‘Sixties’ and ‘forties’ are traditions, happily, of the past. Although Sarnian spinsters may still go out to tea with a maid and a hand-lanthorn, the number of their candles is no longer a rigorous type of their social condition.
But the society of an island, twelve miles long by four broad, must always be cousin-german to the society of a ship. Wherever choice is circumscribed, human nature tends to eclecticism. Sixties and forties may have had their day. A stranger is amazed, still, at the number of island families who do not visit other island families, seemingly from hereditary topographical reasons. The Eastern people have not much to say to those of the West. The country districts hold scanty intercourse with the townsfolk.
At the time I write of the remote little peninsula of Tintajeux was probably the most exclusive parish in the island.
‘While we were on terms with the Rector of Noirmont we had four people in our set,’ Marjorie would say. ‘The Rector of Noirmont, his wife, the Seigneur of Tintajeux, Marjorie Bartrand. Since grandpapa and M. Noirmont had their big Latin fight we have split up into further faction. Our set consists of the Seigneur of Tintajeux and Marjorie Bartrand. We are a nation of two.’
Of the things done and left undone by the Petersportinhabitants, this nation of two was ofttimes as ignorant as though some dark continent divided them. The dances, picnics, military bands, garden parties, and general gossip of urban life, concerned the Bartrands languidly. Old Andros had his farming, his dogs, his classic authors, and a curiously mixed performance which he called parochial work, to occupy him. Marjorie had her study, a boat, fishing-tackle, gardening tools; in days not so very far distant, had a carpenter’s bench; all the wholesome outdoor interests of a country-nurtured child. If Cassandra Tighe chanced occasionally to rattle round in her village cart and communicate to them the last town news, they heard it; rarely, otherwise.
It thus happened, Cassandra remaining away with her nets and her sea-monsters in Sark, that the comedy in course of rehearsal between Geff and Marjorie went on for several days without interruption. The master and pupil met seldom, save during the hours of work, when Geff, professionally severe, discouraged idle conversation. It did not become easier to Marjorie than it had seemed on the first night of their acquaintance to say the words, Your wife. The terms on which they met were frank; slightly stiffer, perhaps, under the broad sun of noon than they had been among the syringa blossoms by starlight! They stood, on the outside, at least, in the position of any commonly dense freshman, and of a coach, conscientiously minded to get his man, if possible, through Previous.
On the outside. Growing to know Marjorie’s transparent nature better and better, deriving keen refreshment from the badly-trained, fine intelligence which might have risen so high above the commonly dense freshman’s level, Geoffrey grew, hourly, more sensible that their seasons for meeting were ’ower lang o’ comin’,’ that each intervening day was a space of time to be lived through! At this point stood Geff. Secure, she was fain to think contented, in theknowledge of a Mrs. Arbuthnot’s existence, Marjorie worked with an unstinted zeal, a vivid delight, such as the whole defunct race of governesses, morning or resident, had failed to awaken in her.
So things progressed through half a dozen lessons. Then, one sunless afternoon, sky and sea and speck of island painted in half-tones, misty, dubious as the happiness of human life, came the rattle as of a score of chained captives along the avenue of Tintajeux. Marjorie, pacing up and down the schoolroom as she boldly struggled with the irregularities of a Greek verb, recognised the sound of Cassandra’s cart-wheels. Pushing Delectus and exercise books aside, she ran forth joyfully to meet her friend. Had not important news to be told? Our Cambridge B.A. thinking good things possible in the direction of Girton, the emancipation of those benighted Spanish women, who only know how to manage their house or fold their mantilla gracefully, a few prospective inches advanced!
‘You are inkier than ever, Marjorie Bartrand.’
This was Miss Tighe’s first personal observation, thrown back over her shoulder as she knotted Midge, the unkempt Brittany pony, to a rail, with one of the sundry odds and ends of rope stowed away in readiness within that all-containing cart of hers.
‘Only about the wrists,’ Marjorie pleaded, holding out the sleeve of her holland pinafore.
‘But I don’t see that University teaching puts flesh on your bones. You are growing too much like that picture of your mother. Eyes are all very well, especially handsome ones, but one wants something more than eyes in a face. You would have done much better’—who shall say Cassandra was not right—‘much better to come with Annette and me to Sark, jelly-fish hunting.’
The speech gave an impression of being double-shotted. But Marjorie, with unwonted meekness, made no retortuntil she and her visitor were within shelter of the drawing-room. There, in the familiar presence of the buhl Cupids, of the miniature Bartrands, who had danced, loved or hated each other, and gone to the guillotine with such easy grace, the girl felt herself protected—oh, Marjorie, from what dim vision of a sin could that white soul need protection? She began the story of her days, and of her intercourse with Geff Arbuthnot, bravely.
‘I feel half way towards Little Go, Miss Tighe. I get my six hours’ teaching a week, and——’
‘You have always had teaching in abundance,’ remarked Cassandra, wilfully misinterpreting her. ‘Since you were twelve, you have had Madame Briquebec six hours a week.’
‘Madame Briquebec—a music mistress!’
‘Six hours’ lessons, and twelve hours’ practice. It would require a Cambridge mathematician,’ observed Cassandra, ‘to reckon how many years’ solid capital, out of a lifetime, are given by young women to such an instrument as the piano!’
‘I am not talking of the piano, as you know, Miss Tighe,’ cried Marjorie, the heart within her rallying at the scent of coming strife. ‘I never practised less for poor old Madame Briquebec than I do now. I talk of my six hours’ solid reading with Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘Ah! I trust you find Mr. Arbuthnot solidly satisfactory?
