The speech must have been uttered with some of the airy mental reservation that Gaston Arbuthnot’s habit of ‘poker talk’ made easy to him. He did not for one instant forget that he was engaged to dine that evening at The Bungalow; engaged, although there was no moon, to enjoy pure air and watch the light upon the Caskets from the jetty yonder.
‘The battle is to the strong, Marjorie Bartrand; the race to the swift. Women have been fatally handicapped since the world began. And Nature understands her own intentions, depend upon it, better than we do.’
‘Does Nature intend one half of the human race to be ciphers?’
‘Nature intends men to have wives. There is no escaping that fact. When I was a girl we got quite as much education as society required of us.’
‘Society!’
‘We learned modern languages, French and Italian, for of course German was not in vogue, and I must say I think Italian much the more feminine accomplishment.’
‘That is paying an exceedingly high compliment to German, ma’am!’
‘And we studied English literature, solidly, not out of little green-backed handbooks. Never a day passed that I did not read Addison, or some other fine Queen Anne writer, aloud to my father. And we knew how to write a letter. And we coloured from Nature, for the love of the thing, exceedingly well, some of us, though there was no South Kensington, and we never called ourselves art students, and, and—Marjorie Bartrand, how did this conversation begin?’
‘Apropos of Spain, did it not?’
‘To be sure. Apropos of your Girton scheme, your wish to see classics and mathematics pushed into a country where women are still content to be women, and very womanly ones. University teaching for girls is a freak that will die out of itself, like coal-scuttle bonnets, bishops’ sleeves, crinoline, or any other mode that is at once cumbersome and unbeautiful.’
Afternoon sunshine was flooding the weather-beaten lichened walls of Tintajeux Manoir. The Atlantic glittered, one vast field of diamonds, until it melted into pallid sky along the southern horizon line. The keen, cool ocean saltness mingled with and almost overbalanced the fragrance of the pinks, heliotropes, and roses in the Reverend Andros Bartrand’s old-fashioned borders. On a garden bench, at some short distance from the house, were seated two ladies, fresh of face, both; countrified of dress; fast friends, although more than forty years stood between their ages. A cedar of Lebanon spread wide its layers of odorous darkness above their heads. A grass plot, emerald green, close shorn, was their carpet.
‘If your wits were your fortune, child, such ambitions might be pardonable.’ So, after a space, the enemy of progress resumed her parable. ‘In families where the olive branches are in excess of the exchequer, the governess, Heaven help her, is expected to “ground” the boys, as they call it, in Latin grammar and Euclid. But with your grandfather’s position, your own inheritance, putting the idea of your marriage aside——’
‘As you know I have put it, for ever and ever!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand, her whole face seeming abruptly transformed into a pair of passionate eyes. ‘Did we not decide long ago, Miss Tighe, that the word mar——, the word I detest so heartily, should never be spoken between us. Allow that I may not be forced, for money, to ground smallboys in Latin grammar. Allow that my visions of raising Spanish girls above the level of dolls are as laughable as you all seem to find them. May I not want to bring myself, Marjorie Bartrand, up to the highest improvable point as a human being? Great in mathematics I shall never be.’
‘I am thankful, indeed, to hear you say so,’ remarked Miss Tighe, with an air of relief.
‘But even the Seigneur is forced to confess I might become—a fourth-rate classic! I know French and Spanish, Dogberry wise, by nature. That must help me a long way on the road to Latin. And I have learnt seventeen irregular Greek verbs—I’m not sure about the aorists—and Mademoiselle le Patourel and I went straight through the Apology of Plato, with Bohn’s crib.’
‘Poor Sophie le Patourel! You have outgrown her, at last, as you outgrew all your previous dozen or more governesses.’
‘I don’t know about “outgrown.” Grandpapa ridiculed our attempting Greek, from the first. You know the cruel way we Bartrands have of ridiculing under cover of a compliment! Well, one day last week, Mademoiselle le Patourel was reading the text of Plato aloud, not very flowingly, poor good soul——’
‘Sophie le Patourel had better have kept to the millinery! Her mother made up a cap like no woman in this island.’
‘And looking round she saw the Seigneur, outside the window, with a wicked smile about that handsome old mouth of his as he listened. Grandpapa made her the prettiest speech in the world about her quantities, her fine classic tastes, and her pupil. And Mademoiselle le Patourel never gave me another lesson.’
‘So now your scheme is to prepare for Girton by yourself. Ambitious, on my word!’
‘My scheme,’ said Marjorie, lowering her voice and glancing over her shoulder to make sure her terrible grandfather, Andros Bartrand, was not within earshot—‘my scheme is to have a real University coach of my own. A Cambridge B.A. at the present time residing in Guernsey.’
Cassandra Tighe started up from her seat.
She was a spare, tall, conspicuous spinster, with a face all features, a figure all angles, a manner all energy. Her hair was bleached, as much by exposure to weather as by actual age. Her complexion was that of a frosted apple. Her dress cost her fifteen pounds a year!
Living alone with one woman-servant in a small Guernsey cottage, it may be affirmed that Miss Tighe made as much of her life as any gentlewoman of modest income, and more than sixty summers, in the British dominions. Her intellectual resources were many. She was a thorough, an inborn naturalist. She played the harp, and with no dilettante touch, but as ladies early in the Victorian reign were wont to play that instrument. She drew. On stormy evenings, when she knew her voice could not penetrate the cottage window shutters, Cassandra confessed that she sang—such songs as ‘I see them on their winding way,’ ‘The Captive Knight,’ or ‘Zuleika.’
