‘Si vous n’avez rien à me direPourquoi passez-vous par ici?’
‘Si vous n’avez rien à me direPourquoi passez-vous par ici?’
‘Si vous n’avez rien à me direPourquoi passez-vous par ici?’
‘Si vous n’avez rien à me dire
Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?’
She remembered how the white hands of Major Tredennis used to rattle out the accompaniment of that song. She remembered the flower Major Tredennis wore at his button-hole the last day he visited Tintajeux—remembered, when she got knowledge of his treachery, how instant and far-reaching was her scorn.
With what honesty did she now scorn all human creatures of the Tredennis stamp! How loyally would she put herself forward as Dinah’s friend; yes, although she must forfeit the reading of mathematics and classics with Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot as her reward!
‘You have not been here long enough to see much of the island. Of course you are fond of the country?’
‘Well, I was country born and bred. Real country folk, my husband says, set less store upon green fields and hedgerows than the town people.’
‘But you like being out of doors? You will walk or drive with me sometimes? I have a pair of Welsh ponies, capital at scrambling up and down our Guernsey lanes.’
‘You are very kind, Miss Bartrand, but I can’t quite give an answer. You see I should have to speak to Mr. Arbuthnot.’
Poor Dinah coloured with actual shame at the proposal.
‘Now, to-day. Why are you not enjoying yourself with the rest of the world at the show? Guernsey roses, I can tell you, are worth looking at.’
‘I asked Geff, in joke, of course, to take me,’ Dinah answered. ‘But he was not polite enough to say “Yes.”’
‘Will you come with me?’ cried Marjorie. ‘As I drove in from Tintajeux I was getting my courage up all the way to ask you this. I have no chaperon, and now that I am seventeen, nearly a grown-up woman, the old ladies tell my grandfather it is improper I should go about without one. I, who know the island like a cat! You would be doing an act of charity by coming with me to the Arsenal.’
Dinah’s face grew irresolute at this piece of special pleading. She crossed to the window, and looked with wistful eyes up the street. She recalled the group which had passed along a quarter of an hour before. She heard Gaston’s voice again, saw the tiny primrose hands clasped round his throat. She thought of Linda Thorne’s rainbow-coloured flounces, and of Linda Thorne herself.
‘I should like to go.’ The truth broke from her after a minute more of hesitation. ‘I was feeling duller than usual when you came, Miss Bartrand, and I do like a flower-show above all things. We used to go to the Tiverton shows when my sister and I were girls. Uncle William, who lived bailiff at Lord Lufton’s, would take us when the gentlepeople were gone. But that,’ Dinah interrupted herself hastily, ‘was different. We were with Uncle William, we were in our place. I should not be in my place with you. Perhaps you are too young, Miss Bartrand, to see this. My husband is at the Arsenal with his friends, and——’
‘Wherever a husband goes is a place for his wife, according to my ideas of matrimony,’ said Marjorie, in a careless tone, but with her veracious face aflame. ‘I will not hear another excuse. It will be a curiously pleasant surprise for Mr. Arbuthnot when he sees you in my society.’
‘The ladies are dressed so elegantly,’ objected Dinah, at the same time moving towards the door. ‘And I never wear smart things.’
‘Neither do I.’ In truth, Marjorie wore one of the plain washed frocks, the sunburnt straw hat, that she wore on the moor at Tintajeux. ‘What do smart things or smart people matter to you and me? Dress as you choose, Mrs. Arbuthnot. You will look better than every woman in the Arsenal.’
‘I had best put on black. My husband, fortunately, has lovely taste, even in ladies’ dress. He tells me black is always the safest thing for me to wear.’ (‘Black cachemire and silence.’ Dinah remembered those were the requisites Gaston advocated, obliquely—the hint concealed by charming flowers of speech—on the solitary occasion when he introduced her to some female members of his family in London.) ‘I shall ask you to tell me, Miss Bartrand, about my gloves and ribbons.’
Thus speaking, Dinah passed away through a side door into her own chamber. For Gaston, with his knack of organising daily life after the manner that best suited himself, had taken a compact little suite of apartments on Mr. Miller’s ground floor. And Marjorie, left to her meditations, glanced around the parlour—in writing of Guernsey, and of Dinah, the old-fashioned word must be excused—for land-marks that should point out its present possessor’s tastes.
Dinah was not a woman whose affections tended towards ornament, in art or in dress. Had they done so, Dinah’s life had probably been happier. Her work-basket, with its outlying heaps of silk and wool, was the only sign Marjorie could detect of feminine occupation. What of Dinah’s husband? Pipes and cigarette-holders of varying patterns were ranged on either side the mantelpiece. A tobacco jar stood in unabashed evidence on a table. An odour not to be mistaken clung round the draperies of the windows. So this man smoked, thought Marjorie irefully—smokedin his beautiful, refined wife’s living-room! Yellow-backedFrench novels abounded (French novels, I must confess, were an abiding inspiration of Gaston’s genius). The neighbourhood of the piano was strewn with French songs. A volume of Greek poetry, lent to Geoffrey by old Andros Bartrand, lay on a bookshelf. In a corner by the door Marjorie discerned a rough briar walking-stick, which she recognised as her tutor’s property.
As she looked around the room her impulse was to burst into tears. It was but an inn’s best parlour. You could not expect the perfume, the grace of Tintajeux under good Mr. Miller’s roof. But it was not Louis Seize furniture, or Pompadour cabinets, or Trianon rose-baskets, that Marjorie missed. To pipes and tobacco smoke her life with the Seigneur had accustomed her. Yellow-backed novels did not disturb her conscience. Within limits she could endure French songs. The room repulsed her because it destroyed every dream she had had of Geoffrey! Without the Greek volume, she thought, without the briar stick even, her disenchantment had been less vivid. She had not been forced to remember him, to admit the lapse into bathos of her own ridiculously high-pitched ideal.
