. To begin with, your son is much handsomer than
I."
"The drawing of his features may be more correct, but you are quite
handsome enough," she answered, with her pretty friendly air, as if she
had been his aunt. "And your face is more strongly marked than his,
just as your voice is stronger," she added, with a sigh.
"Your son is not an invalid, I hope?"
"An invalid! No. But he is not very strong. He could not play football.
He hated even cricket. He is passionately fond of horses, and an ardent
sportsman; but he can be sadly idle. He likes to lie about in the
sunshine, reading or dreaming. I fear he is a dreamer, like his mother."
"He is not like you, in person."
"No."
"He is like his father, no doubt."
"You will see his father's picture, and you can judge for yourself.
Well, we are to be friends, are we not, Mr. Carew? And you will come
to see me sometimes; and if you ever have any little troubles which can
be lightened by a woman's sympathy, you will come and confide them to
me, I hope."
"It will be very sweet to be allowed to confide in so kind a friend,"
said Allan.
"My son will be home for his long leave before the end of the year, and
I want you to make him your friend. He is very amiable," again with a
suppressed sigh. "Come, now it is your turn to tell me something about
yourself. This room tells you all there is to be told about me."
"It tells me you are very fond of music."
"I live for it. Music has been my companion and consoler all my life."
"And I hope you will let me hear you play again some day."
"Again? Ah, I forgot! You were in the churchyard last Sunday while I
was playing. Did you listen?"
"As long as you played. I was under the open window most of the time."
"You are fond of organ music?"
"As fond as an ignorant man may be. I know nothing of the subtleties of
music. I have never been educated up to Wagner or Dvorak. I love the
familiar voices--Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Gounod, Auber even, and I
adore our English master of melody, Sullivan. Does that shock you?"
"Not at all. I will play his cantata for you some day. If you have
nothing better to do with your time this afternoon, I should like to
show you my garden."
"I shall be enchanted. I am enchanted already with that long straight
walk, those walls of cypress and yew, that peacock sunning his emerald
and sapphire plumage by the dial. In such a garden did Beatrice hide
when Hero and her ladies talked of Benedick's passion; in such a garden
did Jessica and Lorenzo loiter under the moonlight."
"I see you love your Shakespeare."
"As interpreted by Irving and Ellen Terry. The Lyceum was the school in
which I learnt to love the bard. An Eton examination in Richard the
Second only prejudiced me against him."
"Mr. Wornock was a great Shakespearian."
They were in the garden by this time--sauntering with slow footsteps
along the level stretch of turf on one side of the broad gravel walk.
At the end of the cypress avenue there was a semicircular recess, shut
in by a raised bank, and a wall of clipped yew, in which, at regular
intervals, there were statues in dark green niches.
"Mr. Wornock brought the statues from Rome when he was a young man.
The gardens were laid out by his grandfather nearly a century ago,"
explained Mrs. Wornock.
Allan noticed that she spoke of her husband generally as "Mr. Wornock."
"That amphitheatre reminds me a little of the Boboli gardens," said
Allan; "but there is a peacefulness about this solitude which no public
garden can have."
Three peacocks were trailing their plumage on the long lawns between
the house and the amphitheatre, and one less gorgeous but more
ethereal, a bird of dazzling whiteness, was perched, with outspread
tail, on an angle of the cypress wall.
The lady and her companion strolled to the end of the lawn, and crossed
the amphitheatre to a stone temple, open on the side fronting the
south-western sun, and spacious enough to accommodate a dozen people.
"If you had a garden-play, how delightfully this temple would serve for
a central point in your stage," said Allan, admiringly.
"People have asked me to lend them the gardens for a play--'Twelfth
Night,' or 'Much Ado about Nothing;' but I have always said no. I
should hate to see a crowd in this dear old garden."
"Yet there are people who would think such a place as this created on
purpose for garden-parties, and who would desire nothing better than a
crowd of smart people."
Mrs. Wornock shuddered at the mention of smart people.
"A party of that kind would be misery for me," she said. "And now
tell me about yourself, and your relations. Mrs. Mornington told me
that your father and mother are both living, and that you inherited
Beechhurst from your uncle. I remember seeing Admiral Darnleigh years
and years ago, when everything at Discombe and at Matcham was new to
me. It must be sad for your mother to lose you from her own home."
"My mother is not given to sadness," Allan answered, smiling. "She is
the best and kindest of mothers, and I know she loves me as dearly as
any son need desire; but she is quite resigned to my having my own home
and my own interests. She would argue, perhaps, that were I to marry I
must have a house of my own, and that my establishment at Beechhurst is
only a little premature."
"You are very much attached to your mother?"
"Very much--and to my father."
"Your tone as you say those words tell me that your father is the
dearer of the two."
"You have a quick ear for shades of meaning, Mrs. Wornock."
"Pray do not think me impertinent. I am not questioning you out of
idle curiosity. If we are to be friends in the future, I must know and
understand something of your life and your mind. But perhaps I bore
you--perhaps you think me both eccentric and impertinent."
"My dear Mrs. Wornock, I am deeply touched that you should offer to be
my friend. Be assured I have no reserve, and am willing--possibly too
willing--to talk of myself and my own people. I have no dark corners
in my life. My history is all open country--an uninteresting landscape
enough. But there is no difficult going--there are no bogs or risky
bits over which the inquiring spirit need skim lightly. Your ear did
not deceive you, just now. Fondly as I love my mother, I will freely
confess that the bond that draws me to my father is the stronger
bond. In the parrot jargon of the day, his is the more interesting
'personality.' He is a man of powerful intellect, whose mind has
done nothing for the good of the world--who will die unhonoured and
unremembered except by his familiar friends. There is one question I
have asked myself about him ever since I was old enough to think--a
question which I first asked myself when I began to read classics
with him in my school vacations, and which I had not finished asking
myself when his untiring help had enabled me to take a first-class in
the Honour School. To me it has always been a mystery that a man of
wide attainments and financial independence should have been utterly
destitute of ambition. My father was a young man when he married; he is
still in the prime of life; and for six and twenty years he has been
content to vegetate in Suffolk, and has regarded his annual visit to
London as more of an affliction than a relief. It is as if the hands
of life's clock had stopped in the golden noon of youth. I have told
myself again and again that my father's life must have been shadowed
by some great sorrow before his marriage, young as he was when he
married."
Mrs. Wornock listened intently, her head slightly bent, her clasped
hands resting on her knee, her sensitive lips slightly parted.
"You say that your father married young," she said, after a brief
silence, in which she seemed to be thinking over his words. "What do
you call young in such a case?"
"My father was not three and twenty when he married--two years younger
than I am at this present hour--and yet the idea of matrimony has
never shaped itself in my mind. But you must not infer from anything
I have said that my father's has been an unhappy marriage. On the
contrary, he is devoted to my mother, and she to him. I cannot imagine
a better assorted couple. Each supplies the qualities wanting in the
other. She is all movement, impulse, and spontaneousness. He is calm
and meditative, with depths of thought and feeling which no one has
sounded. They are perfectly happy as husband and wife. But there is
a shade of melancholy that steals over my father in quiet, unoccupied
hours, which indicates a sorrow or a disappointment in the past. I have
taken it to mean an unhappy love-affair. I may be utterly wrong, and
the shadow may be cast by a disappointed ambition. It is not unlikely
that a man of powerful intellect and lymphatic temperament should feel
that he had wasted opportunities, and failed in life. It is quite easy
to imagine ambition without the energy to achieve."
She made no comment upon this, but Allan could see in her eager
countenance that she was intensely interested.
"Is your mother beautiful?" she asked timidly.
It seemed a foolish and futile question; and it jarred upon that
serious thought of his parents which had been inspired by her previous
questioning. But, after all, it was a natural question for a woman to
ask, and he smiled as he answered--
"No, my mother is not beautiful. I am not guilty of treason as a son
if I confess that she is plain, since she herself would be the first
to take offence at any sophistication of the truth. She has never
set up for being other than she is. She has a fine countenance and
a fine figure, straight as a dart, with a waist which a girl might
acknowledge without a blush. She dresses with admirable taste, and
always looks well, after her own fashion, exclusive of beautiful
features or brilliant colouring. She is what women call stylish, and
men distinguished. I am as proud as I am fond of her."
"Will she come to see you in your new home?"
"Most assuredly my mother will pay me a visit before the summer is
over, and I shall be charmed to bring you and her together."
"And your father? Will not he come?"
"I don't know. He is very difficult to move. He is like the lichen
on the old stone walls at home. He takes no particular interest in
chairs and tables; he would care not a fig for my new surroundings.
Besides, he saw Beechhurst years ago, when the Admiral was building and
improving. He has no curiosity to bring him here; and as for his son,
he knows he has only to want me for me to be at his side."
After this there came a silence. Certainly Mrs. Wornock was not gifted
as a conversationalist. She sat looking straight before her at the long
perspective of lawn and cypress, broad gravel walk, and narrow grass
plots, all verging to a point at which the old house rose square and
grey, crowned with cupola and bell. The peacocks strutted slowly along
the narrow lawn. The waters of a fountain flashed in the warm sunlight.
It was a garden that recalled Tivoli, or that old grave garden of the
Vatican, with its long level walks and prim flower-beds, in which
the Holy Father takes his restricted airing. In the Vatican pleasure
grounds there are peacocks and clipped hedges, and smooth greensward,
and formal cypress avenues, and quaint arbours; but the hum of Rome,
the echoes of the Papal Barrack, the rush of the Tiber are near; and
not even in that antique garden can there be this summer silence,
profound as in the enchanted isle where it seemeth always afternoon.
"Tell me more about yourself, your childhood, your youth," Mrs. Wornock
asked suddenly, with an air of agitated impatience which took Allan by
surprise.
Mrs. Mornington had prepared him for a certain eccentricity in the
lonely lady of Discombe; but the strangeness of her manner was even
more than he had expected.
"There is very little to tell about my own life," he said. "I have
lived at home for the most part, except when I was at Eton and
Cambridge. My father helped me in all my studies. I never had any other
tutor except at the University. My home life was of the quietest.
Fendyke is twenty miles from Cambridge, but it seems at the end of the
world. The single line of rail that leads to it comes to a full stop.
The terminus stands in the midst of a Dutch landscape--level fields
divided by shallow dykes, a river so straight that it might as well
be a canal, water-mills, pollarded willows, broad clean roads, and
fine old Norman churches large enough for a city, no Sunday trains,
and not many on lawful days. A neat little town, with decent shops,
and comfortable inns, and a market which only awakens from a Pompeian
slumber for an hour or two on Fridays. A land of rest and plenty,
picturesque cottages and trim cottage gardens, an air of prosperity
which I believe is real. So much for our town and surroundings. For the
family mansion picture to yourself a long low house, built partly of
brick and partly of wood, with chimney-stacks that contain brick enough
for the building of respectable houses, and which have defied the gales
sweeping down from the Ural mountains--there is nothing, mark you,
between Fendyke and the Urals--ever since Queen Elizabeth was young
enough to pace a pavan."
"You must be fond of an old house like that."
"Yes, I am very fond of Fendyke. I even love the surrounding country,
though I can but wish Nature had not ironed the landscape with her
mammoth iron. She might have left us a few creases, a wrinkled meadow
here and there."
"I have heard that people born in Norfolk and Suffolk have an innate
antipathy to hills."
"That may be. Indeed, I have noticed in the East Anglians a kind of
stubborn pride in the flatness of their soil. But I have not that
perverted pride in ugliness, since I was not born in Suffolk."
"Indeed!"
"No. My father lived in Sussex--at Hayward's Heath--at the time of his
marriage, and for half a dozen years after my birth. Fendyke came to
him from his maternal grandfather, who left the estate to his daughter
and heiress, and to her son after her, who was to assume the name and
arms of Carew when he succeeded to the property. My father's name was
Beresford."
There was no reply--no further questioning on Mrs. Wornock's part--and
for some minutes Allan abandoned himself to the dreamy silence of the
scene, content to watch the peacocks on the lawn, and to listen to the
splash of the fountains.
Then suddenly the silence surprised him, and he turned to look at
his companion. Her head had fallen back against the wall of the
summer-house, her eyes were closed, and her face was white as death.
She was in a dead faint; and they were at least a quarter of a mile
from the house.
The situation was awkward for Allan, though there was nothing in so
simple a matter as a fainting-fit to surprise him. He knew that there
are women who faint at the smallest provocation, in a crowded room, in
the sunshine, at church, anywhere. Here the sunshine was perhaps to
blame; that delicious pure sunlight in which he had been basking.
He gave a long Australian cooe, long enough and loud enough to have
brought help in the wilderness, and assuredly calculated to attract
some gardener at work within call. Then he bethought himself of the
fountain, and ran to get some water in his hat.
At the first dash of water, Mrs. Wornock opened her eyes, with a little
sobbing sigh, and looked at him as if wondering who and what he was.
"I knew he would have answered my prayer," she murmured brokenly,
"spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost."
It seemed a worse kind of faint than Allan had supposed, for now her
mind was wandering.
"I fear the sun was too warm for you," he said, standing before her
in painful embarrassment, half expecting some indication of absolute
lunacy.
"Yes, yes, it was the sun," she answered nervously. "The glare is so
strong this afternoon; and this summer-house is shadeless. I must go
back to the house. It was very foolish of me to faint. I am so sorry. I
hope you won't consider me a very silly person."
"My dear Mrs. Wornock, I have never heard that a fainting-fit on a warm
summer afternoon is a sign of silliness."
"No, it is a thing one cannot help, can one? But it must have been so
unpleasant for you. Ah, here is one of the gardeners," as a man came
hurrying towards her, with a scared countenance. "There is nothing the
matter, Henry. I am quite well now, Mr. Carew, and I can walk back to
the house. And so your father's original name was Beresford. Does he
call himself Beresford-Carew?"
"Yes, in all important documents; but he is a man too careless of forms
to trouble himself much about the first name; and it has fallen into
disuse for the most part, Carew being the name of honour in our county.
He is known at Fendyke and in the neighbourhood simply as Squire Carew.
I sign myself Beresford-Carew sometimes, when I want to distinguish
myself from the numerous clan of Carews in Devonshire and elsewhere.
Will you take my arm to go back to the house?"
"Yes"--timidly and faintly--"I shall be very glad of your support."
She put her hand through his arm, and walked slowly and silently by his
side. Returning consciousness had brought back very little colour to
her face. It had still an almost unearthly pallor. She walked the whole
distance without uttering a word. A faint sigh fluttered her lips two
or three times during that slow promenade, and on her drooping lashes
Allan saw the glitter of a tear. For some reason or other she was
deeply moved; or it might be that her fainting-fits always took this
emotional form. He saw her safely seated on her own sofa, with footman
and maid in attendance upon her, before he took a brief adieu.
"You'll come and see me again, I hope," she said, with a faint smile,
as she gave him her hand at parting.
"I shall be most happy," he murmured, doubtful within himself whether
he would ever hazard a repetition of this agitating finale to an
afternoon call.
To be interrogated about himself and his surroundings, with an eager
curiosity which was certainly startling, and then to find himself
_tête-à-tête_ with an unconscious fellow-creature was an ordeal
that few young men would care to repeat.
When he described his visit next day to Mrs. Mornington, she only
shrugged her shoulders and said decisively, "Hysteria! Too much money,
too much leisure, and no respectable connections. If there is one woman
I pity more than another that woman is Mrs. Wornock."
"If ever I call on her again it must be with you or with my mother,"
said Allan. "I won't face her alone."
Although he came to this decision about the lady, he found himself not
the less disposed to dwell upon her image during the days and weeks
that followed his afternoon at Discombe; and more than once he asked
himself whether there might not be some more cogent reason for her
fainting-fit than the sun's warmth or the sun's glare--whether that
deep interest which she had evinced in all he could tell her of home
and parents might not be founded on something more serious than an idle
woman's idle curiosity.
Could it be that he had lighted upon some trace of that mystery in his
father's past life--that mystery which, without tangible evidence, he
had always imagined as the key-note to his father's character in later
years? She had fainted immediately upon his telling her his father's
former name. Was that a mere coincidence of time, or was the name the
cause of the fainting-fit?
* * * * *
Lady Emily arrived on a visit to her son while he was pondering
this unanswerable question about Mrs. Wornock, and he caught at the
opportunity. He hardly allowed his mother time to inspect his house and
gardens, and the small farm which supplied his larder, and to give her
opinion upon the furnishing of the rooms and the arrangement of the
flower-beds and lawns, before he suggested taking her to call upon his
neighbour at Discombe.
"But why, Allan? why should I call upon this Mrs. Wornock, when I am a
stranger in the land?" argued his mother. "If there is any question of
calling, it is Mrs. Wornock who must call upon me."
"Ah, but this lady is an exception to all rules, mother. She calls upon
hardly anybody, and she has begged me to go and see her, and I feel a
kind of hesitation in going alone--a second time."
He stopped in sudden embarrassment. He did not wish to tell his mother
about the fainting-fit, though he had described the thing freely to
Mrs. Mornington. He had thought more seriously of the circumstance
since that conversation, and he was inclined to attach more importance
to it now than at that time.
"I think you would be interested in Mrs. Wornock, mother," he urged,
after a pause, during which Lady Emily had been pacing the room from
window to wall with the idea of suggesting a bay to be thrown out
where there was now only a flat French casement.
"Allan, you alarm me. I think you must be in love with this eccentric
widow. You told me she was very rich, didn't you? It might not be a bad
match for you."
"Perhaps not, if Mrs. Wornock had any penchant for me; and if I wanted
a wife old enough to be my mother. Do you know that the lady has a son
as old as I am?"
He reddened at the thought of that son, whose likeness to Beresford
Carew was startling enough to surprise Lady Emily, and might possibly
occasion unpleasant suspicions. And yet accidental likenesses are so
common in this world that it would be weak to be scared by such a
resemblance.
Would he be wise in taking his mother to Discombe? Perhaps not. He had
made up his mind to take her there, wisely or foolishly. He wanted to
bring her plain common sense to bear upon Mrs. Wornock's fantastic
temperament.
"My mother is the shrewdest woman I know," he told himself. "She will
read Mrs. Wornock's character much better than I can."
Lady Emily was the soul of good nature, and was particularly free from
the trammels of conventionality; so, when she found her son had the
matter at heart, she waived all question of the caller and the called
upon, and allowed Allan to drive her to Discombe on the afternoon after
her arrival at Beechhurst; and the drive and the approach to the Manor
were very agreeable to her.
"You are really prettier hereabouts than we are in Suffolk," she said
condescendingly; "but you have not our wide expanse of field and
meadow, our open horizon. Those high downs have a cramping effect on
your landscape--they narrow your outlook, and shut you in too much.
Your sunsets must be very poor, in a broken-up country like this."
The weather was more sultry than on Allan's previous visit. Summer had
ripened, the roses were in bloom, and the last purple petal had fallen
in the rhododendron jungle through which they drove to the Manor House.
Mrs. Wornock was at home. Vain for the footman to deny it, even had he
been so minded, for the deep-toned music of the organ was pealing along
the corridor. The chords which begin Beethoven's Funeral March for the
Burial of a Hero crashed out, solemnly and slowly, as Lady Emily and
her son approached the music-room; and when, at the opening of the
door, the player stopped suddenly, the silence was more startling than
the music had been.
Startling, too, to see the fragile form of the player, and the
semi-transparent hands which had produced that volume of sound.
"I had no idea you were so fine a musician, Mrs. Wornock," Lady Emily
said graciously, after the introduction had been got over, the lady of
Discombe standing before her timidly in the broad sunlight from the
open window, so fragile, so youthful-looking, so unlike the mistress
of a great house, and the chief personage in a rustic parish. "My son
was eloquent in your praise, but he forgot to tell me of your musical
talent."
"I don't think I have much talent," answered Mrs. Wornock,
hesitatingly. "I am very fond of music--that is all."
"There is a great deal in that ALL. I wish my love of music--and Allan
knows I prefer a good concert to any other form of entertainment--would
enable me to play as you do, for then I could take the place of the
stupidest organist in England at our parish church."
Lady Emily was making conversation, seeing that Mrs. Wornock's lips
were mute and dry, as if she were absolutely speechless from fright.
A most extraordinary woman, thought Lady Emily, shy to a degree that
bordered on lunacy.