Her popularity and her influence were widespread. The figure of Miss Tighe in her red fishing-cloak, with nets, hooks, jars, boxes, bottles, overflowing from her village cart, was familiar throughout every nook and corner of the island. If she had not had the sunniest of human hearts you might have been tempted to dub her a gossip. That good old English word, however, is associated in these days with a more than doubtful spice of malice. And men and women who had known Cassandra Tighe for thirty years averred that they had never heard an unkindly judgment from her lips. She was simply araconteuse—we lack the English equivalent—a sympathiser in all the vivid varying doingsthat constitute the lives of young and wholesomely happy people; a chronicler of news; a delighter in love affairs.
Simply this. And yet, not unfrequently, Cassandra Tighe made mischief. Truthful, as far as conscious veracity went, to a fault, this excellent lady’s memory was in a chronic state of jumble; so stored, it may be, with polysyllabic names of plants, grubs, and fishes, that subsidiary human details had to be packed in pell-mell, and take their chance of coming out again untwisted. And, depend upon it, these tangled well-meaners, not your deliberate villains, are the cause of half the loves marred, the heartburnings, the jealousies, that make up the actual dramas, the unwritten three-volume novels of this work-a-day world!
‘You are going to study with a tutor, Marjorie Bartrand! With a Cambridge B.A.! With aMAN! What does your grandfather say?’
‘I have not told him the news, Miss Tighe. I grudge giving the Seigneur such intense pleasure. “If you insist on learning Latin and Greek,” grandpapa has always said, “learn them decently. Send these trashy governesses to the winds. Be taught by a competent master.” Yes,’ cried Marjorie, bringing down a very small hand with very great energy on her knee, ‘I grudge grandpapa his triumph, but the truth must be told. Now that I have caught him, I shall begin coaching with my B.A., my Cantab, forthwith.’
Cassandra shook her head, mournfully incredulous. She was of an age and of a disposition to which revolutionary ideas do not come with ease. There was really no place in her mental fabric for the picture of Marjorie Bartrand, here, inside the sacred walls of Tintajeux, reading classics and mathematics with a University coach.
‘I think it more than likely the plan will fall through. We have no Cambridge tutors in the island, unless, indeed, you mean good old Mr. Winkworth from the High Street Academy?’
‘I mean no one belonging to Guernsey. I mean a person who—ah, Miss Tighe,’ the girl broke off, ‘I see that I must make full confession. No knowing, as grandpapa says, when you once begin to speak the truth, where the truth may land you. My B.A. is coming to arrange about terms and hours this evening.’
‘And how did he—how did any stranger man hear of you?’
‘I put an advertisement in theChronique Guernésiaise, three days ago.’
‘Without consulting the Seigneur! Child—you did this thing? You gave your name, unknown to your grandfather, in the public newspaper?’
‘I gave my name in the public newspaper, ma’am, and this afternoon I got an answer to my advertisement. Wait one second and you shall hear it.’
Marjorie drew a note from the breast of her frock, and with an air half of mystery, half of triumph, began to read aloud:—
‘“Miller’s Hotel, Tuesday, June 14th.‘“Geoffrey Arbuthnot, B.A., Cantab., is willing to read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand. Terms, five shillings an hour. Geoffrey Arbuthnot will call at Tintajeux Manoir, on approval, between the hours of seven and eight this evening.”’
‘“Miller’s Hotel, Tuesday, June 14th.
‘“Geoffrey Arbuthnot, B.A., Cantab., is willing to read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand. Terms, five shillings an hour. Geoffrey Arbuthnot will call at Tintajeux Manoir, on approval, between the hours of seven and eight this evening.”’
‘Arbuthnot? Why, this is fatality.’ Cassandra discerned a special providence, an inchoate stroke of destiny in most things. ‘I was looking in at Miller’s Hotel last night. That reasonless creature, Mrs. Miller, has one of her throats again, and I did so want her to take some of my globules, but in vain. The ignorance of uneducated people——’
‘And you saw my coach of the future,’ interrupted Marjorie, knowing that when Miss Tighe got into suchengrossing interests as throats and globules, she must be brought back to her subject with a run.
‘Yes, I saw Mr. Arbuthnot. A rough diamond, my dear, to speak truth.’
‘That is so much in his favour,’ said Marjorie, peeling, shred from shred, the petals of a carnation that she held between her fingers. ‘I want to do my work for Girton steadily, unvexed by the sight or thought of that most irritating of God’s creatures—a beauty-man.’
Cassandra looked hard at the girl, remembering days, perhaps, when a beauty-man, in the fullest sense of the contemptuous epithet, had scathed rather than softened Marjorie Bartrand’s heart.
‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, on the score of ugliness, will meet your wishes, my dear. A rough-hewn Scotchman of the Carlyle stamp. A man who looks as though he ought to do big things in the world. A man with a scar—got, I am told, in a Quixotic pavement fight—traversing his forehead.’
‘I like the sketch. Proceed.’
‘As regards Geoffrey Arbuthnot himself I have done. Walking at his side, the evening light falling on her uncovered head and fair face, was the loveliest sight these old eyes have beheld for many a year—Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s wife.’
‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot—has he a wife?’ cried Marjorie in an altered voice. ‘My Cambridge B.A.—married! I hope you are sure of your facts, Miss Tighe. You know that sometimes—rarely, of course—mistakes occur in our little bits of Sarnian intelligence. You are perfectly certain that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot is a married man?’