But so the facts stood. ‘One may be made a fool twice,’ the girl told herself. ‘First by a sweetheart, secondly by a friend. Happily Dinah Arbuthnot, not Marjorie Bartrand, must this time pay the reckoning.’
And the tears were in her eyes still. In spite of all disillusionment, her liking for Geff lingered obstinately. She thought she could never again be glad of heart as on that mid-summer night when she curtsied to the moon and wished a wish by her tutor’s side on the lawn at Tintajeux.
It took Dinah Arbuthnot fifteen minutes—a real ‘quarter of an hour of Rabelais’ for Marjorie—to put on hat and gown; fifteen minutes ere she could be sure her appearance would pass muster in the eyes of Linda Thorne. The bestand simplest women infrequently dress for the other sex, or for the world at large, or for themselves. They dress for each other, oftenest of all for one especial feminine criticism which they have reason to fear.
‘Shall I do, Miss Bartrand?’ Dinah peeped, her exquisite face aflush, through the half-opened door, then she crossed the room to Marjorie; instinct, true as a child’s, informing her that in Geoffrey’s pupil she had found a friend. ‘I want you to pick me to pieces, find as much fault with me as you can. Shall I do?’
‘Do!’ repeated Marjorie.
And a volume of hearty admiration was in the monosyllable.
Dinah Thurston, in her girlhood, had learnt dressmaking as a trade. Of dress as a difficult social art Dinah Arbuthnot knew not the initial letters. Here her husband was an unfailing monitor. Gaston had an artist’s knowledge of colour and effect. He had the sense of fitness belonging to a man of the world. Dinah’s apparel might not accurately follow the fashion books. It bore the seal of distinction at all times.
Thus the ‘safe’ black dress was absolutely perfect of its kind; plain of make, as was meet for such a bust, such shoulders as Dinah’s, but draped by a Parisian hand that knew its cunning. A ruffle of Mechlin lace enhanced the sweet whiteness of the wearer’s throat. A velvet-lined hat threw up the outline of the head, the waves of short-cut English-coloured hair in rich relief.
‘You are lovelier than any picture!’ cried Marjorie, looking at Dinah Arbuthnot with as generous a pleasure, surely, as ever woman felt in the beauty of another.
‘Advise me about my gloves.’ Dinah blushed and drew back at the girl’s frank praise. ‘Here are cream-coloured ones, you see, the same shade as my ruffle, and here is a box of long black silk gloves. My husband had them sentfrom Paris with the gown. Of course, the cream-coloured are the dressiest.’ The tone of Dinah’s voice betrayed her own leaning. ‘Mr. Arbuthnot warns me generally against light gloves. My hands, he says, are half a size too large. Still for a flower-show——’
‘You must wear the black gloves, Mrs. Arbuthnot. No shadow of doubt about it! As you see, I don’t go in for dandy dress myself,’ said Marjorie, ‘but one can’t help hearing the whispers of the milliners. These long silk gloves are at present the one righteous thing to wear in London and in Paris.’
‘And no ribbons, no ornament? I have a gold necklace that looks nice on black, and——’
‘You want no ornament at all. You must take our little world by storm just as you stand at this moment. Miller has some crimson roses in his garden. We will cut one as we pass. The black of your hat would be better for a single spot of colour.’
By the time Marjorie’s fiery Welsh ponies had rushed up to the Arsenal four o’clock was striking. The rose-show festivities were, for the weak and frivolous, at their culminating point. It was the hour when staid flower-lovers—sensible souls who came to see the real, not the human roses—were leaving, Cassandra Tighe among them.
‘I am starting off to Tintajeux,’ she told Marjorie, as they passed each other at the entrance. ‘The Seigneur’s “Duc de Rohan” has taken a prize, and I must be first to carry the news to the Manoir.’ Then, with a kindly glance at Dinah, ‘You have done the right thing, have paid your visit,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t see the necessity of mixing yourself up with it all in public. Linda Thorne presides at the refreshment tent, and that wretched man is simply infatuated in his attentions. But the error is generous. Being a Bartrand, you can, I suppose, do nothing by halves.’
‘I consider myself honoured by appearing with Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ returned Marjorie, very low. ‘I want to judge of that wretched man’s conduct at first hand, see facts alive, and extract their meaning by the light of my own common sense.’
The refreshment tent was pitched at the most conspicuous point of the Arsenal, just within the gates. Here Linda Thorne, assisted by three or four white-muslined aides-de-camp, dispensed strawberries, ices, and tea, liberal of smiles, but most illiberal in charges to the crowd.
Gaston Arbuthnot hovered near, not engaging Mrs. Thorne’s attention, but with the air of a man whose freedom is nominal—of a prisoner on parole. The ayah had vanished. Small Rahnee, in a corner, was busily laying up a week’s trouble for her tropical digestion over a plate of stolen macaroons. A swarm of well-gloved, well-set-up young gentlemen, subalterns, for the most part, of the Maltshire Royals, newly returned from Africa, clustered ornamentally around.
‘Lord Rex,’ cried Linda, in a playful voice appealing to a youth who stood behind her chair, a plain but ultra-dandified youth, with a sun-scorched face, sandy hair and eyelashes, and who wore his left arm in a sling. ‘My dear Lord Rex, where are your thoughts to-day? For the third and last time of asking, will you run across to Madame the Archdeaconess, and press her to drink a second cup of tea?’
