CHAPTER XIV.
"HE HATH AWAKENED FROM THE DREAM OF LIFE."
It was the day which was to have seen Suzette's wedding—the thirteenth of December, a dull, mild December, promising that green Christmas which is said to people churchyards with new-comers; a December to gladden the heart of the fox-hunter, and disappoint the skater.
Sitting in melancholy solitude by the drawing-room fire, on this grey, rainy morning, Suzette was glad to remember that she had prevented the sending out of invitation cards, and that very few people in Matcham knew the intended date of that wedding which was never to be. There were not many to think of her with especial pity on this particular day, sitting alone in her desolation, in her dark serge frock, with the black poodle, Caro, and her piano for her only companions. Even the companionship of that beloved piano had failed her since Geoffrey's disappearance. Music was too closely associated with his presence. There was not a single composition in her portfolio that did not recall him—not an air she played that did not bring back the words he had spoken when last her fingers followed the caprices of the composer. He had been her master as well as her lover—he had taught her the subtleties of musical expression—had breathed mind into her music.
Bessie Edgefield knew the date; but Bessie was sympathetic, and never officious or obtrusive. She would drop in by-and-by, no doubt, pretending not to remember anything particular about the day. She would be full of some little bit of village news, or a new book from Mudie's, or Mrs. Roebuck's last bonnet.
The wedding was to have been at two o'clock, a sensible, comfortable hour; giving the bride ample leisure in which to put on her wedding finery. The hours between breakfast and luncheon seemed longer than usual that morning, a long blank weariness, after Suzette had seen her father mount and ride away on his favourite hunter. The hounds met on the other side of the downs, on the borders of Hampshire. It would be late, most likely, before she would welcome that kind father to the comfortable fireside, and listen, or at least pretend to listen, to the varying fortunes of an adventurous day. And in the meantime she had the day all before her, to dispose of as best she might, that day which was to have seen her a bride.
Was she sorrowing for the lover who had forsaken her, as she sat looking with sad, tearless eyes into the fire? Was she regretting the happiness that might have been, thinking of a life which should have been cloudless? No, she had never contemplated a life of cloudless happiness with Geoffrey Wornock. She had loved that fiery spirit. Her love had been conquered by a mind stronger than her own, and she had submitted, almost as a slave submits to her captor. Mentally she had been in bondage, able to see all that was faulty and perilous in the character of her conqueror, yet loving him in spite of his faults.
But to-day his image was associated with a great terror—a terror of undiscovered crime—the fear that when next she heard his name spoken she would hear of him as an arrested criminal; or as a suicide, self-slaughtered in some quiet spot, where the searchers must needs be slow to find him.
Two o'clock. She had tried all her best-loved books in the endeavour to forget the dark realities of life; but books did not help her to-day. She never went into the dining-room for a formal luncheon when her father was out for the day; preferring some light refreshment of the kind which one hears of in Miss Austen's novels as "the tray," a modest meal of cake and fruit, with nothing more substantial than a sandwich. To-day even the sandwich was impossible. Her lips were dry with an inward fever. Her hands were cold as ice, her forehead was burning. "Was it raining?" she asked the servant. "No, the rain had ceased an hour ago," the man told her. She started up with a feeling of relief at the idea of escape from the dull, silent house; put on her hat and jacket, and went out by the glass door into the garden, where the mild winter had left a few flowers, pale Dijon roses, amidst the thick foliage of honeysuckle and magnolia on the south wall, a lingering chrysanthemum here and there in a sheltered bend of the shrubbery. The air was full of the sweetness of herbs and flowers, and the freshness of the rain. Yes, it was a relief to be walking about, looking at the shrubs, shaking the rain from the feathery branches of the deodaras, searching for late violets behind a border of close-clipped box. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned garden, full of things that had been growing for the best part of a century, a garden of broad gravel walks, and square grass plots, espaliers hiding asparagus-beds, the scent of sweet herbs conquering the more delicate odours of violets and rare roses—a dear old garden to be happy in, and a quiet retreat in which to walk alone with sorrow.
