‘Ho, Œdipus,Why thus delay our going?’
‘Ho, Œdipus,Why thus delay our going?’
‘Ho, Œdipus,Why thus delay our going?’
‘Ho, Œdipus,
Why thus delay our going?’
Taking his cigar from his mouth, the Seigneur of Tintajeux recited a passage from Sophocles in the Oxford Greek accents of sixty years ago, looking about him with the leisurely physical enjoyment of the moment that was more common, probably, at the time of his own youth—a time when Göthe still walked upon the face of the earth—than it is now.
Something towering, individual, audacious, was in the old figure. Geff watched the Reverend Andros with admiration. A man so richly vitalised that he could smoke an after-dinner cigar, declaim Greek verse for his own pleasure at eighty—a man who had so proved himself superior to the common shocks and reverses of human life—should be one worth knowing, even though his fine moral equipoise must perforce be studied in the murky and dubious atmosphere engendered by a girl’s temper.
Tintajeux Manoir with its weather-bleached walls, its courtly, faded drawing-room, its half lights, its rose scents, had already laid hold of Geoffrey’s imagination. The Seigneur with his antiquated Greek accent, his wise, subtly ironical old face, reciting Sophocles under this late sky, had for him a personal interest. If only the one jarring note need not be struck! If the capricious heiress were but a full-fledged graduate, a resident M.A. say, within the distant walls of St. Margaret’s Hall, or of Girton!
Scarcely had the thought crossed Geff Arbuthnot’s mind when he heard a door behind him open and close. Turning quickly, he saw, to his pleasure, a child dressed in a white and red cotton frock, confined by a bright-coloured ribbon round the slim waist, and who advanced to him—a pair of brown, beautifully-carved small hands, outheld.
‘You are ten minutes late, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’ The faintest un-English accent was traceable in her voice. ‘But you are welcome, a thousand times over, to Tintajeux.’
Now Geff was a veritable child lover, and if this young person had only been two years younger than she looked, he would, likelier than not, have finished several of his life’s best chances by lifting her in his arms and kissing her on the spot. With a little princess of thirteen or fourteen one must be on one’s guard—for the first five minutes, at least, of acquaintance.
He took her offered hands and held them, enjoying the arch vivacity of that upturned face, brimful of sunshine as a water lily’s cup; a face good as it was sweet.
‘Poor Cambridge B.A. Poor abashed big coach!’ thought Marjorie Bartrand. ‘The worthy man must be used to cold receptions, I should say, on his wife’s account. Now, let me set him at his ease.’
Crossing to one of the Trianon baskets she softly signed to Geoffrey to follow.
‘Do you see that “Bon Espoir,” Mr. Arbuthnot?’ A hawk moth hovered, at the moment, with poised vibrating wings above the mass of roses. ‘In Spain we have a superstition about the “Bon Espoir” when he enters a house. If he is powdered with black we say, Bad luck! If he is powdered with gold, Good! Ah,’ clapping her hands, ‘and our “Bon Espoir” is gold! We are to be lucky, sir, you and I, in our dealings. Now I shall tell you another Spanish saying. “To begin a friendship with a gift is a happy omen.” Take this rose from me.’
And with a movement of quick grace, most artless, most unconventional, one of the finest roses in the basket was transferred by the pupil’s hand to her future master’s button-hole.
‘Grazias, muy Grazias,’ said Geff, hazarding the only two words of Spanish he knew.
Marjorie clasped her hands over her ears.
‘You pronounce frightfully ill, though the words are true, Mr. Arbuthnot. Decent people say the “z” in grazias sharp. They say “mou-y.” Yes, sir,—and although you do teach me classics and mathematics—Spanish and French are my natural languages, and I shall always think myself free to give you a little lesson in pronunciation.’
‘Classics and mathematics!’ stammered Geoffrey Arbuthnot, reddening as the unwelcome image of Miss Bartrand was brought back to him. ‘I believed—I mean, my impression was——’
He stopped short.
‘English University manners are not good,’ thought Marjorie, shaking her head, pityingly. ‘But I like my poor B.A.—yes, just because he is shy and rugged, and has that ugly scar across his forehead. I respect him for his unpolished manner. I will call on his wife to-morrow! My impression was,’ she remarked aloud, showing such a gleam of ivory teeth in her smile, as rendered a large andrather square mouth lovely—‘my impression was that I advertised in theChronique Guernésiaisefor some one good enough to help me in my attempts at work, and that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot offered to be that some one. I hope, sir, you do not repent you of the offer already?’
So he stood in presence of the heiress; a little country girl with sun-kissed hands, innocent of inkstains, a child’s fledgling figure, a child’s delightful boldness, and not one barleycorn’s weight of dignity in her composition. Should he, obeying first impulse, believe in her, and so incur the fate of well-snubbed predecessors? Or should he arm himself against the coquetry which this very frankness, this assumption of simplicity in dress and speech, might mask?
Long ago, in Gaston’s Cambridge rooms, Geff came across a French volume entitled, ‘The Bad Things which Men have said of Woman.’ He extracted therefrom, at more than one reading, such bitter nectar as his scanty knowledge of the tongue allowed. Several of the maxims had slumbered in his memory. They reawakened at this moment, and bade him play the philosopher, remember at what price per hour the heiress was about to hire him, and for what work. ‘Self-respect was in his keeping still,’ cried half a dozen wicked old well-chosen French cynics in a breath. ‘Let him retain it.’
And Geff followed his own impulse. He looked on Marjorie’s unblemished prettiness, and believed in her—with a circumspect belief.
‘One or two things, I know, want explaining.’ A wave of Miss Bartrand’s hand signalled to Geoffrey to take a chair. Then she seated herself opposite him, the rosy western afterglow falling directly on her clear, truth-telling face.
‘You thought my advertisement bizarre, did you not?’
‘On the contrary, I thought it sensible and to the point.’
Geff’s answer was given with stiff courtesy.
‘But too independent; for I had never consulted mygrandfather, understand! I never spoke to the Seigneur till an hour ago, about my having a coach. Tell me, you don’t think the worse of me for this?’
Had he fallen asleep, lying among the blue-leaved campanulas on the moor with the waving sedges at hand, with the falcon soaring high overhead; was this drawing-room, with its mirrors and rose-scents and Cupids, a dream? Could it be possible that Marjorie Bartrand, the heiress, who never bestowed a civil word upon any man, should plead, in sober reality, for his, Geff Arbuthnot’s, good opinion?
‘I am obliged to think and act for myself. There is my defence. My grandfather, whom you will see presently, is clever—oh, cleverer than any man in Guernsey, perhaps in Spain! Mathematics, classics—youeven could name no branch of learning, Mr. Arbuthnot, that grandpapa has not.’
‘Of that I am sure, Miss Bartrand.’
‘He was known in Oxford sixty years ago. The revolution so disgusted my great-grandfather with everything French that he turned Protestant out of revenge. A mean action—say?’
‘That depends upon the manner of conversion.’
‘Well, he had come to be Seigneur of Tintajeux through the inheritance of his Guernsey wife, and to be a proper Seigneur in this country you should be a Reverend. How great-grandpapa got to be ordained I don’t know. Andros, his son, was sent to Winchester and Oxford.’