For Linda, a clever politician, never allowed the present to divert her mindfulness from the future. Belonging—sub silentio—to the extreme left of any society in whichshe found herself, Mrs. Thorne kept a firm grip, here in European coteries, as formerly in Indian stations, on whatever Conservative mainstay might be within her reach. Her Guernsey mainstay was the Archdeacon’s wife. Linda was a member, under Madame Corbie, of cutting-out clubs, district-visiting corps, societies for persuading members of all denominations to change places with each other, and similar intricate philanthropies of the hour and place. If, occasionally, serious circles looked with misgiving upon some little new escapade, some unaccustomed outbreak of vivacity at The Bungalow, Linda’s usefulness floated her. There was such a fund of sterling worth in Linda Thorne! So some old lady would say at whose house Linda perhaps, on the preceding evening, demure as a mouse, had been painting Christmas cards for the Caribbee Islanders. Such energy, such zeal for the weaker brethren! Such a genius for collecting subscriptions, or organising fancy bazaars! And then one must not forget the stock she came of. One must always remember what our dear flighty Linda’s grandpapawas!
Hence, perhaps, the leniency of the judgments. The old Sarnian ladies never forgot that our dear flighty Linda’s grandpapa was an earl.
‘Madame Corbie—tea!’ echoed Lord Rex Basire, the sun-scorched dandy, absently. ‘Ah, there she goes again! The prettiest girl, yes, by Jove! the out-and-outest girl, every way, I have seen in Guernsey. Golden hair, a complexion, a figure.... Let me take the Venerable her cheering cup at once, and set me free to fly after my Dulcinea.’
‘A new Dulcinea?’ asked Linda, with a glance as sweet as the cup she had prepared for Madame Corbie. ‘I thought Lord Rex Basire had flown after every Dulcinea in the Channel Islands a long time since.’
Lord Rex broke away without reply, causing a gooddeal of the Venerable’s tea to overflow by reason of his impetuous movements. But he was not set free again as quickly as he desired.
Madame Corbie was what the Scottish bailie called ‘a fine respectit half-worn sort of woman.’ Her set of immediate worshippers, poorer cousins for the most part, would speak of her beneath their breath as so superior! Madame Corbie never smiled. Madame Corbie never retracted a step once taken. It was her harmless boast that she had never read a novel in her life—as one would say he had never cut a throat, or picked a pocket. She would wear no black satin that cost less than ten shillings and sixpence (Guernsey currency) per yard. And she surveyed the moral, as she did the physical, world through a pair of smoke-coloured spectacles.
Even the Archdeaconess, however, had her little stock of human vanities and foibles. Persons of title, though they exist in adequate number on the British mainland, are scarce and prized, like the pink flowering hydrangea, on these smaller islets. With the rectors’ wives from half a dozen country parishes sitting around, neglected, it was a distinctly soothing sensation for good Madame Corbie’s unworldly heart to have Lord Rex Basire, the fifth son of a very impoverished duke, in attendance upon her.
A second cup of tea? Why, Lord Rex and dear Linda were certainly conspiring to spoil us all! And might she, the Archdeaconess, ask if there was such a thing to be had as a macaroon?
‘Too late, Madame Corbie! Lost your chance,’ cried Lord Rex. ‘That young limb, Rahnee, has been beforehand with you. I saw her devouring the last three macaroons at a gulp just as Linda sent me off with your tea.’
Lord Rex was forced to shout these words into Madame Corbie’s ear, for the band of the Maltshire Royals were playing a forcible, much kettle-drummed polka not twentyfeet distant, so his attentions, even to the obtuse perceptions of country rectors’ wives, must be unmistakably marked.
‘Sadly unwholesome diet, to be sure. But poor Linda Thorne is so indiscreet in minor matters. You agree with me, do you not, Lord Rex? Nothing more sadly indigestible for a young child’s stomach than macaroons?’
Lord Rex Basire heard her not. It may be doubted whether Lord Rex heard the horns and kettle-drums as they echoed resonantly from the Arsenal walls. He was absorbed in the vision of a distant lovely head, poised flowerlike on a white throat, its waves of amber hair set off against the soft velvet of a Rubens hat. No other interest existed on our planet at that moment for Lord Rex Basire.
He was a man who from his birth upward had followed the desire of the hour, for evil or for good; mainly, not for good. His desire now was to become acquainted with the exquisitely pretty girl whom his eyes pursued. Bluntly abandoning the question (from a physiological side) of macaroons, he addressed himself to the Archdeaconess. Did Madame Corbie—the polka by now had stopped, Lord Rex could ask his question without a shout—did Madame Corbie know the name of the girl who was walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux? ‘Golden-haired girl—straight features, the loveliest complexion in the world,’ added Lord Rex, with the frankness of a momentarily real feeling.
‘It will be my husband’s cousin once removed, Ella Corbie of La Hauterive,’ observed Madame Corbie blandly. ‘The Hauterive yellow roses are fine this year. I have not a word to say against their “Celine Forestier.” But, in my poor opinion, the Archdeacon’s “Maréchal Niel” ought to have taken the prize. Yes, yes,’—Madame Corbie gazed through her smoked spectacles into the perspective of history—‘Ella Corbie is still nice looking. I remember her, dressed for her first evening party, more than a dozen years ago, and now——’
‘My dear Madame Corbie! I beg a thousand pardons, your cup is empty—allow me to set it down,’ interrupted Lord Rex Basire.