‘My tutor thinks well of my staying power. Mr. Arbuthnot sees no reason why, if I gave my life up to it for four years, I should not, some day, come out low in a Tripos.’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot, like the rest of the world, knows perhaps upon which side his bread is buttered.’
The suggestion was Cassandra’s.
‘Bread—buttered! Let me tell you, ma’am, I think that a most harsh speech! Yes!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand,her face aflame, ‘and verging on spiteful. A speech most unworthy of Cassandra Tighe.’
‘To my mind the subject scarcely necessitates so much indignation, Marjorie.’
‘And to mine, it does. If you implied anything, it must be that Mr. Arbuthnot flatters me from motives of self-interest, which is vile.’
Old Cassandra took off her leather driving gloves; she pressed out their folds slowly. Then she examined a signet-ring, masculine in size and device, which was always worn by her on the third finger of the left hand.
‘Mr. Arbuthnot comes to visit you, professionally, three days a week.’ Speaking thus she did not lift her eyes to the young girl’s face. ‘He comes to Tintajeux at other times, naturally?’
‘He came on that first evening when we engaged him—I mean, when Mr. Arbuthnot was good enough to promise to read with me. It was fine warm weather, you must remember—the night before you left for Sark. Grandpapa invited Mr. Arbuthnot to drink tea with us, and afterwards I walked as far as the Hüets, to put him on the right track for getting home by Gros Nez.’
‘He speaks to you, frequently, of the poor, stay-at-home Griselda wife, I make no doubt.’
The blood rose up, less at the question than at Cassandra’s way of putting it, to Marjorie’s cheeks.
‘My tutor has never spoken to me of Mrs. Arbuthnot. You decided, Miss Tighe, that day when we talked it over under the cedars, that there might be an indelicacy in my mentioning her too abruptly. And during our hours of reading we work, and work hard. I think,’ said Marjorie, lifting her small face aloft, ‘that as regards the learning of classics and Euclid, it matters nothing to me whether Mrs. Geoffrey Arbuthnot stay at home or walk abroad.’
‘Mrs.Geoffrey!’ repeated Cassandra. ‘Oh, that certainlyis not the name. I may have led you wrong in the first instance. Geoffrey is not the name of the man people talk so much about.’
Marjorie walked off to the schoolroom, from whence she presently returned with Geoffrey’s card, one that he had enclosed in his first stiff business note to the heiress of Tintajeux.
‘Samson, Samuel, Cyril. I am nearly sure of Samson,’ mused Cassandra. ‘Accuracy as to names and dates was a kind of heirloom in our family.’
‘The name of my coach is Geoffrey,’ said Marjorie Bartrand. ‘Behold it, Miss Tighe, in black and white—Geoffrey Arbuthnot, B.A., Cantab.’
‘I cannot make this out at all. The whole thing is so fresh in my memory. Coming up from the harbour I called in at Miller’s. It was but human to ask that poor, weak, unreliable woman about her throat. Well, although she has swallowed Dr. Thorne’s drugs, Marjorie, she is recovering. Nature is so perverse in these chronic invalids.’
‘Recovering sufficiently to retail a fruity bit of gossip, which Miss Tighe enjoyed. I wonder whether the world was as scandal-loving inyourdays?’ said Marjorie, addressing the calm-eyed group of Bartrands beside the chimneypiece. ‘You were not a moral generation. Perhaps when glass heads were universal, stone-throwing was less in vogue.’
‘Poor Mrs. Miller threw no stones. She told me plain and sad facts about these young Arbuthnot people. The husband for ever philandering in the train of certain idle ladies belonging to our island society, the wife watching up for him till all hours of the morning, people, very naturally, speculating right and left——’
But Cassandra Tighe stopped short. Like an arrow from a bow Marjorie’s slip of a figure had shot across the drawing-room. She stood at her old friend’s knee. A pair of eyes glowing with all the force of strong, fiery, yet most generous temper, looked down upon Cassandra’s face.
‘I hate the speculations of malicious tongues, Miss Tighe. I will never believe that Geoffrey Arbuthnot “philanders,” whatever the term means, or treats his wife neglectfully. I know him to be manly, straightforward, true. I think Griselda ought to be happy, oh! happy quite beyond the common lot.’
The last words were not uttered without a quiver of Marjorie Bartrand’s lip.
Miss Tighe finished, we may well believe, with the theme of love and lovers some thirty-five or forty years before the present time. Was the subject ever of vital personal moment to her? A jealously worn signet-ring, the portrait of a scarlet-coated, dark-eyed lad that hung in her drawing-room, were the only evidence to warrant intimate friends in hazarding a tentative ‘yes.’ Her present interests, said the people of a young and irreverent generation, were of fish, fishy. Are fibres discernible under the microscope in a dogfish’s brain? Can a mollusc see, or only distinguish, between light and darkness? One thing was certain. In Cassandra Tighe’s breast lingered all tender, all womanly sympathy in the troubles of humanity at large. And something in Marjorie’s voice touched her, not to distrust, but compassion. She looked, with the pain that is half foreboding, at the young girl’s ardent, indignant face.
‘Marjorie Bartrand, we are old friends. You always take the lectures I give you in good part.’
‘I may do so occasionally, Miss Tighe, very occasionally. Let us keep to facts.’
‘I hope you will take a little lecture in good part now. Drive to Petersport to-morrow, and call on Mrs. Samson Arbuthnot.’