‘The Seigneur I am about to see?’
‘Yes, and Andros became a fellow of his college. He was one of the three best classics in Oxford. But he stands right away out of my reach.’ Marjorie stretched up her slight arms as though pointing to the inaccessible mental plane occupied by the Reverend Andros. ‘He lives with the gifted people of sixty years ago. For me that is too old.’
‘Rather,’ said Geff, unable, though he would fain stand on his dignity, to repress a smile.
‘Grandpapa is an eighteenth-century man. He was just born early enough to be able to make that his boast. And he has eighteenth-century ideas. “Unless a woman be a Madame de Staël,” says the Seigneur, “let her keep silent. If she be a Madame de Staël, let her keep a thousandfold more silent.” Now I,’ cried small Marjorie, ‘mean to make my voice heard. I want to know nineteenth-century life straight through. I want to learn facts, at first hand. As a matter of lesser moment, I want a degree. Do you think London University would be beyond me?’
‘I must know first,’ answered Geoffrey, ‘to what height of learning you can reach on tiptoes.’
A flash of indignation swept over Marjorie’s face. The possibilities of temper showed round that acute, square-cut mouth of hers.
‘It is correct masculine taste to laugh at a girl’s ambition, I know! The Seigneur, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,—all have the same fine generosity! But why do we lose time? Perhaps, if you will come to the schoolroom, you will look over my books, sir. It is too late, of course, to do any work to-night?’
‘Not too late for me,’ answered Geoffrey, in his heart liking the girl better and better. ‘I came out hoping we should begin to read at once. My time is yours.’
Miss Bartrand led the way, her face held somewhat aloft, into a room plainly furnished as a study, and strewed with books and papers, on the west side of the inner drawing-room. As Geoffrey followed, every sense tempered to a keener edge than usual, he could not help remarking with what curious grace Marjorie’s raven-black tresses were braided. He had been to a few, very few, London entertainments in his life, had glanced at most varieties of our current female ‘heads;’ none tolerable to him beside acertain recollection of soft gold worn in little waves, that way poor Dinah had with her curls, upon a Madonna forehead. But Marjorie’s ebon locks gathered high, in one thick coil, upon the summit of her head, compelled his admiration. The style was too foreign, altogether, for English taste. And the white and red dress, the gaudy waist ribbon, were too evidently got up for effect, Geoffrey decided, now that he could draw breath and criticise. The complexion, too, to a man who for years had had a living ideal of snow and rose-bloom before him, was certainly sallow. And those great black eyes....
Stopping short, Marjorie waited for her visitor on the schoolroom threshold. At the moment he overtook her, she turned, looked up at him. And behold! her eyes were blue; intensely blue as, I think, only Irish or Spanish eyes ever are; with a sweep of jetty lash, with a hidden laughter in them, although the possibilities of temper still lurked round the corner of her lips.
‘This is to be your torture chamber. From the time I was five I have worked myself up to my present state of ignorance at that inky desk you see, and under the rule of a long line of governesses, most of whom gave me and themselves up in despair. Now put me to the test, if you please, Mr. Arbuthnot. Don’t spare my feelings. Treat me as you would treat any backward schoolboy.’
And Geff Arbuthnot obeyed the command to the letter. He did not spare her feelings.
Marjory Bartrand’s attainments were to the last degree patchy and scrappy; the typical attainments to be looked for in a quick, self-willed child, indifferently taught by a succession of teachers, and whose faulty studies had been supplemented by an avid, indiscriminate consumption of good books.
‘Your classics are weak, Miss Bartrand.’
Geoffrey remarked this, pushing papers and books aside, and looking kindly across the table into his pupil’s face.
‘Oh! I never liked the subjects. I knew that you would say so.’
With an effort Marjorie Bartrand kept her voice under control.
‘But your classics are stronger than your mathematics.’
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You will have a great deal of work before you can bring either to—we will not say a high, but an ordinary level.’
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You spoke of a London degree. Let us look at London matriculation first. Children are trained at high schools for about six years, I understand, for London matriculation. And many—more than a third—of the candidates fail.’
‘I spoke of London because London gives you letters after your name. The older Universities would be more thought of in Spain. I have grandpapa’s leave to go to Newnham or Girton when I am eighteen. The first of all my governesses lives in Cambridge. So I should haveonefriend there.’
‘The Girton and Newnham work is on the same level as the other colleges.’
‘And you think that work beyond my reach?’
Geff Arbuthnot thought that a girl with a head so graceful, with eyes so blue, with soft brow gleaming under such a weight of dusky hair, might be content amidst the flower-scents and cedar-shades of Tintajeux Manoir, content to let Euclid and Greek particles go—to be a woman, to accept the homely, happy paths wherein women may walk unguided by exact science, or the philosophy of all the ancients.
The opinions he knew were heterodox and not to be uttered, especially by a man who, at five shillings an hour, had engaged himself to lighten the thorny road that leads to knowledge.
‘Memory will get one through most exams., Miss Bartrand. You have a good memory?’
‘For all useless things, yes. In “Don Quixote,” for instance, you would find it hard to puzzle me. You know a little Spanish?’
‘Five words at most.’
‘How deplorable! A person who has no Spanish is not quite in possession of his faculties. If one had time to spare in these long summer days, I——’
Marjorie broke off abruptly, colouring to the roots of her hair, as she remembered the existence of her tutor’s wife. A girl not ignorant of Spanish only; a girl who could just overcome the difficulties of the Prayer-book and Lessons, perhaps, or write a letter without any glaringly bad spelling, on a push.
‘If one had time to spare in these long summer days, Miss Bartrand?’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot found a pleasure it had been hard to him to account for in her confusion.
‘I was going to say I would teach you Spanish. As if Spanish mattered! As if there were not nobler, lovelier things in life than book-learning. But that was a real Bartrand idea. We Bartrands, mouldering among our owls in this old place, cannot see daylight clear. We think too much of ourselves. Our minds are as narrow as our garden paths. I teach you Spanish, indeed! I’ll tell you what I call that proposal.’ She leaned across till her sweet bud of a face was close to Geoffrey’s, and spoke with a suspension of the breath. ‘I call it a bit ofdevilishBartrand pride and stiff-neckedness.’
Geff started, with a pantomime of horror, from the adjective italicised.
‘You know the meaning of Tintajeux?—Tint-à-jeu in old Norman. You English in Cornwall say Tintagel—the Devil’s castle. A fit abode for us. Look at grandpapa!He quarrelled seven years ago with M. Noirmont, the rector of our next parish, over a Latin quantity. Never in this world will grandpapa speak again to that innocent old man.’
‘A wrong quantity is no jesting matter,’ observed Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
‘Then he has three daughters, my aunts. Neither of the three has spoken to the others or to him for five-and-twenty years. No vulgar quarrel to start with. “We Bartrands wage war on a grand Napoleonic scale,” says the Seigneur. “An exchange of reproachful epithets is sheer waste of brain-power.” The marriage of each sister in succession wounded the other sisters’ pride. All wounded grandpapa’s. It was quite simple.’
