Well, he was not destined to be happy. She had never loved him—never. He had won her by sheer persistency; he had imposed upon her yielding nature, upon the amiability which makes it so hard for some women to say no. She had always been friendly and kind and sweet, but the signs and tokens of passionate love had been wanting. If she would have been content to marry him upon those friendly terms, content to forego the glamour of romantic love, all might have been well. Love would have followed marriage in the quiet years of domestic life. The watchful kindnesses of an adoring husband must have won her heart.
Yes, but for Geoffrey Wornock's appearance on the scene, all might have been well. Suzette would have married Allan, and the years would have ripened friendship into love. Geoffrey's was the fatal influence. Contrast with that fiery nature had made Allan seem a dullard.
This is what the forsaken lover told himself as he roamed about the autumn fields, the fertile levels, where all the soil he trod on was his own, and had belonged to his ancestors when the clank of armed feet was still a common thing in the land, and a stout Suffolk pad was your swiftest mode of travel. The shooting had begun, and the houses of Suffolk were full of guests, and the squires of Suffolk had mustered their guns, and were doing their best to beat the record of last year and all the years that were gone. But Allan had no heart for so much as a morning tramp across the stubble. The flavour and the freshness were gone out of life. He gave his shooting to a neighbour, an old friend of his father's, while his own days were dawdled through in the library, or spent in long walks by stream and mill-race, pine-wood and common, in any direction that offered the best chance of solitude.
He wrote to Suzette, with grave kindness, apologizing for his angry vehemence in the hour of their parting. He expatiated sorrowfully upon that which might have been.
"I think I must have known all along that you had no romantic love for me," he wrote; "but I would have been more than content to have your liking in exchange for my passionate love. I should not have thought myself a loser had you put the case in the plainest words. 'You idolize me, and I—well—I think you an estimable young man, and I have no objection to be your idol, accepting your devotion, and giving you a sisterly regard in exchange.' There are men who would think that a bad bargain; but I am not made of such proud stuff. Your friendship would have been more precious to me than any other woman's love; and I should have been happy, infinitely happy, could I have won you on those terms.
"But it was not to be—and now my heart turns cold every time the post-bag is opened, lest it should contain the letter that will tell me Geoffrey Wornock has won the prize that I have lost. Such things must be, Suzette. They are happening every day, and hearts are breaking, quietly. May you be happy—my dear lost love—whatever I may be."
Much as he might desire solitude, it was impossible for Allan to escape his fellow-man through the month of September in such a happy shooting-ground as that in which his property lay. In that part of Suffolk people knew of hunting as a barbarous form of sport somewhat affected in the midlands, and a fox was considered a beast of prey. The guns had it all their own way in those woods which Allan's great-grandfather had planted, and over the turnips which Allan's tenants had sown. Among the shooters who were profiting by his hospitality it was inevitable that he should meet some one he knew; and that some one happened to be a man with whom he had been on the friendliest terms five years before during a big shoot in the neighbourhood.
They met at a dinner at the house of the jovial squire to whom Allan had given his shooting—a five-mile drive from Fendyke. Lady Emily had persuaded her son to accept the invitation.
His father had been dead six months. Though she, the widow, would go nowhere, it might seem churlish in the son to hold himself aloof from old friends.
"And you don't want to be wearing the willow for that shallow-hearted girl, I hope," added Lady Emily, who was very angry with Suzette.