‘I have seen his wife. How can you ask me if I am certain? “A daughter of the gods,”’ Cassandra quoted, “divinely tall,” fair-skinned, large-eyed, with a look of repressed sadness about her mouth that makes her bloomand youth the more noticeable. I was sitting in poor Mrs. Miller’s parlour, endeavouring to argue the woman out of taking Doctor Thorne’s drugs. As a human creature, a father, a husband, I have not one word to say against Doctor Thorne——’
‘I have!’ exclaimed Marjorie Bartrand imperatively. ‘As a human creature, a father, a husband—most especially as a husband—I have everything imaginable to say against Doctor Thorne.’
‘As a physician I consider him a man-slaughterer. Yes,’ repeated Cassandra, with pious warmth, ‘a man-slaughterer. Indeed, if I had sat at the inquest on more than one of Doctor Thorne’s departed patients, Heaven knows what verdict I should not have returned against him.’
‘But your story, Miss Tighe? The man like Carlyle; the beautiful wife. Return, please, to the Arbuthnots.’
‘Well, just as I was trying to put reason into Mrs. Miller’s weak mind, I was startled by the sight I told you of. This lovely young woman went past the window, not two yards from where I sat.’
‘With her husband. Was she leaning on Mr. Arbuthnot’s arm?’ asked Marjorie. ‘Did they look as if they had ever had a quarrel? Was she in white—bridal looking? Did you hear them murmur to each other? Miss Tighe, be dramatic! At Tintajeux we have not the joy, remember, of eventful living.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot was dressed in black. Her hair lay in short blonde waves on her forehead. She wore not a flower, not an ornament about her person. As they passed the window her husband remarked that he considered the roast duck and peas of which they had partaken for dinner were excellent.’
‘So much,’ said Marjorie, affecting cynicism, ‘for a chapter of married romance.’
‘Ah, that has been. The key of our common life isC major—roast duck and green peas—whatever accidental sharps and flats we may deviate into occasionally. The romance has been. I was overcome by the young woman’s singular beauty,’ went on Cassandra. ‘I asked her name, and was rewarded by hearing such an account of them as warmed my heart. The girl belonged to the humblest class of life—a gardener’s daughter, or something of the kind; and Arbuthnot, while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, married her.’
‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
Marjorie repeated the name softly; a question in her tone rather than in her words.
‘Geoffrey, I presume; that is to say, most decidedly and beyond question, Geoffrey,’ answered Cassandra, with the fatal certitude of inaccuracy. ‘I am the more positive because I felt a kind of love at first sight for the two young people, and made Mrs. Miller give me details. A party of Cambridge men were staying in the hotel when first the Arbuthnots arrived; and some of these men knew the husband by sight. He is looked upon as rather eccentric among his fellows. I am afraid, Marjorie, whenever a man leads a nobler life than other people the tendency of the day is to call him eccentric. And Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s life must be very noble.’
‘Because he had the courage of his opinions in choosing a wife?’
‘Not that only. Arbuthnot is a student still at the Cambridge medical school, and gives such time as he has over from study to the most miserable people in the Cambridge streets. Not proselytising, not preaching—for my part I don’t believe much in a preaching young man,’ said old Cassandra, whose opinions tended towards the broad; ‘simply binding up their wounds as men and women. Doing the Master’s work, not talking about it.’
‘And his beautiful wife helps him!’ exclaimed Marjorie,her sensitive Southern face aglow. ‘Ah, Miss Tighe, thank you again and again for your visit and for telling me this news. In my foolish, trivial, wasted existence, what a splendid bit of good fortune that I should have the chance of knowing two such people!’
Cassandra Tighe looked a little uncomfortable. She prided herself on her freedom from the prejudices of her sex; within limits, really did startle her friends, sometimes, by the free exercise of private judgment. But the liberality of a white-haired lady, whose sixty years of life have run in the safest, narrowest, conventional trammels, may differ widely from the liberality of a hot head, an eager, self-forgetting young heart like Marjorie Bartrand’s.
‘It will be a fine thing for your Girton prospects, capital for your Greek and Latin, to read with Mr. Arbuthnot. But I gathered—you must take this as I mean it, Marjorie Bartrand; you have no mother to tell you things—I gathered from different small hints that Mrs. Arbuthnot is not exactly in society. That she is good and sweet and honest,’ said Cassandra, ‘you have only to look in her face to know; still if I were in Marjorie Bartrand’s place, I should wait to see what the island ladies did in the matter of calling.’
Marjorie paled round the lips—sign infallible, throughout the Bartrand race, of rising tempest. Cassandra, knowing the family storm-signals, prepared to take a hasty departure.
‘I forget time always under the Tintajeux cedars. And there is plenty for me to do at home. To-morrow Annette and I are off to Sark for five days’ shore-work. Our talk about your new tutor has been an interesting one.’
‘Especially the clause that prohibits my calling on the new tutor’s wife!’
‘There is no prohibition at all. The Seigneur might safely leave his card on Mr. Arbuthnot. It would be avery pretty piece of condescension, and of course a gentleman calling upon a gentleman can lead to nothing,’ added Cassandra, rather ignobly temporising.
‘Exactly. Thank you very much, Miss Tighe, for your advice. As you say, I have no mother to enlighten me as to the dark mysteries of calling or not calling. And as I consider the island ladies too frisky for pioneers——’
‘Marjorie! Our archdeaconess, our irreproachable Guernsey matrons,frisky?’
‘I shall just have to act for myself. As Mrs. Arbuthnot, you tell me, has all good qualities written on her face, and knowing the fine things we do know of her husband’s life, it must be a credit to any woman—above all to an archdeaconess—to make their acquaintance.’
