Would he be wise in taking his mother to Discombe? Perhaps not. He had made up his mind to take her there, wisely or foolishly. He wanted to bring her plain common sense to bear upon Mrs. Wornock's fantastic temperament.
"My mother is the shrewdest woman I know," he told himself. "She will read Mrs. Wornock's character much better than I can."
Lady Emily was the soul of good nature, and was particularly free from the trammels of conventionality; so, when she found her son had the matter at heart, she waived all question of the caller and the called upon, and allowed Allan to drive her to Discombe on the afternoon after her arrival at Beechhurst; and the drive and the approach to the Manor were very agreeable to her.
"You are really prettier hereabouts than we are in Suffolk," she said condescendingly; "but you have not our wide expanse of field and meadow, our open horizon. Those high downs have a cramping effect on your landscape—they narrow your outlook, and shut you in too much. Your sunsets must be very poor, in a broken-up country like this."
The weather was more sultry than on Allan's previous visit. Summer had ripened, the roses were in bloom, and the last purple petal had fallen in the rhododendron jungle through which they drove to the Manor House.
Mrs. Wornock was at home. Vain for the footman to deny it, even had he been so minded, for the deep-toned music of the organ was pealing along the corridor. The chords which begin Beethoven's Funeral March for the Burial of a Hero crashed out, solemnly and slowly, as Lady Emily and her son approached the music-room; and when, at the opening of the door, the player stopped suddenly, the silence was more startling than the music had been.
Startling, too, to see the fragile form of the player, and the semi-transparent hands which had produced that volume of sound.
"I had no idea you were so fine a musician, Mrs. Wornock," Lady Emily said graciously, after the introduction had been got over, the lady of Discombe standing before her timidly in the broad sunlight from the open window, so fragile, so youthful-looking, so unlike the mistress of a great house, and the chief personage in a rustic parish. "My son was eloquent in your praise, but he forgot to tell me of your musical talent."
"I don't think I have much talent," answered Mrs. Wornock, hesitatingly. "I am very fond of music—that is all."
"There is a great deal in that ALL. I wish my love of music—and Allan knows I prefer a good concert to any other form of entertainment—would enable me to play as you do, for then I could take the place of the stupidest organist in England at our parish church."