The talk had all to be done by Allan and his mother, since Mrs.
Wornock's share in it was hardly more than monosyllabic. She assented
to everything they said--she contradicted herself over and over again
about the weather, and about the distinguishing features of the
surrounding country. She agreed with Lady Emily that the hills spoiled
the landscape; she assented to Allan's protestation that the hills
were the chief charm of the neighbourhood. She rang for tea, and when
the servants had brought tables and tray and tea-kettle, she sat as in
a dream for ever so long before she became conscious that the things
were there, and that she had a duty to perform. Then she filled the
cups with tremulous hands, and allowed Allan to help her through the
simplest details.
Her obvious distress strengthened Allan's suspicions. There must be
some mystery behind all this embarrassment. Mrs. Wornock could hardly
behave in this way to every stranger who called upon her. Of all women
living no one was less calculated to inspire awe than Lady Emily Carew.
Good humour was writ large upon her open countenance. The milk of human
kindness gave softness to her speech. She was full of consideration for
others.
Distracted by the music of the organ, Lady Emily had not even glanced
at the Millais portrait which faced her as she walked along the
corridor. It was, therefore, with unmixed astonishment that she
observed a photograph on an easel conspicuous on a distant table--a
photograph which she took to be the likeness of her son.
"I see you have given Mrs. Wornock your photo, Allan," she said. "That
is more than you have done for me since you were at the University."
"Go and look at the photo, mother, and you will see I have not been so
wanting in filial duty."
Lady Emily rose and went over to the table in the furthermost window.
"No, I see it is another face; but there is a wonderful look of you.
Pray who is this nice-looking young man, Mrs. Wornock? I may call him
nice-looking with a good grace, since he is not my son. His features
are more refined than Allan's. The modelling of the face is more
delicate."
"That is my son's portrait," answered Mrs. Wornock, "and it is thought
a good likeness. He is like Mr. Carew, is he not? Almost startlingly
like; but the resemblance is less striking in the picture than in the
living face. It is in expression that the two faces are alike."
"I begin to understand why you are interested in my son," said Lady
Emily, smiling down at the face on the easel. "The two young men might
be brothers. Pray how old is this young gentleman?"
"He will be six and twenty in August."
"And Allan was twenty-five last March. And is Mr. Wornock an only son,
like my Allan?"
"Yes. I have only him. When he is away, I am quite alone--except for my
organ and piano. I try sometimes to think they are both alive."
"What a pity you have no daughter! A place like this looks as if it
wanted a daughter. But you and I are in the same desolate condition.
Allan is all I have--and my white farm."
"Mother, why not my white farm and Allan?" said her son laughingly. "If
you knew more of my mother, Mrs. Wornock, if you knew her in Suffolk,
you would be very likely to think the farm first and not second in her
dear love. Perhaps you, too, are interested in farming."
Mrs. Wornock smiled a gentle negative, and gave a glance at the triple
keyboard yonder, which was eloquent of meaning. A glance which seemed
to ask, "Who could waste time upon cowhouse and poultry-yard when all
the master-spirits of harmony are offering their mysteries to the
faithful student?"
* * * * *
"Well, mother, how do you like the mistress of Discombe?" asked Allan,
as they drove homeward.
"She is very refined--rather graceful--dreadfully shy," answered his
mother, musingly; "and I hope you won't be angry with me, Allan, if I
add that she seems to me half an idiot."
"You saw her to-day at a disadvantage," said Allan, and then lapsed
into meditative silence.
Had he not also seen this strange woman at a disadvantage when she
fainted at the mention of his father's name--the name his father
had borne in youth, not the name by which he was known now? Her
fainting-fit might have had no significance in his eyes if it had not
followed upon her eager questioning about his father. And whatever
suspicions had been excited by that first visit were intensified by
Mrs. Wornock's manner in the presence of Lady Emily. Such obvious
embarrassment--a shyness so much more marked than that with which she
had received him on his first visit--could hardly exist without a
deeper cause than solitary habits or nervous temperament.
The likeness between Geoffrey Wornock and himself might have meant no
more than the likeness between Mr. Drummond and Sir Robert Peel; but
that likeness, taken in conjunction with Mrs. Wornock's extraordinary
interest in his father, and most noticeable embarrassment in receiving
his mother, might mean a great deal--might mean, indeed, that the cloud
upon his father's life was the shadow of a lifelong remorse, the dark
memory of sin and sorrow. It might be that within the years preceding
his marriage George Beresford had been involved in a guilty intrigue
with Mr. Wornock's young wife.
To believe this was to think very badly of this gentle creature, who
used the advantages of wealth and position with such modest restraint,
whose only delight in life was in one of the most exalted of life's
pleasures. To believe this was to think Mrs. Wornock a false and
ungrateful wife to a generous husband; and it was to believe George
Beresford a vulgar seducer.
If there is one fallacy to which the non-legal mind is more prone
than another it is its belief in its power to estimate the value of
circumstantial evidence. Allan Carew tried his father and Mrs. Wornock
by the evidence of circumstances, and he found them guilty.
"My mother shall never cross that woman's threshold again!" he decided,
angry with himself for having taken Lady Emily to Discombe.
CHAPTER V.
MORE NEW-COMERS.
Allan recalled the story which Mrs. Mornington had told him of
Mr. Wornock's marriage, and the mysterious birth of his son and
heir--mysterious in that it was a strange thing for an English
gentleman with a fine estate to carry off his wife to a foreign country
before the birth of her first child, and to remain an exile from home
and property until his son was three years old. Mystery of some kind--a
secret sorrow or a secret shame--must have been at the root of conduct
so unusual; and might not that secret include the story of the young
wife's sin?
Allan Carew had heard of husbands so beneficent as to forgive that sin
which to the mind of the average man lies beyond reach of pardon;
husbands who have taken back runaway wives, and set the fallen idol
once again in the temple of home-life; husbands who, knowing themselves
old, ugly, and unlovable, have palliated and pardoned the passionate
impulses of undisciplined girlhood, the sin in which there has been
more of romantic folly than of profligate inclination; husbands who
have asked themselves whether _they_ were not the darker sinners
in having possessed themselves of creatures so lovely and so frail, so
unadapted for a passionless, workaday union with grey hairs and old
age. It might be, Allan thought, that Mr. Wornock was one of these,
and that he had conveyed his young wife away from the scene of her sin
and the influence of her betrayer, and had hidden her shame and his
dishonour in that quiet valley among the snow-peaks and the glaciers.
But if Mrs. Wornock had so sinned in the early days of her married life
there must be people at Matcham who would remember the lover's presence
at Discombe, even although his real character had been undiscovered by
the searching eyes of village censors.
Lady Emily went back to her husband and her farm after a week at
Beechhurst--a pleasant and busy week, in which the mother's experience
and good sense had been brought to bear upon all the details of the
son's household and domestic possessions--plate and linen, glass and
china, books and ornaments.
"If it were not for your smoking-room, or drawing-room, or whatever you
may be pleased to call it, your house would be obviously Philistine,"
said Lady Emily; "but that is a really fine room, and there are some
pretty things in it."
"Some pretty things? Yes, there are a few," answered Allan, laughing
at her tone of patronage. "I was offered five hundred pounds for that
piece of tapestry which hangs in front of the conservatory doors by
a man who thinks himself a judge of such things. The room is full of
treasures from the Summer Palace."
"My brother must have looted in a most audacious manner!"
"No, he bought the things afterwards--mostly from the French sailors,
who were licensed to steal or destroy. I believe the bronzes, and
porcelain, and ivories, and embroideries that the admiral bought for
a few hundreds are worth as many thousands. But there they are, and I
must be very hard up before I disturb them."
* * * * *
Allan called upon Mrs. Mornington the day after his mother's departure,
and was lucky enough to find that lady at home and alone.
She was sitting in her verandah, sewing, with a large basket of plain
work on the ground beside her, and her scissors and other implements on
a wicker-table in front of her. She had a trellis covered with climbing
roses for a background, and a sunny lawn, a sunk fence, and a paddock
dotted with Jersey cows for her outlook.
"I'm at work for the Guild," she said, apologetically, after shaking
hands with Allan, and she went on herring-boning a flannel waistcoat;
a waistcoat of that stout flannel which is supposed to have a kind of
affinity with the skin of the agricultural labourer, although it can be
worn comfortably by no other class.
Allan knew nothing about the Guild, but was accustomed to see Mrs.
Mornington's superfluous energy expending itself in some kind of
needlework. He seated himself in the comfortable armchair to which she
invited him, and prepared himself for a long talk.
Of course he could not begin at once upon the subject of Mrs. Wornock.
That would have to be introduced casually. He talked about his mother,
and her regret at not having been able to stay till the following week,
when Mrs. Mornington was to give a small dance, to which Lady Emily and
her son had been invited.
"She can't be as sorry as I am, or she'd have managed to stay," replied
Mrs. Mornington, in her blunt style.
"She has my father to think of. She is never long away from him."
"Why don't he come too?"
"I hope to get him for a week or so before the summer is over. He
promises to come and look at my surroundings; but he is very much of a
recluse. He lives in his library."
"I dare say he will contrive to come when Philip and I are away on our
August holiday. We always take a month on the Continent just to keep
us in touch with the outside world, and to remind us that the earth
doesn't end on the other side of Salisbury. Do you know why I am giving
this dance?"
"I am sure it is from a conscientious motive--to pay your debts. I find
that most ladies' hospitalities are founded upon a system of exchange
and barter, 'cutlet for cutlet,' as Lady Londonderry called it."
"It is very rude of you to say that--as if women had no real
hospitality! No, Mr. Carew, I owe no one anything in the dancing line;
and I am not making one evening party pay for a whole year's dinners.
I have known that done, I assure you. No, I am turning my house out
of windows, and making poor Phil utterly miserable, for the sake of a
certain young half-French niece of mine, who is coming to live in this
neighbourhood with my brother Bob, her thoroughly English father."
"You mean General Vincent? Some one told me that he was related to you."
"Related? I should think he was related to me! He used to pull my
hair--we wore long plaits in those days, don't you know--with a
ferocity only possible in an elder brother. Poor dear old Bob! I am
monstrously pleased at the idea of having him near me in our old
age. He has been tossed and beaten about the world for the last
thirty years, at home and abroad, and now he is to enjoy enforced
leisure, and the noble income which our country bestows upon a retired
lieutenant-general. He has a little money of his own, fortunately, and
a little more from his wife; so he will be able to live comfortably at
Marsh House--in a very quiet, unpretentious way, _bien entendu_."
"He is a widower, I conclude?"
"Yes; his pretty French wife died fifteen years ago. He met her in
Canada, but she was a Parisian _pur sang_, and of a very good
family. She had gone to Montreal with her mother, to visit some
relations--uncle, cousin, or what-not. It was a very happy marriage,
and Suzette is a very charming girl. She is a Papist"--with a faint
sigh--"which, of course, is a pity. But even in spite of that, she is a
very sweet girl."
"Worthy that you should turn your house out of window in order to
introduce her to the neighbourhood in the pleasantest possible manner,"
said Allan. "My greenhouse is only a bachelor's idea of glass, but any
flowers there shall be sent to add to your decorations--at least, if
you don't despise such poor aid."
"How truly nice of you! Every flower will be useful. I want to make the
rooms pretty, since nothing can make them spacious. Ah, if I had only
the Manor House now--those noble rooms of which Mrs. Wornock makes so
little use!"
Allan seized his opportunity.
"Mrs. Wornock is the most singular woman I ever met!" he exclaimed
quickly, lest Mrs. Mornington should diverge to another subject. "I
took my mother to call upon her----"
"Had she called upon Lady Emily?" asked Mrs. Mornington, surprised.
"No. It was altogether out of order, my mother told me; but I rather
insisted upon her going to Discombe. I wanted her to see Mrs. Wornock;
and I must say that lady's manner was calculated to excite wonder
rather than admiration. I never saw a woman of mature years receive
a visitor so awkwardly. Her shyness would have been remarkable in a
bread-and-butter miss just escaped from the schoolroom."
"That is so like Mrs. Wornock. The ways of society are a foreign
language to her. Had you taken her a German organist with long hair,
or a spiritualist, or an esoteric Buddhist, she would have received him
with open arms--she would have been _simpatica_ to the highest
degree, and would have impressed him with the idea of a sensitive
nature and a temperament akin to genius, while I dare say Lady Emily
thought her a fool."
"She certainly did not give the lady credit for superior intelligence."
"Of course not. She has not even average intelligence in the affairs
of social life. She has lived all these years at Discombe--she
might be in touch with some of the best people in the county--and
she has learnt nothing, except to play the organ. I believe she has
toiled unremittingly at _that_," concluded Mrs. Mornington,
contemptuously.
"I have half forgotten what you told me about her in the first
instance. I think you spoke of a mystery in her early life."
"The only mystery was that old Wornock should have married her, and
that he should have told us nothing about her belongings. Had she been
a lady, we must have heard something about her people in the last five
and twenty years; and yet there is a refinement about her which makes
me think she could not have sprung from the gutter."
"The gutter! No, indeed! She has an air of exceptional refinement.
I should take her to be the offspring of an effete race--a
crystallization. In her early married life, when she and Mr. Wornock
were living together at Discombe, she had friends, I presume. They must
have had visitors occasionally--a house-party?"
"Not they. You must remember that it was not more than six months after
Mr. Wornock brought his young wife home when he took her away again----"
"But in the interim," interrupted Allan, eagerly, "they must have had
visitors in the house! He would be proud to exhibit his pretty young
wife. There must have been men-friends of his coming and going during
that time."
"I think not. He was a dry chip; and I don't think he had made many
friends in the forty years he had reigned at Discombe. I never heard
of any one staying in the house, either at that time or previously.
He was hospitable in a casual way to the neighbourhood while he was
a bachelor--gave a hunt breakfast every winter, and a good many
dinners--but he was not a man to make friends. He was an ardent
politician and an ardent Radical, and would have quarrelled with any
one who wasn't of his way of thinking."
A blank here. No hint of a too-frequent visitor, of one figure standing
out against the quiet background of home-life, of one person whose
coming and going had been marked enough to attract attention.
Allan breathed more freely. It was no prurient curiosity which had led
him to pry into the secrets of the past. He wanted to know the truth;
yet it would have been agony to him to discover anything that would
lessen his reverent admiration for his father, or his belief in his
father's honour and high principle. Sitting idle in the sunshine beside
Mrs. Mornington, he tried to think that there might be nothing more
than eccentricity in Mrs. Wornock's conduct, no indication of a dark
secret in her fainting-fit, or in her embarrassed manner during his
mother's visit.
Mrs. Mornington went back to the subject of her dance--her niece, her
brother, his income, his establishment, and the how much or how little
he could afford to spend. She lamented the dearth of dancing men.
"Both my boys are away," she said, "Luke with his regiment in Burmah,
Fred in London. _He_ might run down for the evening if he liked;
but you know what young men are. Well, perhaps you are more civilized
than Frederick. He pretends to hate dancing-parties; yet, when we spent
a winter at Cannes, he was at a ball nearly every night. He despises my
poor little dance."
"I am sure your little dance will be delightful."
"I hope it will not be dull. I am straining every nerve to make it a
success. I shall have the house full of nice young people, and I shall
have decent music. Only four men, but they will be very good men, and
four will make quite enough noise in my poor little rooms."
Mrs. Mornington's "poor little rooms" included a drawing-room thirty
feet long, opening into a spacious conservatory. There was a wide bay
at the end of the room which would accommodate the grand piano and
the four musicians. Allan had to make a tour of inspection with the
mistress of the house before he left, and to express his approval of
her arrangements.
"There will be a comfortable old-fashioned sit-down supper," she said
finally. "I have asked a good many middle-aged people, and there will
be nothing for _them_ to do but eat."
CHAPTER VI.
LIKE THE MOTH TO THE FLAME.
A small dance in a bright airy country house on a balmy summer evening
is about as pleasant a form of entertainment as can be offered to the
youthful mind not satiated by metropolitan entertainments, by balls
in Park Lane, where the flowers alone cost the price of an elderly
spinster's annuity, Bachelors' balls, and Guards' balls, American balls
in Carlton Gardens, patrician balls in grand old London houses, built
in the days when rank was as much apart from the herd and the newly
rich as royalty; when rank and royalty moved hand-in-hand on a plateau
of privilege and splendour as high above the commonality as Madrid is
above the sea.
Matcham, which gave itself the airs common to all village communities,
pretended to make very light of Mrs. Mornington's dance; a summer
dance, when everybody worth meeting was, or ought to be, in London.
Happily for Mrs. Mornington, the inhabitants of Matcham were a
stay-at-home race--who had neither money nor enterprise for much
gadding. To go to Swanage or Budleigh Salterton for a month or so while
the leaves were falling was the boldest flight that Matcham people
cared about.
There was always so much to do at home--golf, tennis, shooting,
hunting, falconry, fishing for the enthusiasts of rod and line, and
one's garden and stable all the year round, needing the eye of master
and mistress. Except for the absence of the great shipbuilder's family,
at Hillerby Height, three miles on the other side of Salisbury, the
circle of Matcham society was complete, and the answers to Mrs.
Mornington's cards were all acceptances.
Allan went cheerfully enough to the party, but he did not go very
early, and he had something of the feeling which most young men
entertain, or affect, about dances, the feeling that he was sacrificing
himself at the shrine of friendship. He danced well, and he did not
dislike dancing--liked it, indeed, when blest with a good partner; but
it is not often that a young man can escape the chances of partners
that are not altogether good, and Allan felt very doubtful as to the
dancing capacities of Matcham. Those healthy, out-of-door young women,
who went to about half a dozen dances in a year, would hardly waltz
well enough to make waltzing anything but toil and weariness.
He approached the Grove in that state of placid indifference with
which a man generally goes to meet his destiny. He looks back in the
after-time, and remembers that equable frame of mind, hoping nothing,
expecting nothing, content with his lot in life, and in no wise eager
to question or forestall fate--
"Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi,
Finem di dederint."
The Grove was a long, low stuccoed house, built at the beginning of
the century, a house spread over a considerable extent of ground.
To-night--with lights and flowers, and all the doors and windows
open to the summer gloom, and lace draperies where doors had been,
and white-gowned girls moving to and fro, and the sound of a Strauss
waltz mixing with the voices of the idlers sitting in the hall--Mrs.
Mornington's house was as pretty as a fairy palace, and as much unlike
itself in its workaday guise.
Mrs. Mornington, in black lace and diamonds, with a black ostrich fan,
loomed with commanding bulk on the threshold of the dancing-room. She
wanted no steward, no master of the ceremonies to help her. Alone she
did it! Mr. Mornington walked about and pretended to be useful; but it
was Mrs. Mornington who did everything. She received the guests, she
introduced the few strange young men to the many local young ladies. As
for the local young men, whom she had seen grow up from sailor suits
and mud-pies to pink coats which marked them members of the South Sarum
Hunt, her dominion over these was absolute. She drove them about with
threatening movements of her large black fan. She would not allow them
rest or respite, would not let them hang together in corners to discuss
the hunters they were summering, or the hunters they were thinking of
buying, or the probable changes in the management of the kennels, or
any other subject dear to the minds of rustic youth.
"You have come here to dance, Billy Walcott, and not to talk of those
wretched old screws of yours," said Mrs. Mornington. "You can have
that all out in the saddle-room to-morrow when you are smoking with
your grooms. Let me look at your programme, Sidney. Not half full, I
declare. Now go over to Miss Rycroft this instant, and engage her for
the next waltz."
"Come now, Mrs. Mornington, that's rather too rough on me. A man mayn't
marry his grandmother; and surely there's some kind of law to forbid
his dancing with a woman who looks like his great-aunt."
"Sidney, love, to oblige me. The dear old thing has gone to the expense
of a new frock----"
"She might have bought a little more stuff while she was about it,"
murmured the youth.
"On purpose for my dance, and _somebody_ must give her a waltz.
Come, boys, who shall it be?"
"Let's go into the garden and toss up," said Sidney Heathfield; but
the other youths protested that they were engaged for every dance, and
Sidney, who had come late, and whose programme was only half full, had
to submit.
"I'll do it, Mrs. Mornington," he said, with serio-comic resignation,
"on condition you get me a dance with Miss Vincent afterwards."