‘Still, if she is unused——’
‘Oh, I shall not put myself forward. If their merit is unrecognised, if narrow-minded, irreproachable people hold back from calling on them, I can understand that there may be shyness on my tutor’s part in mentioning his wife. I shall simply bide his time. I shall be silent until he chooses, himself, to speak to me of Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
‘That will be wise. Treat him, honest gentleman, as though one had not heard of his marriage. Meantime we can find out if our leading ladies, Madame Corbie especially, intend to notice her——’
‘But in my own self, I honour Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ interrupted Marjorie, her face colouring like a rose at sunset. ‘I admire, honour,lovehim! I wish the world were full of such men. I hold out both hands in fellowship to him at this moment.’
Cassandra, for once, showed prescience worthy of her name. Cassandra argued no more.
Geoffrey Arbuthnot was a man of whom none could say that Fortune had been to him a too fond mistress.
As a four-foot high boy, with shrewd observant Scottish eyes, with a Scottish mind already beginning to hold its own ideas as to the universe, he was sent, through the reluctant generosity of an uncle, to a London public school. In those days sanitary and social reforms for overtaxed city schoolboys were still inchoate. Each boy must look after himself, make personal acquaintance with facts, with the cut and thrust of human circumstance, take his recreation on the London pavements, sink or swim as he listed.
Geoffrey Arbuthnot, before he was ten had made acquaintance with a great many facts, all hard ones. He had no pocket-money, no tips. His holidays had to be paid for out of the same reluctant uncle’s purse—father and mother sleeping in a Perthshire kirkyard ere Geff could well remember aught—and were enjoyed under the roof of such persons as endure homeless schoolboys, on systems of rigid economy, as a business.
Hard-working to excess, perhaps because in work he found a friend, pushed into dead-language grooves because the masters sought to keep up the dead-language reputation of the school, Geoffrey Arbuthnot awoke one morning at the age of eighteen a fine classic. He was sent up tocompete for a Cambridge scholarship, won it, and, true to tradition, began reading, his heart warmed by the unwonted feeling of success, for his Classical Tripos.
Considering that every aptitude he possessed lay in an opposite direction to classical study, one can scarcely look on the nine Cambridge terms that followed as fortunate. The square man did his best to fill the round hole faithfully, his own squareness decreased not. And then, in the midst of this Greek and Latin epoch, came his love affairs—I retract the plural: his one overwhelming passion, ardent, pure as was ever love felt by man for woman; a passion which paled, ere he could well grasp it, into shadow, and which still—yes, in the Guernsey sunshine of this June day—rendered his happiness paradoxical, just at the age when happiness should be fullest, most complete.
Geoffrey Arbuthnot had not been smiled on by Fortune. Nevertheless, he possessed gifts which for the simple hourly manufacture of human contentment are better worth than the bigger favours of the gods. Life interested him. If he had had few artificial pleasures, he had exhausted no pleasures at all. In regard of nature, his sensations were vivid as a child’s. Walking forth to Tintajeux Manoir at an hour when the crisp blue and gold of afternoon had reached declension, Geoffrey felt youth run in his veins like wine. The hay and clover smells from the newly-cut fields; the ‘kiss sweet! kiss sweet!’ of the thrushes; the verdured hedges touched still by Spring’s immaturity, though the flower of the May was past; the peeps at every turn of purple salt water; the road-side ferns through which, knee-deep, he waded; the yellowing honeysuckle sprays which brushed his face; the streamlets slipping seaward away, through channels thick with cresses and forget-me-nots; ay, even the whiffs of wood-smoke from the farmhouse chimneys, the incomprehensible Froissart French in which he heard the haymakers chattering to each other over their breadand cider,—all the low, melodious notes of this homely landscape affected him with a physical and keen delight.
His life, since remotest baby-days, when he walked holding his mother’s hand in blithe, fair Scotland, had been passed among streets and among the human creatures who inhabit them. The pleasure of the Bethnal Green arab who, at six years old, first handles a living daisy, differs, in degree only, from Geoffrey’s as he trudged along through the Guernsey lanes, his mind vaguely fixed on Tintajeux Manoir and on the chill reception from his future pupil which there awaited him.
Would Miss Bartrand’s thunder glances be discharged from black eyes or blue ones? Geoffrey had reached a stretch of undulating rushy common at the extreme western point of the island when this question presented itself. Ahead was a vista of mouldering banks, gay in their shroud of blue-flowered, ivy-leaved campanula, and with here and there a jutting tip of granite, crimson, by reason of its glittering mica, in the sunset. Above hovered a falcon, almost lost to view against the largely-vaulted, bountifully-coloured evening sky.
Interpreting Froissart French by such lights as he possessed, Geoffrey learned from an ancient goat-tending peasant dame that a neighbouring block of stone building, partially visible on the left through oak and larch plantations, was Tintajeux Manoir. Would the girl who awaited his visit there be blonde or dark? Something Mrs. Thorne had hinted about a Spanish mother. According to all mournful human probabilities, the heiress would be swarthy; a black-eyed, atrociously clever-looking young person, he thought, with shining hair drawn tightly from her forehead, with stiff linen collar and wristbands, with a dignified manner and inkstained fingers. Also, despite her seventeen summers, with a leaning towards stoutness.
Geoffrey disrelished the picture projected before hismental sight about as much as in his present buoyant physical state he could disrelish anything. Consulting his watch, he found with relief that he had reached the outskirts of Tintajeux five-and-twenty minutes too early. There would be time, amidst this delicious wealth of atmosphere and hue that flooded him around, for a quiet smoke before encountering the terrible presence of Miss Marjorie Bartrand!
