"LET NO MAN LIVE AS I HAVE LIVED."
Allan went back to Suffolk, and Suzette's life resumed its placid
course; a life in which she had for the most part to find her own
amusements and occupations. General Vincent was fond and proud of his
daughter; but he was not a man to make a companion of a daughter,
except at the social board. If Suzette were at home at twelve o'clock
to superintend the meal which he called tiffin, and in her place in
the drawing-room a quarter of an hour before the eight-o'clock dinner;
if she played him to sleep after dinner, or allowed herself to be
beaten at chess whenever he fancied an evening game, she fulfilled the
whole duty of a daughter as understood by General Vincent. For the
rest he had a supreme belief in her high principles and discretion.
Her name on the tableau in the parlour at the Sacré Cœur had stood
forth conspicuously for all the virtues--order, obedience, propriety,
truthfulness. The nuns, who expect perfection in the young human
vessel, had discovered no crack or flaw in Suzette.
"She has not only amiability and kindness of heart," said the Reverend
Mother, at the parting interview with the pupil's father, "she has
plenty of common sense, and she will never give you any trouble."
When the General took his daughter to India, there had been some talk
of a companion-governess, or governess-companion, for Suzette; but
against this infliction the girl herself protested strongly.
"If I am not old enough or wise enough to take care of myself, I will
go back to the convent," she declared. "I would rather take the veil
than submit to be governed by a 'Mrs. General.' I had learnt everything
the nuns could teach me before I left the Sacré Cœur. I am not going
to be taught by an inferior teacher--some smatterer, perhaps. Nobody
can teach like the sisters of the Sacré Cœur."
General Vincent had been preached at by his female relatives on this
subject of the governess-companion. "Suzette is too young and too
pretty to be alone," said one. "Suzette will get into idle habits if
there is no one to direct her mind," said another. "A girl's education
has only begun when she leaves school," said a third, as gloomy in
their foreshadowing of evil as if they had been the three fatal
sisters. But the General loved his daughter, and when withdrawing her
from the convent had promised her that her life should be happy; so he
abandoned an idea that had never been his own.
"A Mrs. General would have been a doosid expensive importation," he
told his friends afterwards, "and I knew there would be plenty of nice
women to look after Suzie."
Suzette had proved quite capable of looking after herself, unaided by
the nice women; indeed, her conduct had been--or should have been--a
liberal education to more than one of those nice women, who might have
found their matronly exuberances of conversation and behaviour in a
manner rebuked by the girl's discretion and self-respect. Suzette
passed unsmirched through the furnace of a season at Simla, and a
season at Naini Tal, and came to rustic Wiltshire with all the frank
gaiety of happy girlhood, and all the _savoir faire_ which comes of
two years' society experience. She had been courted and wooed, and had
blighted the hopes of more than one eligible admirer.
When she came to Matcham, there was again a question of chaperon or
companion. The odious word governess was abandoned. But it was said
that Indian society was less conventional than English society, and
that what might be permitted at Simla could hardly be endured at
Wiltshire; and again Suzette threatened to go back to her convent if
she were not to be trusted with the conduct of her own life.
"If I cannot take care of myself I am only fit for a cloister," she
said. "I would rather be a lay sister, and scrub floors, than be led
about by some prim personage, paid to keep watch and ward over me, a
hired guardian of my manners and my complexion."
Mrs. Mornington, who was less conventional than the rest of the
General's womankind, put in her word for her niece.
"Suzette wants no chaperon while I am living within five minutes'
walk," she said. "She can come to me in all her little domestic
difficulties; and as for parties, she is not likely to be asked to any
ceremonious affair to which I shall not be asked too."
Mrs. Mornington had been as kind and helpful as she had promised to
be; and in all domestic cruxes, in all details of home life, in the
arrangement of a dinner or the purchase of household goods Suzette had
taken counsel with her aunt. The meadows appertaining to the Grove
and to Marsh House were conterminous, and a gate had been made in the
fence, so that Suzette could run to her aunt at any hour, without hat
or gloves, and without showing herself on the high-road.
"If ever we quarrel, that gate will have to be nailed up," said
Mrs. Mornington. "It makes a quarrel much more awful when there is
a communication of that kind. The walling up of a gate is a public
manifesto. If ever we bar each other out, Suzette, all Matcham will
know it within twenty-four hours."
Suzette was not afraid that the gate would have to be nailed up. She
was fond of her aunt, and fully appreciated that lady's hard-headed
qualities; but although she went to her aunt Mornington for advice
about the gardener and the cook, the etiquette of invitations and
the law of selection with reference to a dinner-party, it was to
Mrs. Wornock she went for sympathy in the higher needs of life; it
was to Mrs. Wornock she revealed the mysteries of her heart and her
imagination.
