CHAPTER XII.
"THAT WAY MADNESS LIES."
It would have taken a very respectable earthquake to have made as much sensation in a rural neighbourhood as was made in the village and neighbourhood of Matcham by the cancelment of Allan Carew's engagement to General Vincent's daughter. The fact that no visitors had been bidden to the wedding seemed to make no difference in the rapid dissemination of the news. People from twenty miles round had been interested; people from twenty miles round had come up to be taxed, and had sent pepper-pots and hair-brushes, paper-knives and scent-bottles, fans and candlesticks—all of which were now returned to the givers in the very tissue paper and cardboard boxes in which they had been sent from shops or stores, accompanied by a formal little note of apology. The marriage had been deferred indefinitely; and, at his daughter's request, General Vincent begged to return the gifts, with best thanks for the kindly feeling which had prompted, etc.
"It will do for some one else!"
That was the almost inevitable exclamation when the tissue paper was unfolded and the gift appeared, untarnished and undamaged by the double transit. Then followed speculations as to the meaning of those words, "deferred indefinitely."
"Indefinitely means never," pronounced Mrs. Roebuck; "there's no doubt upon that point. He has jilted her. I thought he would begin to look about him after his father's death. I dare say he will have a house in town next season—apied à terrenear Park Lane—and go into society, instead of vegetating among those Bœotians. He must feel himself thrown away in such a hole."
"I thought he was devoted to Miss Vincent."
"Nonsense! How could any man be devoted to an insignificant Frenchified chit without style orsavoir farie?"
"She has a pretty, piquant little face," murmured Mr. Roebuck meekly, not liking to be enthusiastic about beauty which was the very opposite of his wife's Roman-nosed and flaxen-haired style.
Upon Mrs. Mornington the blow fell far more heavily than on Suzette's father, who was very glad to keep his daughter at home, albeit regretful that she should have treated a faithful lover so scurvily.
"If the poor child did not know her own mind at the beginning, it's a blessed thing she found out her mistake before it was too late," pleaded the General to his irate sister.
"Itistoo late—too late for respectability—too late for common humanity. To lead a young man on for over a year, almost to the foot of the altar, and then to throw him off. It is simply shameful! To make a fool of him and herself before the whole neighbourhood—to belittle herself as much as she has belittled him. No doubt all the women will say thathehas jiltedher."
"Let them. That cannot hurt her."
"But it can hurt me, her aunt. I feel inclined to slap my most intimate friends when they ask me leading questions, evidently longing to hear that Allan has acted badly. And when I assure them that my niece is alone to blame, I can see in their faces that they don't, or won't, believe me. And why should they believe me? Could any girl, not an idiot, throw over such a match as Allan has become since his father's death?"
"I hope you don't mean to say that my girl is an idiot?"
"I say that she has acted like an idiot in this affair."
"And I say that she has acted like an honest woman."
"I shall never be able to look Lady Emily Carew in the face again."
"Don't be alarmed about Lady Emily. She will be no more sorry to keep her son to herself than I am to keep my daughter."
"She won't have him long. He'll be going off and marrying some horrid end-of-the-century girl in a fit of pique."
"I don't believe he is such a fool."
Matcham might talk its loudest, and dispute almost to blows, as to which was the jilter and which the jilted. The principal performers in the tragedy were well out of ear-shot—Allan at Fendyke with Lady Emily, Suzette at Bournemouth with an old convent friend and her invalid mother, people who had no connection with Matcham, and in whose society the girl could not be reminded of her own wrong-doing. The invitation to the villa at Branksome had been repeated very often; and on a renewal of it arriving just after that painful scene at Discombe, Suzette had written promptly to accept.
"If you don't mind my coming to you out of spirits and altogether troubled in mind,chérie," she wrote; and the girl, who was a very quiet piece of amiability, and who had worshipped her livelier school-fellow, replied delightedly, "Your low spirits must be brighter than other people's gaiety. Come, and let the sea and the downs console you. Bournemouth is lovely in September. Mother has given me the charmingest pony, and I have been carefully taught by our old coachman, who is a whip in a thousand, so you need not be afraid to trust yourself beside me."
"Except for father's sake, it might be a good thing if she were to throw me out of her cart and kill me on the spot," mused Suzette, as she sat listlessly watching her maid packing her trunk.
Among the frocks, there was one of the Salisbury tailor's confections, a frock which was to have been worn by Mrs. Allan Carew, and Suzette felt that she would sink with shame when she put it on.
"I ought to be prosecuted for obtaining goods under false pretences," she thought.
Geoffrey Wornock found a telegram waiting for him at the little post-office at Hartzburg, and the mere outward casing of that message set his heart beating furiously. There must be news of his love in it, news good or bad.
"I will not live through her wedding-day, if she marries him," he told himself.
The telegram was from his mother.
"The marriage is broken off with much sorrow on both sides."
"That's nonsense. On her part there can be no sorrow—only relief of mind, only joy, the prospect of a blissful union, a life without a cloud. Thank God, thank God, thank God! I never felt there was a God till now. Now I believe in Him—now I will lift up my heart to Him, in nightly and daily prayer, as Adam did by the side of Eve. Oh, thank God, the barrier is removed, and she can be mine! My own dear love—heart of my heart—life of my life!"
He carried a fiddle among his scanty luggage, not the treasured inimitable Stradivarius, but a much-cherished little Amati; and by-and-by, having eaten some hurried scraps by way of dinner, he took the violin out of its case and went out to a little garden at the back of the inn, and in a vine-clad berceau gave himself up to impassioned utterance of the love that overflowed his heart. Music, and music only, could speak for him—music was the interpreter of all his highest thoughts. The stolid beer-drinkers came out of their smoke-darkened parlour to hear him, and sat silent and unseen behind an intervening screen of greenery, and listened and approved.
