That sweetly pensive face of Mrs. Wornock's had slain the viper envy in Allan's breast. When first he rode through those woods and over those undulating pastures and by those gables embowered in roses and wisteria, or starred with the pale blue clematis, he had felt a certain sour discontent with his own good fortune, about which people, from his mother down to the acquaintance of yesterday, prattled and prosed so officiously. He was sick of hearing himself called a lucky fellow. Luck, forsooth! what was his luck compared with Geoffrey Wornock's? That a bachelor uncle of his, having scraped together a modest little fortune, and not being able to carry it with him to the nether-world, should have passed it on to him, Allan, was not such a strange event as to warrant the running commentary of congratulation that had assailed his ear ever since he came to Matcham. No one congratulated Geoffrey Wornock. Nobody talked of his good luck. He had been born in the purple, and people spoke of him as of one having a divine right to the best things that this earth can give—to a Carolian mansion, and chase and park, and wide-spreading farms. There seemed to Allan Carew's self-consciousness an implied disparagement of himself in the tone which Matcham people took about Geoffrey Wornock. They in a manner congratulated him on his likeness to the Lord of Discombe Manor, and insinuated that he ought to be proud of himself because of this resemblance to the local magnate.
To-day, however, Allan forgot all those infinitesimal vexations which in the beginning of his residence at Matcham had made the name of Wornock odious to him. His thoughts were full of that pale sad face, the wasted cheeks, the heavy eyelids, the somewhat sickly transparency of complexion, the large violet eyes, which lit up the whole face as with a light that is not of this world. It was the most spiritual countenance he had ever seen—the first face which had ever suggested to him the epithet ethereal.
He remembered what society had told him about Mrs. Wornock; her encouragement of spirit-rapping people and thought-reading people, and every phase of modern super-naturalism; her passion for music—a passion so absorbing as almost to pass the border-line of sanity; at least in the opinion of the commonplace sane. He wondered no longer that such a woman had held herself aloof from the hunting, and shooting, and dinner-giving, and tea-drinking population scattered within a radius of eight or ten miles of Discombe; the people with whom, had she lived the conventional life of the conventional rural lady, she should have been on intimate terms. She was among them, but not of them, Allan told himself.
"Surely I am not in love with a woman old enough to be my mother!" he thought, between jest and earnest, as he drove up to the house. "I have not thought so persistently of any woman since I was sick for love of the dean's pretty daughter, fairest and last of my calf-loves."
He was not wholly in jest, for during the last three days the lady's image had haunted him with an insistency that bordered on "possession." It was as if those dark grey eyes had cast a spell upon him, and as if he must needs wait until the enchantress who held him in her mystic bands should unweave her mystery and set his thoughts at liberty.
The hall door stood open to the summer air and the afternoon sun. A large black poodle, with an air of ineffable wisdom, was stretched near the threshold; a liver-and-white St. Bernard sunned his hairy bulk upon the grass in front of the steps; and on the broad terrace to the right of the house a peacock spread the rainbow splendour of his tail, and strutted in stately slowness towards the sun.
"House and garden belong to fairyland," thought Allan. "The enchantress has but to wave her wand and fix the picture for a century. We may have extended the limit of human life a hundred years hence, and Mrs. Wornock's age may count as girlhood, when some gay young prince of fifty-five shall ride through the tangled woodland to awaken the sleeper. Who can tell? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.'"
CHAPTER IV.
"IN THE ALL-GOLDEN AFTERNOON."
The hall door stood wide open to the sunlight, sufficiently guarded by that splendid brute, the St. Bernard.