A suspicion that the heiress’s peppery temper might be roused if one’s jacket smelt of tobacco rather heightened the alacrity with which Geff Arbuthnot threw himself down on the fragrant sward and produced his pipe and pouch. The pipe was a black, ferociously Bohemian-looking ‘bulldog,’ the pouch a delicate mass of silk embroidery and velvet. As he drew forth—alas! that I should have to say it, his strong-flavoured cavendish, Geoffrey thought, as it was his custom to think four or five times each day, of the tender friendly woman’s hand that worked this pouch for him—Dinah’s!
Poor Dinah! When he saw her last, an hour before, her hands were clasped together with the half-apathetic gesture of a person to whom moral suffering has become a habit. A basket of coloured wools stood before her on the table, ready for her evening’s cross stitching. Round the corners of her lips was the look of silent endurance which had become so painfully familiar to Geoffrey’s sight. And all this for what? There was no great sin, surely, in Gaston’s putting himself at once under Mrs. Thorne’s easy guidance. The happiest households one hears of, thought Geoffrey, striking a vesuvian, are those in which the broadest law of liberty obtains. Does not an artist, more than other men, want change, professionally? Dinah should know that a creator, of the cheap popularity order, as Gaston with his pleasant self-depreciation would say, must have a constant supply of straw for his brickmaking; must have material,‘stuff,’ must see brisk lights, sharp shadows that the calm twilight of domestic happiness does not yield. And yet....
It was that constant, unspoken ‘and yet’ in Geoffrey’s mind which, up to the present point, had rendered the close friendship of the three Arbuthnots a paradox.
Leaning back against a little thyme-grown knoll, his hands clasped behind his head, Geff looked, with eyes that had learned the secret of most common things in Nature, at the moorland weeds around him. Here were graceful quake grasses in plenty, and waving sedges, and the poet’s wood-spurge, three cups in one. Close at his right hand grew a stalk of rush crowned by four or five brownish insignificant flowers, the least lovely outwardly of all the brilliant Guernsey flora. Well, and it came to pass that the neighbourhood of these degenerate, colourless petals altered Geff’s mood. He thought of the inherited mysteries and dooms of human life. He called to mind the sordid prose of the Cambridge outskirts, and the wretched men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who lived in them. He called to mind his own often despairing work, the struggles, hard and single-handed, of his manhood, his youth. His youth—ah! and with that the moorland scene faded. The years since he first saw Dinah spread themselves out scrollwise, suddenly illuminated, before Geff Arbuthnot’s mind.
How well he remembered himself a lad of twenty! How well he remembered the hawthorn-scented evening of their first meeting! He was walking alone through the one street of Lesser Cheriton, had passed its rectory, its seven public-houses, was honestly thinking of his approaching ‘Mays’ and of nothing in the world beyond, when a cottage casement window opened just above his head, and looking up he saw her—unornamented, in russet gown and apron blue, a jug of water in her white handready for the thirsty row of mignonette and geranium slips in the window-box.
He loved her, there and then. It was an old, a sacred story now, and Geoffrey questioned no syllable of the text as he scanned it quickly through. He took her picture back with him to his dark, book-strewn scholar’s attic in John’s, and that night he dreamed of her. Next morning he walked forth to Lesser Cheriton at the same hour, passed the rectory, the seven public-houses, and again caught glimpses of Dinah’s head as she sat, with a very fat old lady, alas! of a very humble class, in a close little parlour sewing, the lamp lighted, the windows fast shut, all the glories of the outside June night ignored.
The same kind of mute worship went on the next evening and the next. Towards the end of the week the old lady of a very humble class accosted him. Geff could remember the thrill of that moment yet. Away through the garden gloom did he not descry the flutter of a russet dress, the outline of a girlish head downbent over a bush of opening roses? The young gentleman would pardon her for taking such a liberty, but as he seemed fond of the country he might care sometimes for a bunch of cut flowers. She was a lone widow and lived too far off to send in her garden stuff to the Cambridge market except in wall-fruit time. If she could dispose, friendly like, of a few cut flowers it would be a little profit to her. Some of the University gentlemen, she had heard, dressed up their rooms, like a show, with flowers, and the roses and carnations this term were coming on wonderful. If the young gentleman would please to walk round the garden and see?
The young gentleman walked round the garden. He bought as many flowers as his arms could carry away. He learned that the girl’s name was Dinah Thurston, that she was ‘apprenticed to the dressmaking,’ and had come upall the way out of Devonshire to spend a month’s holiday with the old lady, her father’s sister. The Devonshire burr in Dinah’s speech disenchanted him no more than did an occasional lapse or two in Dinah’s grammar. When is a stripling of his age disenchanted by anything save frowns or rivals? Geoffrey held original ideas on more than one burning social subject, had made up his mind—on the first evening he saw Dinah Thurston—that it was a duty for him and for every man to marry young.
And he cared not one straw either for want of money, or for plebeian birth.
Good, because healthy blood flowed in this girl’s veins, thought Geff—the incipient physiologist. Sweet temper was on her lips. A stainless woman’s soul looked forth from those fair eyes. She was above, only too much above him in every excellence, inward or external. What chance had he with his plain face, his shy student’s manner, of winning such a jewel as Dinah Thurston’s love? What hope was there that she would wait until the day, necessarily distant, when he would be able to work for a wife’s support?
He became a daily caller at the cottage, and it is hard to suppose that both Dinah and Dinah’s protector were quite blind to the truth. Garden stuff was ever Geff’s ostensible object. He wanted cut flowers for himself, for an acquaintance who could not walk as far as Lesser Cheriton. He wanted radishes, cresses,—so different, he declared, to the stringy salad of College butteries! He wanted to know when the strawberries were likely to ripen.
