Was she sorrowing for the lover who had forsaken her, as she sat looking with sad, tearless eyes into the fire? Was she regretting the happiness that might have been, thinking of a life which should have been cloudless? No, she had never contemplated a life of cloudless happiness with Geoffrey Wornock. She had loved that fiery spirit. Her love had been conquered by a mind stronger than her own, and she had submitted, almost as a slave submits to her captor. Mentally she had been in bondage, able to see all that was faulty and perilous in the character of her conqueror, yet loving him in spite of his faults.
But to-day his image was associated with a great terror—a terror of undiscovered crime—the fear that when next she heard his name spoken she would hear of him as an arrested criminal; or as a suicide, self-slaughtered in some quiet spot, where the searchers must needs be slow to find him.
Two o'clock. She had tried all her best-loved books in the endeavour to forget the dark realities of life; but books did not help her to-day. She never went into the dining-room for a formal luncheon when her father was out for the day; preferring some light refreshment of the kind which one hears of in Miss Austen's novels as "the tray," a modest meal of cake and fruit, with nothing more substantial than a sandwich. To-day even the sandwich was impossible. Her lips were dry with an inward fever. Her hands were cold as ice, her forehead was burning. "Was it raining?" she asked the servant. "No, the rain had ceased an hour ago," the man told her. She started up with a feeling of relief at the idea of escape from the dull, silent house; put on her hat and jacket, and went out by the glass door into the garden, where the mild winter had left a few flowers, pale Dijon roses, amidst the thick foliage of honeysuckle and magnolia on the south wall, a lingering chrysanthemum here and there in a sheltered bend of the shrubbery. The air was full of the sweetness of herbs and flowers, and the freshness of the rain. Yes, it was a relief to be walking about, looking at the shrubs, shaking the rain from the feathery branches of the deodaras, searching for late violets behind a border of close-clipped box. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned garden, full of things that had been growing for the best part of a century, a garden of broad gravel walks, and square grass plots, espaliers hiding asparagus-beds, the scent of sweet herbs conquering the more delicate odours of violets and rare roses—a dear old garden to be happy in, and a quiet retreat in which to walk alone with sorrow.
Suzette walked alone with her sorrow for nearly an hour, thankful for the hazard which had carried her energetic aunt to Salisbury two days before, on a visit to her friends in the Close, and had thus spared her Mrs. Mornington's society on this particular day. To have been comforted, or to have been bewailed over, would have added to her burden. To walk alone in this dull old garden was best.
Not alone any more! She heard the rustling of branches at the other end of the long green alley, and a footstep—a heavier footfall than Bessie Edgefield's—on the moist gravel. Her heart throbbed with a startled expectancy. Joy or fear? She had no time to know which feeling predominated before she saw her lover coming quickly towards her. He was dressed, not as she had been accustomed to see him in the corduroy waistcoat, short tweed coat, and knickerbockers of rustic out-of-door life, but in a frock-coat, light grey trousers, and white waistcoat, and was wearing a tall hat. She had time to note these details, and the malmaison carnation in his coat, and the light gloves which he was carrying, before he was at her side, looking down at her with wild, bloodshot eyes, grasping her arm with a strong hand, while those smart lavender gloves dropped from his unconscious grasp, and fell on the wet gravel, to be trampled underfoot like weeds.
"Why were you not at the church? Why are you wearing that dingy frock? You and your bridesmaids ought to have been ready an hour ago. I have been waiting for you. Have you forgotten what this day means?"
"Geoffrey! have not you forgotten? What madness to come back like this! What have you been doing with your life since the fourteenth of November? Where have you been hiding?"
"Where? Hiding! Nonsense! I have been travelling. I took it into my head, when Allan was coming back, that you didn't care for me, that he was the favoured lover, in spite of all. I had extorted your promise—and you were sorry you had ever given it. And I thought the best thing for me would be to make myself scarce, to go to Africa, Australia, anywhere. The world is big enough for two people to give each other a wide berth, but not big enough for Allan and me, if you liked him better than me. I was a fool, that's all: a fool to doubt my dearest! But there's no time to lose. We must be married before three. Come to the church as you are. What does it matter? I've put on my war-paint, you see. My valet seemed to think I was mad."
"You have seen your mother?"
"Yes, she has been plaguing me with questions. I gave her the slip. Allan is there, in my house. The irony of fate, isn't it? Hovering between life and death, my mother told me. How long will he hesitate between two opinions? I left them wondering, and hurried to the church to meet you, only to find emptiness. No one there! Not even the sexton. But there is still time. We can be married—you and I—with the sexton and pew-opener for witnesses, and can start for the other end of the world to-night."