Suzette walked alone with her sorrow for nearly an hour, thankful for the hazard which had carried her energetic aunt to Salisbury two days before, on a visit to her friends in the Close, and had thus spared her Mrs. Mornington's society on this particular day. To have been comforted, or to have been bewailed over, would have added to her burden. To walk alone in this dull old garden was best.
Not alone any more! She heard the rustling of branches at the other end of the long green alley, and a footstep—a heavier footfall than Bessie Edgefield's—on the moist gravel. Her heart throbbed with a startled expectancy. Joy or fear? She had no time to know which feeling predominated before she saw her lover coming quickly towards her. He was dressed, not as she had been accustomed to see him in the corduroy waistcoat, short tweed coat, and knickerbockers of rustic out-of-door life, but in a frock-coat, light grey trousers, and white waistcoat, and was wearing a tall hat. She had time to note these details, and the malmaison carnation in his coat, and the light gloves which he was carrying, before he was at her side, looking down at her with wild, bloodshot eyes, grasping her arm with a strong hand, while those smart lavender gloves dropped from his unconscious grasp, and fell on the wet gravel, to be trampled underfoot like weeds.
"Why were you not at the church? Why are you wearing that dingy frock? You and your bridesmaids ought to have been ready an hour ago. I have been waiting for you. Have you forgotten what this day means?"
"Geoffrey! have notyouforgotten? What madness to come back like this! What have you been doing with your life since the fourteenth of November? Where have you been hiding?"
"Where? Hiding! Nonsense! I have been travelling. I took it into my head, when Allan was coming back, that you didn't care for me, that he was the favoured lover, in spite of all. I had extorted your promise—and you were sorry you had ever given it. And I thought the best thing for me would be to make myself scarce, to go to Africa, Australia, anywhere. The world is big enough for two people to give each other a wide berth, but not big enough for Allan and me, if you liked him better than me. I was a fool, that's all: a fool to doubt my dearest! But there's no time to lose. We must be married before three. Come to the church as you are. What does it matter? I've put on my war-paint, you see. My valet seemed to think I was mad."
"You have seen your mother?"
"Yes, she has been plaguing me with questions. I gave her the slip. Allan is there, in my house. The irony of fate, isn't it? Hovering between life and death, my mother told me. How long will he hesitate between two opinions? I left them wondering, and hurried to the church to meet you, only to find emptiness. No one there! Not even the sexton. But there is still time. We can be married—you and I—with the sexton and pew-opener for witnesses, and can start for the other end of the world to-night."
"Geoffrey, why did you go away?" she asked, looking up at that wild face with infinite terror in her own.
The restless eyes, the convulsive working of the dry hot lips told their story only too plainly, the story of a mind distraught.
"Dear Geoffrey!" she said gently, with unspeakable pity for this human wreck, "there can be no marriage to-day. We are all in great trouble—about Allan."
"About Allan—always about Allan!" he interrupted savagely. "What has Allan to do with the matter? It is our wedding-day, yours and mine. I don't want Allan for my best man."
"There can be no marriage while Allan is ill, lying in your house, so nearly murdered; perhaps even yet to die from that cruel usage. They are looking for his murderer, Geoffrey. Was it wise for you to come back to this place, knowing that?"
"Knowing what?"
"That Allan's mother is determined to find the man who so nearly killed her son."
"What have I to do with her determination? I shall neither hinder nor help her."
Oh, the crafty smile, the malice and the cunning in that face, a look which Suzette had never seen till now! A look which made that once splendid countenance seem the face of a stranger.
She shrank from him involuntarily. He saw the sudden look of repulsion, and tightened his grasp upon her arm, until she gave a cry of pain.
"Did I hurt you?" loosening his grasp with a laugh. "What a fluttering little dove it is; so easily scared, so easily hurt. Come, Suzette, you are not going to cheat me, are you? This is the thirteenth of December. Do you hear? the thirteenth, the date fixed and appointed by you, by your very self. You shall not evade your own appointment. Come, love, come."
He took a few rapid steps forward, dragging her along with him, lifting her off her feet in his vehemence, but stopping suddenly when he found she was nearly falling.
