CHAPTER XI.
"WHO KNOWS WHY LOVE BEGINS?"
The time was drawing near. The corn was cut and carried on many a broad sweep of hot chalky soil, and "summer's branding sun" had burnt up the thin grass on the wide bare down, where never shadow of tree or bush made a cool spot in the expanse of light and heat and dryness. The mysterious immemorial stones yonder on Salisbury Plain stood up against a background of cloudless blue; and the windows of the cathedral in the valley glittered and flashed in the sunshine. Only in the sober old close, and the venerable gardens of a bygone generation, within hedges that dead hands had planted, trees whose growth dead eyes had watched, was there coolness or shelter, or the gentle slumberous feeling of summer afternoon in its restful perfection.
Here, in an antique drawing-room, Mrs. Mornington and her niece were taking tea, after a morning with tailor and dressmaker.
"There never was such a girl for not-caringness as this girl of mine," said Mrs. Mornington, with a vexed air. "If it had not been for me, I don't think she would have had a new frock in her trousseau, and as she is a very prim personage aboutlingerie, and has a large stock of Parisian prettiness in that line, there would really have been nothing to buy."
"Rather a relief, I should think," laughed Mrs. Canon, who was giving them tea.
"A most delightful state of things," asserted Mrs. Sub-Dean, proud mother of half a dozen daughters, in which opinion agreed a county lady, also rich in daughters.
"Ah, you are all against me!" said Mrs. Mornington; "but there is a great pleasure in buying things, especially when one is spending somebody else's money."
"Poor papa!" sighed Suzette. "My aunt forgets that he is not Crœsus."
"Look at that girl's wretched pale face!" cried Mrs. Mornington. "Would any one think that she was going to be married to a most estimable young man, and the best match in the neighbourhood—except one?"
At those two last words, Suzette's cheeks flamed crimson, and the feminine conclave looking at her felt she was being cruelly used by this strong-minded aunt of hers.
"I don't think the nicest girls are ever very keen about their trousseau," said the county lady, with a furtive glance at a buxom freckled daughter, who had lately become engaged, and who had already begun to discuss house-linen and frocks, with a largeness of ideas that alarmed her parents.
"Yes; but there is a difference between caring too much and not caring at all. Suzette would be married in that white gingham she is wearing to-day, if I would let her."
"Pray don't teaze people about my frocks, auntie. If you can't find something more interesting to talk about, we had better go away," said Suzette, with a pettishness which was quite unlike her; but it must be owned that to be made the object of a public attack in feminine convocation was somewhat exasperating.
Mrs. Mornington was not to be put down. She went on talking of frocks, though one of the daughters of the house carried Suzette off to the garden—an act of real Christian charity, if she had not spoilt her good work by beginning to talk of Suzette's lover.
"I can quite fancy your aunt must be rather boring sometimes," she said. "Butdotell me about Mr. Carew. I thought him so nice the other day at the flower-show, when you introduced him to me."
"What can I tell you about him? You have seen him—and I am glad you thought him nice."
"Yes; but one wants to know more. One wants to know what he is like—from your point of view."
"But how could you see him from my point of view? That's impossible."
"True! A casual acquaintance could never see him as he appears to you—to whom he is all the world," said the Canon's daughter, who was young and romantic, having lived upon church music and Coventry Patmore's poetry.
"There's my aunt showing them patterns of my frocks!" exclaimed Suzette, irritably, glancing in at the drawing-room, where Mrs. Mornington sat, the centre of a little group, handing scraps of stuff out of her reticule.
The scraps were being passed round and peered at and pulled about by everybody, with a meditative and admiring air. An African savage, seeing the group, would have supposed that some act of sortilege was being performed.
"It is rather an ordeal being married," said the Canon's daughter, thinking sadly of a certain undergraduate who was down-hearted about his divinity exam., and upon whose achieving deacon's orders within a reasonable time depended the young lady's matrimonial prospects.
She sighed as she thought of the difference in worldly wealth between that well-meaning youth and Allan Carew; and yet here was the future Mrs. Carew pale and worried, and obviously dissatisfied with her lot.
When those gowns had been ordered, Suzette felt as if it were another link forged in the iron chain which seemed to weigh heavier upon her every day of her life.
