CHAPTER IV.
"LET NO MAN LIVE AS I HAVE LIVED."
Allan went back to Suffolk, and Suzette's life resumed its placid course; a life in which she had for the most part to find her own amusements and occupations. General Vincent was fond and proud of his daughter; but he was not a man to make a companion of a daughter, except at the social board. If Suzette were at home at twelve o'clock to superintend the meal which he called tiffin, and in her place in the drawing-room a quarter of an hour before the eight-o'clock dinner; if she played him to sleep after dinner, or allowed herself to be beaten at chess whenever he fancied an evening game, she fulfilled the whole duty of a daughter as understood by General Vincent. For the rest he had a supreme belief in her high principles and discretion. Her name on the tableau in the parlour at the Sacré Cœur had stood forth conspicuously for all the virtues—order, obedience, propriety, truthfulness. The nuns, who expect perfection in the young human vessel, had discovered no crack or flaw in Suzette.
"She has not only amiability and kindness of heart," said the Reverend Mother, at the parting interview with the pupil's father, "she has plenty of common sense, and she will never give you any trouble."
When the General took his daughter to India, there had been some talk of a companion-governess, or governess-companion, for Suzette; but against this infliction the girl herself protested strongly.
"If I am not old enough or wise enough to take care of myself, I will go back to the convent," she declared. "I would rather take the veil than submit to be governed by a 'Mrs. General.' I had learnt everything the nuns could teach me before I left the Sacré Cœur. I am not going to be taught by an inferior teacher—some smatterer, perhaps. Nobody can teach like the sisters of the Sacré Cœur."
General Vincent had been preached at by his female relatives on this subject of the governess-companion. "Suzette is too young and too pretty to be alone," said one. "Suzette will get into idle habits if there is no one to direct her mind," said another. "A girl's education has only begun when she leaves school," said a third, as gloomy in their foreshadowing of evil as if they had been the three fatal sisters. But the General loved his daughter, and when withdrawing her from the convent had promised her that her life should be happy; so he abandoned an idea that had never been his own.
"A Mrs. General would have been a doosid expensive importation," he told his friends afterwards, "and I knew there would be plenty of nice women to look after Suzie."
Suzette had proved quite capable of looking after herself, unaided by the nice women; indeed, her conduct had been—or should have been—a liberal education to more than one of those nice women, who might have found their matronly exuberances of conversation and behaviour in a manner rebuked by the girl's discretion and self-respect. Suzette passed unsmirched through the furnace of a season at Simla, and a season at Naini Tal, and came to rustic Wiltshire with all the frank gaiety of happy girlhood, and all thesavoir fairewhich comes of two years' society experience. She had been courted and wooed, and had blighted the hopes of more than one eligible admirer.
When she came to Matcham, there was again a question of chaperon or companion. The odious word governess was abandoned. But it was said that Indian society was less conventional than English society, and that what might be permitted at Simla could hardly be endured at Wiltshire; and again Suzette threatened to go back to her convent if she were not to be trusted with the conduct of her own life.
"If I cannot take care of myself I am only fit for a cloister," she said. "I would rather be a lay sister, and scrub floors, than be led about by some prim personage, paid to keep watch and ward over me, a hired guardian of my manners and my complexion."
Mrs. Mornington, who was less conventional than the rest of the General's womankind, put in her word for her niece.
"Suzette wants no chaperon while I am living within five minutes' walk," she said. "She can come to me in all her little domestic difficulties; and as for parties, she is not likely to be asked to any ceremonious affair to which I shall not be asked too."
Mrs. Mornington had been as kind and helpful as she had promised to be; and in all domestic cruxes, in all details of home life, in the arrangement of a dinner or the purchase of household goods Suzette had taken counsel with her aunt. The meadows appertaining to the Grove and to Marsh House were conterminous, and a gate had been made in the fence, so that Suzette could run to her aunt at any hour, without hat or gloves, and without showing herself on the high-road.
"If ever we quarrel, that gate will have to be nailed up," said Mrs. Mornington. "It makes a quarrel much more awful when there is a communication of that kind. The walling up of a gate is a public manifesto. If ever we bar each other out, Suzette, all Matcham will know it within twenty-four hours."
Suzette was not afraid that the gate would have to be nailed up. She was fond of her aunt, and fully appreciated that lady's hard-headed qualities; but although she went to her aunt Mornington for advice about the gardener and the cook, the etiquette of invitations and the law of selection with reference to a dinner-party, it was to Mrs. Wornock she went for sympathy in the higher needs of life; it was to Mrs. Wornock she revealed the mysteries of her heart and her imagination.