‘Mrs. Geoffrey Arbuthnot. With so many fables afloat, let us snatch, ma’am, pray, at whatever truth we may.’
‘Mrs. Geoffrey, if you choose. Although my convictionis unshaken. Drive in to Petersport to-morrow. Call upon your tutor’s wife. Remember her want of birth and education, imagine a little excusable jealousy. Put yourself, in short, in her place, and I am sure your good heart——’
‘I have no heart. Grandpapa, the whole of my governesses have impressed that upon me often.’
‘Your good common sense, then, will teach you how you can best befriend her. That is my lecture.’
Marjorie moved away into the nearest window. She looked out, athwart garden, orchard, moor, towards the Atlantic, gray, sullen, as though the season had gone back from June to December. A sense of deeply wounded pride, of cruel, inexplicable disappointment mingled in the girl’s heart.
‘I ought to have done the right thing,’ so she communed with herself. ‘I ought to have done it at once. I have just drifted into meanness. As though it could matter to us Bartrands if every woman in the island declined to call on Mrs. Arbuthnot. It was you, Miss Tighe,’ she turned round incisively on Cassandra, ‘who preached to me the gospel of Mammon.’
‘And one hears such nice things said of her, poor dear. The faults are so obviously the husband’s. Really, if I could have known all one knows now, my wisest advice would have been—keep clear of them both! In these prickly affairs, in anything connected with amésalliance, you are pretty sure to get your hand stung, whichever way you grasp your nettle.’
‘Too late in the day for pensive regrets, Miss Tighe. I have not kept clear of Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘The more the pity. As matters stand, Marjorie, I know that your conduct will be full of the sweetest tact. We have a few old-fashioned rules,’ said good, well-meaning Cassandra, ‘to guide us in our perplexities. The first is, to do unto others as we would they should do unto us.’
‘To-day is not Sunday.’ Marjorie’s foot tapped a quicklittle tune on the polished floor. ‘Please don’t let us have Sunday talk.’
‘How should we feel if we were Mrs. Arbuthnot? If you were Mrs. Arbuthnot, how would you wish Marjorie Bartrand should do unto you?’
Cassandra’s tone was plaintively sentimental, infalliblest tone of all to stir up mischief, never far from the surface, in Marjorie Bartrand’s heart.
‘How should I feel if I were Mrs. Arbuthnot? Wish that I had my precious liberty back, of course, and envy every girl I met hers—the natural feelings, one would hope, of all well-conducted, sensible married women. Ah,’ ejaculated Marjorie, folding her lithe arms, and with darkness like that of a swiftly-gathered thunder-cloud on her Southern face, ‘and to hear people talk as though such things as roaming husbands and weeping wives werenecessities, as though the doom of the serpent was laid upon every son and daughter of Adam.A Dieu ne plaisethat it should be so! There is one girl,’ striking her breast emphatically, ‘in Her British Majesty’s dominions who will shed tears for no man while she lives!’
‘We will hope so, Marjorie,’ said Cassandra, as she put on her driving gloves. ‘A good many of us have held the same opinions at seventeen, and yet had occasion to modify them later on.’
But the thunder-shower soon broke, the blue sky showed beyond. Tears, Marjorie Bartrand shed none. What sorrows had she of her own, what sweetheart, philandering or otherwise, to weep for? In regard of Geoffrey’s unknown wife, her brief-lived cynicism shifted, ere Cassandra had been gone an hour, into most genuine, most girl-like pity. After an outburst of temper, however scornful or unjust, there was ever in Marjorie’s heart a pungent and fiery fidelity which led her back, straight as magnet to steel, to her better self.
That she should be disappointed in Geoffrey’s character was, she told herself, inevitable. What is there in any man that one should not, on close acquaintance, be disappointed in him? She had thought, judging from frank and plainly given confidences, that she knew, to a minute, how her tutor’s time was passed here in Guernsey. A little hospital work daily, Geff having met an old college friend in the house surgeon; a little study for his next Cambridge exam.; a good deal of boating; a good many walks round the island; three days a week, his reading with herself at Tintajeux. The picture had been a clear, a pleasant one in Marjorie’s sight. And now matter so alien as this of fashionable fine ladies, midnight domestic scenes, idlers speculating right and left, must come, unwelcome and ugly blots, on the canvas.
She was disappointed in Geoffrey, personally. She felt, with the certainty of her age, that she could not work under him again with the bright unblemished interest of the past days. The change of feeling should be made up, Marjorie determined, by kindness shown to his wife. On Mrs. Arbuthnot she pledged herself to call to-morrow. Meantime, yes, during the forenoon lesson, she would assume a sterner manner towards this recreant husband, this sober-mannered student who, after all one hoped of him, was so little raised at heart above the pitiful vanities of his sex.
And in the first place her own waist-ribbon must be summarily returned. This was Marjorie’s resolve when her head rested on its pillow. The waist-ribbon which, for fear of wounding Geoffrey’s feelings (his wife’s, perhaps, vicariously), she had suffered her tutor to keep, must be returned. Looking upon him in this new—alas! to Marjorie’s experienced mind, this too familiar—character of a philanderer, she could imagine him, married though he was, exhibiting that bit of ribbon among his companions as a trophy. ‘A gift, don’t you know, bestowed on one by a fair hand that shall be nameless.’ Or he might show it among the idle fine ladies—oh, the hot shame at Marjorie’s sleepy heart—the idle ladies in whose train he followed, while his wife, ignorant of Euclid or Greek, but notdevoid of human nature, shed tears, not one single drop whereof the man was worthy, at home.
