CHAPTER X.
"AND THAT UNREST WHICH MEN MISCALL DELIGHT."
Allan went back to Matcham sobered by grief, and longing for the comfort his betrothed could give him, the comfort of sympathy and gentle words, the deeper comfort in the assurance of her love.
Suzette looked very pale in her black frock when Allan appeared at Marsh House after his bereavement. They stood side by side in the grey light of a hopelessly dull day, finding but little speech in the sadness of this first meeting.
"My darling, you have been grieving for my grief," he said tenderly, looking into the dark eyes, noting the tired look as of many tears, the sharper line of the cheek, the settled pallor, where a lovely carmine had been wont to come and go like warm light.
"My dearest, you have lost all your roses—and for my sake. For me those dear eyes have known sleepless nights, those lovely cheeks have grown pinched and pale."
"Do you think that I could help being sorry for you, Allan?" she murmured, with downcast eyelids.
"You had no other cause for sorrow, I hope?"
"No, no; only in every life there are saddening intervals. I was sorry for your sake—sorry that I was never to see your father again. I liked him so much, Allan. And then somehow I got into a low-spirited way, and old Dr. Podmore gave me a tonic which made my head ache. I don't know that it had any other effect."
"Suzette, it was cruel of you not to tell me that you were ill."
"Oh, I was not to say ill. Why should I worry you about such nonsense? I was only below par. That is what Dr. Podmore called it. But please don't talk about me, Allan. Talk to me of yourself and of your poor mother. She is coming to stay with you, I hope?"
"Yes, she is coming to me next week. How is Mrs. Wornock? Do you go to her as much as ever?"
"Almost as much. She seems so dependent upon me for companionship, poor soul. I am the only girl she has taken to—as people say."
"What a wise woman to choose the most charming girl in the world."
"If you said in the Matcham world, it would not be a stupendous compliment."
"Nay, I mean the world. I challenge the universe to produce me a second Suzette. And Geoffrey, your violin player, has he been much at home?"
"Not very much. Please don't call him my violin player. I have not played a single accompaniment for him since you objected. I have been very dutiful."
"Don't talk of duty. It is love that I want, love without alloy; love which, being full of foolishness itself, can forgive a lover's baseless jealousy."
"Allan, have I ever been unforgiving?"
"No, you have borne with my tempers. You have been all that is kind and sweet—but I sometimes wish you would be angry with me. Would that there were a girl in Matcham handsome enough to admit of your jealousy! How desperately I would flirt with that girl!"
Her wan smile was not encouraging.
"Is he still as devoted to his fiddle? Does he talk of Tartini, Spontini, de Beriot, as other men talk of Salisbury or Gladstone?"
"I have seen very little of him; but he is a fanatic about music. He inherits his mother's passion."
"His poor mother," sighed Allan.
"She is so fond of you—almost as fond as she is of her own son."
"That's not possible, Suzie."
"Well, the son must be first, of course; but, indeed, she is very fond of you, Allan."
"Dear soul, it is for old sake's sake. I'll tell you her poor little innocent secret, Suzie. You, who are the other half of my soul, have a right to know all things which gravely interest me. Only you must be discretion itself; and you must never breathe a word of Mrs. Wornock's story to my mother."
And then he sat down by her side in the comfortable corner by the old-fashioned fireplace, fenced off from all the outer world by a Japanese screen, on which Choti and an army of smaller devils grinned and capered against a black satin background, and he told her tenderly, but only in outline, the story of his father's first love, and Esperanza's all-too-willing sacrifice.
"It was generous—but a mistake," he said in conclusion. "She gave up her own happiness, dashed away the cup of joy when it was at her lips. She was nobly unselfish, and she spoilt two lives. Such sacrifices never answer."
"Do you really believe that, Allan?" asked Suzette, looking at him with a startling intensity.
"I really do. I have never known a case in which self-surrender of that kind has ended well. A man and woman who love each other should be true to each other and their mutual love. All worldly considerations should be as naught. If a man truly loves a beggar-girl, let him marry her; and don't let the beggar-girl jilt him because she thinks he would do better by marrying a duchess."