"Ach, what for a fiddler! How he can play! Whole heaven-like. Not true, my friend?"
He played and played, walking about under the vine-curtain—played till the pale grey evening shadows darkened to purple night, and the stars looked through the leafy roof of that rustic tunnel. He was playing to her; to her, his far-away love; to Suzette in England. He was pouring out his soul's desire to her, a hymn of sweet content; and he almost fancied that she could hear him. There must be some mystical medium by which such sounds can travel from being to being, where love attunes two souls in unison—some process now hidden from the dull mind of average man, as the electric telegraph was half a century ago.
This is how a lover dreams in the summer gloaming, in a garden on the slope of a pine-clad hill, with loftier heights beyond, shadowy and dark against the deep blue of that infinite sky where the stars are shining aloof and incomprehensible, in remoteness that fills mortality with despair.
She was free! That was Geoffrey's one thought in every hour and almost every minute of his breathless journey from Hartzburg to Discombe. She was free; and for her to be free meant that she was to be his. He imagined no opposition upon her side when once her engagement to Allan had been broken. She had been bound by that tie, and that only. His impetuous, passionate nature, self-loving and concentrative as the temper of a child, could conceive no restraining influence, nothing that could prevent her heart answering his, her hand yielding to his, and a marriage as speedy as law and Church would allow.
They could be married ever so quietly—in London—where no curious eyes could watch, no gossiping tongues criticise—married—made for ever one; and then away to mountain and lake, to Pallanza, Lugano, Bellaggio, to flowery shores betwixt hill and water, to a life lovelier than his fairest dreams.
No man journeying with a passionate heart ever found rail or boat quick enough, and Geoffrey, always impatient, chafed at every stage of the journey, and complained as bitterly as if he had been travelling at the expensive crawl in which a Horace Walpole or a Beckford was content to accomplish that restricted round which our ancestors called the "grand tour." Nothing slower than a balloon driving before a gale would have satisfied Geoffrey's eager soul. And he would rather have accepted balloon transit, with all its hazards, and run the risk of being landed in a Carinthian valley or a Norwegian fjord, than endure the harassing delay at dusty railway stations, or the slowness of the channel boat.
He telegraphed to his mother from Brussels, and again from Dover; so there was a cart waiting for him at the station with one of the fastest horses in the stable, but, unfortunately, one of the stupidest grooms, who could furnish him with no information upon any subject.
Was all well at home? His mistress well?
The groom believed so.
"Was Miss Vincent well?"
The groom had heard nothing to the contrary; but he had not seen Miss Vincent lately.
No particular inference was to be drawn from this statement of the groom's, since Suzette's visits were not made to the stableyard.
There was no one at Discombe to do stable-parade and to insist upon horses being stripped and trotted up and down for the edification of a visitor whose utmost knowledge of a horse might be that it is a beast with four legs—mane and tail understood, though not always existent.
Geoffrey rattled his old hunter along at a pace that made the cart sway like an outrigger in the wake of a steamer, and he alighted at the Manor House at least a quarter of an hour before a reasonable being would have got himself there.
It was late in the evening, and his mother was sitting alone in the dimly lighted music-room. The piano was shut—a bad sign; for when Suzette was there the piano was hardly ever idle.
"Well, mother dear, so glad to be home again," said Geoffrey, with an affectionate hug, but with eyes that were looking over his mother's head into space for another presence, even while he gave her that filial embrace.
"And I am so glad to have you, Geoffrey; and I hope now this restless spirit will be content to stay."
"C'est selon.Where's Suzette?"
"At Bournemouth, with an old school-fellow."
"Why didn't you wire her address, and then I could have gone straight to her?"
"My dear Geoffrey, what are you thinking of?"
"Of Suzette—of my dear love—of my wife that is to be!"
"My dear boy, you cannot go to her. You must not ask her to marry you while this cancelled engagement is a new thing. I should think her a horrid girl if she would listen to you—for ever so long."
"Do you mean for a week—or a fortnight?"
"For a long, long time, Geoffrey—long enough for Allan's wounded heart to recover."
"Upon my soul, mother, that is too good a joke! Is my mother, the most romantic and unconventional of women, preaching the eighteenpenny gospel of middle-class etiquette?"
"It is no question of conventionality. My affection for Allan is only second to my love for you, and I cannot bear to think of his being wounded and humiliated, as he must be if Suzette were to accept you directly after having jilted him."
"And you would have Suzette sit beside the tomb of Allan's hopes for a year or so while I eat my heart out—banquet on joys deferred—sicken and die, perhaps, with that slow torture of waiting. Mother, you don't know what love is—love in the heart of a man. If she had married Allan, I should have shot myself on her wedding-day. That was written in my book of fate. If she won't marry me; if she play fast and loose, blow hot, blow cold; if she won't look in my eyes and say honestly, 'I love you,' and 'I am yours,' I can't answer for myself—I fear there will be a tragedy. You know there is something here"—touching his forehead—"which loses itself in a whirl of fiery confusion when this"—touching his heart—"is too sorely tried."
"Geoffrey, my dearest! oh, Geoffrey, you agonize me when you talk like that! I think—yes, I believe that Suzette loves you; but she is sensitive, tender-hearted—all that is womanly and good. You must give her time to recover from the shock of parting with Allan, whom she sincerely esteems, and whose sorrow is her sorrow."
"I will see her to-morrow. I cannot live without seeing her. Why, every mile of pine-forest through which I came seemed three, every mile of dusty Belgian flatness seemed seven, to my hot impatience. I must see her, hear her, hold her hand in mine; and she shall do what she likes with the poor rag of life which will be left when I have lived an hour with her."
END OF VOL. II.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]