Marjorie Bartrand fell asleep in a state of the most pointed and virtuous indignation. Morning brought her back, as it brings back all of us, not to accidental emotion, but to the common habit of life. Her habit was to rise, the moment her eyes unclosed, open her window, and gladly welcome the new day. She did so now. Standing in her white night-dress, the elastic air blowing on her face, she looked across a corner of the orchard to the spot whereGeoffrey, the crescent moon shining, plucked the briar roses above her reach. Away in the distant fields she saw the Reverend Andros, as he walked to and fro with firm slow step among his men. On her dressing-table lay an algebra paper, always her hardest work, which she intended resolutely to ‘floor’ before her tutor’s coming.
How sweet life was, thought the little girl, how full of fine things that no man’s hand can take from us! Might it not be wisdom, even in a Mrs. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, as she had committed the error of marriage, to make the best of it—enjoy the sun that shone, the wind that blew, by day, and look upon sleep, not weeping, as the state for which nature designs our race at midnight!
After a swim in the bay, a brisk run up to the manoir, Marjorie, with hunger befitting her years, kept her grandfather in excellent countenance at his breakfast, a solid country meal at which broiled fish, ham and eggs from the farmyard, home-made rolls and Guernsey buttered cake predominated. Then she went to the schoolroom, and, long before a figure she watched for rose above the moor’s horizon, had got the better of her paper.
Her wits were at their brightest this morning. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, for the first time since they had known each other, threw out a few crumbs of praise when the reading closed. Crumbs of plain household bread, be it understood—no sugar, no spice—but that caused Marjorie’s heart to beat, the blood to leap swiftly into her mobile, all-confessing face.
Geff watched her with admiration he sought not to hide. They had been working under the cedars, as was their custom in these fair summer forenoons. A solitary beam of sunlight pierced the thick and odorous shade. It fell full on Marjorie, looking more like a child than usual in an unadorned cotton frock, and with her silky raven hair spread out to dry, unconfined by comb or ribbon, over her shoulders.
‘The endowments of life certainly don’t go to those who need them most.’ Geff gave utterance to the truism with the want of preface that was his habit. ‘Many a pale-faced, hard-working village schoolmistress would have her path smoothened by possessing a tenth part of your brains. While for you——’
The words were leaving his lips in blunt fidelity. They were not well considered words, perhaps. Which of us can stand on mental tiptoe every hour of the twenty-four? But they were about as innocent of premeditated flattery as was ever speech offered by man to civilised woman.
Marjorie interrupted him shortly; dormant indignation against poor Geff as a frequenter of idle society, a midnight reveller, a careless husband, flaming forth on him, lightning wise.
‘For me, Marjorie Bartrand, living on rose leaves in Tintajeux Manoir—oh! I should be equally charming with brains or without them, should not I? Thank you immensely for the compliment, sir. If I could change places I would rather be the village schoolmistress, plainly doing her day’s work for her day’s wages, than live idly on all the rose leaves, all the flatteries, the world could heap together.’ Then lifting her eyes, a look in them to pierce a guilty man’s soul, ‘At what time should I be likely to find Mrs. Arbuthnot at home?’ she asked him with cold directness. ‘I shall drive in to Miller’s Hotel. I shall call on Mrs. Arbuthnot this afternoon.’
A flush of undisguised pleasure went over Geoffrey’s face. All these days he had hoped that some offer of the kind would come from Marjorie, not doubting that in this small island rumours of Dinah’s beauty, perhaps of Dinah’s troubles, must have reached as far as Tintajeux.
‘I am afraid Mrs. Arbuthnot is to be found at home at most hours.’
‘So I am told.’
‘Dinah goes out too little in this fine June weather.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot must amend her ways. To-day is our Guernsey rose show. There will be military bands playing, dandies promenading,’ said Miss Bartrand witheringly, as she glanced at Geff’s undandified figure, ‘fine ladies thinking and talking of everything under God’s sun save the roses. Some of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s friends will surely tempt her to join the gay crowd in the Arsenal?’
‘Dinah has no friends. I mean, we have been too short a time in Guernsey to look for many callers. In the matter of visiting-cards, ladies, I am told, are prone to be sequacious.’
So did Geff, with single-minded good-will, seek to round off the edges of Dinah Arbuthnot’s isolation, of Gaston’s neglect.
‘And yet they say,’ cried Marjorie, her heart palpitating well-nigh to pain, ‘that Mrs. Arbuthnot’s husband has acquaintance without stint.’
‘You must not believe half “they” say, when men and women’s domestic concerns are the theme of conversation. Mrs. Arbuthnot’s husband chanced to meet accidentally with a Doctor and Mrs. Thorne here. The lady was a friend of former student days in Paris. It was the kind of meeting,’ added Geff apologetically, ‘in which a man has no choice but to renew an acquaintance, and——’
‘And Linda Thorne, of course, has called upon Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
The question came like a sword-thrust from Marjorie Bartrand.
‘I ... I am afraid ... not yet,’ answered Geoffrey, with hesitation.
Gaston’s careless conduct in regard of Dinah was just the one subject that could occasion straightforward Geoffrey’s tongue to stammer.
‘Ah! Linda Thorne has not called on Mrs. Arbuthnot.That lowers one’s opinion,’ mused Marjorie, ‘not too high at any time, of Linda Thorne.’
‘When you meet Dinah you will see that she is a woman to care little for the common run of morning callers.’