"Geoffrey, how rough you are!"
"I didn't mean to be rough. But there's not a moment to lose. Why won't you come?"
"I am not coming. It is sheer madness to talk of our wedding. You have been away for a whole month of your own accord. Our marriage has been put off indefinitely. Poor Geoffrey!" looking at his haggard face with sudden tenderness, "how dreadfully ill you look! worse than the night you arrived from Zanzibar. I will go back to the Manor with you, and see you safe and at rest with your dear mother."
"No, no, I am never going back to the Manor where that dead man lies."
"Dead! Oh, God! He is not dead! What do you mean?"
"I don't want their dead man there. Well, he may be alive still, perhaps. I don't want him there. His presence poisons my house, as his influence has poisoned my life. He has been a blight upon me. Like me, they say—like me, but of a different fibre. I know how to fight for my own hand. Will you come with me to the church quietly, of your own accord?"
"No, no. Impossible."
"Then I'll make you," he cried savagely, seizing her in his arms. "I won't be fooled. I won't be cheated. I am here to fulfil my part of the bond. I have not forgotten the date."
Then with a swift change of mood he loosened his angry hold upon her, fell on his knees at her feet, crying over the poor little hand which he clasped in both his own.
"Pity me, Suzette, pity me! I am the most miserable wretch in the world. I have been wandering about England like a criminal; a hateful country, no solitude, people staring and prying everywhere; a miserable over-crowded place where a man cannot be alone with his troubles, where there is no space for thought or memory. But I did not forget you. Your image was always there," touching his forehead; "thatnever faded. Only I forgot other things, or hardly knew which were dreams, or which were real. That grey afternoon in the wood, and the words that were said, and his face when I struck him! A dream? Yes, a dream! And then only yesterday the date upon a newspaper seen by accident—I have read no newspapers since I left Discombe—reminded me of to-day. I was at Padstow yesterday afternoon, an out-of-the-way village on the Cornish coast; and it has taken me all my time to get here to Discombe to-day in time to dress for my wedding. You should have seen my servant's face when I rang for him. I went into the house by the old door in the lobby, and walked up to my dressing-room without meeting a mortal. One never does meet any one at Discombe. The house is like the tomb of the Pharaohs—long passages, emptiness, silence."
He had risen from his knees at Suzette's entreaty, and was walking by her side, walking fast, speaking with breathless rapidity, eager, self-absorbed, holding her, lightly now, by the arm, as they paced the gravel walk.
"Higson was always a fool. I could see what he was thinking when I made him put out my frock-coat. The fellow thought I was mad. He wanted me to take a warm bath, and lie down for a bit before I saw my mother. He talked in the smooth wheedling way common people use with lunatics, as if they were children; and then he ran off to fetch my mother; and she came, poor soul, and kissed and cried over me, and thanked God with one breath for my return, and with the next wailed about Allan. Allan was there, close by, in my room. I was not to speak above my breath, lest I should disturb him. I went to another room to dress, but I had ever so much trouble with Higson before I could get the things I wanted—London things he called them—and wouldn't I have this, or that, anything except what I asked for? So you see I had a lot of trouble, and then I walked to the church, and found it was two o'clock, and not a soul there."
"Geoffrey, what could you expect?"
"I expected you to keep your word. This is our wedding-day. I expected to find my bride."
"We must wait, Geoffrey. There is plenty of time."
"No, there is no time. I want to take you with me to the Great Lake, far away from this cramped narrow country, these teeming over-crowded cities, a soil gridironed with railways, shut in with streets and houses, not one wide horizon like that inland sea. Ah, how you would adore it, as I do, in storm or in calm, always beautiful, always grand, a place made for the mind to grow in, for the heart to rest in. Ah, how often in the deep of the moonlight nights I have wandered up and down those smooth sands, thinking of you, conjuring up your image in such warm reality that it froze my blood when I looked round and saw that the real woman was not at my side. You will go to Africa with me, Suzette?"
"Yes, dear, yes; by-and-by."
"Ah, that's what Higson said when I told him to put out a frock-coat, 'By-and-by.' But I answered with a 'Now!' that made him jump. Hark! there's some one coming; a step on the gravel."
