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 muchbrioand 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. Nopoudre des féesblanched the delicate brow; norose d'amourflushed the cheek; noeau de Medéebrightened 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 himselftête-à-têtewith 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.