She had promised, and she must keep her promise. That was what she was continually saying to herself. Those words were woven into all her thoughts. Allan was so good, so true-hearted! Could she disappoint and grieve him? Could she be heartless, unkind, selfish—think of herself first and of him after—snatch at the happiness Fate offered her, and leave him out in the cold? No, better that she should bear her lot—become his wife, live out her slow, melancholy days, his faithful servant and friend, honouring him and obeying him, doing all that woman can do for man, except loving him.
Those meteoric appearances of Geoffrey's had made life much harder for Suzette. She might have fought against her love for him more successfully perhaps had he been always near; had she seen him almost daily, and become accustomed to his presence as a common incident in the daily routine; but to be told that he was in the far north of Scotland, yachting with a friend; and then to be startled by his voice at her shoulder, murmuring her name in Discombe Wood; and to turn round with nervous quickness to see him looking at her with his pale smile, like a ghost—or to be assured that he was salmon-fishing in Connemara, and to see him suddenly sauntering across the lawn in the July dusk, more ghostlike even than in the woods, as if face and form were a materialization which her own sad thoughts had conjured out of the twilight.
He would take very little trouble to explain his unlooked-for return. Scotland was too hot; the North Sea suggested a vast sheet of red-hot iron, blown over by a south wind that was like the breath of a blast-furnace. Ireland was a place of bad inns and inexorable rain; and there were no fish, or none that he could catch. He had come home because life was weariness away from home. He feared that life meant weariness everywhere.
The days were hurrying by, and now Mrs. Mornington talked everlastingly of the wedding, or so it seemed to Suzette, who in these latter days tried to avoid her aunt as much as was consistent with civility, and fled from the Grove to Discombe as to a haven of peace. Mrs. Mornington loved to expatiate upon the coming event, to bewail her niece's indifferentism, to regret that there was to be no festivity worth speaking of, and to enlarge upon the advantages of Allan's position and surroundings, and Suzette's good fortune in having come to Matcham.
"Your father might have spent a thousand pounds on a London season, and not have done half so well for you," she said conclusively.
The General nodded assent.
Certainly, between them they had done wonderfully well for Suzette.
From this worldly wisdom the harassed girl fled to the quiet of Discombe, where the peaceful silence was only broken by the deep broad stream of sound from the organ, touched with ever-growing power by Mrs. Wornock. Suzette would steal softly into the music-room unannounced, and take her accustomed seat in the recess by the organ, and sit silently listening as long as Mrs. Wornock cared to play. Only when the last chord had died away did the two women touch hands and look at each other.
It was about a week after that wearying day in Salisbury when Suzette seated herself by the player in this silent way, and sat listening to a funeral march by Beethoven, with her head leaning on her hand, and not so much as a murmur of praise for music or performer stirring the thoughtful quiet of her lips. When the last pianissimo notes, dropping to deepest bass, had melted into silence, Mrs. Wornock looked up and saw Suzette's face bathed in tears—tears that streamed over the pallid cheeks unchecked.
Geoffrey's mother started up from the organ, and clasped the weeping girl to her breast.
"Poor child! poor child! He was right, then? You are not happy."
"Happy! I am miserable! I don't know what to do. I don't know what would be worst or wickedest. To disappoint him, or to marry him, not loving him!"
"No, no, no! you must not marry, not if you cannot love him. But you are sure of that, Susie? Are you sure you don't love him? He is so good, so worthy to be loved, as his father was—years ago. Why should you not love him?"
"Ah, who can tell?" sighed Suzette. "Who knows why love begins, or how love gets the mastery? I let myself be talked into thinking I loved him. I always liked him—liked his company—was grateful for his attentions, respected him for his fine nature, and then I let him persuade me that this was love; but it wasn't—it never was love. Friendship and liking are not love; and now that the fatal day draws near I know how wide a difference there is between love and liking."
"You must not marry him, Suzette. You know I would not willingly say one word that would tell against Allan Carew's happiness. I love him almost as dearly as I love my own son; but when I see you miserable—when I see Geoffrey utterly wretched, I can no longer keep silence. This marriage must be broken off."
"Allan will hate me; he will despise me. What can he think me?—false, fickle, unworthy of a good man's love."
"You must tell him the truth. It will be cruel, but not so cruel as to let him go on believing in you, thinking himself happy, living in a fool's paradise. Will you let me speak for you, Suzette?—let me do what your mother might have done had she been here to help you in your need?"
Suzette was speechless with tears, her face hidden on Mrs. Wornock's shoulder. The door was opened at this moment, and the butler announced Mr. Carew.