He wanted some daily excuse for gazing on Dinah Thurston’s face.
Hard, I repeat, to think that the feminine instinct, however unsophisticated, would make no guess, as time went on, at the state of the poor young undergraduate’s heart. But this is just the kind of point at which good women, in every class, are prone to innocent casuistry. At all events,Dinah Thurston and her aunt gave no outward sign of intelligence. The old lady took her daily shillings and sixpences with commercial gravity. Dinah cut the flowers or tied up little hunches of cress and radishes in a convenient form for Geff to carry.
So, as in a new garden of Eden without a threat of the serpent’s coming, matters progressed for yet another fortnight.
Lesser Cheriton lies at a junction of rough Cambridgeshire lanes; a village girt round by blossoming orchards in May, by sheets of black water or blacker ice in December. In addition to its rectory and seven public-houses, it contains a score or two of the thatched, high-shouldered cottages common to this part of England. Being untraversed by any of the Maid’s Causeways, Lesser Cheriton lies somewhat out of the ordinary undergraduate track. Geoffrey had no intimate friend in the University save Gaston Arbuthnot, whose time was quite otherwise occupied than in watching the comings and goings of his simple scholar cousin. He was known to be a hard-working man who took his daily walk from duty and without companionship. But for an after-dinner stupidity—a turning missed—the little love drama would probably have unfolded itself with commonplace speed, and Geoffrey have gained a wife, for I cannot think Dinah’s unoccupied fancy would, at the age of eighteen, have been hard to win. The turning, however,wasmissed—thus.
Just as Geff, his hands filled with flowers, was parting from the girl, one hushed and radiant evening, there came a rush of wheels—he could hear it now, dreaming over the past on this Guernsey moorland, and the blood rose to Geff’s face at the remembrance—a rush of wheels down the slumbering street of Lesser Cheriton. For a few seconds the sound was muffled by the ivied churchyard wall where the road wound abruptly. Then, at a slapping pace,trotted past a high-stepping bay, of which Gaston Arbuthnot was for the moment the possessor, also Gaston Arbuthnot, in his well-appointed cart, returning to Alma Mater, with a brace of rich Jesus friends, after spending the afternoon at Ely.
Lesser Cheriton does not lie on the road between Ely and Cambridge. Lesser Cheriton, we may boldly say, lies on the road nowhere. But these young gentlemen were in the adventure-seeking, after-dinner mood, when a devious turning of any kind is taken with pleasant ease. And here, on their wrong road, and in Lesser Cheriton’s one street, they found themselves.
There was daylight lingering still in the low fields of Cambridgeshire sky. There was a young May moon, too, whose yellowish silver caused the outlines of Dinah Thurston’s head and throat to stand out in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge that divided the cottage garden and the road.
Gaston Arbuthnot turned sharply round for an instant and saw her. Shouting a cheery ‘Hullo!’ to his cousin, he drove on, giving a little valedictory wave of his whip ere he disappeared. And Geff, the glory shorn suddenly, unaccountably from his Eden, bade Dinah good-night, and started on his four-mile trudge back to Cambridge.
It was ten days before he again smelt the mignonette and roses of the cottage, or slaked his soul’s thirst by gazing on Dinah’s face. By early post next morning came a letter saying that the uncle to whose reluctantly generous hand he owed the hard All of his life lay at the point of death. The old man was sound of mind still, and desired his nephew’s presence. A lawyer wrote the letter, and it was added that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot would well consult his worldly interests by obeying the wishes of the dying man without delay.
It was one of those crises when all our present andfuture good seems to resolve itself into a desolate ‘perhaps.’ Geoffrey’s debts were few. Still, he had debts. The possibility of remaining up his nine terms at Cambridge might depend upon the will of this stern-hearted uncle who, dying, craved his presence. And yet, in obeying the summons, might he not be risking dearer things than worldly success—jeopardising hopes which already threw a trembling light over his loveless life?
He had spoken no syllable of his passion to Dinah, was too self-distrustful to tell his secret by means so matter-of-fact as a sheet of paper and the post. And so, like many another timid suitor, Geoffrey Arbuthnot elected to play a losing game. With immense fidelity in his breast, but without a word of explanation, he set off by noon of that day to London—not ignorant that Gaston’s eyes and those of Dinah Thurston had already met.
A girl’s vanity, if not her heart, might well have been wounded by such conduct. In after times Geoffrey Arbuthnot, musing over his lost happiness, would apply such medicine to his sore spirit as the limited pharmacopœia of disappointment can offer. If he had had a man’s metal, if, instead of flying like a schoolboy, he had said to her, on that evening when Gaston drove past them at the gate, ‘Take me or reject me, but choose!’—had he thus spoken, Geoffrey used to think, he might have won her.
To-night, on the Guernsey waste-land, with heaven so broad above, with earth so friendly, the past seemed to return to him without effort of his own and without sting. The fortnight he passed in London, the unknown relatives who beset the sick man’s bed, the scene amidst a London churchyard’s gloom, wherein he, Geff, in hired crape, was chief mourner, the reading of the will, the return to Cambridge—all this, at first, floated before his vision in grey monotone, as scenes will do in which one has played a spectator’s rather than an actor’s part. Then in a moment(Geoffrey’s half-closed eyes scanning the moor’s horizon, the soft airs blowing on his face) there came upon him a flash of light. It was so intolerably clear that every leaf and flower and pebble of a cottage garden in far-off Cambridgeshire stood out before him with a vividness that was poignant, a vividness that had in it the stab of sudden bodily pain.