"If I do, she will have to cheat somebody else. Her programme was
full a quarter of an hour after she came into the room. My niece is a
success."
Young Heathfield made his way to a distant bench, where an elderly
young lady of expansive figure, set off by a pink-gauze frock, had been
sitting for an hour and a half, smiling blandly upon her friends and
acquaintance, with a growing sense of despair.
What had come over the young men of the present generation, when good
dancers were allowed to sit partnerless and forlorn? It all came of the
absence of men of standing and mature age at evening parties. Sensible
men were so disgusted by the slang and boldness of chits just escaped
from the schoolroom that they held themselves aloof, and ball-rooms
were given over to boys and girls, and to romping galops and kitchen
lancers.
Here was one sensible boy at least, thought poor Miss Rycroft, as
Sidney Heathfield, tall, slim, studiously correct, stood looking
solemnly down upon her, asking for the next waltz. Little did Miss
Rycroft dream of the pressure which had been put upon the youth by
yonder matron, whose voice was now heard loud and lively on the other
side of the lace curtains.
Mrs. Mornington was talking to Allan.
"How horribly late you are, Mr. Carew. You don't deserve to find one
nice girl disengaged."
"Even if I don't, I know one nice woman with whom I would as soon sit
and talk common sense as dance with the prettiest girl in Matcham."
"If you mean me," said Mrs. Mornington, "there will be no commonsense
talk for you and me to-night. I have all these young men to keep in
order. Now, Billy," suddenly attacking Mr. Walcott, who was talking
mysteriously to a bosom friend about some one or something that was
seven off, with capped hocks, but a splendid lepper, "Billy, haven't I
told you that you were here to dance, not to talk stables? There's Miss
Forlander, the girl from Torquay, who plays golf so well, sitting like
a statue next Mrs. Paddington Brown."
"Oh, Mrs. Mornington," groaned the youth, as he strolled off, "what a
life you lead us! I hope you don't call this hospitality."
"Am I not at least to be introduced to Miss Vincent, the heroine of the
evening?" asked Allan.
"The heroine of the evening is behaving very badly," said Mrs.
Mornington. "I don't think I'll ever give a summer dance again. I wish
it had rained cats and dogs. Look at the dancing-room, half empty.
Those young people are all meandering about the garden, picking my
finest roses, I dare say, just to tear them to pieces in the game of
'he loves me, loves me not.'"
"What better use could be made of a garden and roses? As long as you
have only the true lovers, and no Mephistopheles or Martha, your garden
is another Eden. But I must insist upon being introduced to Miss
Vincent before the evening is over."
"I will do my best," said Mrs. Mornington, and then in a lower voice
she told him that she had ordered her niece to keep a late number open
for his name. "She is a very nice girl, and I think you are a nice
young man, and I should like you to know each other," concluded the
lady with her bluff straightforwardness.
Mr. Mornington and an elderly stranger, with iron-grey hair and
iron-grey moustache, came across the hall at this moment.
"Ah, here is my brother!" cried Mrs. Mornington. "Robert, I want
to introduce Mr. Carew to you. He is a new neighbour, but a great
favourite of mine."
Allan stopped in the hall for about a quarter of an hour talking to
General Vincent and Mr. Mornington, and then he, too, was called to
order by his hostess, and was marched into the dancing-room to be
introduced to a Dresden-china young lady, pink and white and blue-eyed,
like Saxony porcelain, who had been brought by somebody, and who was a
stranger in the land.
He waltzed with this young creature, who was pretty and daintily
dressed, and who asked him various questions about Salisbury Cathedral
and Stonehenge, evidently with the idea that she was adapting her
conversation to the locality. When the dance was over, she refused
his offer of an ice, and suggested a turn in the garden; so Allan
found himself among the meanderers under the moonlit sky; but there
was no plucking of roses or murmuring of "Loves me not, loves me,
loves me not," no thought of Gretchen's impassioned love-dream as the
Dresden-china young lady and he promenaded solemnly up and down the
broad gravel terrace in front of the open windows, still conversing
sagely about Salisbury Cathedral and the decoration of the Chapter
House.
While parading slowly up and down, Allan found his attention wandering
every now and then from the young lady at his side to another young
lady who passed and repassed with an elderly cavalier. A tall, slim
young lady, with black hair and eyes, a pale brunette complexion, and
an elegant simplicity of dress and _chevelure_ which Allan at
once recognized as Parisian. No English girl, he thought, ever had
that air of being more plainly dressed than other girls, and yet more
distinguished and fashionable. He had seen no frock like this girl's
frock, but he felt assured that she was dressed in that Parisian
fashion which is said to antedate London fashion by a twelvemonth.
She was in white from head to foot, and her gown was made of some
dead-white fabric which combined the solidity of satin with the soft
suppleness of gauze. The bodice was rather short-waisted, and the young
lady wore a broad satin belt clasped with a diamond buckle, which
flashed with many coloured gleams in the moonlight, as she passed
to and fro; and whereas most young women at that time displayed a
prodigious length of arm broken only by a narrow shoulder-strap, this
young lady wore large puffed sleeves which recalled the portraits of
Sir Thomas Lawrence. The large puffed sleeves became common enough a
year later, but they were unknown in Wiltshire when Mrs. Mornington
gave her dance. The damsel's silky black hair was coiled with artistic
simplicity at the back of the prettily shaped head, while a cloud of
little careless curls clustered above the broad, intelligent forehead.
She was talking gaily with her companion, Colonel Fordingbridge, a
retired engineer, settled for some fifteen years in the outskirts of
Matcham, and an intimate friend of Mr. Mornington's. He was telling
her about the neighbourhood, holding it up to contempt and ridicule
in a good-natured way which implied that, after all, it was the best
neighbourhood in the world.
"It suits an old fellow like me," Allan heard him say; "plenty of sport
of a mildish order. Huntin', fishin', shootin', hawkin', and golf."
"Hawking!" cried the young lady. "Do you really mean that? I thought
there were no more hawks left in the world. Why, it sounds like the
Middle Ages."
"Yes, and I'm afraid you'll say it looks like the Middle Ages when you
see a flight on the hills near Matcham. The members of the Falconry
Club in this neighbourhood are not all boys."
"But the hawks!" exclaimed she. "Where--where can one see them?"
"Have you really hawks?" inquired Allan's young lady, who had exhausted
the Chapter House, and who caught eagerly at another local subject.
"How utterly delightful! Do you go out with them very often?"
"I blush to admit that I have not even seen them, though I know there
are such birds kept in the neighbourhood. I have even been invited
to become a member of the society, and am seriously thinking about
offering myself for election."
Seriously thinking since two minutes ago, be it understood, for until
he caught that speech from the unknown young lady he had hardly given
falconry a thought.
She and her companion had disappeared when he and his porcelain lady
turned at the end of the terrace.
"Do you know that girl who was talking about the hawks?" he asked.
"Yes, I have been introduced to her. She is the girl of the house."
"I am afraid you are missing a dance," said Allan, with grave concern.
"We had better go in, had we not?"
"Yes, I fear I am behaving badly to somebody; but it is so much nicer
here than in those hot rooms."
"Infinitely preferable; but one has a duty to one's neighbour."
They met a youth in quest of the porcelain girl.
"Oh, Miss Mercer, how could you desert me so long? Our waltz is half
over!"
Allan breathed more freely, having handed over Miss Mercer. He made
his way quickly to the hall where Mrs. Mornington was still on
guard, receiving the latest comers, sending the first batch into the
supper-room, and dictating to everybody.
"I shall not leave your elbow till you have introduced me to Miss
Vincent," he said, planting himself near his hostess.
"If you don't take care, you will have to give me some supper," replied
she, "I am beginning to feel sinking. And I think it would be a good
plan for me to sup early in order to see that things are as they should
be."
Allan's heart also began to sink. He knew what it meant to take a
matron in to supper; the leisurely discussion of salmon and cutlets,
the half-bottle of champagne, the gossip, lasting half an hour at the
least. And while he was ministering to Mrs. Mornington what chance
would he have of becoming acquainted with Mrs. Mornington's niece?
"I should be proud to be so honoured; but think how many persons of
greater age and dignity you will offend. Colonel Fordingbridge, for
instance, such an old friend."
"Colonel Fordingbridge has just gone in with my niece."
"Oh, in that case, let me have the honour," exclaimed Allan eagerly,
almost dragging Mrs. Mornington towards the supper-room. "I should not
like to have offended dear old Fordingbridge."
"We may get seats at their table, perhaps. I told Suzette to go to one
of the cosy little tables at the end of the room."
Suzette! what a coquettish, enchanting name! He pushed past the long
table where two rows of people were talking, laughing, gobbling, as
if they never dined and had hardly tasted food for a week. He pushed
on to the end of the room where, on each side of the fireplace, now a
mass of golden lilies and palms, Mrs. Mornington had found space for a
small round table--a table which just held four people snugly, if not
commodiously.
One of these tables had been made to accommodate six; the other had
just been left by the first batch of supper-eaters. Miss Vincent and
Colonel Fordingbridge were standing near while a servant re-arranged
the table.
"That's lucky," said Mrs. Mornington. "Suzette, I want to introduce my
friend Mr. Carew to you--Mr. Carew--Miss Vincent. And after supper he
can take you to your father, whom I haven't seen for the last hour."
"I am afraid he has gone home," replied the young lady, after
smilingly accepting the introduction. "I heard him ask Mrs.
Fordingbridge to take care of me if he should feel tired and be obliged
to go home. He can't bear being up late at night."
"No wonder, when he is out and about at daybreak!"
"The mornings are so nice," said Suzette.
"Yes, for people like you, who can do without sleep; people who have
quicksilver in their veins."
"One learns to be fond of the early morning in India," explained
Suzette.
"Because every other part of the day is intolerable," said Colonel
Fordingbridge.
They were seated by this time, and Mrs. Mornington was sipping her
first glass of champagne with an air of supreme content, while Allan
helped her to lobster mayonnaise. Suzette was on his other side; and
even while ministering to the elder lady his looks and his thoughts
were on the younger.
How pretty she was, and how interesting. It seemed to him that he had
never cared for English beauty; the commonplace pinkness and whiteness,
chubby cheeks, blunt noses, cherry lips. Those delicate features,
that pale dark skin, those brilliant dark eyes and small white teeth
flashing upon him now and then as she smiled, with the most bewitching
mouth--a mouth that could express volumes in a smile, or by a pouting
movement of the flexible lips.
Allan and she were good friends in about five minutes. He was
questioning and she answering. Surely, surely she did not like India as
well as England--a life of exile--a life under torrid skies? Surely,
surely, yes. There were a hundred things that she loved in India; those
three years of her life in the North-West Provinces had been years in
fairyland.
"It must have been because you were worshipped," he said. "You lived
upon adulation. I'm afraid when a young lady is happy in India, it
means that she is not altogether innocent of vanity."
"It is very unkind of you to say that. How sorry you must feel when I
tell you that the happiest half-year I spent in India was when father
was road-making, and the only other officer in camp was a fat, married
major--an immense major, as big as this table."
"And you were happy! How?"
"In all manner of ways; riding, rambling, botanizing, sketching, and
looking after father."
"My niece is a Miss Crichton. She has all the accomplishments," said
Mrs. Mornington.
"Oh, aunt! that is a dreadful character to give me. It means that I do
nothing well!"
Allan had asked her for a dance, and there had been an examination of
her programme, which showed only one blank.
"Auntie told me to keep that waltz," she said. "I don't know why."
"I do. It was kept for me. I am the favoured one."
"But why?" she asked naïvely. "Why you more than any one else?"
"Who can say? Will you call me vain if I tell you that I think I am a
favourite with your aunt?"
She looked at him laughingly, with a glance that asked a question.
"You don't see any reason why I should be preferred," said Allan,
interpreting her look; "but remember there never is any reason for such
preferences. Clever women are full of prejudices."
He could imagine a reason which he would not have had Suzette suspect
for worlds. Perhaps among the available young men in Mrs. Mornington's
circle he was the best placed, with an ample income in the present, and
an estate that must be his in the future, the best placed of all except
the young master of Discombe Manor; and the Lord of Discombe was away,
while he, Allan, was on the spot.
The thought of Geoffrey Wornock suggested a question. They had left the
little table to Mrs. Mornington and Colonel Fordingbridge, who were
able to take care of each other. Allan and Miss Vincent were going to
the dancing-room, not by the nearest way, but through a French window
into the garden.
"Shall we take a little turn before we go back to the house?"
"I should like it of all things."
"And you are not afraid of catching cold?"
"On such a night as this? Why, in the hills I lived out-of-doors!"
"You have been at Matcham before, I suppose!"
"Yes, father and I stayed here with auntie once upon a time."
"Long ago?"
"Ages ago, when I wore short petticoats and wasn't allowed late dinner."
"Heartless tyranny!"
"Wasn't it? I didn't know what to do with myself in the long summer
evenings. I used to roam about this garden till I was tired, and then
I would go and look in at the dining-room window where they were all
sitting at dessert, and auntie would wave me away, 'Go and play,
child.' Play, indeed! Even the gardeners had gone home, and the dogs
were shut up for the night. I was actually glad when it was nine
o'clock and bedtime."
"Poor victim of middle-aged egotism."
"Dear auntie! She is so good! But people don't understand children.
They forget what their own feelings were when they were little."
"Alas, yes! A child is as great a mystery to me to-day as if I had been
born at one and twenty. I can't even understand or interest myself in
a lad of fifteen. He seems such an incongruous, unnecessary creature,
stupid, lumbering, in everybody's way. I can't realize the fact that he
will ever get any better. He is there, complete in himself, a being of
a race apart. I should feel insulted if any one were to tell me I had
ever been like him."
"How true that is!" assented Suzette, gaily. "I have felt just the same
about girls. I only began to wear my hair in a knot three years ago,
and yet there seems hardly one point of union between me and a girl
with her hair down her back. I have got beyond her, as somebody says.
How sad that one should always be getting beyond things! Father detests
India--talks only of the climate--while to me it was all enchantment.
Perhaps if I were to go back to the East, a few years hence, I should
hate it."
"Very likely. Going back is always a mistake."
There was nothing exalted or out of the common in their talk, but at
least there was sympathy in it all, and they were telling each other
their thoughts as freely as if they had been friends of long years. It
was very different from being obliged to talk of Salisbury Cathedral,
and theorize on the history of Stonehenge. And then there was the
glamour of the garden and the moonlight; the mysterious light and shade
of shrubbery walks; the blackness of the cedars that spread a deeper
dark across the lawn. Mrs. Mornington had taken care to choose a night
when the midsummer moon should be at the full, and she had abstained
from cockneyfying the garden with artificial light, from those fairy
lamps or Chinese lanterns which are well enough within the narrow
limits of a suburban garden, but which could only vulgarize grounds
that had something of forestial beauty.
"I am glad you are almost a stranger to Matcham, Miss Vincent," said
Allan, after the first brief pause in their talk.
"Why?"
"Because it is such a pleasure to meet some one who does not know
Geoffrey Wornock."
"And pray who is Geoffrey Wornock?"
"Ah, how delightful, how refreshing it is to hear that question! Miss
Vincent, I am your devoted friend from this moment. Your friend, did I
say? I am your slave--command my allegiance in everything."
"Please be tranquil. What does it all mean?"
"Oh, forgive me! Know then that hitherto everybody I have met in this
place has greeted me by an expression of surprise at my resemblance
to one Geoffrey Wornock--happily now absent with his regiment in the
East. Nobody has taken any interest in me except on the score of
this likeness to the absent Wornock. My face has been criticized, my
features descanted upon one by one in my hearing. I have been informed
that it is in this or that feature, in this or that expression, the
likeness consists, while I naturally don't care twopence about the
likeness, or about Wornock. And to meet some one who doesn't know
my double, who will accept me for what I am individually!--oh, Miss
Vincent, we ought to be friends. Say that we may be friends."
"Please don't rush on in such a headlong fashion. You talk like the
girls at the convent, who wanted me to swear eternal friendship in the
first half-hour; and perhaps turned out to be very disagreeable girls
when one came to know them."
"I hope I shall not turn out disagreeable."
"I did not mean to be rude; but friendship is a serious thing. At
present I have no friend except father, and two girls with whom I have
kept up a correspondence since I left the Sacré Cœur. One lives at
Bournemouth and the other in Paris, so our friendship is dependent on
the post. I think we ought to go back to the dancing-room now. I have
to report myself to Mrs. Fordingbridge, and not to keep her later than
she may wish to stay."
Allan felt that he had been talking like a fool; that he had presumed
on the young lady's unconventional manner. She had talked to him
brightly and unrestrainedly; and he had been pushing and impertinent.
The moonlight, the garden, the pleasure of talking to a bright
vivacious girl had made him forget the respect due to the acquaintance
of an hour.
He was silent on the way back to the ballroom, silent and abashed; but
five minutes afterwards he was waltzing with Suzette, who was assuredly
the best waltzer of all that evening's partners, and he felt that he
was treading on air.
CHAPTER VII.
"O THE RARE SPRING-TIME!"
Allan called at the Grove two days after the dance--called at the
friendly hour when there was a certainty of afternoon tea, if Mrs.
Mornington were at home; and when he thought it likely that Miss
Vincent would be with her aunt.
"She will almost live at the Grove," he thought, as he walked towards
that comfortable mansion, which was nearly a mile from Beechhurst.
"Marsh House is so near. There is a path across the meadows by which
she can walk in dry weather. A girl living alone with her father will
naturally turn to her aunt for companionship, will take counsel with
her upon all household affairs, and will run in and out every day."
It was a disappointment, after having made up his mind in this way, to
see no sign of Suzette's presence in the drawing-room at the Grove.
Mrs. Mornington was sitting in the verandah with her inevitable
work-basket, just as he had found her a fortnight before, when her
brother's advent at Marsh House and the dance at the Grove were still
in the future.
She received him with her accustomed cordiality, but she did not ask
him what he thought of her niece, though he was dying to be questioned.
An unwonted shyness prevented his beginning the subject. He sat meekly
sustaining a conversation about the parish, the wrongs and rights of
the last clerical squabble, till his patience could hold out no longer.
"I hope General Vincent likes Matcham," he said at last, not daring to
touch nearer to the subject which absorbed his thoughts.
"Oh yes, _he_ likes the place well enough. He has lived his life,
and can amuse himself with his poultry-yard, and will potter about
with the hounds now and then when the cub-hunting begins. But I don't
know how it will suit _her_."
"You think Miss Vincent would prefer a livelier place?"
"Of course she would prefer it. The question is, will she put up with
this? She has never lived in an English village, though she has lived
in out-of-the-way places in India; but, then, that was camp life,
adventure, the sort of thing a girl likes. Her father idolizes her,
and has taken her about everywhere with him since she left the Sacré
Cœur at fourteen years of age. She has lived at Plymouth, at York, at
Lucknow. She has had enough adulation to turn a wiser head than hers."
"And yet--so far as a man may venture to judge within the compass of
an hour--I don't think her head has been turned," said Allan, growing
bolder.
"That's as may be. She has a clever little way of seeming wiser
than she is. The nuns gave her that wise air, I think. They have
a wonderfully refining effect upon their pupils. Do you think her
good-looking?"
"Good-looking is an odious epithet to apply to such a girl. She is
exquisitely pretty."
"I'm glad you admire her. Yes, it is a dainty kind of prettiness, ain't
it? Exquisite is far too strong a word; but I think she is a little
superior to the common run of English girls."
"I hope she may be able to endure Matcham. After all, the country round
is tolerably interesting."
"Oh, I believe she will put up with it for her father's sake, if he is
happy here. Only no doubt she will miss the adulation."
"She must not be allowed to miss it. All the young men in the
neighbourhood will be her worshippers."
Mrs. Mornington shrugged her shoulders, pursed up her lips, and made a
long slashing cut in a breadth of substantial calico.
"The young men of the neighbourhood will hardly fill the gap," she
said. "Yourself excepted, there is not an idea among them--that is
to say, not an idea unconnected with sport. If a girl doesn't care
to talk about hunting, shooting, or golf, there is no such thing as
conversation for her in Matcham."