"But if two people love each other—who are otherwise bound and fettered, who cannot be happy without breaking older ties——"
"Ah, that is a different thing. Honour comes into the question, and there must be sacrifices. This world would be a pandemonium if inclination went before honour. I am talking of love weighed against worldly wisdom, against poverty, against rank, race, wealth. You can understand now why Mrs. Wornock's heart went out to me from the beginning of our acquaintance—why she has accepted me almost as a second son."
Allan's Matcham friends were enthusiastic in their welcome, and cordial in their expressions of sympathy. It may be that the increase of means and importance which had come to him by his father's death was no small factor in the opinion of the village and its environs. A man who had an estate in Suffolk, and who lived at Matcham for his own pleasure, was a personage; and Matcham gossip did not fail to exaggerate the unseen Suffolk estate, and to talk of the Beechhurst property as a mere bagatelle, a windfall from a maternal uncle, hardly worth talking about, as compared with Fendyke and its vast acreage.
"Lady Emily has the house and home-farm for her life," Mrs. Mornington explained, with the privileged air of Allan's intimate friend; "but the bulk of the estate passes at once to Mr. Carew. My niece has done very well for herself, after all."
The last words, carelessly spoken, implied that in the first instance Mr. Carew had been rather a poor match for Miss Vincent.
"I suppose this sad event will delay the marriage?"
"For two or three months, perhaps. They were to have been married at midsummer, when Suzette will come of age; but she tells me she would not think of marrying Allan till at least half a year after his father's death. She talked of a year, but that would be simply absurd. The wedding can be as quiet as they like."
"Yes, of course," murmured assenting friends, sipping Mrs. Mornington's Ceylon tea, and despondently foreseeing the stern necessity of wedding presents, without even the poor compensation of champagne, ices, wedding-cake, and a crowd of fine gowns and new bonnets. They were to have positively no equivalent for their money.
Suzette had pleaded hard for a year's delay.
"It would be more respectful to him whom you have lost; and it would be more pleasing to your mother," she said.
"No, Suzette, my mother would rather see me happy than sacrifice my happiness to conventionality. Half a year is a long time for a man whose life seems a thing of shreds and patches, waiting the better fuller life that he longs for. I shall remember my dear father with no less affection; I shall no less regret his loss; when you and I are one. We can be married quietly at nine o'clock in the morning, before Matcham people have finished breakfast, with only your father and aunt, and my mother, for witnesses; and we can slip away from the station in the fresh September morning on the first stage of our journey to Como. Such a lovely journey at that season, Suzie! It will still be summer in Italy, and we can stay late in October, till the grapes are all gathered and the berceaus are getting bare, and then we can come back to Matcham to our own cosy fireside, and amuse ourselves with the arrangement of our house. It will be as new to me as it will be to you, Suzie, for only when you are its mistress will it be home."
Suzette could hardly withhold her consent, her lover being so earnest. It was settled that the marriage should take place early in September; and this being decided, the current of life flowed smoothly on, Allan spending more of his days at Marsh House, The Grove, and Discombe, than in his own house, except when Lady Emily was with him.
Discombe was by far the most delightful of these three houses in out-of-door weather, pleasant as were Mrs. Mornington's carefully tended grounds and shrubberies, her verandah and spacious conservatory.
The gardens at Discombe had that delicious flavour of the old world, and that absolute seclusion which can never be enjoyed in grounds that are within ear-shot of a high-road. At Discombe the long grass walks, the walls of ilex and of yew, the cypress avenues, and marble temples were isolated amidst surrounding woods, nearly a mile away from the traffic of everyday life. There was a sense of quiet and privacy here, compared with which Marsh House and the Grove were scarcely superior to the average villa in a newly developed suburb.