Springing to his feet, Geoffrey resolved to brood over the irrevocable no longer. He emptied the ashes from his pipe, then replaced it, with Dinah’s delicate morsel of handiwork, in his pocket. He took out his watch. It was more than time for him to be off; and after a farewell glance at the campanula-shrouded knolls, Geff started briskly in the direction of Tintajeux Manoir. But the ghosts would not be laid. There were yet two pictures, a garden scene, an interior, upon which, whether he walked or remained still, Geoffrey Arbuthnot felt himself forced, in the spirit, to look.
The garden scene, first: time, seven of a June evening, sky and atmosphere rosy as these that surrounded him now. Thirsting to see Dinah’s face, Geoffrey walked straight away from Cambridge station, he remembered, on his arrival from London. He was dusty and wearied when he drew near the village. The rectory, the seven public-houses of Lesser Cheriton, looked more blankly uninhabited than usual. Some barn-door fowls, a few shining-necked pigeons, strutted up and down the High Street, its only occupants. When he reached the cottage no one answered his ring. The aunt was evidently absent. Dinah, thought Geoffrey, would be busy among her flowers, or might have taken her sewing to the orchard that lay at the bottom of the garden. He had been told, on some former visit, to go round, if the bell was unanswered, to a side entrance, lift the kitchen-latch, and if the door was unbolted, enter. He did so now; passed through the kitchen, burnished andneat as though it came out of a Dutch picture—through the tiny, cool-smelling dairy, and out into the large shadows of the garden beyond.
Silence met him everywhere.
The roses, only budding a fortnight ago, had now yearned into June’s deep crimson. The fruit-tree leaves had grown long and grayish, forming an impenetrable screen which shut out familiar perspectives, and gave Geoffrey a sense of strangeness that he liked not. Under the south wall, where the apricots already looked like yellowing, was a turf path leading you fieldward, through the entire length of the garden.
Along this path, with unintentionally muffled footsteps, Geoffrey Arbuthnot trod. When he reached the hedge that formed the final boundary between garden and orchard a man’s voice fell on his ear. He stopped, transfixed, as one might do to whom the surgeon’s verdict of ‘No hope’ has been delivered with cruel unexpectedness.
The voice was his cousin Gaston’s.
Geoffrey had no need to advance farther. In his black clothes, among the trees’ thick leafage, he was himself invisible, could see by the slightest bending of his neck as much as the world in the way of personal misery had on that summer evening to display to him.
For there, at the entrance to the orchard, stood Dinah Thurston, the glow that lingers after sunset throwing up the fresh beauty of her head and figure, and there stood Gaston. They were face to face, hands holding hands, eyes looking into eyes. And even as Geoffrey watched them his cousin bent forward and kissed Dinah Thurston’s unresisting lips.
Youth, the possibility of every youthful joy, died out in that moment’s anguish from Geff Arbuthnot’s heart. But the stuff the man was made of showed itself. More potent than all juice of grape is pain for evoking the best and theworst from human souls. Desolate, bemocked of fate, he turned away, the door of his earthly Paradise shutting on him, walked back to the scholar’s attic in John’s, whose full loneliness he had never realised till now, and during two hours’ space gave way to such abandonment as even the bravest men know under the wrench of sudden and total loss.
During two hours’ space! Then the lad gathered up his strength and faced the position. As regarded himself, the path lay plain. He must work up to the collar, hot and hard, leaving himself no time to feel the parts that were galled and wrung. But the others? At the point which all had reached, what was his, Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s, duty in respect of them? It was his duty, he thought—after a somewhat blind and confused fashion, doubtless—to stand like a brother by this woman who did not love him. Stifling every baser feeling towards Gaston, it was his duty to further, if he could, the happiness of them both. The sun should not go down on his despair. He would see his rival, would visit Dinah Thurston’s lover to-night.
Gaston Arbuthnot, a man of means, which he considerably lived beyond, occupied charmingly-furnished rooms in the first court of Jesus. Peacock’s feathers and sunflowers had not, happily for saner England, been then invented. A human creature could profess artistic leanings, yet run no risk of being expected by his fellows to live up to a dado! Gaston’s surroundings seemed rather the haphazard outcome of personal taste than the orthodox result of a full purse and adherence to the upholstery prophets. They had the negative merit of sincerity.
Walking with quick steps towards Tintajeux, how distinctly those rose-lit Jesus rooms, the last in the series of pictures, came back upon Geoffrey’s sense! He remembered an unfinished sketch in clay upon the mantelpiece; a Lilith, with languid eyes and limbs, with faultless passionlessmouth, with coils of loosened hair; charms how unlike those of the demure Madonna in the cottage at Lesser Cheriton! He remembered the smell of hothouse flowers, the like of which at all seasons of the year was wont to hang about Gaston Arbuthnot’s rooms; remembered a pile of yellow-backed French books on a writing-table, also a framed photograph of the prettiest actress of the day exactly fronting the easy-chair in which his cousin Gaston was pleased to affirm that he ‘read.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot had to wait some minutes alone, his cousin’s level, self-contained voice informing him from an inner room that he, Gaston, was dressing for the last ball of the term, given by Trinity. Would Geff not have come to that Trinity ball, by the bye? Ah, no. Mourning, weepers. Decent respect—cette chère Madame Grundy. And so the uncle had cut up decently! Nothing for him, of course. Kind of wretch whom uncles always would regard as belonging to the criminal classes. Had a mind to dispute the will, ruin Geoffrey as well as himself by throwing the whole thing into Chancery!