Before Allan could reply, the drawing-room door was thrown open, and
Mrs. Mornington rose to receive a visitor. Her seat in the verandah
commanded the drawing-room as well as the garden, and she was always on
the alert for arrivals. Allan rose as quickly, expecting to see Miss
Vincent.
"Mrs. Wornock," announced the butler, with a grand air, perfectly
cognizant of the lady's social importance.
To Allan the appearance of the lady of Discombe was as startling as if
she had lived at the other end of England. And yet Mrs. Mornington had
told him that she and Mrs. Wornock exchanged three or four visits in
the course of the year.
Mrs. Mornington greeted her guest with cordiality, and the two women
came out to the verandah together. They offered a striking contrast,
and, as types of the sex, were at the opposite poles of woman. One was
of the world, worldly, large, strongly built, loud-voiced, resolute,
commanding, a woman whose surplus power was accentuated by the petty
sphere in which she lived; the other was slender and youthful in
figure, with a marked fragility of frame, pale, ethereal, and with a
girlish shyness of manner, not wanting in mental power, perhaps, but
likely to be thought inferior, from the lack of self-possession and
self-esteem. All the social advantages which surrounded Mrs. Wornock of
Discombe had been insufficient to give her the self-confidence which
is commonly superabundant in the humblest matron who has passed her
thirtieth birthday.
She gave a little start of surprise at finding Allan in the verandah,
but the smile with which she offered him her hand was one of pleasure.
She took the seat which Mrs. Mornington offered her--the most
comfortable chair in the verandah--and then began to apologize for
having taken it.
"I'm afraid this is your chair----"
"No, no, no. Sit where you are, for goodness' sake!" cried Mrs.
Mornington. "I never indulge myself with an easy-chair till my day's
work is done. We are going to have our tea out here." The servants
were bringing table and tray as she talked. "I'm very glad you came
to see me this afternoon, for I dare say my niece will be running in
presently--my brother Robert's daughter--and I want you to call upon
her. I told you all about her the other day when I was at the Manor."
"Would she like me to call, do you think? Of course I will call, if you
wish it; but I hardly think she will care."
"I know that she will care," replied Mrs. Mornington, busy at the
tea-table. "She is not a great performer, but she is almost as
enthusiastic about music as you are. She is a Roman, and those old
Masses of which you are so fond mean more to her than they do to most
of us."
Allan's spirits had risen with the expectation of Miss Vincent's
appearance. He had been right in his conclusions, after all.
He resumed his seat, which was near enough to Mrs. Wornock's chair for
confidential talk.
"You have quite deserted me, Mr. Carew," she said, with gentle
reproachfulness. "I thought you would have been to see me before now."
"I did not want to seem intrusive."
"You could not seem or be intrusive. You are so much more to me than
a common friend. You remind me of the past--of my son. You would be
almost as another son to me if you would let me think of you like that.
If----"
She spoke quickly, almost passionately, and her low voice had a thrill
of feeling in it which touched him deeply. What a strange impulsive
creature this woman was, in spite of the timidity and reserve that
had kept her aloof from that rural society over which she might have
reigned as a queen.
Before Allan could reply to Mrs. Wornock's unfinished speech, there
came a welcome diversion in the shape of a large black poodle,
which rushed vehemently across the lawn, stood on end beside Mrs.
Mornington's gown for a moment or two, sniffed the tea-table, wheeled
round, and rushed off again in a diagonal line towards the point whence
he had come.
This sudden black appearance was followed by an appearance in lavender
cambric, and the tall, slim form of a very elegant young woman, whose
simple attire, as at the ball, bore the true Parisian stamp, that
indescribable air of unlikeness to British dress, which is rather a
negative than a positive quality.
The brilliant dark eyes flashed a smile upon Allan, as the young lady
allowed him to take her hand _à l'Anglaise_, after she had spoken
to her aunt and been introduced to Mrs. Wornock.
"Your poodle is a little too bad, Suzie. He nearly knocked me and the
tea-table clean over."
"That is one of the aunt's innocent exaggerations," said Suzette,
laughing. "If you know her as well as I do, Mrs. Wornock, you must
know that she always talks in a large way. Poor Caro. He is only a
puppy; and I think, for a puppy, his manners are perfect."
Caro was crouching at her feet, breathing hard, for the space of half
a minute as she spoke, and then he rushed off again, circling the lawn
three or four times, with spasmodic halts by his mistress, or by the
tea-table.
"He is rather a ridiculous dog at present," apologized Suzette, fondly
watching these manœuvres; "but he is going to be very clever. He has
begun to die for his queen, and he will do wonderful things when he
is older. I have been warned not to teach him too much while he is a
puppy, for fear of addling his brain."
"I don't believe he has any brain to be addled, or at least he must
have addled it for himself with that absurd rushing about," said Mrs.
Mornington, dealing out the tea-cups, which Allan meekly handed to the
two ladies.
He had been to so many afternoon tea-parties of late that he felt as if
handing cups and saucers and cream and sugar were a kind of speciality
with him. In Suffolk he had never troubled about these things. His time
had been taken up with shooting or fishing. He had allowed all social
amenities to be performed by his mother, unaided by him. At Matcham
he had become a new being, a person to be called upon and to return
calls, with all the punctiliousness of a popular curate. He wondered at
himself as he accomplished these novel duties.
Mrs. Wornock began to talk to Suzette, constrainedly at first, but the
girl's frank vivacity soon put her at her ease, and then Allan joined
in the conversation, and in a few minutes they were all three on the
friendliest terms, although the elder lady gradually dropped out of
the conversation, save for a word or two now and then when addressed
by the other two. She seemed content to sit by and listen while those
two talked, as much interested in them as they were interested in
each other. She was quick to perceive Allan's subjugation, quick to
understand that he was surrendering himself without a struggle to the
fascination of a girl who was not quite as other girls, who had nothing
hackneyed or conventional in person or manner.
After tea, they all went round the lawn, headed by Mrs. Mornington, to
look at her roses and carnations, flowers which were her peculiar pride
and care.
"If I had such a garden as yours--a day-dream in gardens--I don't
suppose I should take any trouble about a few beds of dwarf-roses and
picotees," she said to Mrs. Wornock; "but these flower-beds are all I
have to console me for the Philistinism of my surroundings."
"Oh, but you have a really fine shrubbery," urged Allan, remembering
that promenade of the other night among the lights and shadows, and
the perfume of dewy conifers. "That belt of deodara and arbutus and
rhododendrons, and this fine expanse of level lawn ought to satisfy any
lady's ambition."
"No doubt. This garden of mine always reminds me of the Church
catechism. It suggests that state of life to which it has pleased
God to call me--an eminently respectable, upper middle-class garden,
fifty years old at most; while the grounds at Discombe carry one back
three centuries, and one expects to meet fine gentlemen in ruffs and
doublets, with roses on their shoes, and talking like that book whose
name I forget, or abusing the new and detestable custom of smoking
tobacco. You will be in love with Mrs. Wornock's garden, Suzette, and
will give up all idea of improving the Marsh House flower-beds."
"No, I shan't give up, however much I may admire," protested Suzette,
sturdily. "If I had only a cottage garden, I would toil early and late
to make it beautiful."
"There is plenty of room at Marsh House," said Mrs. Wornock, "and the
garden is capable of improvement. When will you bring Miss Vincent to
see me and my peacocks, Mrs. Mornington? Pray let it be soon. Your
niece and I have at least one taste in common, and I think we ought
to be good friends. Will you come to luncheon to-morrow, you and Miss
Vincent, and you, Mr. Carew, if you are all disengaged?"
"For my part, I would throw over any engagement that was capable of
being evaded," said Mrs. Mornington, cheerily. And then in an undertone
to Allan, she added, "It will be a new sensation to eat a meal at the
Manor. This burst of hospitality is almost a miracle."
Allan accepted the invitation unhesitatingly, and began to think Mrs.
Wornock the most delightful of women, and to be angry with himself for
ever having suspected evil in her past history. Whatever was strange in
her conduct in relation to himself and to his father must be accounted
for in some way that would be consonant with guilelessness and goodness.
* * * * *
That luncheon at Discombe Manor was the beginning of a new phase
in Allan Carew's existence. All things must begin some day; and
love--serious and earnest love--is one of the things which have
their beginning, and whose beginning is sweeter than all the other
first-fruits of life. It is not to be supposed that Allan was
altogether a stranger to tender emotions, that he had come to five and
twenty years of age without ever having fancied himself in love. He
had had his boyish loves, and they had ended in disappointment. The
blighting wind of satiety had swept across his budding loves before
they had time to flower. All those youthful goddesses of his had shown
him too soon and too plainly that there was very little of Olympian
grandeur about them. As an only son with good prospects, he had been
rudely awakened to the cruel truth that the average young lady has a
sharp eye to the main chance, and that he, Allan Carew, was measured
by his expectations rather than by his merits. Very early in his youth
he made up his mind that he would never let his heart go out to any
woman who contemplated marriage from a business standpoint; and he
had been keenly on the watch for the canker of worldliness among
the flowers. Unluckily for his chances of matrimony, the prettiest
girls he had met hitherto had been the most worldly; trained perhaps
to worldliness on account of their marketable qualities. Much as he
admired high-mindedness in woman, he was not high-minded enough to seek
out virtue under an unattractive exterior; so he had almost made up his
mind to follow his uncle's example, and go through life a bachelor.
As a bachelor he might count himself rich, and for a bachelor
Beechhurst was an admirable dwelling-place. The house had been built
for a bachelor. The rooms were spacious but few. Twice as many
bedrooms, best and secondary, would be required for a family man.
Thinking vaguely of the possibility of marriage, Allan had shuddered
as he thought of an architect exploring that delightful upper floor,
measuring walls, and tapping partitions, and discussing the best point
at which to throw out a nursery wing, and where to add three or four
servants' bedrooms.
And behold now this prudent, far-seeing young man, whose philosophy
hitherto had been the philosophy of pure selfishness, was allowing
himself to fall in love with a young lady who, for all he could tell,
might be just as mercenary and worldly-minded as the girls he had met
in Suffolk shooting-parties or in London ball-rooms. He had no reason
to suppose her any better than they. Her father was a man of moderate
means, and according to all the rules of modern life, it would be her
duty to make a good marriage. He remembered how Mrs. Mornington had
ordered her niece to save a dance for him, and he might conclude from
that and other small facts that the aunt would favour him as a suitor
for the niece. Yet the idea of worldly-mindedness never entered his
thoughts in relation to Suzette. He abandoned himself to the charm
of her delightful individuality without the faintest apprehension of
future disillusion. He thought, indeed, but little of the future.
The joys of the present were all-sufficing. To talk with her in
unrestrained frivolity, glancing from theme to theme, but always with a
grain of sentiment or philosophy in their talk; to walk beside her in
those stately alleys at Discombe, or to linger in the marble temple;
to follow the peacocks along the grass walks; to look for the nests
of the thrushes and blackbirds in the thick walls of laurel; to plan
garden-plays--Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream--in that grassy
amphitheatre, which reminded Allan of the Boboli Gardens--these things
made a happiness that filled mind and heart to the exclusion of all
thought of the future.
"I can understand the lilies better now than when I was first told to
consider them," said Allan one day, as he stood with Suzette beside a
great bed of lilium auratum.
"How do you mean?"
"Because I am as happy as they are, and take no more heed of the future
than they do. I feel as they feel when they sway in the summer wind and
bask in the summer sun, fed with the dews of night, having all things
that are good for flowers, satisfied and happy."
"You are as foolish as I am. I can't help fancying sometimes that
flowers are alive and can feel the sun and the glory of the blue sky.
To be always looking up at the sky, dumb, lifeless, not knowing! One
would hardly care for flowers if one could realize that they have
neither sense nor feeling. Yet I suppose one does realize that cruel
fact sometimes. I know when I have been looking at the roses, and
delighting in their beauty, Caro meets me as I go back to the house,
and as he leaps and frisks about me, the difference between him and the
flowers strikes me very keenly. They so beautiful and so far off, he so
near and dear--the precious living thing!"
"Ah, that is the crown of things, Miss Vincent--life! Dead loveliness
is nothing in comparison!"
"No," said Suzette. "And what a blessing that life is beautiful in
itself. One can love ugly people; one may adore an ugly dog; but who
ever cared for an ugly chair, or could become attached to an ugly
house?"
"Not knowingly; but I have known people fondly attached to the
most hideously furnished rooms. And oh, how humiliating it is for
middle-aged people like my mother to be obliged to admit that the
things we think hideous were accounted beautiful when they were young!"
This easy, trivial talk was the growth of more than one luncheon, and
a good many tea-drinkings, in the music-room or in the gardens of
Discombe. Mrs. Wornock had opened her heart and her house to Suzette as
she had never before done to any young lady in the neighbourhood, and
Suzette warmly reciprocated the kindness of the recluse. She ran in at
the Manor House almost as unceremoniously as she ran in at the Grove.
It was understood by the servants that their mistress was always at
home to Miss Vincent. And as Allan had previously been made free of the
Manor House, it was only natural that he and Suzette should meet very
often under Mrs. Wornock's mild chaperonage.
Mrs. Mornington knew of these meetings, and, indeed, often dropped in
while the young people were there, coming to take Suzette home in her
pony-carriage, or to walk with her through the lanes. She showed no
sign of disapproval; yet, as a woman of the world, it may have occurred
to her that, since Mrs. Wornock was so fond of Suzette, it might be
wise for Suzette to refrain from attaching herself to Allan Carew,
while a superior _parti_ remained in the background in the person
of Mrs. Wornock's only son.
Happily for Allan, Mrs. Mornington, although essentially mundane, was
not a schemer. She had made up her mind that Allan was a good deal
better than the average young man, and that Beechhurst was quite good
enough for her niece, whose present means and expectations were of a
very modest order. There had been no mock humility in Mrs. Mornington's
statement of facts when she told Allan that her brother's income, from
all sources, was just big enough to enable him to live respectably at
Marsh House.
* * * * *
The foliage was beginning to show gleams of gold and red amidst the
sombre green of late summer; the hounds were beginning to meet at seven
o'clock in the crisper, clearer mornings of September; and Allan Carew
was beginning to feel himself the bond-slave of a young lady about
whose sentiments towards himself he was still entirely in the dark.
Did she care for him much, a little, not at all? Allan Carew was
continually asking himself those questions, and there was no oracle to
answer him; no oracle even in his inner consciousness, which told him
nothing of Suzette's feelings. He knew that he loved her; but he could
recall no word or look of hers which could assure him that she returned
his love. It was certain that she liked him, and that his society was
pleasant to her.
They had an infinite series of ideas in common--they thought alike upon
most subjects; and she seemed no more to weary of his society than
he of hers--yet there were times when he thought he might have been
nearer winning her love had she liked him less. Her friendship seemed
too frank ever to ripen into love. He would have liked to see her start
and blush at his coming. She did neither; but received him with her
airiest grace, and had always her laughter ready for his poor jokes,
her intellect on the alert for his serious speech about books or men.
She was the most delightful companion he had ever known; but a sister
could not have been more at her ease with him.
"I sometimes think you take me for one of your old convent friends," he
said one day, when she had prattled to him of her housekeeping and her
garden as they walked up and down the long grass alley, while the music
of the organ came to them, now loud with the lessening distance, now
sinking slowly to silence as they walked further from the house.
"Oh no; I should never take you for any one so patrician and
distinguished as Laure de Beauvais, or Athenaïs de Laroche," she
answered laughingly, "I should never dare to talk to them about eggs
and butter, the obstinacy of a cook at twenty-five pounds a year, the
ignorance of a gardener who is little better than a day labourer. But
perhaps I am wrong to talk to you of these everyday cares. I will try
to talk as I would to Athenaïs. I will dispute the merit of Lamartine's
Elegy on Byron as compared with Hugo's Ode to the King of Rome. I was
for Hugo; Athenaïs for Lamartine. We used to have terrible battles. And
now Athenaïs is married to a financier, and has a palace in the Parc
Monceau, and gives balls to all Paris; and I am living with father in a
shabby old house with three maids and a man-of-all-work."
"Talk to me as you like," he said; "talk to me as your serf, your
slave."
And then, without a moment's pause in which to arrange his thoughts,
surprised into a revelation which he had intended indefinitely to
defer, he told her that he was in very truth her slave, and that he
must be the most miserable of men if this avowal of his love touched
no answering chord in her heart.
She who was habitually so gay grew suddenly grave almost to sadness,
and looked at him with an expression which was half-frightened,
half-reproachful.
"Oh, why do you talk like this?" she cried. "We have been such
friends--so happy."
"Shall we be less friendly or less happy when we are lovers?"
That word "when" touched her keen sense of the ridiculous.
"When we are lovers!" she echoed, smiling at him. "You take everything
for granted."
"I have no alternative between confidence and despair."
"Really, really, now? Am I really necessary to your happiness?"
"You are my happiness. I come here, or I go to the Grove, and find you,
and I am happy. When I go away, I leave happiness behind me, except
the reflected light of memory; except the dreams in which your image
floats about me, in which I hear your voice, the sweet voice that is
kinder in my dreams than it ever is in my waking hours."
"Surely I am never unkind."
"No; but in my dreams you are more than kind--you are my own and my
love. You are what I hope you will be soon, Suzette--soon! Life's
morning is so short. Let us spend it together."
They were in the temple at the end of the cypress walk, and in that
semi-sacred solitude his arm had stolen round her waist, his lips were
seeking hers, gently, yet with a force which it needed all her strength
to oppose.
"No; no; you must not. I can promise nothing yet. I have had no time to
think."
"No time! Oh, Suzette, you must have known for the last six weeks that
I adore you."
"I am not vain enough to imagine myself adored. I think I knew that you
liked me--almost from the first----"
"Liked and admired you from the very first," interrupted Allan.
"My aunt said things--hinted and laughed, and was altogether absurd;
but one's kinsfolk are so vain."
"Yes, when they have a goddess born among them."
"Oh, please don't be too ridiculous. You know that I like you; but, as
for loving, I must have a long, long time to think about _that_."
"You shall think as long as you like; so long as you do not withdraw
your friendship. I cannot live without you."
"Why should I cease to be your friend? Only promise that you will never
again talk, or behave, as foolishly as you have done this afternoon."
"I promise, solemnly promise; until you give me leave to be foolish,"
he added, with a touch of tenderness.
He felt that he had been precipitate; that he might, by this temerity,
have brought upon himself banishment from the Eden in which he was
so happy. He had been over bold in thinking that the time which had
sufficed for the growth of passionate love on his part was enough to
make this charming girl as fond of him as he was of her. He was ashamed
of his presumption. The degrees of their merit were so different; she a
being whom to know was to love; he a very commonplace young man.
Suzette was quite as easy in her manner with him after that little
outbreak as she had been before. He had promised not to renew the
attack, and in her simple truthfulness she believed all promises sacred
between well-bred people.
Mrs. Mornington dropped in at teatime, ready to drive her niece home.
It was a common thing now for Suzette to spend the whole day at
Discombe, playing classical duets with Mrs. Wornock, or sitting quietly
by her side reading or musing while she played the organ. The girl's
religious feeling gave significance to that noble music of the old
German and Italian masses which to other hearers were only music. The
acquaintance between the elder woman and the younger had ripened by
this time into a friendship which was not without affection.
"Mrs. Wornock is my second aunt, and Discombe is my second home," said
Suzette, explaining the frequency of her visits.
"And the Grove, does not that count as home?" asked Mrs. Mornington,
with an offended air.
"It is so much my home that I don't count it at all. It is more like
home than Marsh House, both for father and for me."
Later, when the pony-carriage was taking aunt and niece along the road
to Matcham, Suzette said suddenly, after a silence--
"Auntie, would it be a shock to your nerves if I were to tell you
something that happened to-day."
"My nerves are very strong, Suzie. What kind of thing was it? and did
it concern Mr. Carew _par exemple_?"
"How clever you are at guessing! Yes, it was Mr. Carew. He proposed to
me."
"And of course you accepted him."
"Of course! Oh, auntie! what do you think I am made of? I have only
known him about two months."
"What of that? If you had been brought up in the French fashion--and a
very sensible fashion it is, to my thinking--you would have only seen
him two or three times before you marched up to the altar with him.
Surely you did not reject him?"