A light step, a girl's quick footfall. It was the vicar's daughter, fresh and blooming in winter frock and winter hat. A creature of the kind that is usually nailed flat on a barn door was coiled gracefully round the little felt hat, pretending to have come from Siberia.
At the first sight of Geoffrey, she started and looked aghast.
"Mr. Wornock! I thought you were hundreds of miles away."
"So I was, yesterday afternoon; but I happened to remember my wedding-day, and here I am, only to find that other people had forgotten."
"Oh, you happened to remember!" said Bessie, still staring at the white waistcoat, the malmaison carnation, the light grey trousers stained with rain and mud from the knee downwards, and worst of all the haggard countenance of the wearer. "You only remembered yesterday. How funny!"
Miss Edgefield would have made the same remark about a funeral in her present startled condition of mind.
Matcham had plenty of stuff for conversation within the next few days; for by that subtle process by which facts or various versions of facts are circulated in a rustic neighbourhood, people became aware of Geoffrey Wornock's return to Discombe, and of dreadful scenes that had occurred at Marsh House, where he had stayed for a couple of days, during which period Suzette was living at the Grove under her aunt and uncle's protection.
Yes, there had been scenes, tragical scenes, at Marsh House. Mrs. Wornock had been hastily summoned there, and had stayed under General Vincent's roof till her unhappy son was removed in medical custody, whither Matcham people knew not, though there were positive assertions as to locality on the part of the more energetic talkers. A physician had been summoned from London, a man of repute in mental cases; and Mrs. Wornock's brougham had driven away from Marsh House in wintry dusk, with a pair of horses, and had not returned to the Manor till late on the following day; whereby it was concluded that the journey had been at least twenty miles.
Mr. Wornock had been taken away, placed under restraint, people told each other, arriving at the fact by the usual inductive process, and on this occasion unhappily accurate in their deduction. Geoffrey was in a doctor's care; a madman with lucid intervals; not violent, except in brief flashes of angry despair, but with occasional hallucinations, that delirium without fever which constitutes lunacy from the standpoint of law and medicine.
Before he passed into that dim under-world of the private lunatic asylum, he had, in more than one wild torrent of self-accusation, confessed his treacherous desertion of Allan in Africa, his savage assault upon Allan in the wood. They had met, and Allan had upbraided him for that treacherous desertion, and for stealing his sweetheart. Suzette's name had been like a lighted fuse to an infernal machine; and then the latent savage which is in every man had leapt into life, and there had been a deadly struggle, a fight for existence on Allan's part, a murderous onslaught from Geoffrey.
It needed not the opinion of the detective police, nor yet the discovery of Allan's watch and signet-ring under the rotten leaves in the deep hollow of an old oak half a mile from the spot where he himself had been found, to substantiate Geoffrey's self-accusation. His unhappy mother, who was with him at Marsh House throughout those last dreadful hours of raving and unrest, had never doubted his guilt from the time of his reappearance at Discombe.
It was months before Allan returned to the world of active life; but he left the Manor long before actual convalescence.
Not once, during those slow hours of returning health, did he allude to the cause of his terrible illness; and, on his mother timidly questioning him, he professed to have no recollection of the assault which had been so nearly fatal.
"Let the past remain a blank, mother. No good can come by trying to remember."
He was especially gentle and affectionate to Mrs. Wornock on her rare visits to his room during the earlier stages of his convalescence. Geoffrey's name was not spoken by either; but Allan's sympathetic manner told the unhappy mother that he knew her grief and pitied her.
Lady Emily was by no means ungrateful for the lavish hospitality with which Mrs. Wornock's house and household had been devoted to her son, yet she shrank with a natural abhorrence from a scene which was associated with Allan's peril and Geoffrey's crime. No kindness of Mrs. Wornock's could lessen that horror; and Lady Emily did her utmost to hasten the patient's removal to his own house, short of risking a relapse. When she saw him established in his cheerful bedchamber at Beechhurst, she felt as if she had taken him out of a charnel-house into the pleasant world of the living and the happy; a world to which Geoffrey Wornock was fated never to return.