Then Gaston’s airy step crossed the room to a waltz tune that he whistled. A curtain was drawn back. The two men whose future relations were to be one long paradox stood opposite each other.
Gaston Arbuthnot was in evening dress; his white cravat tied to perfection, a tiny moss rose in his button-hole; a pair of unfolded lavender gloves were in his hand. His handsome ‘Bourbon’ face looked its handsomest. No traces of perturbed conscience marred his gracious and débonnaire mien. A man may surely find himself deep in a flirtation with some soft-eyed village Phillis, and at the same time like to dance with as many pretty girls in his own class of life as choose to smile on him!
He advanced with outstretched hand.
‘I congratulate you, Geff.’
The uncle had left Geoffrey a sum that for the forwarding of the frugal student’s worldly ambition was more than adequate—one thousand pounds.
‘And I,’ said Geff, his ice-cold fingers returning his cousin’s grasp firmly, ‘congratulate you!’
There must have been some modulation in his voice, some look on his haggard face, that supplemented these four words, strongly.
Gaston Arbuthnot changed colour.
‘What, on Lilith?’ he asked, shifting away, and bending over his unfinished sketch. ‘It is to be good, like all my things, some day. A new block in the pavement of the road to Hades! At present this left arm, above the elbow, is, as you see, a libel on anatomy.’
Geff followed him. He rested his hand on his cousin’s shoulder with such emphasis that Gaston Arbuthnot had no choice but to look up.
‘I congratulate you,’ he repeated very low, but with a concentrated energy that infused meaning into each syllable ‘I congratulate you upon your engagement to Dinah Thurston.’
So these visions of the past stood out; not merely with rigid correctness of form, but with colour, with fragrance, with the stir of human passion, the ring of human voices, to give them vitality. By the time the last one had vanished—the rose-shaded lamps, the actress in her frame, the clay-sketched Lilith, the yellow-backed novels dissolving into the actual grays and greens of this Guernsey moorland—Geoffrey found himself ringing, with a somewhat quickened pulse, despite his indifference to every form of feminine caprice, at the front bell of Tintajeux Manoir.
The door was opened by a French serving-man, who bestowed on Geoffrey a bow such as valets used to copy from their masters in days when the first country in Europe possessed a manner. Had not Sylvestre made the Grand Tour with the Reverend Andros Bartrand more than half a century before the present time! He was clad in a faded livery of puce and silver, wore long white locks that in this uncertain light gave Geoffrey the notion of a pigtail and hair powder, and had a wrinkled astute face, in which official decorum and a certain thin twinkle of humour, if not of malice, contended together agreeably for precedence.
‘Monsieur demands these ladies?’—from her earliest years Marjorie Bartrand had received a kind of spurious chaperonage through this plural phrase of Sylvestre’s. ‘Will Monsieur give himself then the trouble to enter?’
The look of the old manoir was cheery; its atmosphere was sun-warmed. And still the prospect of his approaching ordeal chilled Geoffrey’s courage. The thought of standing before Miss Bartrand on approval caused him to pass a bad five minutes, as he paused in the drawing-room, whether Sylvestre had ushered him, for her coming.
Could the initial letters of his terrible pupil’s character be deciphered, as one constantly hears it asserted of women,through the outward and visible presence of the house she inhabited?
The Tintajeux drawing-room was over-vast for its height. It opened towards the south, upon the cedar-shaded lawn; it communicated through a double row of fluted pillars with a smaller apartment towards the west. The uncarpeted floors were of oak, black from age, fragrantly and honestly beeswaxed, as floors used to be when Sylvestre was a boy. Nothing like your gray-headed butler for keeping up conservative habits of industry among the servants of a younger generation! Over the chimneypiece and doors were half moons, those graceful ‘lunettes’ of a hundred years ago, carved in bas-relief and tinted in flesh colour. The lace window draperies, looking as though they must fall to pieces at a touch, were relieved by an occasional fold of rich-hued crimson silk. Venetian mirrors hung at all available points along the tarnished white and gold walls. On either side the mantelpiece were miniatures of eighteenth-century Bartrands in velvets and brocades, no prefiguring of destiny looking out from their unconcerned, half-closed patrician eyes. In the centre stood a grand buhl clock, its design a band of Cupids hurling down rose leaves on some unseen object (the guillotine, perhaps) behind the dial.
In each of the deeply bowed windows stood a Petit Trianon gilt basket. They were full of odorous roses, pressed close together, as cunningly set roses ought to be, and showing no green between their damask and pink and faintly yellow petals.
As Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s eyes took in one after another of these details, the room seemed to him a piece of special pleading for the whole past Bartrand race. He stood here in a world that knew no better! He was amidst the shades of a generation which had heroically paid the price of its misdeeds. And the fancy, true or false, predisposed him towards the present owners of Tintajeux. They hadat least, he felt, the fascination of a pathetic background. Rare charm to an imaginative man whose business has led him among the dusty tracks of our modern, low-horizoned English life!
Moving to a window, Geff looked forth across lawn, garden, orchard, upon as fair a sweep of sapphire as ever gladdened human eyes; for here in the heart of the Channel you got beyond the North Sea’s yellowish green, and have real deep ocean blue. In the foreground, so near indeed that Geff instinctively stepped back within shelter of the window’s embrasure, a clerically-dressed tall man was slowly pacing to and fro on the grass. Somewhat rakishly placed on one side his head was a black velvet skull-cap. An after-dinner glow shone on Andros Bartrand’s bronzed four-score-year-old face; between his lips was a cigar. A couple of excellently-bred brindled terriers slunk at his heels.