"For my part, I would throw over any engagement that was capable of being evaded," said Mrs. Mornington, cheerily. And then in an undertone to Allan, she added, "It will be a new sensation to eat a meal at the Manor. This burst of hospitality is almost a miracle."
Allan accepted the invitation unhesitatingly, and began to think Mrs. Wornock the most delightful of women, and to be angry with himself for ever having suspected evil in her past history. Whatever was strange in her conduct in relation to himself and to his father must be accounted for in some way that would be consonant with guilelessness and goodness.
That luncheon at Discombe Manor was the beginning of a new phase in Allan Carew's existence. All things must begin some day; and love—serious and earnest love—is one of the things which have their beginning, and whose beginning is sweeter than all the other first-fruits of life. It is not to be supposed that Allan was altogether a stranger to tender emotions, that he had come to five and twenty years of age without ever having fancied himself in love. He had had his boyish loves, and they had ended in disappointment. The blighting wind of satiety had swept across his budding loves before they had time to flower. All those youthful goddesses of his had shown him too soon and too plainly that there was very little of Olympian grandeur about them. As an only son with good prospects, he had been rudely awakened to the cruel truth that the average young lady has a sharp eye to the main chance, and that he, Allan Carew, was measured by his expectations rather than by his merits. Very early in his youth he made up his mind that he would never let his heart go out to any woman who contemplated marriage from a business standpoint; and he had been keenly on the watch for the canker of worldliness among the flowers. Unluckily for his chances of matrimony, the prettiest girls he had met hitherto had been the most worldly; trained perhaps to worldliness on account of their marketable qualities. Much as he admired high-mindedness in woman, he was not high-minded enough to seek out virtue under an unattractive exterior; so he had almost made up his mind to follow his uncle's example, and go through life a bachelor.
As a bachelor he might count himself rich, and for a bachelor Beechhurst was an admirable dwelling-place. The house had been built for a bachelor. The rooms were spacious but few. Twice as many bedrooms, best and secondary, would be required for a family man. Thinking vaguely of the possibility of marriage, Allan had shuddered as he thought of an architect exploring that delightful upper floor, measuring walls, and tapping partitions, and discussing the best point at which to throw out a nursery wing, and where to add three or four servants' bedrooms.
And behold now this prudent, far-seeing young man, whose philosophy hitherto had been the philosophy of pure selfishness, was allowing himself to fall in love with a young lady who, for all he could tell, might be just as mercenary and worldly-minded as the girls he had met in Suffolk shooting-parties or in London ball-rooms. He had no reason to suppose her any better than they. Her father was a man of moderate means, and according to all the rules of modern life, it would be her duty to make a good marriage. He remembered how Mrs. Mornington had ordered her niece to save a dance for him, and he might conclude from that and other small facts that the aunt would favour him as a suitor for the niece. Yet the idea of worldly-mindedness never entered his thoughts in relation to Suzette. He abandoned himself to the charm of her delightful individuality without the faintest apprehension of future disillusion. He thought, indeed, but little of the future. The joys of the present were all-sufficing. To talk with her in unrestrained frivolity, glancing from theme to theme, but always with a grain of sentiment or philosophy in their talk; to walk beside her in those stately alleys at Discombe, or to linger in the marble temple; to follow the peacocks along the grass walks; to look for the nests of the thrushes and blackbirds in the thick walls of laurel; to plan garden-plays—Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream—in that grassy amphitheatre, which reminded Allan of the Boboli Gardens—these things made a happiness that filled mind and heart to the exclusion of all thought of the future.
"I can understand the lilies better now than when I was first told to consider them," said Allan one day, as he stood with Suzette beside a great bed of lilium auratum.
"How do you mean?"
"Because I am as happy as they are, and take no more heed of the future than they do. I feel as they feel when they sway in the summer wind and bask in the summer sun, fed with the dews of night, having all things that are good for flowers, satisfied and happy."
"You are as foolish as I am. I can't help fancying sometimes that flowers are alive and can feel the sun and the glory of the blue sky. To be always looking up at the sky, dumb, lifeless, not knowing! One would hardly care for flowers if one could realize that they have neither sense nor feeling. Yet I suppose one does realize that cruel fact sometimes. I know when I have been looking at the roses, and delighting in their beauty, Caro meets me as I go back to the house, and as he leaps and frisks about me, the difference between him and the flowers strikes me very keenly. They so beautiful and so far off, he so near and dear—the precious living thing!"