‘You colour highly, Miss Bartrand.’
‘I am giving you sketches from life. No colouring could be too high for showing up our Bartrand traits, the little faults of our virtues, as the French say, prettily.’
Geoffrey felt himself on the road to disenchantment. The girl might have marvellous eyes, a wealth of dusky hair, tones of liquid music, a sunburnt hand that was a poem. The heart within her was hard to the core. Linda Thorne, by hidden affinity, perhaps, was not so very far out in her judgments. Marjorie knew too much, had learned bitter lessons in human nature, not from books, but from keen reading of the men and women nighest to herself in blood.
‘Yes, we think too highly of our small talents. I, with my shallowness, to propose teaching a Bachelor of Arts anything! I ought to be grateful to Mr. Arbuthnot for condescending to read with such a pupil. Now, which three mornings in the week could you give me?’
He could give her Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. They gravely arranged their hours. They talked over the work—say, a book of Cicero, the two first books of Euclid—to be looked over before their first lesson. Then Geoffrey Arbuthnot rose to his feet. Putting on a staid and tuitional manner, he stated that his terms in Guernsey, would be five shillings,British currency, per hour.
Marjorie’s face grew one hot blaze of shame.
‘Oh! of course—please do not speak of money. It is far too little. It is an honour, I mean, for me to learn, and I am coming——’
She was just about to commit herself, and so considerably simplify Geff’s position—just about to blurt out, ‘and I am coming to call upon your wife,’ when a footstep, alert, though it had paced the earth for more than eighty years, sounded on the garden path outside. The glass door of the schoolroom was pushed open, and old Andros Bartrand walked in.
An atmosphere of fresh country air, blent with tobacco smoke, surrounded him, as we like to think it surrounded Parson Adams. He saluted Geff with that nice mixture of personal reserve and general expansiveness which among a bygone generation was called breeding. He bestowed a partial smile on Marjorie (‘those Bartrand company smiles,’ as she used to bemoan, when she was a younger child. ‘Counters that I must make believe are sixpences until the visit is over, until the round game melts back into our grim duel at solitaire’).
‘Mr. Arbuthnot, I presume? Welcome to Tintajeux, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ He shook Geff’s hand with a distant affability. ‘Glad always to see a man from the Alma Mater in our little island. Oxford is not the Oxford of my days, still——’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot hails from Cambridge, grandpapa,’ shrieked Marjorie with energy in the Seigneur’s deafer ear.
‘Then, in one sense, Mr. Arbuthnot is to be congratulated, for Cambridge is nearer to Newmarket. A bitter blow to the talent that victory of Mademoiselle Ninette’s in the One Thousand, last April, was it not?’
‘The proverbial uncertainty of fillies retaining their form,’ said Geoffrey. ‘The usual reason for strong fielding.Still, the performance of Maydew in the Two Thousand was so good that the odds seemed legitimate.’
Geff Arbuthnot cared as much for horse-racing as for the native industries of Japan. But the tastes of a man of fourscore must be respected. And with a glance at the Seigneur of Tintajeux you could detect the sporting element, softened, not ungracefully, through a course of sixty years by the learning of the scholar and the quiet life of the priest.
‘You come over to England, of course, sir, for the big events of the year?’
‘Not I, not I. When you arrive at the age of a hundred you will find yourself content with newspaper reports of most human goings on, great or small. I have my books about me here, my farm, my dogs, a horse or two, and my cure of souls. Marjorie, small witch, where are you? Did you not say Mr. Arbuthnot was to take Holy Orders?’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot is to cure bodies, not souls.’
Marjorie’s answer was given in a tone ofaltissimoderision.
Geff put himself through a little exercise of moral arithmetic; the result required being the precise sum of dislike which a man of his age could feel towards a scoffing girl of seventeen, a girl with eyes like Marjorie’s, silken black hair, and exquisite hands. It was not, perhaps, so large an amount as one might have looked for. ‘An Æsculapius,’ observed the Reverend Andros. ‘You know the parable, Mr. Arbuthnot? Two stalwart men, Nature and Disease, are fighting. A third man, the Doctor, seizes his club and rushes into themelée, sometimes hitting Disease and sometimes Nature. You are to be the man with the club.’
‘I am to be the man with the club,’ answered Geff, relishing the old Seigneur’s manner. ‘As long as I confine myself to the setting of broken bones, sir, I hope to do as little harm as may be.’
‘The doctors kill us no quicker than they used,’ admitted Andros Bartrand liberally. ‘When I was an undergraduate they relied on their brains, as you do now on your finger-tips, and I believe killed us no quicker. You are an honours’ man, of course? At a hundred years old one is naturally ignorant as to the University regulations of the times. I know next to nothing of your Cambridge Triposes. You won your laurels, I assume, among bones and minerals?’
The Seigneur’s prejudices were mellow and crusted as his own port. A born and passionate lover of classic literature, he regarded the admission of natural science into the Universities as a mistake, a sort of shuffle among examiners and Liberal Governments that enabled lowly-born classes of men to take high degrees.
‘Unfortunately for myself, I did not,’ said Geff. ‘When my real college life was over I saw bread and cheese in a remote perspective, and had to begin bones and minerals from their ABC. In my day I came out eighth,’ and being exceedingly human, Geff’s face flushed a bit, ‘in the Classical Tripos.’
The Seigneur put his hand within the young man’s arm.
‘Come for a walk with me, Mr. Arbuthnot. Eighth in the Classical Tripos—eh! I will point out the limits of my vast estate to you. Marjorie, small witch, go and set ready the tea-table. Mr. Arbuthnot will spend the remainder of the evening with us.’
The daylight by now had gone into odorous dew-freshened dusk; a big solitary planet looked down upon the woods of Tintajeux. Geff felt himself in a new world, a thousand miles removed from pale, work-a-day, prosaic England. The affluence of air and sea, the largeness of sky, took possession of him, played in his blood, evoked that precise condition of mind and body which is so often at four-and-twenty the prelude to human passion.
The talk of Andros Bartrand accorded well with the scene and moment. They spoke of men, measures, books—of books chiefly.
‘I belong, really, to the eighteenth century,’ said the Seigneur, as, with his hand on Geff’s arm, they paced the lawn’s goodly limits. Old Andros had the vanity of his age in seeking to exaggerate it. He had been known, or so Marjorie would affirm, to speak of himself as alive at the dawn of the French Revolution. Perhaps you appreciated his real age best when you reflected that the bride of his youth might have been a contemporary of Emma Woodhouse! ‘I was born before moral pulse-feeling came into fashion. This modern verse—“singing, maugre the music”—don’t please me. I never mix my wines. I like to take my verse and my philosophy separate. Hand-made paper, rough edges, vellum, constitute poetry nowadays, don’t they!’
‘The æsthetic fever is on us still, sir, I fear.’
‘In regard to Church matters, I was middle-aged, mind, when Tract 90 decimated the country. Tractarian or Evangelical, Theist or Pantheist—the Church went on quite as profitably before parsons began calling each other by such a variety of names.’
‘Names that all mean the same thing,’ Geoffrey suggested, ‘if men had temper enough to examine them coolly.’