‘I shall endeavour, just the same, to make her care for me.’
Marjorie’s tones were icy, a swell of curiously mixed feeling was in her breast.
‘Endeavour will not be needed. I never made too sure,’ said Geff modestly, ‘that you would pay this visit. But I know that Dinah, in her heart, is more than prepared to bid you welcome.’
He rose, visibly reluctant, from the cool greensward. Then, with a sense that some subtle, intangible change had crept into his relations with his pupil, Geff prepared to take his leave.
But perilous stuff had yet to be dislodged from Marjorie Bartrand’s conscience. She would not call upon the wife while that bit of Spanish ribbon, a loan made in a moment of foolish high spirits, remained unchallenged in the husband’s possession.
‘I hope you have taken care of something I lent you, sir. A piece of coloured ribbon tied round those flowers I sent, the first evening grandpapa and I had the pleasure of knowing you, to Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
‘To Mrs. Arbuthnot! This is rough on a man,’ cried Geff. ‘Why, Miss Bartrand, you must have forgotten. Those flowers were given to me.’
‘Don’t make too certain of that.’
‘But I am certain. I can see you as you stood in the strip of moonlight by the water-lane, wishing me good-night. Your last words were, “the flowers are for yourself—your better self.”’
‘The ribbon, at least, was given to no one,’ retorted Marjorie, changing colour under his gaze. ‘It was lent tohinder you from breaking your neck. You meant to climb the Gros Nez cliffs if you could. To do that a real good Guernsey man needs his hands, both of them, and I thought it a pity——’
‘The real good Guernsey night should be disfigured by a stupid stranger leaving the world too tragically. I thank you heartily,’ went on Geff, as the girl blushed deeper and deeper. ‘I measured the extent of your sympathy to an inch at the time.’
A ring of absolute independence was in his voice; a suspicion lurked there, too, of hardly restrained laughter. For the situation was taking hold of him. Let us see, thought Geoffrey, in this feather-light matter of keeping or not keeping a morsel of sash ribbon, how far the small shrew could be tamed? Let us see which of the two should fitly, in the end, be styled conqueror?
So he thought: by no means forecasting that this feather-light matter of keeping a morsel of sash ribbon might be the pivot on which his life’s fortunes should one day turn.
‘My sympathy, I believe, was rightly bestowed,’ said Marjorie frigidly. ‘I would not see the poorest wandering pedlar start for the Gros Nez cliffs without helping him to the extent I helped you. Even a pedlar might have a wife at home, sir. A foolish, fond creature, shedding tears of anxiety for him in his absence.’
The side-thrust did not seem to scathe Geoffrey’s conscience as it should have done.
‘Would you make it a special point that this married pedlar should return you your ribbon, Miss Bartrand?’
‘I make it a point that Mr. Arbuthnot shall do so.’ Marjorie delivered her ultimatum unflinchingly. ‘The ribbon is worthless, except as a memento of some happy days I spent in Cadiz once, totally worthless to any living person but me.’
‘And why should it not be a memento of happy days spent in Guernsey by myself?’
She looked him straight between the eyes, too hotly, dangerously irate to make immediate answer.
‘Suppose, leading a prosaic life in the thick of bricks and mortar, that length of ribbon could act as a kind of talisman.’
‘I don’t understand you in the least.’
‘A charm bringing back to one’s tired eyes and heartthe blue summer night, the smell of moon-coloured hayfields, the whole moment when it was given to me.’
‘I will suppose nothing of the sort. It was not given. This is vapid, sentimental talk,’ said Marjorie, concentrating her thoughts firmly on absent Dinah. ‘And I abhor sentiment.’
‘On that solitary point we agree.’
‘The ribbon I lent you to tie round Mrs. Arbuthnot’s flowers is just a yard of woven, parti-coloured silk. Buy the best match you can find to it in the nearest mercer’s shop. It will be as good a talisman.’
‘Are you a materialist, Miss Bartrand? Would you say that the ragged colours of one of the Duke’s regiments, the pennants of one of Nelson’s ships, were so much woven silk, more or less stained and weather torn?’
‘I do not see that my sash ribbon can or should be of the smallest interest to Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ observed Marjorie, the blood leaping, more swiftly than it had done under his praise, to her cheek.
In this moment she was a woman, the childish cotton frock, the hair hung out to dry, the slim immature figure notwithstanding. A dawning of her sex’s shame burned at her heart as she turned her looks away from him. In this moment, were it possible to assign place and date to matter so intangible, I should say that Geff Arbuthnot first, distinctly, began to fall in love.
‘And supposeIfeel that your sash can and ought to be of the greatest possible interest to me?’ he urged.
Marjorie found no answer to her hand. If she had been reared under a different rule to Andros Bartrand’s, if she had associated more with girls, had frequented afternoon-teas and garden-parties, she would, doubtless, even in innocent little Sarnia, have learned the formula by which a married man, hazarding idle speeches, ought mildly and effectually to be crushed.
Marjorie knew no more of flirtation or of its dialects than she did of Sanscrit. She had gone through an engagement, once, during a brief uncomfortable fortnight; an experience which took the taste for lovers and lovers’ vows most adequately out of her young mouth. And now—oh, now she never meant to marry! She had her Greek and Latin in the present, a large outlook for herself and others in the future. Of flirtation she knew nothing, of engagements she knew too much! And she liked Geff Arbuthnot, and did not like the duties of repressing his frivolity, or of ranging herself against him in the civil wars of his home life. Yet to the utmost of her strength should both these duties be fulfilled.