"I may not have said positively no; but I told him that it was much
too soon--that I could not possibly love him after such a short
acquaintance, and that, if we were to go on being friends, he must
never speak of such a thing again."
"Never!"
"I think the word was never--or, at any rate, for a long, long time.
And he promised."
"He will keep his promise, no doubt. Well, Suzette, all I can say is
that you must be very difficult to please. I don't believe there is
another girl in Matcham who would have refused Allan Carew."
"What, are all the young ladies in Matcham so much alike that the same
young man would suit them all? Have they no individuality?"
"They have individuality enough to know a good young man, with an
excellent position in life, when they see one. I believe your father
will be as disappointed as I am."
"Disappointed? Because I am not in a hurry to leave him. I don't know
my father, if he is capable of such unkindness."
"Suzette, that little mind of yours is full to the brim of high-flown
notions," retorted her aunt, impatiently.
"Dear auntie, surely you are not angry?"
"Yes, Suzie, I am angry, because I have a very high opinion of Allan
Carew. I consider him a pearl among young men."
"Really, aunt! And if he were a poor curate, or a barrister
without--what do you call them--briefs? Yes, briefs! Would he be a
pearl then?"
"He would be just as good a young man, but not a husband for you.
Don't expect romantic ideas from me, Suzette. If I ever was romantic,
it was so many years ago that I have quite forgotten the sensation."
"And you cannot conjure back your youth in order to understand me,"
said her niece, musingly. "You are not like Mrs. Wornock, whose mind
seems always dwelling upon the past."
"Has she talked to you of her youth?" Mrs. Mornington asked quickly.
"Not directly; but she has talked vaguely sometimes of feelings
long dead and gone--of the dead whom she loved--her father whom she
lost when she was seventeen, and whose spirit--as she thinks--holds
communion with her in her solitary daydreams at the organ. He was a
musician, like herself, passionately fond of music."
"I hope you will not take up any of Mrs. Wornock's fads."
"Not unless you call music a fad."
"No, no, music is well enough, and I like you to practise and improve
your playing. But I hope you will never allow yourself to believe in
poor Mrs. Wornock's nonsense about spirit-rapping, and communion with
the dead. You must see that the poor woman is _toquée_."
"I see that she is dreamy; and I am not carried away by her dreams.
I think her the most interesting woman I ever met. Don't be jealous,
auntie darling, I should never be as fond of her as I am of you."
"I hope not!"
"Only I can't help being interested in her. She is _simpatica_."
"'Simpatica!' I hate the word. I never heard any one talked of as
simpatica who hadn't a bee in her bonnet. I really don't know if your
father ought to allow you to be so much at the Manor."
"I am going to take him to see Mrs. Wornock to-morrow afternoon. I know
he will be in love with her."
"It would be a very good thing if he were to marry her, and make a
sensible woman of her."
"Mrs. Wornock with a second husband! The idea is hateful. She would
cease to interest me, if she were so commonplace as to marry. I prefer
her infinitely with what you call her fads."
"'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,'" said Mrs. Mornington,
quoting one of the few poets with whom she had any acquaintance.
"You and I would never think alike, I suppose, young woman. And so
you refused Mr. Carew, and told him never to talk to you of love or
wedlock, and you refused Beechhurst, yonder," pointing with her whip
across the heath to where the white walls of Allan Carew's house smiled
in the afternoon sunlight. "I know what your uncle Mornington will say
when I tell him what a little fool you have been."
"Auntie, why is it you want me to marry, Mr. Carew?" Suzette asked
pleadingly. "Is it because he is rich? Is it for the sake of
Beechhurst?"
"No, Miss Minx, it is because I believe him to be a good young man--a
gentleman--and as true as steel."
Suzette gave a little sigh, and for a minute or so was dumb.
"Do you know why I have always been glad that my father is an
Englishman?" she asked presently.
"Why, because he is an Englishman, I suppose. I should think any girl
would be English if she could."
"No, auntie, I am not so proud of my father's country as all that. I
have been glad of my English father because I knew that English girls
are allowed to make their own choice in marriage."
"And a very pretty use you are going to make of your privileges,
refusing the best young man in the neighbourhood. If you were my
daughter, I should be half inclined to send for one of those whipping
ladies we read about, and have you brought to your senses that way."
"No, you wouldn't, auntie. You wouldn't be unkind to daughter or to
niece."
"Well, you have your father to account to. What will he say, I wonder?"
"Only that his Suzie is to do just as she likes. Do you know that I
refused a subaltern up at the Hills, a young man with an enormous
fortune whom ever so many girls were trying to catch--girls and widows
too--he might have had a large choice."
"And what did my brother say to that?"
"He only laughed, and told me that I knew my own value."
Mrs. Mornington was thoughtful for the rest of the way. Perhaps, after
all, it was a good thing for a girl to be difficult to please. A
girl as bright and as pretty as Suzette could afford to give herself
airs. Allan would be sure to propose to her again; and then there was
Geoffrey Wornock, who was expected home before Christmas. Who could
tell if Geoffrey might not be as deeply smitten with this charming
hybrid as Allan? and Discombe was to Beechhurst as sunlight unto
moonlight, in extensiveness and value.
"And yet I would rather she should marry Carew," mused Mrs. Mornington.
"I should be afraid of young Wornock."
CHAPTER VIII.
NOT YET.
Allan was dashed by Suzette's refusal to accept him on any other
footing than that of friendship, and he was angry with himself for
having spoken too soon. The only comfort left him was her willingness
to consider him still her friend; but this was cold comfort, and in
some wise more disheartening than if she had been more angry. Yet in
his musings he could but think that she liked him better than a mere
average acquaintance; while now and then there stole across his mind
the flattering hope that she liked him better than she herself knew. He
recalled all those happy hours they had spent together, with only Mrs.
Wornock to make a third, Mrs. Wornock who so often crept away to her
beloved organ and left them free to loiter in the gardens, or to sit
in one of the deeply recessed windows, talking in whispers, while the
music filled the room, or to stray far off in the stately pleasaunce,
where their light laughter could not disturb the player.
They had talked together often enough and long enough to have explored
each other's minds and imaginations, and they had found that about all
great things they thought alike; while their differences of opinion
about the trifles of life gave them subjects for mirthful argument,
occasions for disagreeing only to end in agreement.
Suzette complained that Allan's university training made all argument
unfair. How could she--an illogical, prejudiced woman, maintain her
ground against a master of dialectics?
In all their companionship he could remember no moments of ennui, no
indication upon the young lady's part that she could have been happier
elsewhere than in his company. This was at least encouraging. The dual
solitude seemed to have been as pleasant to her as it was to him. She
had confided in him in the frankest fashion. She had told him story
after story of her convent life; of her friends and chosen companions.
She had talked to him as a girl might talk to a cousin whom she liked
and trusted; and how often does such liking ripen into love; an
attachment truer and more lasting than that hot-headed love at first
sight, born of the pleasure of the eye, and taking shallowest root in
the mind. Allan's musings ended in a determination to cultivate the
friendship which had not been withheld from him, and to trust to time
for the growth of love.
He was anxious to see Suzette as soon as possible after that premature
avowal which had stirred the calm current of their companionship,
lest she should have time to ponder upon his conduct, and to feel
embarrassed at their next meeting. She had told him that she was going
to the golf-links before breakfast on the following morning; so at
eight o'clock Allan made his appearance on the long stretch of rather
rough common-land which bordered the Salisbury road half a mile from
Beechhurst, and which was distinguished from other waste places by the
little red flags of the golf club.
She was there, as fresh as the morning, in her blue-serge frock and
sailor hat, attended by a small boy, and with the vicar's youngest
daughter for her companion.
She blushed as they shook hands--blushed, and then distinctly laughed;
and the laugh, frank as it sounded, was the laugh of a triumphant
coquette, for she was thinking of her aunt's indignation yesterday
afternoon, and thinking how little it mattered her refusing a man who
was so absolutely her slave. Propose to her again, forsooth? Why, of
course he would propose to her again, and again, and again, as that
foolish young subaltern had done at Simla. Were all men as foolish,
Suzette wondered; and had all young women as much liberty of choice?
She glanced involuntarily at the Vicar's youngest daughter, regarded by
her family as the flower of the flock, but of a very humble degree in
the floral world. A fresh-coloured, pudding-faced girl, with small eyes
and a pug nose, but with a tall, well-developed figure of the order
that is usually described as "fine."
The golf went on in a desultory way, Allan strolling after the
players, and venturing a remark now and then, as suggested by a single
summer's experience at St. Andrews. When the two girls had been
round the course, and it was time to hasten home to their respective
breakfast-tables, he accompanied them on their way, and after having
left Miss Bessie Edgefield at the Vicarage gate he had Suzette all
to himself for something under a quarter of a mile. They met Mrs.
Mornington a little way from Marsh House, sallying out for her morning
conference with butcher and fishmonger, the business of providing Mr.
Mornington's dinner being too important to be left to the hazards
of cook and shopkeeper. It was necessary that Mrs. Mornington's own
infallible eye should survey saddle or sirloin, and measure the
thickness of turbot or sole.
She greeted the two young people with jovial heartiness, and rejoiced
beyond measure at seeing them together. After all, perhaps Suzette had
done well in refusing the first offer. The poor young man was evidently
her slave.
"Or if Geoffrey should fall desperately in love with her," mused Mrs.
Mornington, on her way to the village street, not quite heroic enough
to put the owner of Discombe Manor altogether out of her calculations;
"but, no, I shouldn't care about that. It would be too risky."
That which Mrs. Mornington would not care about was the mental tendency
that Geoffrey might inherit from his mother, whom the strong-minded,
clear-headed lady regarded as a visionary, if not a harmless lunatic.
No! Geoffrey was clever, interesting, fascinating even; but he was
not to be compared with Allan, whose calm common sense had won Mrs.
Mornington's warmest liking.
After that morning on the links, and the friendly homeward walk, Allan
felt more hopeful about Suzette; but he was not the less bent upon
bringing to bear every influence which might help him to win her for
his own, before any other suitor should come forward to dispute the
prize with him. Happily for him, there were few eligible young men in
the neighbourhood, and those few thought more of horses and guns than
of girlhood and beauty.
Lady Emily had promised her son a visit in the autumn. Allan hoped
that his father would accompany her. He wanted to bring Suzette into
the narrow circle of his home life, to bring her nearer to himself by
her liking for his mother and father. With this intent he urged on the
promised visit, delighted at the thought that his mother's presence
would enable him to receive Suzette as a guest in the house where he
hoped she would some day be mistress.
He wrote to his father, reminding him of his assurance that he would
not always remain a stranger to his son's home, and this letter of
his, which dwelt earnestly upon certain unexplained reasons why he was
especially anxious for his father's early presence at Beechhurst, was
not without effect. The recluse consented to leave his library, which
perhaps was no greater sacrifice on his part than Lady Emily made in
leaving her farm. Indeed, one of the inducements which Allan held out
to his mother was the promise of a pair of white peacocks from Mrs.
Wornock, finer and whiter than the birds at Fendyke.
Mr. Carew professed himself pleased with his son's surroundings.
"Your house is like the good man who bequeathed it to you," he said,
after his tour of inspection; "essentially comfortable, solid, and
commonplace. The admiral had a grand solidity of character; but even
your mother will not deny that he was commonplace."
Lady Emily nodded a cheery assent. She always agreed with her husband
on all points that did not touch the white farm. There her opinions
were paramount; and she would not have submitted to dictation in so
much as the ears of a rabbit.
"I could hardly forgive my brother for buying such a house if he
hadn't-----"
"Left it to your son," interrupted her husband.
"No, George, that is not what I was going to say. I could not forgive
his Philistine taste if he had not brought home all those delicious
things from China, and built the Mandarin's room. That is the redeeming
feature which makes the house worth having."
"Every one admits that it is a fine room," said Allan. "There is no
such room in the neighbourhood, except at Discombe."
"Your father must see Discombe, Allan. We must introduce him to Mrs.
Wornock."
"I think not, mother. He would be insufferably bored by a woman who
believes in spirit-rapping, sees visions, and plays the organ for hours
at a stretch."
His father looked at him intently.
"Who is this person?" he asked quickly.
"A rich widow, whose son is lord of the manor of Discombe, one of the
most important places between here and Salisbury."
"And she believes in spiritualism. Curious in a lady living in the
country. I thought that kind of thing had died out with Home, and the
famous article in the _Cornhill Magazine_."
"We have had later prophets. Eglinton, for instance, with his
materializations and his slate-writing. I don't think the
spiritualistic idea is dead yet, in spite of the ridicule which the
outside herd has cast upon it."
"I hope the widow lady is not beguiling you into sharing her delusions,
Allan."
The son had seen a look in the father's face which spoke to him
as plainly as any spoken words. That look had told him that his
description of Mrs. Wornock conjured up some thrilling image in his
father's mind. He saw that startled wondering look come and go, slowly
fading out of the pensive face, as the mind dismissed the thought which
Allan's words had awakened. Surely it was not a guilty look which
had troubled his father's mild countenance--rather a look of awakened
interest, of eager questioning.
"I should hate to see Allan taking up any nonsense of that kind," said
Lady Emily, with her practical air; "but really, if this Mrs. Wornock
were not twenty years older than he, I should suspect him of being in
love with her. She is a pretty, delicate-looking woman, with a shy,
girlish manner, and looks ridiculously young to be the mother of a
grown-up son."
"Oh, she has a grown-up son, has she?" asked Mr. Carew. "She belongs to
this part of the country, I suppose, and is a woman of good family?"
He looked at his son; but, for some reason of his own, Allan parried
the question.
"I know hardly anything about her, except that she is a very fine
musician, and that she has been particularly kind to me," he said.
"There, George," cried Lady Emily. "Didn't I tell you so? The foolish
boy is half in love with her!"
"You will not say that after to-morrow, mother."
"Shall I not? But why?"
"You will lose all interest in to-morrow, if I tell you. Go on
wondering, mother dear, till to-morrow, and to-morrow I will tell you
a secret; but, remember, it is not to be talked about to any one in
Matcham."
"Should I talk of a secret, Allan?"
"I don't know. I have an idea that secrets are the staple of tea-table
talk in a village."
"Poor village! for how much it has to bear the blame; and yet people
are worse gossips in Mayfair and Belgravia."
"Only because they have more to talk about."
* * * * *
Allan had arranged a luncheon-party for the following day. His courage
had failed at the idea of a dinner: the lengthy ceremonial, the fear of
failure if he demanded too much of his cook, the long blank space after
dinner, with its possibility of ennui. Luncheon was a friendlier meal,
and would less heavily tax the resources of a bachelor's establishment;
and then there was the chance of being able to wander about the garden
with Suzette in the afternoon, the hope of keeping her and her father
till teatime, when the other people had gone home; though people do not
disperse so speedily after a country luncheon as in town, and it might
be that everybody would stop to tea. No matter, if he could steal away
with Suzette to look at the single dahlias, in the west garden, fenced
off from the lawn by a high laurel hedge, leaving Lady Emily and Mrs.
Mornington to entertain his guests.
He had asked Mr. and Mrs. Mornington, General Vincent and his
daughter, Mr. Edgefield, the Vicar, and his daughter Bessie (Suzette's
antagonist at golf), Mr. and Mrs. Roebuck, a youngish couple, who
prided themselves on being essentially of the great world, towny,
cosmopolitan, anything but rustic, and who insisted on talking
exclusively of London and the Riviera to people who rarely left their
native gardens and paddocks. Mr. Roebuck had been officiously civil to
Allan, and he had felt constrained to invite him. The invitation was on
Mrs. Mornington's principle of payment for value received.
Allan had invited Mrs. Wornock; he had even pressed her to be of the
party, but she had refused.
"I don't care for society," she said. "I am out of my element among
smart people."
"There will be very little smartness--only the Roebucks, and one may
say of them as Beatrice said of Benedick, 'It is a wonder _they_
will still be talking, for nobody minds _them_.' Seriously now,
Mrs. Wornock, I should like you to meet my father."
"You are very kind, but you must excuse me. Don't think me rude or
ungrateful."
"Ungrateful! Why, it is I who ask a favour."
"But I am grateful for your kindness in wishing to have me at your
house. I will go there some day with Suzette, when you are quite
alone, and you shall show me the Mandarin-room."
"That is too good of you. Mind, I shall exact the performance of that
promise. You are very fond of Suzette, I think, Mrs. Wornock?"
"Yes, I am very fond of her. She is the only girl with whom I have ever
felt in sympathy; just as you are the only young man, except my son,
for whom I have ever cared."
"You link us together in your thoughts."
"I do, Allan," she answered gravely, "and I hoped to see you linked
by-and-by in a lifelong union."
"That is my own fondest hope," he said. "How did you discover my
secret?"
"Your secret! My dear Allan, I have known that you were in love with
Suzette almost from the first time I saw you together--yes, even that
afternoon at the Grove."
"You were very sympathetic, very quick to read my thoughts. I own that
I admired her immensely even at that early stage of our acquaintance."
"And admiration soon grew into love. It has been such happiness for me
to watch the growth of that love--to see you two young creatures so
trustful and so happy together, walking about that old garden yonder,
which has seen so little of youth or of happiness. I felt almost as
a mother might have felt watching the happiness of her son. Indeed,
Allan, you have become to me almost as a second son."
"And you are becoming to me almost as a second mother," he said,
bending down to kiss the slim white hand which lay languidly upon her
open book.
Never till to-day had she called him Allan, never before had she spoken
to him so freely of her regard for him.
"Allan," she repeated softly. "You don't mind my calling you by your
Christian name?"
"Mind! I am flattered that you should so honour me."
"Allan," she repeated again, musingly, "why were you not called George,
after your father?"
"Because Allan is an old family name on my mother's side of the house.
Her father and grandfather and elder brother were Allans."
He left her almost immediately, taking leave of her briefly, with a
sudden revulsion of feeling. That question of hers, and the mention of
his father's name, chilled and angered him, in the very moment when his
heart had been moved by her sympathy and affection.
There was something in the familiar mention of his father's name that
re-awakened those suspicions which he had never altogether banished
from his mind. It was perhaps on this account that he had spoken
slightingly of Mrs. Wornock when Lady Emily suggested that he should
make her known to his father. That question about the name had seemed
to him a fresh link in the chain of circumstantial evidence.
Suzette and her father were the first arrivals at Allan's
luncheon-party. The General was a martinet in the matter of
punctuality; and having taken what he called his _chota haz'ri_
at half-past six that morning, was by no means inclined to feel
indulgently disposed towards dilatory arrivals, who should keep him
waiting for his tiffin; nor could he be made to understand that a
quarter to two always meant two o'clock. The Morningtons appeared at
five minutes before two, the Vicar and his daughter as the clock struck
the hour; and then there followed a quarter of an hour of obvious
waiting, during which Allan showed Suzette the Chinese enamels and
ivories, and the arsenal of deadly swords and daggers displayed against
the wall of the Mandarin-room, while the Morningtons were discussing
with Lady Emily and her husband the merits of Wiltshire as compared
with Suffolk.
This delay, at which General Vincent was righteously angry, was
occasioned by the Roebucks, who sauntered in with a leisurely air at
a quarter-past two; the wife on the best possible terms with herself
and her new tailor gown; the husband puffed up at having read his
_Times_ before any one else, and loquacious upon the merits of
the "crushing reply" made last night by Lord Hatfield at Windermere to
"the abominable farrago of lies" in Mr. Henry Wilkes' oration the night
before last at Kendal.
"I dare say it was a very good speech," said the General, grimly; "but
you might have kept it for after luncheon. It would have been less
injured by waiting than Mr. Carew's joint; if he's going to give us
one."
"Are we late?" exclaimed Mrs. Roebuck, who had endured a quarter of an
hour's agony in front of her cheval glass before the new tailor bodice
could be made to "come to." "Are we really late? How very naughty of
us! Please, please don't be angry, good people. We beg everybody's
pardon," clasping two tightly gloved hands with a prettily beseeching
gesture.
"Don't mention it," said the General. "We all like waiting; but if
Carew has got a mug cook, I wouldn't give much for the state of her
temper at this moment."
"We'll send a pretty message to the cook after luncheon, if she has
been clever enough not to spoil her dishes."
