CHAPTER II.
"IF SHE BE NOT FAIR TO ME."
Geoffrey Wornock went back to Discombe, and his mother read failure and mortification in his gloomy countenance; but he vouchsafed no confidence. He was not sullen or unkind. He lived; and that was about as much as could be said of him. The fiddles, which were to him as cherished friends, lay mute in their cases. He seemed to regard that spacious music-room with its lofty ceiling and noble capacity for sound, as the captive lion regards his cage—a place in which to roam about, and pace to and fro, restless, miserable, unsatisfied. He did not complain, and his mother dared not attempt to console. Once she pressed his hand and whispered "patience;" but he only shook his head fretfully, and walked out of the room.
"Patience! yes," he muttered to himself. "I could be patient, as patient as Jacob when he waited for Rachel—if I were sure she loved me. But I have begun to doubt even that. Oh, if she knew what love meant, she would have rushed into my arms. She would have swooned upon my breast in the shock of that meeting; but she sat prim and quiet, only a little pale and tearful, while I was shaken by a tempest of passion. She is capable of no more than a schoolgirl's love—held in check by the pettiest restraints of good manners and the world's opinion—and she has hardly decided whether that feeble flame burns for me or for Allan."
And then he began to preach to himself the sermon which almost every slighted swain has preached since the world began. What was this woman that he should die of heartache for her? Was she so much fairer than other women whom he might have for the wooing? No, again and again, no. He could conjure fairer faces out of the past—faces he had gazed at and praised, and which had left him cold. She was not as handsome as Miss Simpson, at Simla, last year—that Miss Simpson who had thrown herself at his head—or as Miss Brown at Naini Tal, General Brown's daughter, who looked liked a houri, and who waltzed like a thing of air, imparting buoyancy and grace to the lumpiest of partners. He had not cared a straw for Miss Brown, even although the General had hinted to him, in the after-dinner freedom of the mess-room, that Miss Brown had an exalted opinion of him. No, he had cared for neither of these girls, though either might have been his for the asking. Perhaps that was why he did not care. He was madly in love with Suzette, whom he had known only as another man's betrothed. Suzette represented the unattainable; and for Suzette he could die.
He hardly left the bounds of Discombe during those bright autumnal days, when the music of the hounds was loud over field and down. He had dissevered himself from most of the friends of his manhood by leaving the army; and in Matcham he had only acquaintance. From these he kept scrupulously aloof. One Matcham person, however, he could not escape. Mrs. Mornington surprised him in the music-room with his mother one afternoon, and instead of running away, as he would have done from any one else, he stayed and handed tea-cups with supreme amiability.
He knew she would talk of Suzette. That was inevitable. She had scarcely settled herself in a comfortable armchair when she began.
"Well, Mrs. Wornock, have you seen anything more of this niece of mine?"
Of course there could be only one niece in question.
"No, indeed. She has not come back from Bournemouth, has she?"
"Oh yes, she has. She has come and gone. I made sure she would pay you a visit. You and she were always so thick. I believe she is fonder of you than she is of me."
Geoffrey began to walk about the room—as softly as the parquetted floor would allow—listening intently. Eager as he was to hear, he could not sit still while Suzette was being discussed.
Mrs. Wornock murmured a gentle negative.
"Oh, but she is, you know. There is that," said Mrs. Mornington, pointing to the organ, "and that," pointing to the piano, "and your son is a fiddler. You are music mad, all of you. Suzette took to practising five hours a day. It was Chopin, Rubinstein, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn all day long. She looks upon me as an outsider, because I don't appreciate classical music. I wonder she didn't run over to see you."
"Has she gone back to Bournemouth?"
"Not she. My foolish brother took fright about her because she was looking pale and worried when she came home; so he whisked her off to London, took her to a doctor in Mayfair, who said Schwalbach; and to Schwalbach they are gone, and I believe, after a course of iron at Schwalbach—where they will meet no civilized beings at this time of year—they are to winter on the Riviera, and a pretty penny these whims and fancies will cost her father. I am glad I have no daughters. Poor Allan! such a fine, honest-hearted young man! She ought to have thanked God for such a sweetheart. I dare say, if he had been a reprobate and a bankrupt, she would have offered to go through fire and water for him."
Geoffrey walked out at the open window which afforded such a ready escape.
She was gone! Heartless, selfish girl! Gone without a word of farewell, without a whisper of hope.
Allan returned to Matcham a few days after Mrs. Mornington's appearance at Discombe, and in spite of his dark doubts about Geoffrey, his first visit was to Mrs. Wornock.
She was shocked at the change in him. He was pale, and thin, and serious looking, and, but for his grey-tweed suit, might have been mistaken for an overworked East-end parson.