"Quite hopeless," was the verdict of medical authority.
Mrs. Wornock left Discombe, and was said to be living in complete seclusion, attended upon by two or three of the oldest of the Manor servants, in a cottage near the private asylum where her son was a prisoner for life.
Before midsummer Allan's health was completely restored, and mother and son left for Suffolk, for the pastures and pine-woods, the long white roads and sandy commons, the wide horizons and large level spaces flooded with the red and gold of sunsets that are said to surpass the splendour of sunsets in more picturesque scenery. Lady Emily would have been completely happy in this quiet interlude, this tranquil pause in the drama of life, had not Allan talked of going back to Africa before the end of the year.
"Why not?" he asked, when she remonstrated with him. "There is nothing for me to do in England, and Africa doesn't mean a lifelong separation, mother, or I would not dream of going there. Every year shortens the journey. Six weeks, I think Consul Johnstone called it, to Lake Tanganyika. If I go, I promise to return in less than two years. You would hardly have time to miss me in your busy days here——"
"Busy about such poor trifles, Allan? Do you think my farm could fill the place of my son? If you were away, one great care and sorrow would fill every hour of my life. And think what an anxious winter I went through—a season of fear and trembling."
This plea prevailed. He could not disregard the care and love that had been lavished upon him. No, he would not allow himself to be drawn back to that dark continent which is said to exercise a subtle influence over those who have once crossed her far-reaching plains, and rested beside her wide waters, and lived her life of adventure and surprise. No, it was too soon for the son to leave his mother, she having none but him. He had done with love; but duty still claimed him; and he stayed.
A quiet winter at Beechhurst, with his mother to keep house for him, a good deal of hunting, and so much attention and kindly feeling from everybody in the neighbourhood, that he could not altogether play the hermit. He was forced into visiting, and into entertaining his friends, and Lady Emily was very happy in playing her part of hostess in the livelier circle of Matcham, while the shutters were closed at Fendyke, and the bailiff had full sway on the white farm, allowed to do what he liked there, which was generally something different from what his mistress liked.
Life was made easier for Allan that winter by the absence of Suzette, who was travelling with her father—easier, and emptier, for the one presence which would have given a zest to life was wanting. He told himself that it was better so, better for his peace, since she could never be anything to him. The disappearance of his rival would make no difference in her feelings for Allan; for no doubt her affection for Geoffrey would only be strengthened by their tragical separation and her lover's miserable fate.
"If she should ever care for any one else, it will be a stranger," Allan told himself in those long reveries which the mere sight of a well-known garden wall, or the chimneys of Marsh House seen above the leafless elms as he rode past, could evoke. "She will never waste a thought upon me."
Other people were more hopeful. Mrs. Mornington told her friends in confidence that her niece's acceptance of that unfortunate young man had been a folly, into which she had been entrapped by Geoffrey's dominant temper, and by her passion for music.
"She never loved that unhappy young man as she once loved Allan Carew."
"And now, no doubt, she and Mr. Carew will make it up and marry," said the confidant, male or female, as the case might be.
"Not now: but some day, yes, perhaps," replied Suzette's aunt, with a significant nod.
And the day came—when Geoffrey Wornock's passionate heart was still for ever—had been stilled for more than two years—and when to him, at rest in the silence of the family burial-place at Discombe, by the side of the mother who had only survived him by a few weeks, the sound of Suzette's wedding-bells, the knowledge of Allan's happiness could bring no pain.
Allan's day came—long and late, after years of patient waiting, when Suzette had attained the sober age of six and twenty; but it was a day of cloudless happiness, which promised to last to the end of life. No fear of the future marred the joy of the present. The later love that had grown up in Suzette's heart for her first lover, was too strongly based upon knowledge and esteem to suffer the shadow of change.
THE END.
[1]Kigambo: unexpected calamity, slavery, or death.
[1]Kigambo: unexpected calamity, slavery, or death.
[2]Mambu kwa mungu: "It is God's trouble."
[2]Mambu kwa mungu: "It is God's trouble."
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.]