The ladies--Lady Emily and Mrs. Mornington descanting on gardens
and glass all the way--went in a bevy to the dining-room, the men
following, Mr. Roebuck still quoting Lord Hatfield, and the way in
which he had demolished the Radical orator.
"The worst of it is he don't make 'em laugh," said Mr. Mornington.
"Nobody can make 'em laugh as Wilkes does. Town or country, hodge or
mechanic, he knows the length of their foot to a fraction, and knows
what will hit them and what will tickle them."
The cook was sufficiently "mug" to have been equal to the difficulties
of twenty minutes' delay, and the luncheon was admirable--not too many
courses, nor too many dishes, but everything perfect after its kind.
Nor was the joint--that item dear to elderly gentlemen--forgotten,
for after a first course of fish and a second of curry and _crême de
volaille_, there appeared a saddle of Wiltshire mutton, to which the
elderly gentlemen did ample justice, while the ladies, who had lunched
upon the more sophisticated dishes, supplied the greater part of the
conversation.
"My father will quote your cook for the next six months," said Suzette,
by whose side Allan had contrived to place himself during the casual
dropping into seats at the large round table, "for yours is the only
house where he has seen Bombay ducks served with the curry."
"Did you not tell me once that your father has a weakness for those
absurd little fish?"
"Did I really? Was I capable of talking such absolute twaddle?"
"It was not twaddle. It was very serious. It was on a day when I found
you looking worried and absent, unable to appreciate either Mrs.
Wornock's music or my conversation; and, on being closely questioned,
you confessed that the canker at your heart was dinner. The General
had been dissatisfied; the cook was stupid. You had done your
uttermost. You had devoted hours to the reading of cookery-books, which
seemed all of them hopelessly alike. You had studied all his fancies.
You had given him Bombay ducks with his curry----"
"Did I say all that? How silly of me. And how ridiculous of you to
remember."
"Memory is not a paid servant, but a most capricious Ariel. One cannot
say to one's self, I will remember this or that. My memory is as
fugitive as most people's; but there is one thing for which it can be
relied on. I remember everything about you--all you say to me, all you
do--even to the gowns you wear."
Suzette laughed a little and blushed a little; but did not look
offended.
"You had about five minutes' talk with my mother before I took you to
see the enamels. How do you like her?"
"Immensely! Lady Emily is charming. She was telling me about her white
farm."
"It would have been odd if you had escaped hearing of that, even in the
first five minutes."
"I was deeply interested. Lady Emily has promised me some white
bramahs. I am going to start a white poultry-yard. I cannot aspire
higher than poultry; but I am determined that every bird shall be
white."
"Pretty foolishness! And so you like my mother?"
"Very, very much. She is one of those people with whom one feels at
one's ease from the first moment. She looks as if she could not say or
even think anything unkind."
"I don't believe she could do either. And yet she is
human--feminine-human--and can enjoy an interesting scandal--local,
if possible. She enjoys it passively. She does nothing to swell the
snowball, and will hardly help to roll it along. She remains perfectly
passive, and never goes further than to say that she is shocked and
disappointed. And yet I believe she enjoys it."
"It is only the excitement that one enjoys. We had scandals even
in the convent--girls who behaved badly, dishonourably, about their
studies; cheating in order to get a better chance of a prize. I'm
afraid we were all too deeply interested in the crime and the
punishment. It was something to think about and talk about when life
was particularly monotonous."
Lady Emily was watching them from the other side of the table, and
lending rather an indifferent ear to Mr. Roebuck's account of Homburg
and the people he and his wife had met there. They had only just
returned from that exhilarating scene. He could talk of nothing but
H.R.H.'s condescension; the dear duchess; Lady this, Lord the other;
and the prodigious demand there had been for himself and his wife in
the very smartest society.
"Four picnics a day are hardly conducive to the cure of suppressed
gout," said Mr. Roebuck; "and there were ever so many days when we
had to cut ourselves up into little bits--lunching with one party,
taking coffee with another, driving home with somebody else, going to
tea-fights all over the place. Dinner engagements I positively set my
face against. Mimosa and I were there for rest and recuperation after
the season--positively washed out, both of us. You have no idea what a
rag my wife looked when we took our seats in the club train."
Happily for Lady Emily, who had been suffering this kind of thing for
half an hour, the coffee had gone round, and at her first imploring
glance Mrs. Mornington rose and the ladies left the dining-room. Yet
even this relief was but temporary; for Mrs. Roebuck appropriated Lady
Emily in the garden, and entertained her with her own view of Homburg,
which was smarter, inasmuch as it was more exclusive than Mr. Roebuck's.
"A horrid place," said the lady. "One meets all one's London friends
mixed up with a herd of foreign royalties whom one is expected to
cultivate. I used to send Richard to all the gaieties, while I stopped
at home and let my maid-companion read to me. We shall go to Marienbad
next August. If one could be at Homburg without people knowing one was
there, the place might be tolerable."
"I have been told the scenery is very fine," hazarded Lady Emily.
"Oh, the scenery is well enough; but one knows it, and one has seen
so much finer things in that way. When one has been across the
Cordilleras, it is absurd to be asked to worship some poor little hills
in Germany."
"I have seldom been out of Suffolk, except to visit some of my people
in Scotland. Ben Lomond and Ben Nevis are quite big enough for me."
"Oh, the Scotch hills are dear things, with quite a character of their
own; and a Scotch deer forest is the finest thing of its kind all over
the world. The duke's is sixty thousand acres--and Dick and I always
enjoy ourselves at Ultimathule Castle--but after being lost in a
snowstorm in the Cordilleras----"
Lady Emily stifled a despairing yawn. Not a word had she been able to
say about her Woodbastwick cows, which she was inwardly comparing
with Allan's black muzzled Jerseys, grazing on the other side of the
sunk fence. Heartfelt was her gratitude to Mrs. Mornington when that
lady suddenly wheeled round from a confidential talk with the Vicar
and interrupted Mrs. Roebuck's journey across the Cordilleras by an
inquiry about the Suffolk branches of the Guild for supplying warm and
comfortable raiment to the deserving poor.
"I hope you have a branch in your neighbourhood," she said.
"Yes, indeed we have. I am a slave to the Guild all the winter. One
can't make flannel petticoats and things in summer, you know."
"_I_ can," retorted Mrs. Mornington, decisively.
"What, on a broiling day in August! when the very sight of flannel puts
one in a fever?"
"I am not so impressionable. The things are wanted in October, and July
and August are quite late enough for getting them ready."
"I subscribe to these institutions," Mrs. Roebuck remarked languidly.
"I never work for them. Life isn't long enough."
"Then you never have the right kind of feeling about your poorer
fellow-creatures," said Mrs. Mornington. "It is the doing something for
them, using one's own hand and eye and thought for the poor toiling
creatures, sacrificing some little leisure and some little fad to
making them more comfortable--it is that kind of thing which brings the
idea of that harder world home to one."
"Ah, how nice it is of you dear ladies to sacrifice yourselves like
that; but you couldn't do it after a June and July in London. If you
had seen what a poor creature I looked when we took our seats in the
club train for Homburg----"
Mrs. Mornington tucked her arm under Lady Emily's and walked her away.
"I want you to tell me all about your farm," she said. And then, in
a rather loud aside, "I can't stand that woman, and I wish your son
hadn't been so conscientious in asking her."
While emptiness and ennui prevailed on the terrace in front of the
Mandarin-room, there were a pair of wanderers in the shrubbery, whose
talk was unleavened by worldliness or pretence of any kind. Allan had
stolen away from the smokers in the dining-room, and was escorting
Suzette and her friend Bessie Edgefield round his modest domain--the
shrubberies, the paddocks nearest the house, which had been planted and
educated into a kind of park; the greenhouse and hothouse, which were
just capacious enough to supply plenty of flowers for drawing-room and
dinner-table, but not to grow grapes or peaches. Everything was on a
modest, unassuming scale. Allan felt that after the mansion and gardens
at Discombe, his house suggested the abode of a retired shopkeeper. A
successful hosier or bootmaker might create for himself such a home.
Wholesale trade, soap, or lucifer matches, or cocoa would require
something far more splendid.
Modest as the place was, the two girls admired, or seemed to admire,
all its details--the conifers of thirty years' growth, the smiling
meadows, the fawn-coloured cows. A sunny September afternoon showed
those fertile pastures and trim gardens at their best. Allan felt
exquisitely happy walking about those smooth lawns and gravel paths
with the girl he loved. At every word of approval he fancied she was
praising the place in which she would be content to live. After that
avowal of his the other day, it seemed to him that her kindness meant
much more than it had meant before she knew her power. She could not
be so cruel as to mock him with the promise of her smiles, her sweet
words, her undisguised pleasure in his company. Yes, he was perfectly
happy. He thought of her refusal the other day as only the prelude to
her acceptance. She had not said "No;" she had only said "Not yet."
Bessie Edgefield was one of those sweetly constituted girls whom Nature
has especially created to be a third party in a love affair; never to
play the heroine in white satin, but always the confidante in white
muslin. She walked beside her friend, placid, silent, save for an
occasional monosyllable, and was of no more account than Suzette's
shadow.
"The Roebucks are taking leave," exclaimed Suzette, looking across the
lawn to the groups on the terrace. "Mr. Carew, I'm afraid you are a
sadly inattentive host."
"Have I neglected you, Miss Vincent?"
"You have neglected Mrs. Roebuck, which is much worse. She will be
talking of your want of _savoir vivre_ all over Matcham."
"Let her talk. She has been boring my mother with a cruelty worthy of
Torquemada. She forgets that torture was illegal in England even in
Bacon's time. See, they are all going away; but you and the General and
Miss Edgefield must stay to tea, even if the Vicar is too busy to stop."
The Vicar had quietly vanished, to resume the round of parish duties,
quite content to leave his Bessie in comfortable quarters. The Roebucks
were going, and the Morningtons were following their example; but
General Vincent had no objection to stop to tea if his daughter and
Miss Edgefield desired him to do so.
He was smoking a cheroot, comfortably seated in a sheltered part of
the terrace--a corner facing south, screened from east and north by an
angle of the house, where the Mandarin-room projected from the main
building--and he was absorbed in a discussion of Indian legendary lore
with Mr. Carew, who owned to some knowledge of sanscrit, and had made
Eastern fable and legend an especial study.
Suzette and her father stayed till nearly seven o'clock, when Allan
insisted on walking home with them, having suddenly discovered that he
had had no walking that day. He had been cub-hunting from seven in the
morning till nine; but he declared himself in need of walking exercise.
Lady Emily went with them to the gate, and parted with Suzette as with
a favourite of long standing. Allan was enraptured to see his mother's
friendliness with the girl he loved; and it was all he could do to
restrain his feelings during the walk to Marsh House.
Perhaps it was only that gay temper of hers, that readiness to laugh
at him and at all things in creation, which held him at a distance.
He had made up his mind that she was to be his--that if she were to
refuse him twenty times in twenty capricious moods of her light and
airy temperament, there was somewhere in her nature a vein of serious
feeling, and by that he would win her and hold her.
* * * * *
"You like Miss Vincent, mother?" he asked that evening, when he was
sitting with his father and mother in the Mandarin-room after dinner.
The evening was warm to sultriness, and there were several casements
open in the long window which filled one end of the room; a window with
richly carved sashes and panels of cedar and lattice-work alternating
with the glass. There was another window in the western wall, less
elaborate--a door-window--which formed the usual exit to the garden.
This was closed, but not curtained.
The room was lighted only with shaded lamps, which lighted the tables
and the spaces round them, but left the corners in shadow.
Lady Emily was sitting at one of the tables, her fingers occupied with
a large piece of work, which she carried about with her wherever she
went, and which, to the eye of the uninitiated, never appeared to make
any progress towards completion. It was destined eventually to cover
the grand piano at Fendyke, and it was to be something very rare and
precious in the way of embroidery; the basis a collection of Breton
shawl-pattern handkerchiefs, overlaid by Lady Emily with embroidery in
many-coloured silks and Japanese gold thread. This piece of work was
a devouring monster in the matter of silk, and Lady Emily was always
telling her friends the number of skeins which were required for its
maintenance, and the cost of the gold thread which made so faint an
effect in the Oriental labyrinth of palms and sprigs and arabesques
and medallions.
"I'm afraid I shall never live to finish it," Lady Emily would conclude
with a sigh, throwing herself back in her chair after an hour's
steadfast labour, her eyes fixed in a kind of ecstasy upon the little
corner of palm which she had encrusted with satin stitch and gold; "but
if I _do_, I really think it will repay me for all my trouble."
To-night her mind was divided between her embroidery and her son, who
sat on a three-cornered chair beside her, meekly threading her needles
while he tried to get her to talk about Suzette.
His father was seated almost out of earshot, at a table near the open
window, reading the _Nineteenth Century_ by the light of a lamp
which shone full upon his lowered eyelids, and on the thoughtful brow
and sensitive mouth, as he sat in a reposeful attitude in the low, deep
chair.
"Do I like Miss Vincent?" repeated Lady Emily, when she had turned a
critical corner in the leafy edging of a scroll. "I wonder how often
you will make me tell you that I think her a very--no, Allan, the
light peacock, please--not that dark shade--very sweet girl--bright,
unaffected----"
"And exquisitely lovely," interjected her son, as he handed her the
needleful of silk.
"Ah, there you exaggerate awfully. She is certainly a pretty girl;
but her nose is--well, I hardly know how to describe it; but there
is a fault somewhere in the nose, and her mouth might be smaller;
but, on the other hand, she has fine eyes. Her manners are really
charming--that pretty little Parisian air which is so fascinating in a
high-bred Parisian. But, oh, Allan! can you really mean to marry her?"
"I really mean to try my hardest to achieve that happiness, and I
shall think myself the luckiest man in Wiltshire, or in England, or in
Europe, if I succeed."
"But, Allan, have you reflected seriously? She tells me that she is a
Roman Catholic."
"If she were a Fire-worshipper, I would run the risk of failure in
converting her to Christianity. If she were a Buddhist, I should be
inclined to embrace the faith of Gautama; but since she is only a
conformer to a more ancient form of religion of which you and I are
followers, I don't see why her creed should be a stumbling-block to my
bliss."
Lady Emily shook her head sagely, and breathed a profound sigh.
"Differences of religion are so apt to make unhappiness in married
life."
"I am not religious enough to distress myself because my wife believes
in some things that are incredible to me. We shall both follow the same
Master, both hope for reunion in the same heaven."
"Allan, _she_ believes in Purgatory. Think how inconsistent your
ideas of the future must be."
Allan did not pursue the argument. He was smiling to himself at the
easy way in which he had been talking of his wife--their future,
their very hopes of heaven--making so sure that she was to be his.
He looked at his father, sitting alone with them, but not of them,
and thought of his father's married life as he had seen it ever since
he was old enough to observe or understand the life around him; so
peaceful, so in all things what married life should be; and yet over
all there had been that faint shadow of melancholy which the son had
felt from his earliest years, that absence of the warmth and the
romance of a marriage where love is the bond of union. Here, Allan told
himself, the bond had been friendly regard, convenience, the world's
approval, family interests, and lastly the child as connecting link
and meeting-place of hopes and fears. Love had been missing from the
life of yonder pale student, musing over half a dozen pages of modern
metaphysics.
Allan rose and moved slowly towards that tranquil figure, and feeling
the night air blowing cold as he approached that end of the room, he
asked his father if he would like the windows shut?
"No, thank you, Allan, not on my account," Mr. Carew answered, without
looking up from his book.
Had he looked up, he would have seen Allan standing between the
lamplight and the window like a man transfixed.
A pale wan face had that moment vanished in the outward darkness; a
face which a moment before had been looking in at one of the open
lattices, a face which Allan had recognized at the first glance.
He went to the glass door, opened it quietly, and went out to the
terrace, so quickly and so silently that his disappearance attracted no
attention from father or mother, one absorbed in his book, the other
bending over her work.
The face was the face of Mrs. Wornock; and Mrs. Wornock must be
somewhere between the terrace and the gates. There was no moon, but
the night was clear, and the sky was full of stars. Allan went swiftly
round the angle of the house to the terrace outside the large window;
but the figure that he had seen from within was no longer stationed
outside the window. The terrace was empty. He went round to the front
of the house, whence the carriage drive wound with a gentle curve to
the gates, between shrubberies of laurel and arbutus, cypress and
deodara.
Yes, the figure he had expected to see vanished round the curve of the
drive as he drew near the porch, a slender figure in dark raiment,
with something white about the head and shoulders. He ran along the
drive, and reached the gate just in time to see Mrs. Wornock's brougham
standing in the road, at a distance of about fifty yards, and to see
Mrs. Wornock open the door and step in. Another moment--affording him
no time for pursuit, had he even wished to pursue her--and the carriage
drove away.
Allan had no doubt as to the motive of this conduct. She had come by
stealth to look upon the face of the man whom she had refused to meet
in the beaten way of friendship.
CHAPTER IX.
"SO GREW MY OWN SMALL LIFE COMPLETE."
After the incident of that September night, there was no longer the
shadow of doubt in Allan's mind as to the relations between his father
and the lady at Discombe Manor. That they had known each other and
loved each other in their youth he was now fully convinced. This last
strange act of Mrs. Wornock's was to his mind the strongest link in
the chain of evidence. Whatever the relations between them had been,
guilty or innocent--and fondly as he loved his father, he feared there
had been guilt in that association--it was his duty to prevent any
meeting between them, lest the mere sight of that pale, spiritual face
with its singular youthfulness of aspect, should re-awaken in his
father's breast some faint ghost of the passion that had lived and died
a quarter of a century ago. Nor did his respect for his honest-minded,
trustful-hearted mother permit him to tolerate the idea of friendly
intercourse between her and this mysterious rival from the shadowland
of vanished years. He took care, therefore, to discourage any idea of
visiting the Manor; and he carefully avoided any further talk of Mrs.
Wornock, lest his father's closer questioning should bring about the
disclosure of her identity. His father's manner, when the lady was
first discussed, had shown him very clearly that the description of her
gifts and fancies coincided with the memory of some one known in the
past; but it had been also clear that neither the name of Wornock, nor
the lady's position at Discombe, had any association for Mr. Carew.
If he had known and loved her in the past, he had known and loved her
before she married old Geoffrey Wornock.
His anxiety upon his father's account was speedily set at rest, for
Mr. Carew--after exploring his son's small and strictly popular
library, where among rows of handsomely bound standard works, there
were practically no books which appealed to the scholar's taste--soon
wearied of unstudious ease, and announced a stern necessity for going
to London, where a certain defunct Hebrew scholar's library, lay and
ecclesiastical, was to be sold at Hodgson's. He would put up for a
few days at the old-fashioned hotel which he had used since he was
an undergraduate, potter about among the book-shops, look up some
references he wanted in the Museum Reading-room, and meet his wife at
Liverpool Street on her way home.
Lady Emily, absorbed in her son and her son's love affair, agreed most
amiably to this arrangement.
"Telegraph your day and hour for returning, when you have bought all
the books you want," she said. "I'm afraid you spend more money on
those dreadful old books, which nobody in Suffolk cares a straw about,
than I do on my farm, which people come to see from far and wide."
"And a great nuisance your admirers are, Emily. I am very glad the
Suffolk people are no book-lovers; and I hope you will never hint to
anybody that my books are worth seeing."
"I could not say anything so untrue. Your shelves are full of horrors.
Now Allan's library here is really delightful--_Blackwood's
Magazine_, from the beginning, _Macaulay_, _Scott_,
_Dickens_, _Thackeray_, _Bulwer_, _Lever_,
_Marryat_--and all of them so handsomely bound! I think my brother
showed excellent taste in literature, though I doubt if he ever read
much. But as you seem happier in your library than anywhere else, I
suppose one must forgive you for spending a fortune on books that don't
interest anybody else. And one can't help being a little bit proud of
your scholarship."
And so they kissed and parted, with the unimpassioned kiss of marriage
which has never meant more than affectionate friendship. Lady Emily
stood at the hall door while her husband drove off to the station, and
then turned gaily to her son, and said--
"Now, Allan, I am yours to command. Let me see as much as possible of
that sweet young thing you are in love with. Shall we go and call on
her this afternoon? She has a white cat which may some day provide her
with kittens to distribute among her friends, and, if so, I am to have
one to bring up by hand as I did Snowdrop. You remember Snowdrop?"