The seasons waxed and waned; the month of May, when the woodland walks round Discombe were white with the feathery bloom of the mountain ash, and golden with the scented blossoms of the yellow azalea; and June, which filled the woodland avenues with a flush of purple rhododendrons, masses of bloom, in an ascending scale of colour from the deep bass of darkest purple to the treble of palest lilac; and July, with her lap full of roses that made the gardens as brilliant as a picture by Alma Tadèma.
"I always tell the gardeners that if they give me roses I will forgive them all the rest," said Mrs. Wornock, when Allan complimented her upon her banquet of bloom; arches of roses, festoons of roses, temples built of roses, roses in beds and borders, everywhere.
"But your men are model gardeners; they neglect nothing."
In this paradise of flowers Allan and Suzette dawdled away two or three afternoons in every week. Discombe seemed to Allan always something of an enchanted palace—a place upon which there lay a glamour and a spell, a garden of sleep, a grove for woven paces and weaving hands, a spot haunted by sad sweet memories, ruled over by the genius of love, faithful in disappointment. Mrs. Wornock's personality gave an atmosphere of sadness to the house in which she lived, to the gardens in which she paced to and fro with slow, meditative steps; but it was not an unpleasing sadness, and it suited Allan's mood in this quiet summer of waiting, while grief for the loss of his father was still fresh in his mind.
Lady Emily came to Discombe on several occasions, and now that Mrs. Wornock's shyness had worn off—with all those agitations which were inevitable at a first meeting—the two women were very good friends. It was difficult for any one not to take kindly to Lady Emily Carew, and she on her side was fascinated by a nature so different from her own, and by that reserve force of genius which gave fire and pathos to Mrs. Wornock's playing.
Lady Emily listened with moistened eyes to the Sonata Pathetica, and Mrs. Wornock showed a cordial interest in the Blickling Park and Woodbastwick cows—which gave distinction to the Fendyke dairy farm.
"Pure white, with lovely black muzzles—and splendid milkers!" protested Lady Emily. "I was taught that thing you play, dear Mrs. Wornock; but my playing was never good for much, even when I was having two lessons a week from poor Sir Julius. He was only Mr. Benedict when he taught me, and he was almost young."
Geoffrey made meteoric appearances at Discombe during those quiet summer months, and his presence seemed to make everybody uncomfortable. There was a restlessness—a suppressed fever about him which made sensitive people nervous. Dearly though his mother loved him, and gladly as she welcomed his reappearance upon the scene of her life, she was always fluttered and anxious while he was under her roof.
His leave expired early in July, but instead of joining his regiment, which had returned to England, and was now quartered at York, he sent in his papers, without telling his mother or anybody else what he was doing, and he would not reconsider his decision when asked to do so by his colonel. He told his mother one morning at breakfast, in quite a casual way, that he had left the army.
"Oh, Geoffrey!" she exclaimed, with a shocked look.
"I hope you are not sorry. I thought it would please you for me to be my own master, able to spend more of my life with you."
"Dear Geoffrey, I am very glad on that account; but I'm afraid it is a selfish gladness. It was better for you to have a profession. Everybody told me so years ago, when I was so grieved at your going into the army."
"That is a way everybody has of saying smooth things. Well, mother, I am no longer a soldier. India was pleasant enough—there was a smack of adventure, a possibility of fighting—but I could not have endured garrison life in an English town. I would rather mope at home."
"Why should you mope, Geoff?"
"Yes, why? I am free to go east, west, north, and south. I suppose there need be no moping now?"
"But you will be often at home, won't you, dear? Or else I shall be no gainer by your leaving the army."
"Yes, I will be here as often, and as much as—as I can bear it."
He had risen from the breakfast-table, and was walking up and down the room, with that light careless step of his which seemed in perfect harmony with his tall slim figure. He was very pale, and his eyes were brighter than usual, and there was a quick restlessness in the smile that flashed across his face now and then.
"Do I bore you so much, Geoffrey?" his mother asked, with a wounded look.
