"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--a _pied à terre_ near 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 or _savoir 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.
"It _is_ too 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 that _he_ has jilted _her_."
"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.]