‘Possibly. Let me direct your attention to my young wheat. You see it in the enclosure, just between that red stable roof and the orchard. I mean to cut my wheat with the Guernsey sickle, Mr. Arbuthnot, the same pattern of sickle, it is believed, that was used under Louis XI. I mean to get more for my wheat per quarter than any grower in England. There is the advantage of being a Channel Island farmer. One may not only be a Conservative, but, like certain great statesmen, make one’s Conservatism pay.’
A resonant call from Marjorie summoned them before long to the tea-table—a meal at which old Andros with his grand-seigneur air made his guest pleasantly welcome. The dinner-hour at Tintajeux was five, the ‘late dinner’ of Andros Bartrand’s youth. By half-past eight, in this keen Atlantic air, broiled mullet, hot potato scones, with other indigenous Guernsey dishes, were adjuncts to the tea-table which no healthily-minded person could afford to despise. Afterwards came a cigar smoked just inside the open French windows. ‘At a hundred years old,’ the Seigneur apologised, ‘there was one thing a man might not brave with impunity—night air.’ And then Geoffrey Arbuthnot prepared to take his leave.
Business-like, he reverted to pounds, shillings, and pence. It was a settled thing that he should read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand on three mornings of the week, at the sum (happily the darkness veiled the blushes on Marjorie’s face) of six francs an hour.
‘Classics and mathematics!’ cried old Andros, assenting to the money part of the transaction with suave courtesy. ‘What will the little witch do with classics and mathematics when she has got them?’
‘Enter Newnham or Girton with them, in the first place,’ answered Marjorie unhesitatingly.
‘Newnham or Girton!’
The unfavourable summing-up of all arguments that have been put forth on the subject of woman’s higher education was in Andros Bartrand’s enunciation of the words.
‘Newnham and Girton send forth good men,’ remarked Geoffrey Arbuthnot. ‘In the future, sir, when the girls shall “make Greek Iambics, and the boys black-currant jams,” we look forward confidently to seeing Girton head of the river.’
‘At my age I am unmoved by new theories,’ said oldAndros. ‘New facts I am not likely to confront. There has never yet been a great woman poet.’
‘Mrs. Browning, grandpapa.’
‘Nor a great woman painter.’
‘Rosa Bonheur.’
‘Nor a discoverer in science.’
‘Mrs. Somerville.’
‘Nor a solitary musical composer.’
The girl was silent.
‘Yet all these fields have been as open to them as to men, have they not, witch?’
Marjorie Bartrand had passed into the garden. She stood impatiently tapping a slender foot on the turf and looking up, her arms folded, an expression on her face curiously like that of old Andros, at a strip of crescent moon that showed between the cedar branches.
‘A new moon. I curtsey to her, twice, thrice, and I wish a wish!’
‘Did you hear my question, witch? In poetry, art, music, have women not had just as ample chances as men?’
‘Spanish women have had no chances at all,’ cried Marjorie, raising her tone, as she adroitly shifted her ground, after the manner of her sex. ‘For their sake I mean to work—yes, to get to the level of a B.A., grandpapa, in spite of your most withering contempt.’
‘For the sake of Spain, benighted Spain!’ remarked the Seigneur genially. ‘My granddaughter’s blood is half Spanish, Mr. Arbuthnot. I had a son once—an only son——’ Could it really be that Andros Bartrand’s firm voice for a second faltered? ‘When he was no longer a young man he went to Cadiz, for health’s sake, and married, poor fellow, a Spanish girl who died at the end of the year. Marjorie has stayed a few times among her mother’s family, and has gone Spain-crazed, as you will soon find out for yourself.’
‘Crazed!’ rang Marjorie’s tuneful voice through the night. ‘I want to hold my hands out to my own people, yes, to teach, if I ever know anything myself, among the girls of our poor benighted Spain. And I am proud of my craziness. I thank you for the word, grandpapa. It is the prettiest compliment.’
The complexion of the family talk was threatening; Geoffrey Arbuthnot hastened his adieux. But Andros had still a farewell shot to discharge against the little witch.
‘Our poor benighted Spain is the one country in Europe with a decent peasantry of its own. Get Mr. Arbuthnot, get anyone who understands the matter, to talk to you about the English ploughman, and compare the two pictures. The Spanish peasant’s wife sews, knits, embroiders, reads her Mass-book and can cook a capital stew. Her drink is water. Infanticide is unknown. The men are hospitable, courteous, dignified. Among benighted people like these, Marjorie Bartrand proposes to preach the benefits of a liberal pauper education as exhibited in England.’
By the time the Seigneur’s ironies came to an end Marjorie’s small figure had vanished among the deepening shadows of the lawn. Fearful of losing sight of her altogether—for, indeed, Marjorie Bartrand was suggestive of something weird, sprite-like, and of a nature to take other form at an hour when owls do fly—Geff bade his host a hasty good-night and followed.
The girl herself was invisible, but a clear childish voice chanted the old ditty of Roland somewhere in the neighbourhood, ‘Like steel among weapons, like wax among women.’ Or, as Marjorie sang with spirit:
‘Fuerte qual azero entre armas,Y qnal cera entre las damas.’
‘Fuerte qual azero entre armas,Y qnal cera entre las damas.’
‘Fuerte qual azero entre armas,Y qnal cera entre las damas.’
‘Fuerte qual azero entre armas,
Y qnal cera entre las damas.’
‘I have found my gardening scissors, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she cried, emerging through the schoolroom window, a basket on her arm. ‘Flowers smell sweetest that are cutwith the dew on them. I mean to cut some roses and cherry-pie for—for——’
‘Your wife,’ was on Marjorie’s lips, but she stopped herself abruptly, all Cassandra Tighe’s warnings about Geoffrey’s domestic embarrassments coming back to her.
‘Let me help you,’ said Geoffrey. A minute later Marjorie, on tiptoe, was vainly endeavouring to catch a bough of swaying yellow briar. ‘You are just one foot too short to reach those roses, Miss Bartrand.’
Marjorie sprang up in air. She plunged with bold final grasp among the thorns, and succeeded in getting scratches destined to mark her right hand for some weeks to come; scratches that might, perhaps, recall this moment to both of them in the pauses of some tough mathematical problem, some arid point in Latin grammar or Greek delectus.
‘The result of over-vaulting ambition.’ Thus from his calm altitude of six-foot-one Geff moralised. ‘How many roses am I to pick?’
‘You are to pick three beauties!’ said Marjorie, somewhat crestfallen. ‘Won’t you have the scissors? These briars prick cruelly.’
But Geff wanted no scissors; his skin, so he told her, was of about the same texture as a stout dog-skin glove. When the briar-roses were duly laid in Marjorie’s basket he put on the grave manner of his profession. It was his duty as a surgeon to make immediate inspection of her injuries.
‘You are losing a good deal of blood, Miss Bartrand.’ Taking both her hands, he held them up, in the streak of moonlight, not very distant from his lips. ‘But while there is life there is hope. Three, four, deep wounds! For my sake, don’t faint, if you can help it.’