‘Your interests were appropriated long before you ever saw me,’ she replied at last. ‘What hour, this afternoon, would it be convenient, pray, for me to visit Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Her tone, her look, might for a moment have suggested to Geoffrey that the secret of his youth had made unto itself wings and flown to Tintajeux. Only the very supposition were wild! Gaston, Dinah herself had never suspected the passionate madness which, in the May twilight of long ago, used to draw him night after night to the little thatched, rose-covered cottage at Lesser Cheriton.
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot? For anything I know to the contrary, Dinah will be at home between three and four o’clock.’
‘And at our next reading, sir, you will bring back my ribbon.’
‘I made no promise.’
‘Of what mortal use can a bit of ribbon be to you, Mr. Arbuthnot?’
‘I have had thoughts of turning this particular ribbon into a book-marker,’ said Geff, boldly imaginative.
‘A book-marker! I ask you—do you think it honest to keep property that belongs to other people?’
‘My conscience, I must confess, does not prick me.’
‘If I order, will you obey?’
Marjorie had turned abruptly pale. Her mouth quivered.
‘If you order, I submit,’ said Geff, watching her gravely. ‘I will never go against your smallest wish while I live. You shall have your ribbon before our next lesson, Miss Bartrand, I promise.’
The shadow of a quarrel was between them when they bade good-bye. And at the thought of this shadow Marjorie’s illogical spirit was sore vexed. But I think Geff Arbuthnot walked back to town with a lighter spirit in his breast than had reigned there since the moment when he first saw Dinah and Gaston as lovers, hand clasping hand, in the little Cambridgeshire orchard.
His knowledge of young girls, their instability, their hot and cold fits, their tempers, their fluctuating emotions, had been derived from books. So his theories on the subject were mainly worthless. But men who in after days rival neither Thackeray nor Balzac, do often, during one phase of their own experience, make keen enough guesses as to the source of female weakness. Geoffrey felt, with an instinct’s force, that Marjorie Bartrand’s blanched cheeks, her quivering lip, her passionate tones, were not the outcome of childish anger. He felt, with an instinct’s force, that the girl herself was a child no longer. Whither must this altered state of things tend?
The question was complex; and Geoffrey willingly let it rest. As he walked the warm air was briar-scented, the birds murmured lazy midday nothings to each other amidst the lush hedges, the voice of Marjorie Bartrand filled his heart. What need to hope or fear for the future when one is twenty-four years old, and the actual living hour has a hold, delicious as this, upon the senses!
Dinah and her husband were alone together, a quietlittle picture of domestic still life, when Geff reached the hotel.
A vine-trellised slip of courtyard lay outside the north window of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s sitting-room. Here, during the sunny forenoons, Gaston, picturesquely bloused, found it pleasant to work, when he was sufficiently in the vein to work at all. He wore his blouse, was in the vein, now. That which two days ago was a mass of rough clay, showed the airy outlines of a baby-girl, seated on a Brobdingnagian shell, one small foot neatly shoed and socked, the other clasped, naked, between her dimpled hands, in an attitude of inimitable, three-year-old dismay.
‘We label this work of genius “The Lost Shoe,” or “Dodo’s Despair,” or some equally pathetic and unhackneyed title,’ remarked the sculptor as Geff entered upon the scene. ‘We get our so many guineas for it, from our masters, and solicit further orders, do we not, Dinah?’
‘You should have no master but your art,’ was Dinah’s answer.
‘That is easily said. My wife, as usual, Geff, is urging upon me to fulfil my mission, to deliver messages, to begin big and serious work. But I fancy I gauge my own depths justly. I have no messages whatever to deliver to anybody. These trickeries of Philistine sentiment,’ Gaston pointed with a shapely clay-stained hand to his model, ‘are always a success. In the first place, they draw tears from Mr. and Mrs. Prud’homme. In the second, the dealers approve them. What more can an artist’s heart desire?’
‘Everything,’ replied Dinah.
But she spoke in parenthesis, and under her breath.
‘Am I anatomical, Geoffrey? This must always be important, whether a man work with or without a mission. How about this bend in the left knee-joint? Are my muscles right?’
Geoffrey offered one or two strictly professional criticisms;then after admiring the grace, the charm of the little clay sketch, gave his uncompromising moral support to Dinah.
Whoever possesses genius—well, talent, no need to fight over words—lies under the behest of duty. Gaston’s duty, the one straight and unmistakable road that lay before him, was to abandon conventional prettiness, to go in for the expression of the highest thoughts that were in him.
‘I am destitute of high thoughts,’ said Gaston, his refined, intellectual face belying the assertion. ‘I have not the prophet’srôle. If I tried to soar, I should immediately afterwards have to climb down. I have no original ideas to embody——’
‘Gaston!’ broke, with an accent of denial, from Dinah’s lips.
‘And the dealers, Farrago in Pall Mall especially, are my masters. Before I left town Farrago’s advice was memorable. “The market demands nothing classic in statuettes, Mr. Arbuthnot. Nothing romantic. Above all, nothing to make us think. The market demands trifles, sir, trifles. Objects for the smoke-room or boudoir. Domestic amenities, as you agreeably say, for Monsieur and Madame Prud’homme! And, for wider sections of society, ‘flavour.’ In any case, trifles. Nothing, if you please, to make us think.”’
‘Instead of obeying,’ exclaimed Dinah, ‘you ought to say, “I, Gaston Arbuthnot, must do such and such work, no other. Let Mr. Farrago take my statuettes or leave them, as he likes.”’