For at this precise moment the perfect features, the lovely complexion, were again setting towards him in the crowd.
But Madame Corbie, the head of our local society, rose to the occasion, and to her feet.
‘Let me have a good look, Lord Rex, and if it is my cousin Ella, I will introduce you to her. A young lady walking, you say, with Marjorie Bartrand? That is certainly most unlike Ella! The Hauterive family keep so exclusively to themselves. Still——’
‘There they are—coming this way, by Jove!’ cried Lord Rex breathlessly. ‘You see the girl I mean? Splendid girl in black—lace ruffle—a red rose lying on her hair?’
Madame Corbie looked through her smoke-coloured glasses straight. Then she looked through her smoke-coloured glasses obliquely. Then she pushed them high away on her ample forehead, and gazed stoically upward in the broad light of the merry June day.
‘The person,’ she pronounced, with awful solemnity, ‘who is walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeuxdoes not belong to this island.’
And so speaking, and with the folds of her satin doing credit to the price paid for them, Madame Corbie there, in full presence of the inferior clergy’s wives, sat down.
‘Ah! I thought not. Thought I had never seen such a pretty woman in the place,’ observed Lord Rex, addressing his own consciousness, rather than the ill-pleased ears of the Archdeaconess. ‘What are the odds I don’t get properly introduced and properly snubbed before another quarter of an hour is over!’
As a preliminary step Lord Rex rushed back to the refreshment tent, Madame Corbie’s tea-cup his ostensibleexcuse. He threw himself on Linda Thorne’s ambiguous sympathy.
‘Mrs. Thorne, you know all about every one, by fine natural discernment. I’ve heard you say so a hundred times. Who is this wonderful girl in black that Marjorie Bartrand is walking about with?’
A suppressed smile lurked round Linda Thorne’s thin lips.
‘Let us give Mr. Arbuthnot the task of learning her pedigree. It is an act of charity always to find work for idle men. Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she turned to Gaston, ‘I want you to find out something for the peace of Lord Rex Basire’s mind and of my own existence. Who is this wonderful girl in black who is walking about the Arsenal grounds with Marjorie Bartrand?’
‘If I were of a brave disposition I would go myself,’ said Lord Rex, when Gaston had sauntered placidly off on his mission. ‘But I am not. I am a coward down to the ground. Peace at any price is my motto, politically and otherwise. To-day I am feeling more than usually nervous—not half “go” enough in me to stand up under one of Marjorie Bartrand’s snubbings.’
‘I cannot say your modesty makes itself known to the world by outward and visible signs.’
‘Modesty—no! I understand you, madam. A man may have forward manners but a faint heart.’
Lord Rex Basire’s arm, in justice let it be spoken, got a bullet through it in hot warfare. This dandified boy was in the thick of more than one African fight when clouds gathered dark above the English colours, was all but drowned on a never-to-be-forgotten night while attempting to carry succour to the wounded, left with their solitary gallant surgeon, on an abandoned position.
‘I tried once, at a militia review or something, to talk to Marjorie, just in the usual way one talks, not without success you know, to girls of her age.’
‘And the result was?’ asked Linda.
‘She looked at me coolly—grand Spanish eyes of hers those are, bar the temper in them! “You are fresh from Eton, are you not?” she observed. I confessed that Eton had known me in my youth. “Talk about Eton, then,” struck out Miss Bartrand, straight from the shoulder. “Talk about cricket, football, boating, Latin grammar, if you learnt any. I will not,” with a murderous flash from her big eyes, “listen to foolishness from any man.”’
By the time Lord Rex finished this characteristic anecdote Gaston Arbuthnot, with his usual expression of genial impenetrability, had sauntered back to the refreshment tent. Picking up Rahnee, he asked the child what ailed her? For Rahnee’s face, sickly at all times, wore a look and hue forlornly out of keeping with the bravery of her attire.
‘What in the world has befallen the infant, Mrs. Thorne? Her complexion is of the lively arsenic green the doctors forbid us to use in wall papers.’
‘Rahnee! mamma’s own darling pet, what is the matter?’ cried Linda, suddenly recalled to the fact of her darling’s existence.
‘Me eat matazoons. Bad matazoons!’ whimpered Rahnee, with the tender conscience, the quick physical repentance of her age.
‘That is a wise little Rahnee,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot, kissing her. ‘Right morality. Pitch into our pleasures the moment our pleasures begin to pitch into us.’
‘Have you seen her?’ exclaimed Lord Rex. ‘This kind of trifling, remember, may be fun to all of you. It’s stretched high above a joke to me. A tall fair girl, dressed in black——’
‘With a crimson rose in her hair,’ added Linda, ‘and walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux.’
‘Well, yes,’ Gaston admitted in the lapses of whispered consolation to poor Rahnee, ‘I have seen her.’
‘And who is she?’ exclaimed Linda Thorne. ‘I am almost as curious as Lord Rex. Have you discovered this new Dulcinea’s name?’
‘Her name is Dinah Arbuthnot,’ replied Gaston cheerfully. ‘Yes, Mrs. Thorne, incredulous though I know you feel, the wonderful girl in black, and who is walking with Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux, is—my wife.’
Lord Rex sank in an attitude of despair, half mock, half genuine, upon the nearest bench.
Dinah Arbuthnot had been more than woman could she have run the gauntlet of this Guernsey rose-show unconscious of her success.
But admiration to Dinah was no new thing. As a girl she never went through that chrysalis or ugly-duckling stage, the remembrance of which to many women puts an edge on after triumphs. Heads were turning after her to-day, she saw, just as heads used to turn when she was a baby toddling along the Devonshire lanes, or a slim maid walking in the procession of ‘young ladies’ from Tiverton boarding-school. She had known since she knew anything that she was beautiful, and rated beauty at a pathetically low standard.