Allan kissed his mother before he answered, but not for Snowdrop's sake.
"I have a vague recollection of something white and fluffy hanging to
the skirt of your gown, that I used to tread upon."
"Yes, you were horrid. You very nearly killed him. Shall we go?"
"Please, please, please, mother dearest. I am ready this instant. Three
o'clock. We shall get there at half-past, and if we loiter looking at
white kittens, or the mother of potential kittens, till half-past four,
she will give us tea, and we can make an afternoon of it."
"Hadn't I better put on a bonnet, Allan?"
"No, no. You will go in your hat, just as you are. You will treat her
without the slightest ceremony--treat her as your daughter. Do you
know, mother, I am uncommonly glad you never honoured me with a sister."
"Why, Allan?"
"Because, if I marry Suzette, she will be your only daughter. There
will be no one to be jealous of her, in Suffolk or here."
"What a foolish fancy! Well, give me a daughter as soon as you like. I
am getting old, Allan, and your father's secluded habits leave me very
often alone. His books are more his companions than I am----"
"Ah, but you know how he loves you, mother," interrupted Allan.
They were on their way to the gate by this time, Lady Emily in her
travelling-hat and loose tan gloves, just as she had been going about
the gardens and meadows in the morning, Allan twirling his stick in
very gladness of heart.
They were going to her. If she were out, they would go and find her;
at her aunt's, at the Vicarage, on the links yonder; anywhere but at
Discombe. He hoped she had not gone to Discombe.
"Yes, he is fond of me, I believe, in his own way. There never was a
better husband," Lady Emily answered thoughtfully. "But I know, Allan!
I know!"
"What, mother?"
"I know that I was not his first love--that I was only a _pis
aller_--that there is something wanting in his life, and always must
be till the end. I should brood over it all, perhaps, Allan, and end by
making myself unhappy, if it were not for my farm; but all those living
creatures occupy my mind. One living fox-terrier is worth a whole
picture-gallery."
Suzette was at home. The after-math had been cut in the meadow in front
of Marsh House, a somewhat swampy piece of ground at some seasons,
but tolerably dry just now, after a hot summer. Suzette and Bessie
Edgefield were tossing the scented grass in the afternoon sunshine,
and fancying themselves useful haymakers. They threw down their
hay-forks at the approach of visitors, and there was no more work
done that day, though Allan offered to take a fork. They all sat in
the garden talking, or wandered about among the flowers in a casual
way, and while Bessie and Lady Emily were looking at the contents of
the only greenhouse, Allan found himself alone with Suzette in a long
gravel walk on the other side of the lawn-like meadow, along all the
length of which there was a broad border filled with old-fashioned
perennials that had been growing and spreading and multiplying
themselves for half a century. A row of old medlar and hazel trees
sheltered this border from the north wind, and hid the boundary fence.
"Dear old garden!" cried Allan. "How much nicer an old garden is than a
new one!"
"I hope you don't mean to disparage your garden at Beechhurst. Our
gardener is always complaining of the old age of all things here.
Everything is worn out. The trees, the shrubs, the frames, the
greenhouse. One ought to begin again from the very beginning, he says.
He would be charmed with Beechhurst, where all things are so neat and
trim."
"Cockney trimness, I'm afraid; but if you are satisfied with it, if you
think it not altogether a bad garden----"
"I think it a delightful garden," said Suzette, blushing at that word
"satisfied," which implied so much.
"I am glad of that," said Allan, with a deep sigh of content, as if
some solemn question had been settled. "And you like my mother?"
"Very much indeed. But how you skip from the garden to Lady Emily!"
"And you approve of the Mandarin-room?"
"It is one of the handsomest rooms I ever saw, except in an Indian
palace."
"Then take them, Suzette," he cried eagerly, with his arm round her
waist, drawing the slim figure to his breast, holding and dominating
her by force of will and strength of arm, smiling down at her with
adoring eyes. "Have them, dearest! Mother, garden, room--they are all
your own; for they belong to your very slave. They are at your feet, as
I am."
"Do you call this being at my feet?" she asked, setting herself
suddenly free, with a joyous laugh. "You have a very impertinent way of
offering your gifts."
"Not impertinent--only desperate. I remembered my repulse of the other
day, and I swore to myself that I would hold you in my arms--once, at
least, if only once, even if you were to banish me into outer darkness
the next moment--and I have done it, and I am glad! But you won't
banish me, will you, Suzette? You must needs know how I love you--how
long and patiently I have loved you----"
"Long! patiently! Why, we only met at Midsummer."
"Ah, consider the age that every day on which I did not see you has
seemed to me, and the time would hardly come within your powers of
computation. Suzette, be merciful! say you love me, were it ever so
little. Were it only a love like a grain of mustard-seed, I know it
would grow into a wide and spreading tree by-and-by, and all the days
of my life would be happy under its shelter."
"You would think me curiously inconsistent if I owned to loving you
after what I said the other day," faltered Suzette, looking down at the
flowers.
"I should think you adorable."
She was only serious for a moment, and then her natural gaiety
prevailed.
"Do you know that my aunt lectured me severely when I confessed to
having refused your flattering offer?"
"Did she really? How sweet of her! After that, you cannot refuse me
again. Your aunt would shut you up and feed you upon bread and water,
as fathers and mothers used to do with rebellious daughters in the
eighteenth century."
"I hardly think she would treat me quite so ferociously for saying
'No;' but I think she would be pleased if I were to say 'Yes.'"
"And that means yes, my love, my own!" he cried, in a rapture so swift
and sudden that he had clasped her to his breast and snatched the kiss
of betrothal before she could check his impulsiveness. "You are my
very own," he said, "and I am the happiest man in England. Yes, the
happiest----Did I say in England? What a contemptible notion! I cannot
conceive the idea that anywhere upon this earth there beats a human
heart so full of gladness as mine. Suzette, Suzette, Suzette!" he
repeated tenderly, with a kiss for each comma.
"What a whirlwind you are!" she remonstrated. "And what a rag you are
making of my frock! Oh, Allan, how you have hurried me into this! And
even now I am not quite sure----"
"You are sure that I adore you! What more need my wife be sure of? Oh,
my darling, I have seen wedlock where no love is--only affection and
trustfulness and kindly feeling--all the domestic virtues with love
left out! Dearest, such a union is like a picture to the colour-blind,
like music to the stone-deaf, like a landscape without sunlight. There
is nothing in this world like love, and nothing can make up for love
when love is wanting."
"And nothing can make up for love when love is wanting," repeated
Suzette, suddenly serious. "Oh, Allan! what if I am not sure?--if I
doubt my own feelings?"
"But you can't doubt. My dearest, I am reading the signs and tokens of
love in those eloquent eyes, in those sensitive lips, while you are
talking of doubt. There is no one else, is there, Suzette?" he asked,
with quick earnestness. "No one in the past whose image comes between
you and me?"
"No one, no one."
"In all your Indian experiences?"
"No one."
"Then I am more than satisfied. And now let us go and tell my mother.
She has been waiting for a daughter ever since I was born; and, behold,
at last I am giving her one, the sweetest her heart could desire."
Suzette submitted, and walked by his side in silence while he went in
search of Lady Emily, whom he finally discovered in the poultry-yard
with Bessie Edgefield. Allan's elated air and Suzette's blushes were a
sufficient indication of what had happened; and when mother and son had
clasped hands and looked at each other there was no need of words. Lady
Emily took the girl to her heart and kissed her.
"I hope your father will be pleased, Suzette."
"I don't think he will be sorry."
"And I know Mrs. Mornington will be glad. Allan has her consent in
advance."
"Auntie is a very silly woman," said Suzette, laughingly. And then she
had to endure Bessie Edgefield's congratulations, which were of the
boisterous kind.
"Of course you will let me be bridesmaid," she said, with that vulgar,
practical view of things which wounds the sensitiveness of the newly
betrothed almost as much as an estimate from a furniture dealer, or a
prospectus from an insurance office.
CHAPTER X.
"OUR DREAMS PURSUE OUR DEAD, AND DO NOT FIND."
Miss Vincent's engagement met with everybody's approval, with the one
exception of the marriageable young ladies of the neighbourhood, who
thought that Allan Carew had made a foolish choice, and might certainly
have done better for himself. What good could come of marrying a girl
who was neither English nor French; who had been educated in a Parisian
convent, and who drove to Salisbury every Sunday morning to hear mass?
"What uncomfortable Sundays they will have!" one of these young ladies
remarked to Bessie Edgefield; "and then how horrid for him to have a
wife of a different creed! They are sure to quarrel about religion.
Isn't the Vicar dreadfully shocked?"
"My father is rather sorry that Mr. Carew should marry a Roman
Catholic. There is always the fear that he might go over to Rome----"
"Of course. He is sure to do that. It will be the only way to stop the
quarrelling. She will make him a pervert."
Mrs. Mornington, on the other hand, flattered herself that, by her
marriage with a member of the English Church, her niece would be
brought to see the errors of Rome, and would very soon make her
appearance in the family pew beside her husband.
Lady Emily cherished the same hope, since, although a less ardent
Churchwoman than Mrs. Mornington, she believed in Anglicanism as the
surest road to salvation, and she dwelt also upon the difficulties that
might arise by-and-by about the poor dear children, talking of those
potential beings as if they were already on the scene.
The Roman Church was severe upon that question, and it would perhaps
be impossible for Suzette to be married in her own church unless her
husband would promise that their children should be baptized and
educated in the true faith.
While other people were thinking about these things for him, Allan had
no room for thought of any kind, unless a lover's meditation upon the
image of the girl he loved could be dignified by the name of thought.
For Allan, life was a perpetual ecstasy. To be with Suzette in her own
home, at the Grove, on the links, anywhere--to be with her was all
he needed for bliss. For his sake, his mother had prolonged her stay
at Beechhurst, in order that the two young people might be together
in the house where they were to live as man and wife. It was Allan's
delight to make Suzette familiar with her future home. He wanted her
to feel that this was the house in which she was to live; that under
her father's roof she was no longer at home; that her books, her
bric-à-brac, the multifarious accumulations of a happy girlhood,
might as well be transferred at once to the sunny, bow-windowed
upstair room which was to be her den. It was now a plainly furnished,
matter-of-fact morning room, a room in which the Admiral had kept his
boots, cigar-boxes, and business documents, and transacted the fussy
futilities of his unoccupied life. The mantelpiece, which had been
built up with shelves and artful cupboards for the accommodation of
the Admiral's cigars, would serve excellently to set off Suzette's
zoological china; her Dresden pugs, and rats, and lobsters, and
pigs, and rabbits, her morsels of silver, and scraps of wrought
copper would adorn the shelves; and all her little odds and ends and
never-to-be-finished bits of fancy-work could be neatly stowed away in
the cupboards.
"But won't you want those dear little cubby-houses for your own
cigars?" asked Suzette. "It seems too cruel to rob you of your uncle's
snuggery. I've no doubt you smoke just as much as the Admiral."
"Not cigars. My humble pipe and pouch can stow themselves away
anywhere. I only smoke cigars out hunting, and I keep a box or two in
the saddle-room for handiness. No, this is to be your room, Suzette. I
have imagined you in it until it seems so to belong to you that I feel
I am taking a liberty in writing a letter here. When are you going to
bring the Dresden bow-wows, and the elephants, and mice, and lobsters,
and donkeys?--all about of a size, by the way."
"Oh, I could not possibly spare them," Suzette answered quickly, making
for the door.
They had come in to look at the room, and for Suzette to give her
opinion as to the colour and style of the new papering. It was to be a
Morris paper, although that would entail new carpet and curtains, and a
complete revolution as to colouring.
"Spare them!" echoed Allan, detaining her. "Who wants you to spare
them? When will you bring them with you? When are you coming to take
possession of the house which is no home for me until you are mistress
of it?"
This was by no means the first time the question had been asked.
Again and again had Allan pleaded that his marriage might be soon.
There was no reason why he should wait for his wife. His position
was established, his house was ready; a house as well found as that
flagship had been on whose quarter-deck the Admiral had moved as a
king. Why should he wait? He could never love his future wife more
dearly than he loved her now. All the framework of his life would be
out of gear till he had brought her home to the house which seemed
joyless and empty for want of her.
"When is it to be, Suzette? When am I to be completely happy?"
"What, are you not happy, _par exemple_? You talked about
overwhelming happiness when I said 'Yes.'"
"That was the promise of happiness. It lifted me to the skies; but it
was only the promise. I am pining for the realization. I want you all
to myself--to have and to hold for ever and ever; beside my hearth;
interwoven with my life; mine always and always; no longer a bright,
capricious spirit, glancing about me like a gleam of sunshine, and
vanishing like the sunbeam; but a woman--my very own--of one mind and
of one heart with me. Suzette, if you love me, you will not spin out
the time of dreams; you will give yourself to me really and for ever."
There was an earnestness in his tone that scared her. The blushes faded
from her cheeks, and she looked at him, pale and startled, and sudden
tears rushed to her eyes.
"You said you would give me time," she faltered; "time to know
you better--to be certain." And then recovering her gaiety in an
instant--"Now, Allan, it is too bad of you. Did I not tell you that I
would not be married till my one-and-twentieth birthday? Why do you
tease me to alter the date? Surely you don't want to marry an infant."
"And your birthday will be on the twenty-third of June," said Allan,
rather sullenly. "Nearly a year from now."
"Nearly a year from October to June! What odd ideas you have about
arithmetic! And now I must run and find Lady Emily. We are going to
drive to Morton Towers together."
Allan made way for her to pass, and followed her downstairs, vexed and
disheartened. His mother was to leave him next day; and then there
would be one house the less in which he and Suzette could meet--the
house which was to be their home.
He had not visited Mrs. Wornock since her nocturnal perambulation, and
he had prevented his mother paying her a second visit, albeit the hope
of a white peacock and a certain interest in the widow's personality
had made Lady Emily anxious to call at the Manor. Allan had found
reasons for putting off any such call, without saying one disparaging
word about the lady. He had heard of Mrs. Wornock from Suzette, who
reproached him for going no more to Discombe.
"I did not know you were so fickle," she said. "I really think you have
behaved abominably to poor Mrs. Wornock. She is always asking me why
you don't go to see her; and I am tired of inventing excuses."
Suzette was at the Manor every other day. Mrs. Wornock was teaching her
to play the organ.
"Is it not sweet of her?" she asked Allan. "And though I don't suppose
she ever gave any one a lesson in her life till she began to teach me,
she has the teaching gift in a marked degree. I love to learn of her.
I can play some simple things of Haydn's not altogether badly. Perhaps
you will do me the honour to come and hear me some day, when I have got
a little further."
"I will go to hear you to-morrow, if I may."
"What! Then you have no objection to Discombe in the abstract, though
you have cut poor Mrs. Wornock for the last six weeks?"
"I was so much occupied with my mother."
"And your mother wanted badly to call upon Mrs. Wornock, and you
always put a stumbling-block in her way. But I am happy to say Lady
Emily is to have the white peacock all the same. She is to have a pair
of birds. I have taken care of that."
"Like a good and thoughtful daughter."
* * * * *
When Allan came back from the station, after seeing his mother safely
seated in the London train, he found a letter from Mrs. Wornock on the
hall table--a hand-delivered letter which had just arrived. It was
brief and to the point.
"Why have you deserted me, Allan? Have I unconsciously offended
you, or is there no room in your heart for friendship as well as
love? I hear of your happiness from Suzette; but I want to see
you and your sweetheart roaming about the gardens here as in the
old days, before you were engaged lovers. Now that Lady Emily is
leaving Beechhurst, you will have time to spare for me."
The letter seemed a reproach, and he felt that he deserved to be
reproached by her. How kind she had been, how sympathetic, how
interested in his love-story; and what an ingrate he must appear in her
eyes!
He did not wait for the following morning and the music-lesson, lest
Mrs. Wornock should think he went to Discombe only on Suzette's
account. He set out immediately after reading that reproachful little
letter, and walked through the lanes and copses to the Manor House.
It was four o'clock when he arrived, and Mrs. Wornock was at home and
alone. The swelling tones of that wonderful organ answered his question
on the threshold. No beginner could play with that broad, strong
touch, which gave grandeur to the simple phrases of an "Agnus Dei" by
Palestrina.
She started up as Allan was announced, and went quickly to meet him,
giving him both her hands.
"This is so good of you," she exclaimed.
"Then you are not offended, and you have forgiven me?"
"My dear Mrs. Wornock, why should I be offended? I have received
nothing but kindness from you."
"I thought you might be angry with me for refusing the invitation to
your luncheon-party."
"It would have been very impertinent of me to be angry, when I know
what a recluse you are."
"It is a month since you were here--a whole calendar month. Why didn't
you bring Lady Emily to see me? But perhaps she did not wish to come.
Was that so?"
"No, Mrs. Wornock," he answered coldly. "My mother wished to call upon
you."
"And you prevented her?"
"Yes."
"Why did you do that?"
"Dare I be frank with you?"
"Yes, yes, yes! You cannot be too frank. I love you, Allan. Always
remember that. You are to me as a second son."
Her warmth startled and scared him. His face flushed hotly, and he
stood before her in mute embarrassment. If the secret of the past
was indeed the guilty secret which he had suspected, there was utter
shamelessness in this speech of hers.
"Allan, why are you silent?"
"Because there are some things that can hardly be said; least of all by
a man of my age to a woman of yours."
"There is nothing that you can say to me, Allan, about myself or my
regard for you, that can bring a blush to my face or to yours. There is
nothing in my life of which I need be ashamed in your sight or in the
sight of my son."
"Forgive me, forgive me, if my secret thoughts have sometimes wronged
you. There has been so much to surprise and mystify me. Your agitation
on hearing my father's name; your painful embarrassment when I brought
my mother here; and last, and most of all, your secret visit to
Beechhurst when my father was there."
"What! you know of that?"
"Yes; I saw your face at the open window, looking in at him."
She clasped her hands, and there were tears in her eyes.
"Yes," she faltered, after a silence of some moments, "I was looking
at the face I had not seen for nearly thirty years--the face that
looked at me like a ghost from the past, and had no knowledge of me,
no care for me. I knew--I have known in all these years that George
Beresford was to be looked for among the living. I have sought for
him in the spirit-world, again and again and again, in long days and
nights of waiting, in my dreams, in long, far-reaching thoughts that
have carried my soul away from this dull earth; but there was no
answer--not a thought, not a breath out of that unseen world where my
spirit would have touched his had he died while he was young, and while
he still loved me. But he lived, and grew old like me, and found a new
love, and so we are as wide apart as if we had never met. I stood in
the darkness outside your window for nearly an hour, looking at him,
listening to his voice when he spoke--the dear, kind voice! _That_
was not changed."
"It is true, then? You knew and loved my father years ago?"
"Yes, knew him and loved him, and would have been his wife if it had
been for his happiness to marry me. Think of that, Allan! I was to have
been his wife, and I gave him up for his own sake."
"Why did you do that? Why should you not have married him?"
"Because I was only a poor girl, and he was a gentleman--the only son
of a rich widow, and his mother would never have forgiven him for such
a marriage. I knew nothing of that when he asked me to be his wife. I
only knew that we loved each other truly and dearly. But just before
the day that was to have been our wedding-day his mother came to me,
and told me that if I persisted in marrying him I should be the bane of
his life. It would be social extinction for him to marry me. Social
extinction! I remember those words, though I hardly knew then what they
meant. I was not eighteen, Allan, and I knew less of the world than
many children of eight. But I did not give up my happiness without a
struggle. There was strong persuasion brought to bear upon me; and at
last I yielded--for his sake."
"And blighted his life!" exclaimed Allan. "My mother is the best of
women, and the best and kindest of wives; but I have always known
that my father's marriage was a loveless marriage. Well," he went on,
recovering himself quickly, apprehensive lest he should lower his
mother's dignity by revealing too much, "you acted generously, and no
doubt for the best, in making that sacrifice, and all has worked round
well. You married a good man, and secured a position of more importance
than my father's smaller means could have given you."