"I seem to have known you all my life," she told that lady; "and I am
never afraid of being troublesome."
"You never can be troublesome," Mrs. Wornock answered, looking at
her with admiring affection. "I don't know what I should do without
you, Suzette. You and Allan have given my poor worn-out life a new
brightness."
"Allan! How fond you are of Allan," Suzette said, musingly. "It
seems so strange that you should have taken him to your heart so
quickly--only because he is like your son."
"Not only on that account, Suzette. That was the beginning. I am fond
of Allan for his own sake. His fine character has endeared him to me."
"You think he has a fine character?"
"Think! I know he has. Surely you know him too, Suzie. You ought to
have learnt his value by this time."
"Yes, I know he is good, generous, honest, and true. His love for his
father is very beautiful--and yet he found time to come all this way to
spend an hour or two with unworthy frivolous me."
"He did not think that a sacrifice, Suzie, for he adores you."
"You really think so--that he cares as much as that?"
"I am very sure that he loves with his whole heart and mind, as his
father--may have done before him."
"Oh, his father would have been in earnest, I have no doubt, in any
affection; but I doubt if he was ever tremendously in love with Lady
Emily. She is all that is sweet and dear in her frank homely way, but
not a person to inspire a _grande passion_. Allan's father must have
loved and lost in his early youth. There is a shade of melancholy in
his voice and manner--nothing gloomy or dismal--but just that touch of
seriousness which tells of deep thoughts. He is a most interesting man.
I wish you could have seen him while he was at Beechhurst. I fear he
will never leave Fendyke again."
Mrs. Wornock sighed and sat silent, while Suzette went to the piano and
played a short fugue by their favourite Sebastian Bach--played with
tender touch, lengthening out every slow passage in her pensive reverie.
There had been no more concertante duets. Geoffrey had entreated her
to go on with their mutual study of De Beriot and the older composers,
Corelli, Tartini, and the rest; but she had obstinately refused.
"The music is difficult and tiring," she said.
This was her first excuse.
"We will play simpler music--the lightest we can find. There are plenty
of easy duets."
"Please don't think me capricious if I confess that I don't care
about playing with the violin. It takes too much out of one. I am too
anxious."
"Why should you be anxious? I am not going to be angry or disagreeable
at your _brioches_--should you make any."
She still refused, lightly but persistently; and he saw that she had
made up her mind.
"I begin to understand," he said, with an offended air; and there was
never any further talk of Suzette as an accompanist.
Geoffrey was seldom at home in the daytime after this refusal, and
life at the Manor dropped back into the old groove. Mrs. Wornock and
Suzette spent some hours of every day together; and, now that the
weather often made the garden impossible, the organ and piano afforded
their chief occupation and amusement. Suzette was enthusiastic, and
pleased with her own improvement under her friend's guidance. It was
not so much tuition as sympathy which the elder woman gave to the
younger. Suzette's musical talent, since she left her convent, had been
withering in an atmosphere of chilling indifference. Her father liked
to be played to sleep after dinner; but he hardly knew one air from
another, and he called everything his daughter played Rubinstein.
"Wonderful fellow that Rubinstein!" he used to say. "There seems no end
to his compositions; and, to my notion, they've only one fault--they're
all alike."
Suzette heard of Geoffrey, though she rarely saw him. His mother talked
of him daily; but there was a regretful tone in all her talk. Nothing
at Discombe seemed quite satisfactory to the son and heir. His horses
were failures. The hunting was bad--"rotten," Geoffrey called it, but
could give no justification for this charge of rottenness. The sport
might be good enough for the neighbours in general; but it was not good
enough for a man who had run the whole gamut of sport in Bengal, under
the best possible conditions. Geoffrey doubted if there was any hunting
worth talking about, except in the shires or in Ireland. He thought of
going to Ireland directly after Christmas.
"He is bored and unhappy here, Suzette," Mrs. Wornock said one morning,
when Suzette found her particularly low-spirited. "The life that suits
Allan, and other young men in the neighbourhood, is not good enough
for Geoffrey. He has been spoilt by Fortune, perhaps--or it is his sad
inheritance. I was an unhappy woman when he was born, and a portion of
my sorrow has descended upon my son."
This was the first time she had ever spoken to Suzette of her past life
or its sorrows.
"You must not think that, dear Mrs. Wornock. Your son is tired of this
humdrum country life, and he'll be all the better and brighter for a
change. Let him go to Ireland and hunt. He will be so much the fonder
of you when he comes back."