Thanks to roseleaf tint or well-cut features, a sweetheart’s fancy can easily be won. Who should say that cleverness, knowledge of the world, tact, are not the solid gifts that bring happiness, the qualities that might chain a husband—wearied, say, after modelling from hired beauty—to his own fireside?
‘If you do not object, Miss Bartrand, I would like to find some place where we could rest, away from the crowd, a little.’ Bent upon displaying their friendship before the Sarnian world, Marjorie had by this time paraded her companion bravely throughout the length and breadth ofthe Arsenal. ‘My husband has seen me. He is in the tent near the entrance—the tent where Mrs. Thorne is serving refreshments. As Mr. Arbuthnot does not come forward to meet us, I am afraid he is displeased.’
‘Displeased! That is a great idea,’ cried headstrong Marjorie. ‘Put all the blame on me. I think I shall be strong enough to bear the brunt of Mr. Arbuthnot’s wrath if I rest myself well first.’
They succeeded in finding a bench, withdrawn somewhat from the crowd, yet within sight of the stall at which Linda presided. Here Dinah could pluck up her drooping courage, while Marjorie communed scornfully in her heart as to the pitiful weakness of married women in general, and of this most neglected, most mistaken married woman in particular. Their seclusion lasted for two or three minutes only. Then a blush started up into Dinah’s cheek, vivid, bashful, such as a girl’s face might wear on catching sight unexpectedly of her lover, for she saw Gaston approaching. At his side was a very dandily dressed, sun-tanned youth, his arm in a sling; a youth whom as yet Dinah Arbuthnot knew not.
‘He is coming! Miss Bartrand, I look to you to smooth things over. Just say you pressed me to come to the show, and I refused at first, and——’
‘I will say everything that can decently be compressed into one act of contrition.’ Marjorie’s tone was fraught with ironical seriousness. ‘But your eyes are better than mine, Mrs. Arbuthnot. A guilty conscience perhaps sharpens the external senses. I am looking with the best of my seeing power over the whole Arsenal. I see no Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘Then his companion must stand in the way—the light-haired gentleman with a plain-like, reddish face,’ whispered Dinah, ‘and who wears his left arm in a sling.’
‘That is our popular hero, Lord Rex Basire, newly returned from South African fighting, and as proud of his gunshot wound as a foolish girl might be of her first conquest.’
‘Well, and there is my husband walking with him.’
‘Your husband! Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Marjorie’s world was reeling. A possibility—she knew not of what—a wild and passionate hope trembled on the outside edge of her thoughts.
‘Perhaps I am not a fair judge,’ murmured Dinah, the two young men having been arrested on their road by that incorrigible button-seizer, Doctor Thorne, ‘but, to my mind, Gaston must always be the most noticeable man in any company he enters, no matter how high that company may be.’
‘Gaston?’
Marjorie Bartrand was in a state of such bewilderment that the echoing of Dinah Arbuthnot’s words seemed about as great originality in the way of speech as she was mistress of.
‘Geoffrey must have sounded my husband’s praises to you pretty often. That is a right good point of poor Geff’s, his love and admiration for Gaston. At Cambridge he was called the handsome American. I know it,’ said Dinah, with earnestness which became those sweet lips of hers mightily, ‘because Aunt Susan had relations in the town, on Market Hill, you know. Before my marriage we used to hear something flattering of Gaston every day. It is the same in London. The tailors will give him any credit. I believe they would make his coats gratis so long as they got his promise to wear them.’
‘And Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’ It cost Marjorie no small effort just then to force Geff’s name from her lips. ‘What relationship is there between him and you?’
‘Geoffrey is our first cousin. His father and my husband’s died, both of them, when their children were young. Gaston has always been Geoffrey’s good genius.’ In saying this Dinah believed herself to be enunciating truth, clear as crystal. ‘They did not meet as boys.Geoffrey spent his young years in a gloomy city school. My husband was brought up—you can tell it, they say, by his accent—in Paris. When they came together in Cambridge nothing could be more different than their positions. Poor Geff, a scholar at John’s, was forced to work without amusements, almost without friends, for his Tripos, while Gaston——’
‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot had livelier things than work to think about,’ suggested Marjorie, as Gaston’s wife paused.
‘He was clever enough to come out first in any Tripos he had read for. But his friends would not let him read. He was sought after, popular,’ said Dinah, with a sigh, ‘just as you see him now. However, that made no difference for Geff. Gaston treated him like a younger brother always. He does so now. I have grown myself to think of Geoffrey as of a brother.’
She stopped short, for Gaston Arbuthnot and Lord Rex Basire were now within hearing distance; Doctor Thorne, adhesive as goose-grass, addressing them by turns as he followed, with his nimble limp, in their steps.
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot, you must grant me my postulate.’ Doctor Thorne packed up all of nature or of books—chiefly of books—that came within his reach in little, neatly-labelled comprehensible forms, dilettante demonstrations of the universe ready for his own daily use and the misery of his fellows. ‘Grant, as a postulate, that the magnitudes we call molecules are realities, and the rest follows as a necessary deduction. Let us look around us at this moment. Evolution teaches us that these bright blooms we behold actually come into being through the colour-sense of insects; and, and——Lord Rex Basire! you, I am sure, are fascinated by the subject!’