Allan had approached the group by the organ before either Mrs. Wornock or Suzette could hide her agitation. Their tears, the way in which they clung to each other, told of some over-mastering grief.
"Good God! what is the matter? What has happened?" he exclaimed.
"Nothing has happened, Allan; yet there is sorrow for all of us—sorrow that has been coming upon us, though some of us did not know it. Suzette, may I tell him—now, this moment?"
"May you tell me? Tell me what?" questioned Allan. "Suzette, speak to me—you—you—no one else!"
Fear, indignation, despair were in his tone. He caught hold of Suzette's arm, and drew her towards him, looking searchingly at the pale, tear-stained face; but she shrank from his grasp, and sank on her knees at his feet.
"It is my miserable secret—that must be told at last. I have tried—I have hoped—I honour—I respect you—Allan. But our hearts are not our own; we cannot guide or govern their impulses. My heart is weighed down with shame and misery, but it is empty of love. I cannot love you as your wife should. If I keep my word, I shall be a miserable woman."
"You shall not be that," he said sternly—"not to make me the happiest man in creation. But don't you think," with chilling deliberation, "this tragedy might have been acted a little earlier? It seems to me that you have kept your secret over carefully."
"I have been weak, Allan, hopelessly, miserably weak-minded. I tried to do what was best. I did not want to disappoint you——"
"Disappoint me? Why, you have fooled me from the first! Disappoint me? Why, I have built the whole fabric of my future life upon this rotten foundation! I was to be happy because of your love; my days and years were to flow sweetly by in a paradise of domestic peace, blest by your love. And all the time there was no such thing. You did not love me; you had never loved me; you were only trying to love me; and the hopelessness of the endeavour is brought home to you now—at this eleventh hour—three weeks before our wedding-day. Suzette, Suzette, never was woman's cruelty crueller than this of yours!"
She was in floods of tears at his feet, her head drooping till her brow almost touched the ground. He left her kneeling there, and rushed away to the garden to hide his own tears—the tears of which his manhood was ashamed, the passionate sobs, the wild hysterical weeping of the sex that seldom weeps. He found a shelter and a hiding-place in an angle of the garden, where there was a side walk shut in by close-cropped cypress walls, and here Mrs. Wornock found him presently, sitting on a marble bench, with his elbows on his knees, his face hidden in his hands.
She seated herself at his side, and laid her hand gently on his.
"Allan, dear Allan, I am so sorry for you," she said softly.
"I am very sorry for myself. I don't seem to need anybody's pity. I think I can do all the grieving."
"Ah, that is the worst of it. Nobody's sympathy can help you."
"Not yours," he answered almost savagely; "for, at heart, you must be glad. My dismissal makes room for some one else—some one whose interests are dearer to you than mine could ever be."
"There is no one nearer or dearer to me than you, Allan—no one—not even my own son. You have been to me as a son—the son of the man I fondly loved, whose face I was to look upon only once—once after those long years in which we were parted. I have loved you as a part of my youth, the living memory of my lost love. Ah, my dear, I had to learn the lesson of self-surrender when I was younger than you. I loved him with all my heart and mind, and I gave him up."
"You did wrong to give him up. He himself said so. But there is no parallel between the two cases. This girl has let me believe in her. I have lived for a year in this sweet delusion—a bliss no more real than the happiness of a dream. She would have loved me; she would have married me; all would have been well for us but for your son. When he came, my chance was blighted. He has charms of mind and manner which I have not—like me, they say, but ten times handsomer. He can speak to her with a language that I have not. Oh, those singing notes on the violin; that long-drawn lingering sweep of the bow, like the cry of a spirit in paradise—an angelic voice telling of love ethereal—love released from clay; those tears which seemed to tremble on the strings; that loud, sudden sob of passionate pain, which came like a short, sharp amen to the prayer of love! I could understand that language better than he thought. He stole her love from me—set himself deliberately to rob me of my life's happiness."
"It is cruel to say that, Allan. He is incapable of treachery, of deliberate wrong-doing. He is a creature of impulse."
"Meaning a creature with whom self is the only god. And in one of his impulses he told Suzette of his love, even in plainer words than his Stradivarius could tell the story; and from that hour her heart was false to me. I saw the change in her when I came back—after my father's death."
"You are unjust to him, Allan, in your grief and anger. Whatever his feelings may have been, he has fought against them. He has made himself almost an exile from this house."
"He has been biding his time, no doubt; and now that I have had thecoup de gracehe will come back."