"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."