‘That style of talk is for giants, my dear child—putting aside the fact that I am bound to Farrago for another six months. Carlyle talked so to the Edinburgh Reviewers. Viewed by the light of after success his talk may sound grand. If Carlyle had not speedily written the “French Revolution” it would have been called “tall.”’
‘But I want you to write your “French Revolution” inclay,’ Dinah persisted. ‘Here, in Guernsey, you know, you planned to make studies, always studies, for the great work you will set about in Florence. But then,’ a piece of embroidery was between Dinah’s hands; she lifted her eyes from her wools and silks at this juncture, and fixed them, full of earnest reproach, on Gaston, ‘there have been unfortunate throw-backs.’
‘Throw-backs! As how?’ Gaston Arbuthnot applied himself to the correction of one of the points anatomically criticised by Geoffrey. ‘As long as I am bound to Farrago, even feminine morality, my love, will allow that I should be honest. Every saleable thing I do must pass, as per contract, through Farrago’s hands. Taking one day with another, I have got through rather more work than the average, here in Guernsey.’
‘Have you put your own thoughts into form, Gaston? This model, when it is finished’—she glanced somewhat coldly at ‘Dodo’s Despair’—‘will be a portrait of Rahnee Thorne simply.’
‘Rahnee Thorne idealised!’ Gaston’s rejoinder was made with the unruffled temper that characterised him. ‘My clay infant has flesh upon her bones, and an infant’s face. Rahnee, though I love the child, is but a poor little wizened Bengalee, at her best.’
‘Will the portrait of Rahnee’s mamma, the model you have on hand at The Bungalow, need to be idealised also?’
‘Dinah, you should be magnanimous.’ And with a movement that in a less composed man might have been a shrug of the shoulders, Mr. Arbuthnot prepared to clean the clay from his hands. ‘A pretty woman—well, if you shake your head, an exceedingly beautiful woman—need never utter a sarcasm about a plain one.’
At the negative compliment a colour, soft as the pure pink veining of a shell cameo, stained Dinah’s face. Her breast throbbed. And all the time the speech, delicious insound, signified nothing. Gaston had been engaged for days past to escort plain Mrs. Linda to the rose-show, and felt not the smallest temptation to break his engagement. Dinah must be magnanimous! Dinah’s husband, after two or three hours’ facile work on ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ needed relaxation, and would have it.
‘You ought to take me to the show, Geff,’ she pleaded, turning round half jestingly, half in earnest, to Geoffrey. ‘What would Linda Thorne, what would Gaston think, if I suddenly made my appearance among all the fine ladies of Guernsey?’
‘Linda Thorne might have her own views,’ said Gaston. ‘When Dinah Arbuthnot shows her face, every fine lady, in Guernsey, or elsewhere, must be on the spot eclipsed.’
Whatever Dinah thought, Geff knew that a certain insincerity underlay the speech, and controlled a pungent remark with effort. The friendship of the Arbuthnot trio was never more sharply paradoxical than at this moment.
The June rose-show stands second only to Her Majesty’s Birthday among the big events of the Channel Islands’ calendar.
By three o’clock the road between Petersport and the Arsenal plateau was filled with a growing stream of men and women. Simple rose lovers many of them, but some lovers of another kind. And some roses themselves! What buoyant young figures fluttered past the window whence Dinah Arbuthnot, shrouded from view, undreaming of her own future, watched the crowd! What ruddy fine complexions were here, what well-shapen noses and mouths, what dark Norman eyes! Why, you might scour half a dozen English counties before you could bring together as many handsome girls as would soon be within the Guernsey Arsenal’s four walls. Must not excuse be made—the thought was Dinah’s—for an artist who should long to stock his brain’s tablets with so much beauty, even though an idle tear or two, a little discontent in some one left at home, must be the price of his experience?
She strove her best to be magnanimous, to give a valiant ‘yes’ to this self-propounded question. Then, even as she made the effort, a group of persons drew nigh from the direction of Petersport, at the sight of whom poor Dinah’s magnanimity and the wifely heart that beat in her breaststood instantly at variance. Her hands turned cold and rigid. A prophecy, rather than an actual living look of jealous anger, swept all the youthful gentleness from her face.
A group of four persons: Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, Mrs. Thorne, the small daughter Rahnee, and a native nurse. Dazzling was Mrs. Linda in whatever furbelows and head gear local Parisian milliners had impressed on the feminine Sarnian mind as the ‘last thing out.’ Overdecked in embroidery and ribbons was Rahnee, a sorrowfully thin little child, with dark-ringed eyes, sallow cheeks, bangles on wrist. A typical Indian child, perverse, sickly, unruled, and who at the present moment was dancing, knowingly and deliberately, on her mother’s fragile flounces at every second step.
‘I am sure one ought to reform her.’ Thus Linda would make confession among her matron friends. ‘But what is to be done as long as you keep an ayah? You must reform the ayah first. That is just the one enthusiasm of humanity which is outside my reach, to reform an ayah.’