Lord Rex had not heard a syllable. Breaking away from Doctor Thorne, Lord Rex stood still, his eyes pointedly avoiding Dinah’s face. Gaston, meanwhile, his hat held low,after the fashion of Broadway or the Boulevards, was saluting the two ladies, making Marjorie Bartrand’s acquaintance, and jesting amicably with Dinah as to the march she had stolen upon himself and an unexpectant Sarnian world.
When two or three minutes had passed Lord Rex gave evidence of his presence. Coming forward, he delivered a set little compliment to Marjorie Bartrand on the Seigneur’s roses. It was a source of agreeable satisfaction to Lord Rex Basire that the ‘Duc de Rohan’ should have taken a first prize. He would like——
‘The Seigneur’s dark roses have taken a prize every June show for the last quarter of a century,’ Marjorie interrupted him cruelly. ‘When once we islanders, flower-show judges included, get into a safe groove, we keep there.’
‘What an improving place Guernsey must be to live in!’ Gaston Arbuthnot remarked. ‘I have been trying vainly through the best years of my life to keep in safe grooves.’
‘Tokeepin safe grooves!’ repeated Marjorie, with rather stinging emphasis. ‘You would need to get into them first, would you not?’
‘You are severe, Miss Bartrand.’ Gaston came over to the girl’s side. ‘And I like it. Severity gives me a new sensation. Now, I am going to ask a favour which I can tell beforehand you will grant. I want you to show me these conquering Tintajeux roses. Tintajeux is not an unknown name to us.’
Gaston added this last clause in a lower key, then watched to note how much the colour would vary on her ever-varying face.
Under any other circumstances than the present ones Marjorie would, I think, have selected Gaston Arbuthnot as the type of human creature least to be encouraged under heaven. Was he not obtrusively good-looking, a popularity man, a dandy for whom Bond Street tailors would becontent, as a flesh-and-blood block, a living advertisement, to stitch gratis? Was he not a coolly neglectful husband, a pleasure-seeker, a frequenter of the afternoon teas of frivolous, attention-loving women?
But in her rush of joyous surprise, of contradictory relief, in her gratitude to him for not being Geoffrey, the girl was ready to extend a hand of hearty friendship to Dinah’s husband—during the first half hour of their acquaintance, at all events.
‘You wish to see the Tintajeux roses? Come, then, and let me play show-woman. Unfortunately,’ Marjorie added, ‘I don’t know in which quarter of the globe the “Duc de Rohan” lives.’
‘I believe I can guide you. I know the whereabouts of every stall in the Arsenal.’
And Lord Rex neatly affixed himself to the party as Marjorie and Dinah rose.
Dinah’s breath came short. She knew instinctively how the eyes of this pale-haired, sun-burnt youth avoided her face, and in that avoidance read the fact of his admiration. She divined that Lord Rex’s intention was to walk at her side. She foresaw, with terror, the necessity of conversation.
Gaston Arbuthnot gave his wife a quick, comprehensive look—Lord Chesterfield embodied in a glance! Then he went through a brief, informal word of introduction.
‘Lord Rex Basire—my wife. I fancied, Dinah, that you and Basire had met already. Now, Miss Bartrand, let us make an exploring tour of the Arsenal. We shall reach the Seigneur’s dark roses, sooner or later. I look to you,’ Gaston added, ‘for enlightenment as to some of the human elements of the show.’
Marjorie’s mood was abundantly bright; the ‘enlightenment’ was not slow of coming. Her prattle, with its brisk bitterish flavour, amused Gaston as he would have thoughtit impossible to be amused by any classico-mathematical girl extant. As they passed the bench that still supported Madame the Archdeaconess’s sacerdotal weight, Marjorie broke into a laugh—that hearty, human, unmistakable laugh of hers. For Doctor Thorne stood beside the great female pillar of the Church, delivering an oration in his most verbose little manner, to which not only the Archdeaconess, but the wives of the inferior clergy, listened with respect. And Marjorie’s quick ear had caught his text.
‘One ought not to laugh at our betters, Mr. Arbuthnot, ought one?’
Asking this, Marjorie looked gravely up in Gaston’s face.
‘It is so written in the copy-books, Miss Bartrand. For my part, I think the greatest good a man ever does his fellows is when he furnishes them, consciously or unconsciously, with materials for farce.’
‘At least, one should not laugh loud enough to be heard?’
‘I think you ought to laugh very often, and loud enough for all the world to hear,’ replied Gaston.
‘Doctor Thorne is too much for me; I have an old “Sandford and Merton” among my books, and when I hear him talk, I think of Mr. Barlow moralising at Tommy. Mr. Barlow turned scientist. “Grant as a postulate that the magnitudes we call molecules are realities ...” “Evolution teaches us that these bright blooms ...” etc. Dr. Thorne’s flower-show speech! We had it last autumn with the dahlias. We had it in the spring with the tulips. I heard him addressing it just now to that poor small boy, Lord Rex. Mrs. Corbie is orthodox to the core. I suppose he will make a big jump, as they do over the words in plays, when he gets to anything so brimstony as “evolution.”’
The crowd, as it happened, was setting in the direction of the Tintajeux roses. By the time Gaston and Marjorie had made their way into front places before the stand, theydiscovered that Dinah and Lord Rex Basire had parted company from them in the crowd.
‘I brought Mrs. Arbuthnot here. It was through my persuasion she laid down her cross-stitch,’ cried Marjorie, ‘and now we have let her fall victim to Lord Rex. How wearied she will be of him!’
‘I am not so sure of that. My wife has the old-fashioned weaknesses of the sex. The sight of a wounded soldier is dear to her. All women, at heart, are thoroughgoing Jingoites.’
