Had he not also seen this strange woman at a disadvantage when she fainted at the mention of his father's name—the name his father had borne in youth, not the name by which he was known now? Her fainting-fit might have had no significance in his eyes if it had not followed upon her eager questioning about his father. And whatever suspicions had been excited by that first visit were intensified by Mrs. Wornock's manner in the presence of Lady Emily. Such obvious embarrassment—a shyness so much more marked than that with which she had received him on his first visit—could hardly exist without a deeper cause than solitary habits or nervous temperament.
The likeness between Geoffrey Wornock and himself might have meant no more than the likeness between Mr. Drummond and Sir Robert Peel; but that likeness, taken in conjunction with Mrs. Wornock's extraordinary interest in his father, and most noticeable embarrassment in receiving his mother, might mean a great deal—might mean, indeed, that the cloud upon his father's life was the shadow of a lifelong remorse, the dark memory of sin and sorrow. It might be that within the years preceding his marriage George Beresford had been involved in a guilty intrigue with Mr. Wornock's young wife.
To believe this was to think very badly of this gentle creature, who used the advantages of wealth and position with such modest restraint, whose only delight in life was in one of the most exalted of life's pleasures. To believe this was to think Mrs. Wornock a false and ungrateful wife to a generous husband; and it was to believe George Beresford a vulgar seducer.
If there is one fallacy to which the non-legal mind is more prone than another it is its belief in its power to estimate the value of circumstantial evidence. Allan Carew tried his father and Mrs. Wornock by the evidence of circumstances, and he found them guilty.
"My mother shall never cross that woman's threshold again!" he decided, angry with himself for having taken Lady Emily to Discombe.
CHAPTER V.
MORE NEW-COMERS.
Allan recalled the story which Mrs. Mornington had told him of Mr. Wornock's marriage, and the mysterious birth of his son and heir—mysterious in that it was a strange thing for an English gentleman with a fine estate to carry off his wife to a foreign country before the birth of her first child, and to remain an exile from home and property until his son was three years old. Mystery of some kind—a secret sorrow or a secret shame—must have been at the root of conduct so unusual; and might not that secret include the story of the young wife's sin?
Allan Carew had heard of husbands so beneficent as to forgive that sin which to the mind of the average man lies beyond reach of pardon; husbands who have taken back runaway wives, and set the fallen idol once again in the temple of home-life; husbands who, knowing themselves old, ugly, and unlovable, have palliated and pardoned the passionate impulses of undisciplined girlhood, the sin in which there has been more of romantic folly than of profligate inclination; husbands who have asked themselves whether they were not the darker sinners in having possessed themselves of creatures so lovely and so frail, so unadapted for a passionless, workaday union with grey hairs and old age. It might be, Allan thought, that Mr. Wornock was one of these, and that he had conveyed his young wife away from the scene of her sin and the influence of her betrayer, and had hidden her shame and his dishonour in that quiet valley among the snow-peaks and the glaciers. But if Mrs. Wornock had so sinned in the early days of her married life there must be people at Matcham who would remember the lover's presence at Discombe, even although his real character had been undiscovered by the searching eyes of village censors.
Lady Emily went back to her husband and her farm after a week at Beechhurst—a pleasant and busy week, in which the mother's experience and good sense had been brought to bear upon all the details of the son's household and domestic possessions—plate and linen, glass and china, books and ornaments.