‘Faint!’ Marjorie’s laugh was a thing good to hear; a thing fresh as the chatter of birds in April, pungent as the smell of new-turned earth. ‘I wonder whether any of theold Bartrands ever fainted. I mean,beforethey were guillotined! Confess, we are queer specimens, grandpapa and I, are we not, sir?’ Asking Geff this question, she left her hands in his simply until he should choose to let them go. The first ineffable coldness of girlhood was on her. She knew no more of passion than did her own roses. ‘Not very pleasant people to live with—say! in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir.’
‘So much must depend on the taste of him who survived the ordeal.’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot quietly surrendered the slim hands resting unresponsively in his. ‘At the present moment life in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir seems to me—endurable.’
A stronger word was very near escaping Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s lips.
‘You are taken in by our picturesqueness,’ said Marjorie with decision. ‘England must be an astonishing ugly country, judging from the effect our bit of Channel rock appears to make upon English people. Now, to me, who have seen Spain, it is all so cramped, so sea-weedy. Look away to the left there—sea. To the right—sea. Move a little step nearer—close here, don’t be afraid, and look where I point across the moor—sea again. Let an out-and-out big wave come some day, and the whole nation would be submerged, like Victor Hugo’s hero.’
The glimpse of silver-gray tranquil moor brought back before Geoffrey the thyme-grown bank, the falcon high poised, the tuft of wood-rush—associated with the last rose visions of the squalid Barnwell pavements, of the men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who dragged out their span of human existence there.
‘I should like to know what you are thinking about,’ Marjorie asked, noting with a child’s acumen the changed expression of his face.
‘I am thinking about England, about the hard battlessome English men and women have to go through with. A night like this,’ said Geff, ‘brings sharp thoughts before one of one’s own life, one’s own uselessness.’
In an instant Marjorie was softened. Tears almost rushed to her eyes. Her thoughts, true to her better self, followed Geoffrey’s as if by instinct. Then the good impulse passed. It entered her wilful head that this excellent young gentleman from Cambridge meant to sermonise her. She resolved to shock him.
‘I used to feel goody-goody myself, very long ago. You would not believe it, sir, but as a child I was pious.’
‘I believe it thoroughly,’ answered Geff, grave of countenance.
‘When I wanted my lettuce-seed to come up I would perform little acts of propitiatory contrition to Pouchée, the poor old Pouchée who lives in Cambridge now. When grandpapa went out shooting I carried his game-bag, and used to offer fervent prayers, whenever the dogs came to a point, that he might kill his bird. Facts undermined my faith. Sometimes the point was false. Sometimes grandpapa missed his aim. Chaffinches and slugs ate my lettuce-seed. I turned infidel. I have remained one. Grandpapa says I have the hardest flint soul in, or out of, Christendom. Still, that is one Bartrand judging of another.’
‘I am not a Bartrand,’ remarked Geff Arbuthnot. ‘I do not think you have a hard flint soul. You believe in wishes addressed to a strip of new moon, for instance?’ They were standing at the highest point of Tintajeux; a small plateau, the approach to which was fashioned on the exploded system of puzzle or maze. Long before Marjorie’s lifetime this plateau—who shall say on what morning of youthful human hope—had been christened Arcadia! The country-folk around Tintajeux called it Arcadia still. Cool draughts of air were stirring from the moorland. They brought fragrance of distant hayfields, honeyed whiffsof the syringa hedges that formed the maze. Would Marjorie ever curtsey to future moons without the scent of hay, the over-sweetness of blown syringa returning on her senses?
‘Some day,’ observed Geff, as she maintained a caustic silence, ‘I mean you to tell me what you wished for, a quarter of an hour ago, under the cedars.’
Marjorie Bartrand turned from him, the determination of a long lineage of dead, high-tempered Bartrands on her face. To command, implied or spoken, had she never yet bowed, during her seventeen years of life, without asking the reason why.
She asked nothing now. Her cheeks—happily, the starlight betrayed no secrets—were glowing damask. For the girl knew, deep in her fiery heart, what the wish was; a wish by no means unconnected with her feelings towards Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
Meanwhile the solstice night grew at each instant more purple, more mysterious. Geff felt himself in love with midsummer starlight, with Guernsey, with Tintajeux. Marjorie he would fain have engaged for a game of hide-and-seek among the neighbouring orchards, or of follow-my-leader along the beach, white in the crescent moon’s shining. For what was this poor small heiress but a child, with a child’s cold, sweet, unopened heart, a child’s quick temper, a child’s readiness for play, in whatever shape play might happen to be offered her!
‘You will not tell me your wish to-night, Miss Bartrand. Never mind. You will tell it me some day. To show you I bear no malice, you shall hear mine. My present wish, as I must leave Tintajeux, is to return to Miller’s Hotel by the longest road possible. You could point it out to me?’
‘I should rather think so!’ cried Marjorie, brusquely. ‘If you don’t mind a quarter of an hour’s nice hard scramble, your plan is to go up the Gros Nez cliffs, about a mile from this, and so back to your hotel along the edge of the steep. You are tolerably steady on the legs, I suppose?’
Tolerably! A too shallow purse, a too well endowed brain had combined to force Geoffrey Arbuthnot out of the ranks of the big and world-renowned athletes. But ask the All England football team, ask the men against whom theAll England football team has played, if Arbuthnot of John’s be tolerably steady on his legs!
‘I don’t know that I am unusually feeble, Miss Bartrand. My weakness, perhaps, is more of the nerves than the limbs. Point out some path to me that you and the Seigneur are in the habit of treading, assure me, on your honour, that you think that path safe, and perhaps I shall have courage to attempt it.’
‘Well, when you get free of Tintajeux you must go straight across the corner of the moor to Les Hüets. At the end of a few hundred yards you will find four water-lanes meet. You must take the one that seems to lead away from Petersport, and follow it until you get to Tibot. You know Tibot, of course?’
‘I am shamefully ignorant, Miss Bartrand. I do not know Tibot.’
‘After that, a brisk two minutes’ walk down, down, through spongy wet earth churning at every step over your ankles, brings you to the shore. Right in face of you are the Gros Nez heights, and if you get to the top all right (even in broad day it is not considered a very safe climb for strangers), your road home will lie straight before you, along the edge of the cliffs.’
Geff Arbuthnot clasped his forehead.
‘When I get clear of Tintajeux I must go across the moor to an unpronounceable place where four water-lanes meet. Of these I must choose the one that looks least likely to lead anywhere. Then down, down, through spongy wet earth churning up to my ankles at every step, until I catch sight of the cliffs where I shall finally break my neck. Miss Bartrand, will you allow me to ask a favour?’
‘Doubtless.’ A gleam of white teeth showed the heartiness of the girl’s amusement. ‘It rests with me, though,’ she added maliciously, ‘to say “yes” or “no” to it.’
‘Unfortunately it rests always with feminine caprice to say “yes” or “no” to the proposals made by men.’
The hour, or the moonlight, or some curiously occult and unknown influence must have been telling on Arbuthnot of John’s. He stood on the brink of a flirtation.