She talked to him about Lady Emily and the farm. Had he been shooting? Were there many birds this year? She talked of the most frivolous things in order to ward off painful subjects. But he himself spoke of Suzette.
"She has gone away, I am told, for the whole winter. Marsh House is shut up. I never knew what a bright, home-like house it was till I saw it this morning, with the shutters shut, and the gates padlocked. There was not even a dog to bark at me. She has gone far afield; but I am going a good deal farther."
And then he told her with a certain excitement of his meeting with Cecil Patrington, and his approaching departure for Zanzibar.
"It was the luckiest thing in the world for me," he said. "I had not the least idea what to do with myself, or where to go, to get out of myself. The little I have seen of the Continent rather bored me—picture-gallery, cathedral, town-hall, a theatre, invariably shut up, a river, reported delightful when navigable, but not navigable at the time being. The same thing, and the same thing—not very interesting to a man who can't reckon the age of a cathedral to within a century or two—over and over again. But this will be new, this will mean excitement. I shall feel as if I were born again. The wonder will be—to myself, at least—that I don't come home black."
"And you think you will find consolation—in Africa?"
"I hope to find forgetfulness."
"Poor Allan! Poor Geoffrey! It is a hard thing that you should both suffer."
"Mr. Wornock's sufferings will soon be over, I take it. Rapture and not suffering will be the dominant in the scale of his life. He will have everything his own way when I am gone."
"I don't think he will. He has not confided his secrets to me, but I believe he has offered himself to her, since her engagement was broken, and has been rejected."
"He will offer himself again and will be accepted. There are conventionalities to be observed. Miss Vincent would not like people to say that she transferred her affections from lover to lover with hardly a week's interval."
"I only know that my son is very unhappy, Allan."
"So is a spoilt child when he can't have the moon. Your son will get the moon all in good time—only he will have to wait for it, and spoilt children don't like waiting."
"How bitterly you speak of him, Allan. I hope you are not going to be ill friends."
"Why should we be ill friends? It is not his fault that she has thrown me over—at the eleventh hour. It is only his good fortune to be more attractive than I am. It was the contrast with his brilliancy that showed her my dulness. He has the magnetism which I have not—genius, perhaps, or at least the air and suggestion of genius. One hardly knows what constitutes the real thing. I am one of the crowd. He has the marked individuality which fascinates or repels."
"And you will be friends still, Allan—you and my poor wilful son? He is like a ship without a rudder, now that he has left the army. He has no intimate friends. He cannot rest long in one place. I never wanted him to steal your sweetheart, Allan. I am sure you know that. But I should be very glad to see him married."
"You will see him married before long—and to the lady who was once my sweetheart."
Mrs. Wornock shook her head; and the argument was closed by the appearance of Geoffrey himself, who came sauntering in from the garden, with his favourite Clumber spaniel at his heels.
"Been shooting?" Allan asked, as they shook hands.
There was a certain aloofness in their greeting, but nothing churlish or sullen in the manner of either. On Geoffrey's side there was only listlessness; on Allan's a grave reserve.
"No. I look at my dogs every day. The keepers do the rest."
"You are not fond of shooting?"
"Not particularly—not of creeping about a copse on the look-out for a cock pheasant; still less do I love a hot corner!"
He seated himself on the bench by the organ, and began to turn over a pile of music, idly, almost mechanically, not as if he were looking for anything in particular. Allan rose to go, and Mrs. Wornock followed him to the corridor.
"Does he not look wretched? And wretchedly ill?" she asked appealingly; her own unhappiness visible in every line of her face.
"He is certainly changed for the worse since I saw him last. That was a longish time ago, you may remember. He looks hipped and worried. He should go away, as I am going."
"Not like you, Allan, to a savage country. I wish he would take me to Italy for the winter. We could move from place to place. He could change the scene as often as he liked."
"I fear the mind would be the same, though earth and sky might change. Travelling upon beaten paths would only bore him. If he is unhappy, and you are unhappy about him, you had better let him come with Patrington and me."
The offer was made on the impulse of the moment, out of sympathy with the mother rather than out of regard for the son.
"No, no, I could not bear to lose him again—so soon. What would my life be like if you were both gone? I should lapse into the old loneliness—and solitude would bring back the old dreams—the old vain longing——"
These last words were murmured brokenly, in self-communion.
Allan left her, and she went back to the music-room, where Geoffrey had seated himself at the piano, and was playing a Spanish dance by Sarasate, for the edification of the spaniel, who looked agonized.
"What have you been saying to Carew, mother?" he asked, stopping in the middle of a phrase.
"Nothing of any importance. Allan is going to Central Africa with a friend he met in Suffolk—a Mr. Patrington."
"A Mr. Patrington? I suppose you mean Cecil Patrington?"
"Yes, that is the name."