"I seem to have known you all my life," she told that lady; "and I am never afraid of being troublesome."
"You never can be troublesome," Mrs. Wornock answered, looking at her with admiring affection. "I don't know what I should do without you, Suzette. You and Allan have given my poor worn-out life a new brightness."
"Allan! How fond you are of Allan," Suzette said, musingly. "It seems so strange that you should have taken him to your heart so quickly—only because he is like your son."
"Not only on that account, Suzette. That was the beginning. I am fond of Allan for his own sake. His fine character has endeared him to me."
"You think he has a fine character?"
"Think! I know he has. Surely you know him too, Suzie. You ought to have learnt his value by this time."
"Yes, I know he is good, generous, honest, and true. His love for his father is very beautiful—and yet he found time to come all this way to spend an hour or two with unworthy frivolous me."
"He did not think that a sacrifice, Suzie, for he adores you."
"You really think so—that he cares as much as that?"
"I am very sure that he loves with his whole heart and mind, as his father—may have done before him."
"Oh, his father would have been in earnest, I have no doubt, in any affection; but I doubt if he was ever tremendously in love with Lady Emily. She is all that is sweet and dear in her frank homely way, but not a person to inspire agrande passion. Allan's father must have loved and lost in his early youth. There is a shade of melancholy in his voice and manner—nothing gloomy or dismal—but just that touch of seriousness which tells of deep thoughts. He is a most interesting man. I wish you could have seen him while he was at Beechhurst. I fear he will never leave Fendyke again."
Mrs. Wornock sighed and sat silent, while Suzette went to the piano and played a short fugue by their favourite Sebastian Bach—played with tender touch, lengthening out every slow passage in her pensive reverie.
There had been no more concertante duets. Geoffrey had entreated her to go on with their mutual study of De Beriot and the older composers, Corelli, Tartini, and the rest; but she had obstinately refused.
"The music is difficult and tiring," she said.
This was her first excuse.
"We will play simpler music—the lightest we can find. There are plenty of easy duets."
"Please don't think me capricious if I confess that I don't care about playing with the violin. It takes too much out of one. I am too anxious."
"Why should you be anxious? I am not going to be angry or disagreeable at yourbrioches—should you make any."
She still refused, lightly but persistently; and he saw that she had made up her mind.
"I begin to understand," he said, with an offended air; and there was never any further talk of Suzette as an accompanist.
Geoffrey was seldom at home in the daytime after this refusal, and life at the Manor dropped back into the old groove. Mrs. Wornock and Suzette spent some hours of every day together; and, now that the weather often made the garden impossible, the organ and piano afforded their chief occupation and amusement. Suzette was enthusiastic, and pleased with her own improvement under her friend's guidance. It was not so much tuition as sympathy which the elder woman gave to the younger. Suzette's musical talent, since she left her convent, had been withering in an atmosphere of chilling indifference. Her father liked to be played to sleep after dinner; but he hardly knew one air from another, and he called everything his daughter played Rubinstein.
"Wonderful fellow that Rubinstein!" he used to say. "There seems no end to his compositions; and, to my notion, they've only one fault—they're all alike."
Suzette heard of Geoffrey, though she rarely saw him. His mother talked of him daily; but there was a regretful tone in all her talk. Nothing at Discombe seemed quite satisfactory to the son and heir. His horses were failures. The hunting was bad—"rotten," Geoffrey called it, but could give no justification for this charge of rottenness. The sport might be good enough for the neighbours in general; but it was not good enough for a man who had run the whole gamut of sport in Bengal, under the best possible conditions. Geoffrey doubted if there was any hunting worth talking about, except in the shires or in Ireland. He thought of going to Ireland directly after Christmas.
"He is bored and unhappy here, Suzette," Mrs. Wornock said one morning, when Suzette found her particularly low-spirited. "The life that suits Allan, and other young men in the neighbourhood, is not good enough for Geoffrey. He has been spoilt by Fortune, perhaps—or it is his sad inheritance. I was an unhappy woman when he was born, and a portion of my sorrow has descended upon my son."
This was the first time she had ever spoken to Suzette of her past life or its sorrows.