‘As you may have proved to your cost, sir,’ thought Marjorie, not quite without a movement of pity. ‘As you may have proved in that hour—I wonder how many years ago—when the Devonshire peasant girl decided on becoming Mrs. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘And my proposal is that you come with me, at least as far as the unpronounceable meeting of the water-lanes; start me on my downward spongy way to the sea, and then, unless I descend too quickly from the Gros Nez cliffs, I shall have a fair chance of finding my road home.’
To an agonised wife! It might be—so mixed is human happiness, thought Marjorie ironically—to the least little domestic lecture on the subject of late hours.
‘Feminine caprice,’ she observed gravely, ‘is in your favour for once, Mr. Arbuthnot. I will look after your interests as far as Tibot. After that, your fate will be in your own hands. On the outside chance of your getting back alive to your hotel, I may as well present you with some rather better flowers.’
She flitted about, moth-fashion, from one garden-plot to another, ever rifling the choicest and sweetest bloom of each for her basket. Afterwards, the lodge gates passed, she accompanied Geoffrey across a strip of common land and down a few hundred yards of darksome lane to the Hüets, from which point the trickle of a little moorland stream guided them to Tibot. Here, emerging into such light as the young moon yielded, the moment came for bidding good-night. And here an exceedingly delicate question in social tactics presented itself with force to Marjorie’s attention. What decorous but strictly indirect message oughtto accompany her gift of flowers to Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s wife?
‘You don’t mind carrying things, I hope, sir, as long as they are not from the butcher’s, or done up in a brown paper parcel? Guernsey is not Cambridge, you know. Grandpapa and I carry everything on the end of our walking stick, from a conger eel downwards.’
‘I will carry a conger eel for you, any day, with delight,’ said Geoffrey.
‘I shall remember that speech. I shall present you with a conger eel four feet long, in the market, and watch to see you carry him to your hotel. To-night I only want you to take these flowers for me to—to some one in the town,’ observed Marjorie, with staid composure.
But she was in no courageous mood, really. She listened as though she would ask counsel of it to the familiar little black-veined moor stream, eddying away with chill clear voice to the sea.
‘You have only to command me,’ said Geoffrey, with an absurd, a reasonless sense of personal disappointment, ‘and I obey. The address of your friend is——’
‘You will have no difficulty about the address. Indeed, I am afraid,’ stammered Marjorie, ‘that at present, for another few days, I have scarcely a right to speak of the person as my friend. The difficulty is, sir, how will you carry the flowers? In your hands, you say! A man who would climb Gros Nez cliffs must pretty nearly hang on by his eyelashes, like the heroes in Jules Verne’s stories; at times he wants as firm a grip, I can tell you, as all his ten fingers can give.’
‘If I surmount these terrific perils, if I reach Petersport safely, your flowers will share my fate. Don’t be anxious about them, Miss Bartrand.’
Marjorie paused, her face set and thoughtful. After a minute or two, with the unconsciousness of self, theignorance of possible misconstruction which rendered her actions so absolutely the actions of a child, she unloosened her waist ribbon. A length of twine lay in her basket. With this she bound the flower stalks firmly together, then knotting her ribbon, she attached it in a long loop to the bouquet.
‘Before setting foot on the cliff’s you must pass the loop round your neck—so.’ For Geffs better guidance she pantomimed her instructions round her own girlish throat. ‘By that contrivance you leave your hands free. And you must take care of my ribbon, if you please, sir, and bring it back next lesson. It is a bit of real Spanish peasant ribbon one of my cousins bought for me in Cadiz. A thing not to be replaced in these parts of the world. Good-night, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You have not said half enough. You have not even told me whom your flowers are for.’
‘My flowers are for a person I hope, before long, to know and like well.’
‘The description is tantalising. It would scarcely furnish me, I fear, with the one name and address of the person wanted, among all the narrow, twisting streets of Petersport.’
‘The flowers are, Mr. Arbuthnot, cannot you guess—for whom they are meant?’
‘I am ill at originating ideas, Miss Bartrand. I can guess nothing.’
‘Because you cannot, or will not, which?’
‘Because I cannot, because I am blankly unimaginative.’
For a few moments Marjorie stood masterfully inactive. Then she flew discreetly back into the shadow of the lane. On a slightly rising mound she stopped. What light there was touched the upper half of her face, and Geoffrey could see her eyes. He knew that her mood, for Marjorie Bartrand, was a softened one.
‘The flowers are for yourself, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ so her voice rang through the sea-scented night. ‘For your better self, you understand. Don’t lose my ribbon, and, if you can help it, don’t fall over the Gros Nez cliffs. Good-night.’
And with a wave of her hand—though he was blankly unimaginative, Geoffrey believed it might be with a wafted kiss from her finger tips—she disappeared.
Geff Arbuthnot’s first experience in snubbing had come to an end.
Pondering over many things, most of all over the cruelties and caprices of youthful woman, he ran lightly down the ankle-deep water-lane, then across a miniature bay of argent, shell-strewn sands, to the base of Gros Nez cliffs. The ridge rose sheer above his head, a dark wall of over a hundred and fifty feet, polished as glass to the limit of the breakers, but, above that line, fissured, lichened, rough.
Miss Bartrand’s sarcasm had not exaggerated the gravity of the ascent. The man who in an uncertain light should successfully scale Gros Nez must have not only his hands and feet, but his wits thoroughly under command.
And here the loop of ribbon attached to Marjorie’s flowers proved of great use.
I have tried to represent in Geoffrey a man little moved by the nicer shades of cultivated or hothouse feeling, a man more likely to be wrapped up in one grim fact of the mortuary or dissecting-room than in all the pretty uncertainties of sentiment put together. But to-night a change had certainly passed over him. Before beginning his climb he found a delicate pleasure in suspending Marjorie’s bouquet, exactly in the mode her fingers had taught him, round his neck. He found a pleasure—the cliff’s dizzy height hardly won—in unknotting her ribbon, smoothing it out from its creases with a hand unversed in millinery tasks, finally in hiding it away, jealously, in the breast-pocket of his jacket.
Concerning this jealousy he asked himself neither why nor wherefore. In transitional moments like these an old tender image fading even as a new one rises above the horizon, few of us in our inmost thoughts care to be motive-seekers. Geoffrey knew that he would not for an empire have let Dinah see that ribbon to-night, or any other night. He knew that between him and the little girl with carved sweet lips and ebon hair there existed a secret. He knew that tutoring was a far pleasanter business than he had bargained for, also that the flowers Marjorie had given him, and which he carried in his hand, smelt of Tintajeux.
But he took out his embroidered tobacco pouch, his short black briar, notwithstanding. He smoked his cavendish vigorously as he trudged back to Petersport. Arbuthnot of John’s might stand on the brink of a flirtation. He was not as yet in a state that need occasion a man’s staunchest bachelor friends anxiety.
Dinah was still busied over her embroidery frame when Geoffrey’s entrance brought the coolness of the night, the wholesome odour of heliotropes and roses, into the chronically dinner-oppressed atmosphere of Miller’s Hotel.
Her blonde youthful face looked weary. The lightless, far-away expression, which you may always observe as a result of unshed tears, was in the glance she lifted to Geff.
