No man journeying with a passionate heart ever found rail or boat quick enough, and Geoffrey, always impatient, chafed at every stage of the journey, and complained as bitterly as if he had been travelling at the expensive crawl in which a Horace Walpole or a Beckford was content to accomplish that restricted round which our ancestors called the "grand tour." Nothing slower than a balloon driving before a gale would have satisfied Geoffrey's eager soul. And he would rather have accepted balloon transit, with all its hazards, and run the risk of being landed in a Carinthian valley or a Norwegian fjord, than endure the harassing delay at dusty railway stations, or the slowness of the channel boat.
He telegraphed to his mother from Brussels, and again from Dover; so there was a cart waiting for him at the station with one of the fastest horses in the stable, but, unfortunately, one of the stupidest grooms, who could furnish him with no information upon any subject.
Was all well at home? His mistress well?
The groom believed so.
"Was Miss Vincent well?"
The groom had heard nothing to the contrary; but he had not seen Miss Vincent lately.
No particular inference was to be drawn from this statement of the groom's, since Suzette's visits were not made to the stableyard.
There was no one at Discombe to do stable-parade and to insist upon horses being stripped and trotted up and down for the edification of a visitor whose utmost knowledge of a horse might be that it is a beast with four legs—mane and tail understood, though not always existent.
Geoffrey rattled his old hunter along at a pace that made the cart sway like an outrigger in the wake of a steamer, and he alighted at the Manor House at least a quarter of an hour before a reasonable being would have got himself there.
It was late in the evening, and his mother was sitting alone in the dimly lighted music-room. The piano was shut—a bad sign; for when Suzette was there the piano was hardly ever idle.