Mrs. Wornock sighed, and began to walk about the room in a restless way.
"Oh, Suzette, Suzette," she said, "I am very unhappy about him! I don't
know what will become of us, my son and me. We have all the elements of
happiness, and yet we are not happy."
* * * * *
It was a month after the little dinner at Marsh House, and Suzette
and her sweetheart had not met since that evening. There had been no
change for the better in Mr. Carew's condition; and Allan had felt it
impossible to leave the father over whose dwindling hours the shadow of
the end was stealing--gently, gradually, inevitably. There were days
when all was hushed and still as at the approach of doom--when the
head of the household lay silent and exhausted within closed doors, and
all Allan could do was to comfort his mother in her aching anxiety.
This he did with tenderest thoughtfulness, cheering her, sustaining
her, tempting her out into the gardens and meadows, beguiling her to
temporary forgetfulness of the sorrow that was so near. There were
happier--or seemingly happier--days when the invalid was well enough to
sit in his library, among the books which had been his life-companions.
In these waning hours he could only handle his books--fondle them, as
it were--slowly turning the leaves, reading a paragraph here and there,
or pausing to contemplate the outside of a volume, in love with a
tasteful binding, the creamy vellum, or gold-diapered back, the painted
edges, the devices to which he had given such careful thought in the
uneventful years, when collecting and rebinding these books had been
the most serious business of his life. He laid down one volume and took
up another, capriciously--sometimes with an impatient, sometimes with
a regretful, sigh. He could not read more than a page without fatigue.
His eyes clouded and his head ached at any sustained exertion. His
son kept him company through the grey winter day, in the warm glow of
the luxurious room, sheltered by tapestry portières and tall Indian
screens. His son fetched and carried for him, between the book-table by
the hearth and the shelves that lined the room from floor to ceiling,
and filled an ante-room beyond, and overflowed into the corridor.
"My day is done," George Carew said with a sigh. "These books have been
my life, Allan, and now I have outlived them. The zest is gone out of
them all; and now in these last days I know what a mistake my life has
been. Let no man live as I have done, and think that he is wise. A life
without variety or action is something less than life. Never envy the
student his peaceful meditative days. Be sure that when the end is near
he will look back, as I do, and feel that he has wasted his life--yes,
even though he leave some monumental work which the world will treasure
when he is in the dust--monument more enduring than brass or marble.
The man himself, when the shadows darken round him, will know how much
he has lost. Life means action, Allan, and variety, and the knowledge
of this glorious world into which we are born. The student is a worm
and no man. Let no sorrow blight your life as mine has been blighted."
"Dear father, I have always known there was a cloud upon your life--but
at least you have made others happy--as husband, father, master----"
"I have not been a domestic tyrant. That is about the best I can say
for myself. I have been tolerably indulgent to the kindest of wives.
I have loved my only son. Small merits these in a man whose home-life
has been cloudless. But I might have done better, Allan. I might have
risen superior to that youthful sorrow. I might have taken my dear
Emily closer to my heart, travelled over this varied world with her,
shown her all that is strangest and fairest under far-off skies instead
of letting her vegetate here. I might have gone into Parliament, put
my shoulder to the wheel of progress--helped as other men help, with
unselfish toil, struggling on hopefully through the great dismal
swamp of mistake and muddle-headedness. Better, far better, any life
of laborious endeavour, even if futile in result, than the cultured
idlers' paradise--better far for me, since in such a life I should
have forgotten the past, and might have been a cheerful companion in
the present. I chose to feed my morbid fancies; to live the life of
retrospection and regret; and now that the end has come, I begin to
understand what a contemptible creature I have been."
"Contemptible! My dear father, if every student were so to upbraid
himself after a life of plain living and high thinking, such as you
have led----"
"Plain living and high thinking are of very little good, Allan, if they
result in no useful work. Plain living and high thinking may be only a
polite synonym for selfish sloth."
"Father, I will not hear you depreciate yourself."
"My dear son! It is something to have won your love."
"And my mother. Is it not something to have made her happy?"
"For that I must thank her own sweet disposition. My reproach is that I
might have made her happier. I have wronged her by brooding over an old
sorrow."
"She has not been jealous of the love that came before you belonged to
her. She loves and honours you."
"Far beyond my merits. Providence has been very good to me, Allan."
There was a silence. More books were asked for and brought, languidly
opened, languidly closed, and laid aside. Yes, the zest had gone out
of them. The languor of excessive weakness can find no beauty even in
things most beautiful.