"Position! means!" she repeated, in bitterest scorn. "Oh, Allan, don't
think so poorly of me as to suppose that it was Mr. Wornock's wealth
which attracted me. I married him because he was kind and sympathetic
and good to me in my loneliness--a pupil at a German conservatoire,
living with stony-hearted people, who only cared for me to the extent
of the money that was paid for my board and lodging, and who were
always saying hard things to me because they had agreed to take me so
cheaply--too cheaply, they said. I used to feel as if I were cheating
them when I sat at their wretched meals, and I was thankful that I had
a wretched appetite."
"You were cruelly used, dear Mrs. Wornock. I can just remember my
grandmother, and I know she was a hard woman. She had no right to
interfere with her son's disposal of his life."
"No, she had no right. If I had known even as much of the world as I
know now, when Miss Marjorum--Mrs. Beresford's messenger--came to me,
I would have acted differently. I know now that a gentleman need not
be ashamed of marrying a penniless girl if there is nothing against
her but her poverty; but then I believed what Miss Marjorum told
me--believed that I should blight the life of the man who loved me with
such generous self-sacrificing love. Why should he alone be generous,
and I selfish and indifferent to his welfare?"
"But how did he suffer you to sacrifice yourself at his mother's
bidding?"
"He had no power to stop me. It was all settled without his knowledge.
I hope he was not very sorry--dear, dear George!--so generous, so true,
so noble. Oh, how I loved him--how I have loved him--all my life,
all my life! My husband knew that I had no heart to give him--that I
could be his obedient wife--but that I could never love him as I had
loved----"
Again her sobs choked her speech. She threw herself into a chair and
abandoned herself to that passionate grief.
"Dear Mrs. Wornock, forgive me for having revived these sorrowful
memories. I was wrong--I ought not to have spoken----"
"No, no, there is nothing to forgive. It does me good to talk of the
past--with you, Allan, with you, not with any one else. And now you
know why my heart went out to you from the first. Why you are to me
almost as a son--almost as dear as my own son--and your future wife
as my daughter. It does me good to talk to you of that time--so long
and long ago. It does me good to talk of my dead self. I have never
forgotten. The past has always been dearer to me than anything in this
life that came afterwards."
"I do not think my father has forgotten that past, any more than you
have, Mrs. Wornock. I know that there has always been a cloud over his
life--the shadow of one sad memory. I have felt and understood this,
without knowing whence the shadow came."
"He was too true-hearted to forget easily," Mrs. Wornock said, gently,
"and we were both so young. I was his first love, as he was mine. And
when a first love is pure and strong as ours was, it must be first and
last, must it not, Allan?"
"Yes," he answered, half doubtfully, remembering certain sketchy loves
of his own, and hoping that they could hardly be ranked as love, so
that he might believe that his passion for Suzette was essentially the
first; essentially, if not actually.
"No, I have never forgotten," Mrs. Wornock repeated musingly, seating
herself at the piano, and softly touching the notes now and then,
playing a few bars of pensive melody sotto voce as she talked--now a
phrase from an Adagio of Beethoven's, now a resolution from a prelude
by Bach, dropping gravely down into the bass with softly repetitive
phrases, from piano to pianissimo, melting into silence like a sigh.
"No, I have never forgotten--and I have suffered from the pains as well
as the pleasures of memory. Before my son was born, and after, there
was a long interval of darkness when I lived only in the past, when the
shadows of the past were more real to me than the living things of the
present, when my husband's face was dim and distant, and that dear face
from the past was always near me, with the kind smile that comforted
me in my desolate youth. Yes, I loved him, Allan, loved him, and gave
him up for his own sake. And now you tell me my sacrifice was useless;
that, even with the wife his mother chose for him, the good amiable
wife, he has not been altogether happy."
"His life has been placid, studious, kindly, and useful. It may be that
he was best fitted for that calm, secluded life--it may be that if you
had taken the more natural and the more selfish course--and in so doing
parted him for ever from his mother, who was a proud woman, capable of
lifelong resentment--it may be that remorse might have blighted his
life, and that even your love would not have consoled him under the
conviction that he had broken his mother's heart. I know that, after
her strong-minded masterful fashion, she adored him. He was all she
had in this world to love or care for; and it is quite possible that
a lasting quarrel with him might have killed her. Dear Mrs. Wornock,
pray do not think that your sacrifice was altogether in vain. No such
self-surrender as that can be without some good fruit. I do not pretend
to be a holy person, but I do believe in the power of goodness. And,
consider, dear friend, your life has not been all unhappy. You had a
kind and good husband."
"Good! He was more than good, and for over a year of our married life
I was a burden to him. He was an exile from the home he loved, for my
sake--for me, who ought to have brightened his home for him."
"But that was only a dark interval," said Allan, remembering what Mrs.
Mornington had told him, of the long residence at Grindelwald, and
the birth of the heir in that remote spot. "There were happier days
afterwards."
"Yes, we had a few peaceful years here, before death took him from me,
and while our boy was growing in strength and beauty."
"And in these long years of widowhood music has been your comforter. In
your devotion to art you have lived the higher life."
"Yes," she answered, with an inspired look, striking a triumphant
chord, "music has been my comforter--music has conjured back my dead
father, my lost lover. Music has been my life and my hope."
CHAPTER XI.
THE MASTER OF DISCOMBE.
Mrs. Wornock's frank revelation of her girlish love and self-sacrifice
lifted a burden from Allan's heart and mind. He had been interested in
her, and attracted towards her from that first summer noontide when
he studied her thoughtful face in the village church, and when he
lingered among the villagers' graves to hear her play. His sympathy had
grown with every hour he spent in her society, and he had been deeply
grateful for the friendship which had so cordially included him and the
girl he loved. It had been very painful to him to believe that this
sweet-mannered woman belonged to the fallen ones of the earth, that her
graces were the graces of a Magdalen, most painful to think that she
was no fitting companion for the girl who had so readily responded to
her friendly advances.
The cloud was lifted now, and he felt ashamed of all his past doubts
and suspicions. He respected Mrs. Wornock for her refusal to meet his
father in the beaten way of friendship. He was touched by the devotion
which had brought her creeping to his windows under the cover of night
to look upon the face of her beloved. He resolved that he would do
all that in him lay to atone for the wrong his thoughts had done her,
that he would be to her, indeed, as a second son, and that he would
cultivate her son's friendship in a brotherly spirit.
He stopped in the corridor on the morning after that interview to
study the portrait of the young man whose likeness to himself had now
resolved itself into a psychological mystery, and he could but see that
it was a likeness of the mind rather than of the flesh, a resemblance
in character and expression far more than in actual lineaments.
"He is vastly my superior in looks," thought Allan, as he studied
the lines of that boldly painted face. "He has his mother's finely
chiselled features, his mother's delicate colouring. There is a shade
of effeminacy, otherwise the face would be almost faultless. And to
mistake this face for that! Absurd!" muttered Allan, catching the
reflection of his sunburnt forehead, and strongly marked nose and chin,
in the Venetian glass that hung at right angles with the picture.
He heard the organ while the butler paused with his hand on the door,
waiting to announce the visitor. The simpler music, the weaker touch,
told him that the pupil was playing.
"Please don't stop," he cried, as he went in; "I want to hear if the
pupil is worthy of her mistress."
Mrs. Wornock came to meet him, and Suzette went on playing, with only a
smile and a nod to her sweetheart.
"She is getting on capitally. She has a real delight in music,"
announced Mrs. Wornock.
"How happy you are looking this morning!"
"I have had good news. My son is on his way home."
"I congratulate you."
"He is coming home for his long leave. I shall have him for nearly a
year."
"How happy you will be! I have just been studying his portrait."
"You are so like him."
"Oh, only a rough copy--a charcoal sketch on coarse paper,--nothing to
boast of," said Allan, with a curious laugh.
He was watching Suzette, to see if she were interested in the expected
arrival. She played on, her eyes intent alternately upon the page of
music in front of her, and upon the stops which she was learning to
use. There was no stumbling in the notes, or halting in the time. She
played the simple legato passages smoothly and carefully, and seemed to
pay no heed to their talk.
Allan would have been less than human, perhaps, if his first thought on
hearing of Geoffrey's return had not been of the influence he might
exercise upon Suzette--whether in him she would recognize the superior
and more attractive personality.
"No," he thought, ashamed of that jealous fear which was so quick to
foresee a rival, "Suzette has given me her heart, and it must be my
own fault if I can't keep it. Women are our superiors, at least in
this, that they are not so easily caught by the modelling of a face,
or the rich tones of a complexion. And shall I think so meanly of my
sweet Suzette as to suppose that my happiness is in danger because some
one more attractive than myself appears upon the scene? When we spend
our first season in London as man and wife, she will have to run the
gauntlet of all the agreeable men in town, soldiers and sailors, actors
and painters, ingenuous young adorers and hoary-headed flatterers. The
whole army of Satan that maketh war upon innocence and beauty. No, I am
not afraid. She has a fine brain and a noble heart. She is not the kind
of woman to jilt a lover or betray a husband. I am safe in loving her."
He had need to comfort himself, for the hour of trial was nearer than
he thought.
He went to Discombe before luncheon on the morning after he had heard
of Geoffrey's return. He went expecting to find Suzette at the organ,
and to hear the latter part of the lesson. He was not a connoisseur,
but he loved music well enough to love to hear his sweetheart play, and
to be able to distinguish every stage of progress in her performance.
To-day, however, the organ was silent; the youth who blew the bellows
was chasing a wasp in the corridor, and the room into which Allan was
ushered was empty.
"The ladies are in the garden, sir," said the butler. "Shall I tell my
mistress that you are here?"
"No, thanks, I'll go and look for the ladies."
The autumn morning was bright and mild, and one of the French windows
was open.
Allan hurried out to the garden, and looked down the cypress avenue.
The long perspective of smooth-shaven lawn was empty. There was no one
loitering by the fountain. They were in the summer-house--the classic
temple where Mrs. Wornock had sunk into unconsciousness at the sound
of his father's name, where he had lived through the most embarrassing
experience of his life.
He could distinguish Mrs. Wornock's black gown, and Suzette's
terra-cotta frock, a cloth frock from a Salisbury tailor, which he had
greatly admired. But there was another figure that puzzled him--an
unfamiliar figure in grey--a man's figure.
Never had the grass walk seemed so long, or the temple so remote.
Yes, that third figure was decidedly masculine. There was no optical
delusion as to the sex of the stranger--no petticoat hidden behind the
marble table. As he drew nearer he saw that the intruder was a young
man, sitting in a lounging attitude with his arms resting on the table,
and his shoulders leaning forward to bring him nearer to the two
ladies seated opposite.
He felt that it would be undignified to run, but he walked so fast in
his eagerness to discover the identity of the interloper that he was in
an undignified perspiration when he arrived.
"Allan, poor Allan, how you have been running!" exclaimed Suzette.
"I was vexed with myself for losing the whole of your organ lesson,"
said Allan, shaking hands with Mrs. Wornock, and gazing at the stranger
as at a ghost.
Yes, it was Geoffrey Wornock. Even his hurried reflections during
that hurried walk had told Allan that it must be he, and none other.
No one else would be admitted to the familiarity of the garden and
summer-house. Mrs. Wornock had no casual visitors, no intimate friends,
except Suzette and himself.
"There has been no organ lesson this morning, Allan," Mrs. Wornock
told him, her face radiant with happiness. "Suzette and I have been
surprised out of all sober occupations and ideas. This son of mine took
it into his head to come home nearly a fortnight before I expected him.
He arrived as suddenly as if he had dropped from the skies. He did not
even telegraph to be met at the station."
"A telegram would have taken the bloom off the surprise, mother," said
the man in grey, standing up tall and straight, but slenderly built.
Allan felt himself a coarse gladiatorial sort of person beside
this elegant and refined-looking young man. Nor was there anything
effeminate about that graceful figure to which an envious critic could
take exception. Soldiering had given that air of manliness which can
co-exist with slenderness and grace.
"Geoffrey, this is Allan, of whom you know so much."
"They tell me that you and I are very much alike, Mr. Carew," said
Geoffrey, with a pleasant laugh, "and my mother tells me that you and
I are to take kindly to each other, and in fact she expects to see
us by way of being adopted brothers. I don't quite know what that
means--whether we are to ride each other's horses, and make free with
each other's guns, or go halves in a yacht or a racehorse?"
"I want you to like each other--to be real friends," said Mrs. Wornock,
earnestly.
"Then don't say another word about it, mother. Friendship under that
kind of protecting influence rarely comes to any good; but I am quite
prepared to like Mr. Carew on his own account, and I hope he may be
able to like me on the same poor grounds."
He had an airy way of dismissing the subject which set them all
at their ease, and steered them away from the rocks and shoals of
sentiment. Mrs. Wornock, who had been on the verge of weeping, smiled
again, and led Geoffrey off to look at the gardens, and all the
improvements which had been effected during his three years' absence,
leaving the lovers to follow or not as they pleased.
The lovers stayed in the summer-house, feeling that mother and son
would like to be alone; and mother and son strolled on side by side,
looking like brother and sister.
"My dearest," said Mrs. Wornock, tenderly, slipping her arm through
her son's directly they were really alone, and out of sight, in an
old flower-garden walled round by dense hedges of clipped ilex, a
garden laid out in a geometrical pattern, and with narrow gravel paths
intersecting the flower-beds. The glory of all gardens was over. There
were only a few lingering dahlias, and prim asters lifting up their
gaudy discs to the sun, and beds of marigolds of different shades, from
palest yellow to deepest orange.
"My dearest, how glad I am to have you! I begin to live again now you
have come home."
"And I am very glad to be at home, mother," answered her son, smiling
down upon her, fondly, protectingly, but with that light tone which
marked all he said. "But it seems to me you have been very much alive
while I have been away, with this young man of yours who is almost an
adopted son."
"My heart went out to him, Geoffrey, because of his likeness to you."
"A dangerous precedent. You might meet half a dozen such likenesses in
a London season. It would hardly do for your heart to go out to them
all. You would be coming home with a large family--by adoption."
"There is no fear of that. I don't go into society, and I don't think,
if I did, I should meet any one like Allan Carew."
Geoffrey could but note the tenderness in her tone as she spoke Allan's
name.
"And who is this double of mine, mother; and what is he, and how does
he come to be engaged to that dainty, dark-eyed girl?"
"You like Suzette?"
"Yes, I like her--she is a nice, winning thing--not startlingly pretty;
but altogether nice. I like the way that dark silky hair of hers breaks
up into tiny curls about her forehead--and she has fine eyes----"
"India has made you critical, Geoffrey."
"Not India, but a native disposition, mother dearest. In India we
have often to put up with second best in the way of beauty, faded
carnations, tired eyes, hollow cheeks; but the young women have
generally plenty to say for themselves. They can talk, and they can
dance. They are educated for the marriage market before they are sent
out."
His mother laughed, and hung on to his arm admiringly. In her opinion,
whatever he said was either wise or witty. All his impertinences were
graceful. His ignorance was better than other people's knowledge.
"You have not neglected your violin, I hope, Geoffrey?"
"No, mother. My good little Strad has been my friend and comrade in
many a quiet hour while the other fellows were at cards, or telling
stale stories. I shall be very glad to play the old de Beriot duets
again. Your fingers have not lost their cunning, I know."
"I have played a great deal while you were away. I have had nothing
else to think about."
"Except Allan Carew."
"He has not made much difference. He comes and goes as he
likes--especially when Suzette is here. I sit at my organ or piano and
let them wander about and amuse themselves."
"What an indulgent chaperon!"
"I knew what the end must be, Geoffrey. I knew from the first that they
were in love with each other. At least I knew from the very first that
he was in love with her."
"You were not so sure about the lady?"
"A girl is too shy to let her feelings be read easily; but I could see
she liked his society. They used to roam about the garden together like
children. They were too happy not to be in love."
"Does being in love mean happiness, mother? Don't you think there is a
middle state between indifference and passion--a cordial, comfortable,
sympathetic friendship which is far happier than love? It has no
cold fits of doubt, no hot fits of jealousy. From your account of
these young people, I question if they were ever really in love. Your
Carew looks essentially commonplace. I don't give him credit for much
imagination."
"You will understand him better by-and-by, dearest."
The mother was looking up at the newly regained son, admiring him, and
beginning to fancy that she had done him an injustice in thinking that
Allan resembled him. He was much handsomer than Allan, and there was
something picturesque and romantic in his countenance and bearing which
appealed to a woman's fancy; a look as of the Lovelaces and Dorsets of
old, the courtiers and soldiers who could write a love-song on the eve
of a bloody battle, or dance a minuet at midnight, and fight a duel at
dawn. His manner to his mother was playful and protecting. He had not
the air of thinking her the wisest of women, but no one could doubt
that he loved her.
The summer-house was empty when they went back to it, and there was a
pencilled note on the marble table addressed to Mrs. Wornock.
"Allan is going to see me home in time to give father his tiffin,
and I think you and Mr. Wornock will like to have the day to
yourselves. I shall come for my organ lesson to-morrow at eleven,
unless you tell me to stop away--
"Ever, dear Mrs. Wornock, your own
"SUZETTE."
"Pretty tactful soul! Of course we want to be alone," said Geoffrey,
reading the note over his mother's shoulder. "First you shall give me
the best lunch that Discombe can provide; and then we will drive round
and look at everything. And we will devote the evening to de Beriot. I
must go up to town by an early train to-morrow."
"Running away from me so soon, Geoffrey?"
"Now, mother, it's base ingratitude to say that. I've hardly given
myself breathing time since I landed at Brindisi, because I wanted
to push home to you, first of the very first. I shall only be in
London a day or two. I want to see what kind of horses are being sold
at Tattersall's, and I may run down to look at the Belhus hunters.
Remember I haven't a horse to ride."
"There are your old hunters, Geoffrey?"
"Three dear old crocks. Admirable as pensioners, not to carry eleven
stone to hounds. No, mother, I'm afraid there's nothing in your stables
that will be good for more than a cover-hack."
Mrs. Wornock sighed faintly in the midst of her bliss. She had a
womanly horror of hunting and all its perils, and in her heart of
hearts was always on the side of the fox; but she knew that without
hunting and shooting Discombe Manor would very soon pall upon
her son, dilettante and Jack-of-all-trades though he was. Music
alone--passionately as he loved it--would not keep him contented.
Allan and Suzette strolled home under the bright blue sky. These
late days in October were the Indian summer of the year, a season in
which it was a joy to live, especially in a land where the smoke from
domestic hearths curling upward here and there in silvery wreaths from
wood fires, only suggested homeliness and warmth, not filth and fog.
They sauntered slowly homeward through the rustic lanes, and their talk
was naturally of the new arrival.
"Is he the kind of young man you expected him to be?" asked Suzette.
There was no occasion to be more specific in one's mention of
_him_. There could but be one young man in their thoughts to-day.
"I don't know that I had formed any expectations about him."
"Oh, Allan, that can't be true! You must have thought about him, after
everybody telling you of the likeness. Remember what you told me in our
very first dance--how dreadfully bored you had been about him, and how
glad you were that I didn't know him."
"My being bored--and I was horribly--was no reason why my imagination
should dwell upon him. If I thought of him at all, I thought of him
just as he is--the image of his portrait by Millais--and a very
good-looking and well set-up young man--so much better looking than my
humble self, that I wonder at any one's seeing a likeness between the
two faces."
"Is he better looking, Allan? I know I like your face best."
"I'm glad of that, since you will have to put up with my face for a
lifelong companion."
"Allan, how grumpily you said that."
"Did I, Suzie? I'm afraid I'm a brute. I am beginning to find out
disagreeable depths in my character."
She looked at him with a puzzled air--so sweetly innocent, so free from
any backward-reaching thought--that made him happy again. He took up
the little hand hanging loose at her side and kissed it.
"Let us drop in upon Aunt Mornington, and ask her for lunch," he said
as they came within sight of the Grove. "I don't feel like parting with
you just yet, Suzie."
"Quite impossible. I must be at home for father's tiffin."
"I forgot that sacred institution. Well, Suzie, do you think it's
possible the General might ask me to share that important meal if he
saw me hanging about? We could go to the links afterwards, so that you
might have the pleasure of seeing how wildly I can beat the air?"
Suzie laughed her assent to this proposition, and General Vincent,
overtaking them five minutes afterwards on his useful hack, sustained
an Anglo-Indian's reputation for hospitality by immediately inviting
Allan to luncheon.
END OF VOL. I.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]
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