"You must not think that, dear Mrs. Wornock. Your son is tired of this humdrum country life, and he'll be all the better and brighter for a change. Let him go to Ireland and hunt. He will be so much the fonder of you when he comes back."
Mrs. Wornock sighed, and began to walk about the room in a restless way.
"Oh, Suzette, Suzette," she said, "I am very unhappy about him! I don't know what will become of us, my son and me. We have all the elements of happiness, and yet we are not happy."
It was a month after the little dinner at Marsh House, and Suzette and her sweetheart had not met since that evening. There had been no change for the better in Mr. Carew's condition; and Allan had felt it impossible to leave the father over whose dwindling hours the shadow of the end was stealing—gently, gradually, inevitably. There were days when all was hushed and still as at the approach of doom—when the head of the household lay silent and exhausted within closed doors, and all Allan could do was to comfort his mother in her aching anxiety. This he did with tenderest thoughtfulness, cheering her, sustaining her, tempting her out into the gardens and meadows, beguiling her to temporary forgetfulness of the sorrow that was so near. There were happier—or seemingly happier—days when the invalid was well enough to sit in his library, among the books which had been his life-companions. In these waning hours he could only handle his books—fondle them, as it were—slowly turning the leaves, reading a paragraph here and there, or pausing to contemplate the outside of a volume, in love with a tasteful binding, the creamy vellum, or gold-diapered back, the painted edges, the devices to which he had given such careful thought in the uneventful years, when collecting and rebinding these books had been the most serious business of his life. He laid down one volume and took up another, capriciously—sometimes with an impatient, sometimes with a regretful, sigh. He could not read more than a page without fatigue. His eyes clouded and his head ached at any sustained exertion. His son kept him company through the grey winter day, in the warm glow of the luxurious room, sheltered by tapestry portières and tall Indian screens. His son fetched and carried for him, between the book-table by the hearth and the shelves that lined the room from floor to ceiling, and filled an ante-room beyond, and overflowed into the corridor.
"My day is done," George Carew said with a sigh. "These books have been my life, Allan, and now I have outlived them. The zest is gone out of them all; and now in these last days I know what a mistake my life has been. Let no man live as I have done, and think that he is wise. A life without variety or action is something less than life. Never envy the student his peaceful meditative days. Be sure that when the end is near he will look back, as I do, and feel that he has wasted his life—yes, even though he leave some monumental work which the world will treasure when he is in the dust—monument more enduring than brass or marble. The man himself, when the shadows darken round him, will know how much he has lost. Life means action, Allan, and variety, and the knowledge of this glorious world into which we are born. The student is a worm and no man. Let no sorrow blight your life as mine has been blighted."
"Dear father, I have always known there was a cloud upon your life—but at least you have made others happy—as husband, father, master——"
"I have not been a domestic tyrant. That is about the best I can say for myself. I have been tolerably indulgent to the kindest of wives. I have loved my only son. Small merits these in a man whose home-life has been cloudless. But I might have done better, Allan. I might have risen superior to that youthful sorrow. I might have taken my dear Emily closer to my heart, travelled over this varied world with her, shown her all that is strangest and fairest under far-off skies instead of letting her vegetate here. I might have gone into Parliament, put my shoulder to the wheel of progress—helped as other men help, with unselfish toil, struggling on hopefully through the great dismal swamp of mistake and muddle-headedness. Better, far better, any life of laborious endeavour, even if futile in result, than the cultured idlers' paradise—better far for me, since in such a life I should have forgotten the past, and might have been a cheerful companion in the present. I chose to feed my morbid fancies; to live the life of retrospection and regret; and now that the end has come, I begin to understand what a contemptible creature I have been."
"Contemptible! My dear father, if every student were so to upbraid himself after a life of plain living and high thinking, such as you have led——"
"Plain living and high thinking are of very little good, Allan, if they result in no useful work. Plain living and high thinking may be only a polite synonym for selfish sloth."
"Father, I will not hear you depreciate yourself."
"My dear son! It is something to have won your love."
"And my mother. Is it not something to have made her happy?"
"For that I must thank her own sweet disposition. My reproach is that I might have made her happier. I have wronged her by brooding over an old sorrow."
"She has not been jealous of the love that came before you belonged to her. She loves and honours you."
"Far beyond my merits. Providence has been very good to me, Allan."
There was a silence. More books were asked for and brought, languidly opened, languidly closed, and laid aside. Yes, the zest had gone out of them. The languor of excessive weakness can find no beauty even in things most beautiful.