‘What, you are up still! Do you know that it is past eleven, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Four years ago, when Geoffrey first saw Gaston and Dinah in the bloom of wedded happiness not two months old, it was decreed by Gaston, least jealous of men, that his wife and cousin should call each other by their Christian names.
Upon Dinah’s joyous lips Geoffrey, without an effort, became at once a familiar household word—dear good old Geff, through whom, obliquely, her introduction to the husband she passionately loved had come about!
But Geoffrey, after a few stammering, painful efforts, abandoned the calling of Dinah by her Christian name for ever.
He could and did call her so to Gaston only. He intended to stand by her heroically, absent, or in herpresence; intended, God helping him, to be the good brotherly influence of her life and of her husband’s. Looking upon the eyes that met his with such cruel self-possession, upon the lips which he had once madly coveted to press, Geoffrey Arbuthnot realised that he could never feel towards Dinah as a brother feels. He resolved that his speech, knowingly, should not play traitor to his heart. Gaston’s wife must, for him, be coldly, stiffly, conventionally, ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ until his life’s end.
‘Yes, I am up still, Geff. There’s no chance of seeing Gaston till long past midnight. A lady like Mrs. Thorne, accustomed to India and Indian military society,’ said Dinah, ‘would be sure to keep late hours. So I thought I would shade my poppies straight through. I must wait for daylight to put in the pinks and scarlets.’
Crossing to the table where Dinah was laboriously stitching, Geoffrey seated himself at her side. He looked attentively down at her work with those acute, deep-browed gray eyes of his.
‘Your embroidery is very——’ he was about to say ‘beautiful,’ but checked himself. The star-strewn night, the hay-scents along the cliffs, the roses of Tintajeux were in his soul, lifting it above sympathy with poor Dinah’s wool-work. ‘Your embroidery is very delicate and smooth,’ he went on truthfully. ‘And how quick you are about it! You only began the top yellow rose when I stayed with you and Gaston, I recollect, last Easter.’
Dinah’s pieces of work were on a scale that carried one back to the female industry of the Middle Ages, yet was their ultimate use nebulous. Vast ottomans, vast cushions, yards of curtain border, imply a mansion. And the Arbuthnot’s mansion at present existed not. But on what else should a childless woman, cut off from household duties, not over fond of books, forlornly destitute of acquaintance, and with an ever-absent husband, employ herself?
Once, long ago, the poor girl made Gaston a set of shirts, as a birthday surprise. These shirts were lovingly, exquisitely stitched, as Dinah Thurston had been taught to stitch in her childhood. They were also a consummate failure. As a monument of patience, he observed, they were beyond praise. As a fit—‘Well,’ said Gaston, kissing her cheek in careless gratitude, ‘it is not a case of Eureka.’
He never wore them, never knew on what day, in what manner, his wife, fired by sharp disappointment, got them out of existence. Simply, the shirts did not adjust themselves well round his, Gaston Arbuthnot’s, shapely throat. It was not a case of Eureka. The subject interested him no farther.
Plain sewing for grown men and women, Dinah promptly decided, was fruitless labour. Of dressmaking proper Gaston would never (excusably, perhaps) suffer a trace in his rooms. And so, the sweet fashioning of tiny children’s clothes not belonging to her lot, Dinah Arbuthnot it would seem had no choice, no refuge on the planet she inhabited, but cross-stitch.
At moments of more than common loneliness she would feel that her life was being recorded—mournfully, for a life of two-and-twenty—in these large and not artistic embroideries. It seemed as though she stitched with a double thread, as though a dull strand of autobiography for ever intertwined itself among the flaunting roses, the impossible auriculas and poppies that grew beneath her hands.
The piece at which she now worked was begun in London, at a time when Gaston used to dine out regularly every night of his life, and when his days, from various art callings, were, perforce, spent apart from her. As Geoffrey spoke, she could see her St. John’s Wood lodging, her afternoon walks in the Regent’s Park, worked gloomily in with every shade of those topmost yellow roses. AfterLondon came a short stay at Weymouth. Here Gaston had a ‘convict study’ to make, on order, and with his usual good luck discovered he knew several capital fellows in the regiment quartered at Portland. The capital fellows naturally delighted in having the versatile artist at mess, and Dinah passed almost as many lonely evenings as she had done in London. It was in Weymouth, she remembered, that her auriculas, her impossible auriculas, began to take colour and shape. And now, in Guernsey....
The heavy drops gathered in Dinah Arbuthnot’s eyes; pushing her work frame away, she turned to Geoffrey. The lamp shone on her full. The delicate outlines of her cheek and throat stood out before him in startling whiteness.
‘And so you have come back from your coaching, Geff.’ Her tone was quiet. Long practice had taught Dinah to repress that sound detested by Gaston—as by all husbands—tears in the voice. ‘How do you like the sensation of being snubbed by an heiress?’
‘Pretty well, I thank you,’ said Geff. ‘Snubbing, as you know, Mrs. Arbuthnot, is a sensation I got used to in my youth.’
‘Was the heiress very bad? Did she make you feel miserably uncomfortable?’
‘No, I cannot go so far as that. I cannot say that I felt miserably uncomfortable.’
‘But you don’t care for her? If you keep the work on, it will not be for pleasure?’
Dinah’s heart was fuller than it could hold with love for her husband. Geoffrey was nothing to her, except the best friend that she and Gaston possessed. Yet she asked this question quickly, with interest. In her secret consciousness it was an accepted fear, perhaps, though Dinah knew it not, that Geoffrey would never care, as men care who mean to marry, for any girl.
‘Work that is to be decently done must always be done for pleasure.’
It was Geff Arbuthnot who uttered the aphorism.
‘And your evening, snubbing and all, has been passed pleasantly?’
‘I have breathed ampler air,’ Geoffrey made evasive apology, man-like. ‘I have seen more blue sea and sky than ever in my life before. Miss Bartrand’s snubbing was—not beyond my strength. The Seigneur of Tintajeux is a specimen of the old scholarly, high-and-dry parson, worth walking any number of Guernsey miles to see. Some day, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I shall take you with me to Tintajeux.’
‘To come in for my share of snubbing too?’
Dinah asked the question, faintly colouring.
‘Marjorie is a frank, generous-hearted child. You cannot think of her in the light of a grown-up woman. She is a Bartrand, with the faults and virtues of her inheritance, the faults—pride and temper—visibly on the surface. I am very sure,’ added Geff, bending his head, as though to examine the intricate shading of Dinah’s poppies, ‘that you and Marjorie Bartrand might be fast friends, if you chose.’
‘I have no friends,’ said Dinah, ‘except my own people, down home,’ of whom, in truth, Gaston allowed her to see little enough,’and—and you, Geff.’
The voice was unfaltering, the full good mouth was steady. Dinah made the admission, not as a matter of complaint, but of fact, and Geoffrey’s heart fired.
‘That “friendlessness” is the one huge mistake of your life,’ he exclaimed. ‘Gaston is not selfish, would not be selfish, unless your unselfishness forced him into being so. You should never have allowed this morbid love of solitude to grow on you. You ought to assert yourself, to go into the world at Gaston’s side, whether you like it or not.’