‘I am not! I am an ultra, red-hot Radical,’ exclaimed Marjorie. ‘As to Lord Rex—I believe his wound was well long ago. He wears his arm in a sling to get up sympathy.’
‘It will secure Mrs. Arbuthnot’s,’ said Gaston. Then: ‘What a world of good it will do my wife to have been here,’ he added warmly. ‘That is just what poor Dinah needs, to come out more, mix more with her fellow-creatures, brighten up her ideas; to lay down her cross-stitch, in short. That hits the nail on the head—to lay down her cross-stitch! It was charming of you to call on us, Miss Bartrand! I take it for granted, you see, that you have called. You heard of our existence probably from Geff?’
‘I heard from Mr. Geoffrey that Mrs. Arbuthnot was staying at Miller’s Hotel.’
But Marjorie’s voice faltered. Her soul clothed itself in sackcloth and ashes as she thought of her own error, of thegenerous,delicatemotives which had prompted her—Pharisee that she was!—to call on Dinah.
‘Whatever Geff does comes to good. He cannot take a mile-long walk without some man or woman being the better for it. Geff has a kind of genius for bringing about the welfare of other people.’
At the mention of Geoffrey every artificial trace left Gaston’s manner. The best of the man showed always, nomatter how trifling the occasion, in the honest regard he bore his cousin.
‘Now, look, Miss Bartrand, at the way Geff is spending his time in this island!’
Where Marjorie had suspected him of easy-going callousness, of philandering in the train of idle, fine ladies, of singing French songs, of putting himself on the social and intellectual plane of a Major Tredennis.
‘Six hours a week must, I own, be grudged to him—the hours he spends at Tintajeux Manoir.’
‘Spare yourself the trouble of being polite, Mr. Arbuthnot. If you knew how I detest politeness!’
‘But remember all his other hours.’ The art of thought-reading was certainly to be reckoned among Gaston’s accomplishments. Within ten minutes of his introduction to this little classico-mathematical girl, behold him discoursing with cunning naturalness on the subject likeliest to interest her in the world—Geff’s virtues! ‘Remember how his days, often his nights, are really passed.’
‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot reads, does he not?’
Marjorie gazed into the heart of a glorious Duc de Rohan with interest.
‘Geoffrey reads as I,’ said Gaston, passing into a lighter strain, ‘meant to read, once. You look sceptical, Miss Bartrand! There was a time when I had bookish ambition. Yes, I talked, like many a fool before me, of going in for two Triposes, and left Cambridge without a degree. But Geff has a gigantic physique, a real hunger for hard work. He simply does not know the meaning of taking a holiday.
As they chatted Gaston’s eyes dwelt with artistic satisfaction on the girl’s slender figure and hands, on the chiselled Southern face overkissed by sea and sun for some English tastes, but pure, fresh, as the wine-dark roses over which she bent.
‘I am a sculptor by trade,’ he went on. ‘It might betruer to say a poor manufacturer of statuettes for the London market. Geff has told you how we get our daily bread, has he not?’
‘My tutor speaks of little—beyond my reading,’ stammered Marjorie, still without meeting the penetrating glance of Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘Well, even after work as light as mine, I find,’ said Gaston, with a clear conscience, ‘that amusement, varied in kind and ample of quantity, is needful. The heartiness of one’s work seems determined to a nicety by the heartiness of one’s play. Geoffrey takes his recreation just now in the wards of the Guernsey hospital. There was a bad quarry accident the day after our arrival here——’
‘I know,’ exclaimed Marjorie, paling. ‘The worst accident we have ever had at St. Sampson’s.’
‘Geoffrey, I need not say, went to the fore as a volunteer. Between the poor lads in hospital and those who lie still in the houses to which they were carried from the quarry his hands are full. That is the way Geff recreates himself.’
For a good many seconds Marjorie was speechless. Could it be that conscious weakness—weakness in her, a Bartrand—hindered the girl from trusting her own voice? Then, giving Gaston her profile still, she turned brusquely aside from the Tintajeux roses and from the discussion of Geoffrey’s qualities. She remembered her grandfather’s dinner-hour. The sun was getting low. It would be only human to search for Mrs. Arbuthnot, and deliver her out of the hands of Lord Rex.
‘We shall find them perfectly happy, and eating ices,’ said Gaston. ‘Dinah’s is not such a critical spirit as yours, Miss Bartrand. Let us bend our steps to the refreshment tent.’
Dinah and Lord Rex were all this time advancing,haltingly, monosyllabically, towards acquaintanceship. Gaston’s happy many-sidedness, his power of adapting himself, without effort, to the tastes and moods of others, were gifts in no manner shared by Lord Rex Basire. Dinah’s intelligence differed about as widely from Marjorie Bartrand’s as does placid English moonlight from a flash of tropical lightning.
Thus,—starting, as a cleverer man might do, along beaten tracks, the first remark made by Lord Rex was meteorological:
‘Splendid day this, isn’t it, for a rose-show?’
‘Certainly.’
The chilling assent was not spoken for some seconds, Dinah’s education having failed to inform her that the smallest platitude uttered by men and women when they meet in the world needs instant answer.
‘As a rule, you see, one gets beastly weather for this sort of thing.’
Silence.
‘Festive gatherings, I mean,und so weiter. Speech-day at Eton was always the wettest day of the three hundred and sixty-five.’
‘Was it indeed, Lord Rex Basire?’