Rahnee, I repeat, danced persistently and with effect on her mother’s cobweb furbelows, as she capered and twisted herself along the street. Linda’s expression was as little honeyed as the expression of a coquette can ever be in the presence of a man she seeks to charm. The ayah vainly gesticulated, vainly uttered expostulations in unknown Eastern tongues from the rear. Breakdown and rout of one or other of the forces seemed imminent. Suddenly, just as they were passing the hotel—perhaps it was this incident stabbed Dinah’s unreasoning heart to the quick—Gaston came to the fore as mediator. Holding out both hands, Gaston Arbuthnot offered small Rahnee a place on his shoulder. Dinah could hear his pleasant voice, indicative of a mind content with its surroundings, as he began some sage nursery talk, all-engrossing, it would seem,to Rahnee’s soul. The thin arms closed round his neck, the tiny primrose-gloved fingers played with his hair. Mrs. Linda, a restored picture of amiable maternity, trotted behind. The ayah followed after; her black orbs pantomiming unspeakable things to such portions of the Guernsey world as had been chance witnesses of the scene. Then, domestic-wise, the group of four persons went their way.
A choking, hysterical lump rose in Dinah’s throat. With a vague sense of her own worthiness, a suspicion that if Dinah Arbuthnot was out of keeping with sunshine and flowers and little children, Dinah Arbuthnot herself must be to blame, she watched Gaston and his friends until they had turned the corner towards the Arsenal. Barely was the final shimmer of Linda’s flounces lost to view, when a clatter of hoofs approached rapidly along the Petersport road. A miniature phaeton with a girl driver, and drawn by a pair of small black ponies, came in sight. A minute later, and Marjorie Bartrand, who had drawn up before the portico of the hotel, was inquiring—yes, there could be no mistake; through the open windows the sound of her own name reached Dinah distinctly—‘If Mrs. Arbuthnot was at home?’
Dinah had not received one morning visitor in Guernsey. How many morning visitors (upon Mrs., not Mr., Arbuthnot) had Dinah received since her marriage? The unexpected respectability of the event—for our Tintajeux Bartrands, mind you, with all their eccentricity, stand on the topmost rung of the social insular ladder—moved Mr. Miller’s mind. A man of tact and discrimination, the host proceeded himself to usher Marjorie in.
The Arbuthnots’ parlour door was thrown open with an air. ‘Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux’ was announced in Miller’s most professional voice. Then came the meeting to which Marjorie had looked forward with resoluteconscience, perhaps with lurking doubts as to the cordiality of the reception that should await her.
‘This is very good of you.’ Dinah spoke in her usual voice. She came forward with the simplicity that draws so near to De Vere repose. ‘Geoffrey never warned me I was to look for such a pleasure. I take it very kind of you to come, Miss Bartrand.’
Dinah’s trouble had just reached that level when the smallest act of good will, from friend or stranger, may cause the cup to overflow. Her eyes suffused, her colour heightened.
‘Mr. Arbuthnot thought I should be likely to find you at home this afternoon. I wanted to see you long ago!’ cried Marjorie, her gaze fixed on the face whose delicate beauty so far overpassed her expectations. ‘But I waited—I thought,’ stammered the girl, for the first time since she could remember feeling an excuse needed for her conduct ‘I thought, of course, Mr. Arbuthnot might ask me to call.’
‘Who—Geff?’ answered Dinah, with a fleeting, shy smile. ‘No, indeed, Miss Bartrand. Geoffrey would not make so bold. He knows too well that I live retired.’
Dinah’s phrases were certainly not those of the educated world. But Marjorie, looking open-eyed at the mouth and throat and golden hair, was in no mood to be critical.
‘I have lived retired pretty well from the time I married. My husband does whatever visiting is required of us.’
‘That is unfair to the world at large!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand, drawing up a chair to the table, where wools and silks lay heaped beside Dinah’s patiently progressing canvas. ‘Whatever hermit rules you observe elsewhere we shall make you break through them in Guernsey. I may look at your work? What intricate shading!’ She scanned the pathetic mass of Dinah’s stitches. ‘What a labour of love embroidery must be to you!’
‘It helps pass the time,’ said Dinah Arbuthnot. Wool-work fills up long hours that must else be empty. For I am not a scholar like you, Miss Bartrand, or like Geoffrey. And I only learnt the piano for two years at boarding school, not enough to play well.’
‘Still, you do play?’
Marjorie glanced across at a piano that stood open. A goodly heap of music scores lay on a neighbouring ottoman.
‘Not in such a public place as an hotel. The notes you see there are my husband’s. Mr. Arbuthnot sings, as I dare say you know. He was thought, once on a time, to have the best tenor voice in Cambridge. Some day,’ said Dinah doubtfully, ‘I may play just well enough to accompany him. Unfortunately for me, the most beautiful of his songs are in French.’
Marjorie bethought her of Geoffrey’s accent, and was silent.
‘You will have good opportunities of learning French in Guernsey, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
‘Geff wants me to take lessons. We have a French waitress here in the hotel, but she speaks too quick for me, so do my husband and—and Mrs. Thorne. I only understand the sort of French we learned at boarding school—the sort of French the girls talked together,’ said poor Dinah modestly.
No books, no languages, no music; only cross-stitch, the counting of canvas threads, to fill one’s existence and one’s heart. And for life companion, thought Marjorie, a husband who frequented afternoon teas, who warbled ‘beautiful’ French ditties, in a bad accent, to audiences of women on the level of Linda Thorne!
This vision of Geoffrey, as a singer, added the crowning touch to the girl’s disappointment in his character. Throughout the brief, bitter-tasting epoch when her unwilling hand wore an engagement-ring, she was accustomed to hearFrench sentiment in an English accent, and an English tenor voice, during at least three hours out of each twenty-four. At this moment the tinkling burthen of one frequent song came back, with a sense of repulsion that was pain, upon her heart.