In the course of that round of visits Allan contrived to find out a good deal about the neighbourhood which was henceforward to be his home.
He discovered that it was, above all, a hunting neighbourhood; but that it was also a shooting neighbourhood; and that there was bad blood between the men who wanted to preserve pheasants and the men who wanted to hunt foxes. From the point of view of the rights of property, the shooters would appear to be in their right, since they only wanted to feed and foster birds on their own land; while the hunting-man—were he but the season-ticket-holding solicitor from Bloomsbury—wanted to hunt his fox over land which belonged to another man, and to spoil that other man's costly sport in the pursuit of a pleasure which cost him, the season-ticket holder, at most a stingy subscription to the hunt he affected. But, on the other hand, hunting is a strictly national sport, and shooting is a selfish, hole-and-corner kind of pleasure; so the hunting men claimed immemorial rights and privileges as against the owners of woods and copses, and the hatchers of pheasants.
Allan found another and more universal sport also in the ascendant at Matcham. The neighbourhood had taken lately to golf, and that game had found favour with old and young of both sexes. Everybody could not hunt, but everybody could play golf, or fancy that he or she was playing golf, or, at least, look on from a respectful distance while golf was being played. The golf-links on Matcham Common had therefore become the most popular institution in the neighbourhood, and the scarlet coat of the golfer was oftener seen than the fox-hunter in pink, and people came from afar to see the young ladies of Matcham contest for the bangles and photograph-frames which the golf club offered as the reward of the strong arm and the accurate eye.
Allan, who could turn his hand to most things in the way of physical exercise, was able to hold his own with the members of the golf club, and speedily became a familiar figure on the links. Here, as elsewhere, he met people who told him he was like Geoffrey Wornock, and who praised Wornock's skill at golf just as other people had praised his riding or his shooting.
"He seems to be something of a Crichton, this Wornock of yours," Allan said sometimes, with a suspicion of annoyance.
He was sick of being told of his likeness to this man whom he had never seen—weary of hearing the likeness discussed in his presence; weary of being told that the resemblance was in expression rather than in actual feature; that there was an indefinable something in his face which recalled Wornock in an absolutely startling manner; while the details of that face taken separately were in many respects unlike Wornock's face.
"Yet it is more than what is generally called a family likeness," said Mrs. Mornington of the Grove, a personage in the neighbourhood, and the cleverest woman among Allan's new acquaintances. "It is the individuality, the life and movement of the face, that are the same. The likeness is a likeness of light and shade rather than of line and colour."
There was a curious feeling in Allan's mind by the time this kind of thing had been said to him in different forms of speech by nearly everybody he knew in Matcham—a feeling which was partly irritation, partly interest in the man whose outward likeness to himself might be allied with some identity of mind and inclinations.
"I wonder whether I shall like him very much, or hate him very much," he said to Mrs. Mornington. "I feel sure I must do one or the other."
"You are sure to like him. He is not the kind of man for anybody to hate," answered the lady quickly; and then, growing suddenly thoughtful, she added, "You may find a something wanting in his character, perhaps; but you cannot dislike him. He is thoroughly likeable."