‘I should not like it now. When I was a girl, when wefirst married, my heart was light, against what it is now. It was the end of the London season, you remember. No, I don’t suppose you do?’
Did he not, though—that late July time when, after seeing the marriage ceremony over, he went back to his scholar’s attic in John’s; that Long Vacation when the skies were brazen to him, when day and night alike were one feverish pain!
‘It was the end of the London season, and when Gaston took me to the Opera and twice down to dinner at Richmond I did feel,’ confessed Dinah with humility, ‘that I had it in me to be fond of junketing,—oh, Geff, there’s one of my country words! luckily Gaston can’t hear it—of pleasure, I mean, and society. But the taste has died.’ Of what lingering, cruel death, who should know better than Geoffrey? ‘Ladies of my husband’s class have not called upon me. I have neither rank, talent, nor a million. Without these, Gaston says, no woman can make her way in the English world.’
Hot words were ready to rush from Geoffrey’s lips, but he kept them back. To remain on equal terms with husband and wife in this strange triangular friendship did sorely tax his powers of self-repression at times.
‘Gaston would rejoice in knowing that your life was cheerfuller, no matter how the cheerfulness was brought about. He has told me so, often. Now, here, in Guernsey, eight sea-going hours removed,’ said Geff lightly, ‘from English Philistinism, what should hinder you from joining in any little bit of “junketing” that may offer itself?’
‘The hindrance of having no introduction to the Guernsey ladies.’
‘Mrs. Thorne has called on you.’
‘On Gaston. He is dining with them now. He will dine with them four evenings a week. Yes,’ Dinah’s voice fell, ‘I know, at a glance, the kind of clever person whowill amuse my husband. Mrs. Thorne is one of them. She is magnetic.’
‘With the magnetism that repels rather than attracts,’ remarked Geff.
‘That is your feeling about her. You and Gaston would be safe not to admire the same woman.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot was mute. Although his face was too sunburnt to admit of visible deepening in hue, it may be that just then Geoffrey Arbuthnot blushed.
‘You have no change in your character. You could be content (a happy thing for your wife, whenever Mrs. Geoffrey appears on the scene) with one mood, one voice, one face, day after day, before you for forty years. Is not that true?’
‘I am not an artist,’ said Geff, after a pause. ‘For a humdrum man, prosaically occupied, the one face, Mrs. Arbuthnot, the one voice,’—ah, fool that he was! his own voice trembled—‘might constitute as much happiness as we are likely to taste, any of us, this side death.’
‘And Gaston is an artist in every fibre.’ Poor Dinah’s estimate of Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot was invariably Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s, except that she believed in him a vast deal more than he believed in himself. ‘I ought to know that my dull days, my silent evenings, are matters of course. It is not Gaston’s fault that he can only get inspiration through change. Some day, when the world is bowing down before a really great work of his, my hour of triumph will come. Who knows, Geff, if Gaston had married in his own class, if he and his wife had led just the usual life of people in society—it may be his genius would not have fared so well!’
Dinah never looked more perilously lovely than when, with flushed cheeks and kindling eyes, she spoke aloud of her ambitions for her husband. The poor girl’s whole life lay in her one, passionate, oft-bruised affection. More thancommon beauty, a look of divine, all-hoping, all-forgiving love, shone on her face at this instant.
Geff Arbuthnot recollected it wanted only ten seconds to midnight, and that he must fly. Had not long habit trained him to recognise the moment when flight was his surest, his only wisdom!
‘You and Gaston understand each other, as no third person can hope to do, Mrs. Arbuthnot. I consider you the two happiest mortals alive, though perhaps you do not know the extent of your own happiness.’
‘And you are off to your pillow, to dream of the heiress who has not snubbed you,’ said Dinah, as he moved from her side. ‘Why, Geff!’ For the first time she caught sight of the bouquet, somewhat cunningly held in shadow hitherto. ‘What roses, what jasmines, what heliotropes? I have been wondering all this time what made the room so sweet.’
And speaking thus, she stretched forth her hand for Marjorie Bartrand’s flowers.
During nearly four years, a portentously large slice of life under five-and-twenty, it had been one long case of give-and-take between Geoffrey and Dinah—the ‘take’ invariably on Dinah’s side. She took his heart from him to start with. She took the happiness out of his youth. Silently, unrecognised, Geoffrey constituted himself her knight-errant in the hour of his own sharpest pain. (Till her death Dinah could never know the part played by Geoffrey at the time of her engagement and marriage.) In a hundred ways he had since steadied her husband in the path of right. By a hundred unselfish actions he had smoothed nascent domestic discontents, any one of which might have worked mortal havoc with Dinah’s peace.
She had received all his devotion—a prevalent weakness, it is to be feared, among gentle, unimaginative women of her type—as the simplest thing in the world!
If Dinah, as once there was promise, had had children, doubt not that her moral nature must have widened. But this was not to be. A tiny, dying creature held between weak arms for half a day; some yellowing, never-used baby-clothes, jealously hidden out of Gaston’s sight; a kiss stolen, when her husband was not by to see, from any fair cottage babe she might chance to come across in her walk—this much, and no more, was Dinah to know of motherhood.
And the love blindly centred on Gaston had in it an element which, although the word is hard, must in justice be called selfishness.
‘Nothing Gaston likes so well as the smell of flowers on his breakfast table.’ And Dinah still carelessly held out her hand in a receptive attitude. ‘He says his brain must be like the brains of dogs or deer—smell colours all his thoughts. You will see, Geff! Those heliotropes and roses will just set him kneading some new idea into clay to-morrow morning.’
But the heliotropes and the roses did not quit Geoffrey’s hand.
In this moment, ay, while Dinah was speaking, a current of new, keen, healthful life had swept through him. He felt more thoroughly master of himself than he had done since that May evening when he first blindly surrendered his will, with his heart, to a blonde girl watering flowers through a casement window at Lesser Cheriton. Marjorie’s roses, fresh from her pure touch, a friendly gift from the world-scorning child who, somehow, looked upon her tutor as out of the scope of scorn, were his. If Gaston needed inspiration from flower-scents, Doctor Thorne’s garden, any other garden than that of the Seigneur of Tintajeux, must supply the inspiration.
He made a dexterous exit, rushed away, boy-fashion, light of spirit, three steps at a time, to his own room. Andbefore half a minute was over Dinah Arbuthnot had forgotten him. Poor old faithful Geff, his lesson-giving, his heiress, his bouquet—what were these, nay, what were the alien concerns of the universe to a pathetically tender soul, quick smarting under its own immediate and narrow pain!
Had Linda Thorne the power of holding an artist’s restless fancy captive, the genius of making time pass swiftly, the talent of clever talk, of giving genial little dinners, of dressing perfectly? Above all, was she a woman to expect nothing whatever in return for her devotion? A woman strong enough to be philosophical, even, towards a rival who should vanquish her, in her own world, with her own weapons? If she were thus gifted—Dinah moved to the window and looked out across the hotel garden to a point between an opening in the trees where the sea showed blue and foamless—if Linda Thorne were thus gifted, then might to-night be taken as a foretaste of what the next six weeks, the bloom and glory of a mid-Channel summer, had in store for herself.