"You bore me? No, no, no! Oh, surely you know how the land lies. Surely this fever cannot have been eating up my heart and my strength all this time without your eyes seeing, and your heart sympathizing. Youmustknow that I love her."
"I feared as much, my poor Geoffrey."
No name had been spoken; yet mother and son understood each other.
"You feared! Great God, why should it be a reason for fear? Here am I, young, rich, my own master—and here is she as free as she is fair—free to be my wife to-morrow, except for this tie which is no tie—a foolish engagement to a man she never loved."
"Has she told you that?"
"Not she. Her lips are locked by an over-strained sense of honour. She will marry a man for whom she doesn't care a straw. She will be miserable all her life, or at best she will have missed happiness, and on her deathbed she will boast to her parish priest, 'I kept my word.' Poor pretty Puritan! She thinks it virtue to break my heart and grieve her own."
"You have told her of your love, Geoffrey?"
"Yes."
"That was dishonourable."
"No more than it was to love her. I am a lump of dishonour; I am made up of lies; but if she had an ounce of pluck, there need be no more falsehood. She has only to tell him the truth, the sad simple truth. 'I never loved you. I have let myself be persuaded into an engagement, but I never loved you.'"
"That would break Allan's heart."
"It would be bad to bear, no doubt, but not so bad as the gradual revelation that must come upon him in the years after marriage. She may be able to deceive him now—to delude him with the idea that she loves him; but how about the long winter evenings by their own fireside, and the dull nights when the rain is on the roof? A woman may hide her want of love before marriage; but, by Heaven, she can't hide it after! God help him when he finds that he has a victim, and not a wife!"
"Poor Allan! But how do you know she does not care for him—or that she cares for you?"
"How do I know that I live and breathe, that this is I?" touching himself, with an impatient tap of those light restless fingers. "I know it. I have known it more or less from the time we played those duets—the dawn of knowledge and of love. To know each other was to love. We were born for each other. Allan, with his shadowy resemblance to me, was only my forerunner, like the man one sees in the street, the man who reminds one of a dear friend, half an hour or so before we meet that very friend. Allan taught her to like the type. She never loved him. In me she recognizes the individual, fated to love her and to be loved by her."
"Dear Geoffrey, this is mere guess-work."
"No! It is instinct, intuition, dead certainty. I tell you—once, twice, a thousand times, if you like—she loves me, and she doesn't love him. Tax her with it, pluck out the heart of her mystery. This hollow sham—this simulacrum of love must not go on to marriage. Talk to her, as woman to woman, as mother to daughter. I tell you it must not go on. It is driving me mad."
"I will do what I can. Poor Allan! So good, so true-hearted!"
"Am I false-hearted or vile, mother? Why should Allan be all in all to you?"
"He is not all in all. You know you are the first, always the first in my heart; but I am deeply grieved for Allan. If what you tell me is true, he is doomed to be most unhappy. He is so fond of her. He has placed all his hopes of happiness upon his marriage—and they are to be married in little more than a month. It will be heartless to break it off."
"If it isn't broken off, there will be a tragedy. I will thrust myself between them at the altar. The lying words shall not be spoken. I would rather shoot him—or her—than that she should perjure herself, swear to love another while she loves only me!"
"Geoffrey, how do you know? How can you be sure——"
"Our hands have touched; our eyes have met. That is enough."
He walked out of the window to the garden, and from the garden to the stables, where he ordered his dog-cart. His servant kept a portmanteau always ready packed. He left Discombe within an hour of that conversation with his mother, and he was on his way to London before noon. The first intimation of his departure which Mrs. Wornock received was a note which she found on the luncheon-table.
"I am off to the Hartz for a fortnight's tramp. Remember, something must be done to prevent this marriage. I shall return before the middle of August, and shall expect to find all settled."Address Poste Restante, Hartzburg."
"I am off to the Hartz for a fortnight's tramp. Remember, something must be done to prevent this marriage. I shall return before the middle of August, and shall expect to find all settled.
"Address Poste Restante, Hartzburg."