Dinah’s gentle nature prompted her to be civil to all created beings. She would be civil, kindly even, to this plain and sun-scorched boy who had elected to walk beside her, and whose eyes took so many covert glances of admiration at her face. In the heart of Eve’s simplest daughter were such glances, one short quarter of an hour after introduction, ever registered as crime? Not only would Dinah be civil,—knowing little of titles, and less as to their modes of application, she would fain give Lord Rex Basire the fullest benefit of his.
He paused, and doing so looked with a straighter gaze than heretofore at Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife. She was surpassingly beautiful, fairer than any woman he had seenwith his fleshly eyes or dreamed about in such soul as he possessed. Was she stupid? Not one whit for the higher feminine intelligence or the higher feminine culture did Lord Rex care. In society he held it Woman’s duty to supply him, Rex Basire, with straw for his conversational brick-making; hooks and eyes, don’t you know! gleanings from the comic papers, hints at politics, easy openings for unsentimental sentiment. A distinctly stupid woman frightened him. ‘Makes one feel like being on one’s legs for a speech,’ Lord Rex Basire would say.
‘You are looking forward to a long stay in the island, Ihope, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
At the italicised verb Dinah’s eyes turned on her companion with a vague distrust. Then she changed colour. A rose-flush, vivid as sunset on snow, overspread her face. For she thought of Gaston.
‘If you are a friend of my husband’s, I can understand your wishing to keep us here.’
There was a smile on her lips. The stiffness of her manner began visibly to relax.
Lord Rex for a moment was taken aback. Then he plucked up heart of grace. To see a married woman blush like a school-girl at the mention of her husband’s name was a new and puzzling spectacle to him. He could scarcely flatter his vanity that he, personally, was receiving encouragement. Still, Dinah had smiled. And with the burthen of conversation-making resting heavily on him, he was glad enough to follow any cue that might present itself.
‘Friend? I should think so! Best fellow in the world, Arbuthnot—and a man of genius, too; good-all-round sort of man. Never heard a Briton sing French songs as he does. Rather proud of my own accent.’ As Lord Rex progressed in confidence his speech grew more and more elliptic. ‘Sent to Paris in my infancy. Brought up by theJesuits—there were Jesuits in those days, you know—till I went to Eton. But Arbuthnot puts me in the shade, ra-ther.’
‘Your lordship was brought up by the Jesuits!’
Side by side with many wholesomer qualities, Dinah had inherited not a few of her yeoman forefathers’ prejudices. At the word ‘Jesuit’ she regarded Lord Rex with an interest that had in it almost the tenderer element of pity.
‘I was. You look doubtful, you don’t think the fathers could give one such a Parisian roll of the “r” as your husband’s?’
‘Of that I’m ignorant, my lord. I am no French scholar. I thought of the Jesuits’ fearful underminded dealings.’ Dinah gave a half shudder in the warm sunshine. ‘I thought of the doctrines they must have instilled into you.’
Underminded! From what sect or denomination could Arbuthnot have taken his handsome wife? That Dinah was a rustic ‘mixed up with the great bucolic interests,’ Lord Rex felt certain. The Devonshire burr, the staid, shy, village manner betrayed her. What were her tenets? What sort of conscience had she? A Puritanical conscience, of course, but of what shade, what dimensions?
He harked warily back upon the safe subject of Gaston’s songs.
‘Arbuthnot was singing to us magnificently last night. He was in his best form. Faure himself could never have given “A vingt ans” in grander style. And then he was so well accompanied. The accompaniment is half the battle in “A vingt ans.’”
Gaston Arbuthnot, it should be explained, dined on the preceding night at the mess of the Maltshire Royals. He had dined at mess often of late, and on each occasion Dinah’s heart felt that it had got a reprieve. Dinah believed that dining at the mess of the Maltshire Royals meant, for one evening at least, seeing nothing of The Bungalow, and of Doctor and Mrs. Thorne.
‘You have good musicians among you, no doubt. I know,’ she observed, remembering long and not successful practising of her own, ‘that the accompaniment of this song is hard. But it has become the fashion for young men to play the piano lately.’
‘We can most of us get through a polka, played with one finger, or Malbrook. When I am alone,’ said Lord Rex, ‘I execute the Marseillaise, with chords. No man in the regiment could play a true accompaniment to “A vingt ans.”’
‘No? My husband played it for himself, then?’ asked Dinah, unaccountably persistent.
‘Not a bit of it! A singer never sings his best unless he stand, head up, chest expanded.’ Lord Rex dramatised the operatic attitude as they walked. ‘Mrs. Thorne accompanied Arbuthnot—deliciously, as she always does.’
It was seldom Dinah’s policy to discover her feelings by speech. So much worldly wisdom she had learnt, through most unworldly forbearance towards Gaston. Her complexion showed one of its over-quick changes, her mouth fell. But she spoke not. That there must be deviation from truth somewhere, she divined, with a bitter personal sense of humiliation. But where? She shrank from the possible answer to this question.
A good-humoured epitome of the dinner-party had been given by Gaston, over this morning’s breakfast-table, for her own and Geoffrey’s benefit. ‘The usual guest-night at mess. Curious how precisely alike all mess dinners are. The Engineer Colonel’s never finished commencement, “When we were in the lines before Sebastopol;” the Major’s tiger-slaying adventures in Bengal; the elderly Captain’s diatribes against Liberal Governments and enforced retirements, “A man in the very prime—no, sir, a man before he is in the prime of life put on the shelf.” And the Irishman’s story. And the subaltern’s witticisms.’Gaston, I say, had enlivened the breakfast-table with his lively putting together of these oft-used materials. He had made no reference to the singing of French songs, or to Linda Thorne.
Then Lord Rex Basire’s memory must be at fault.
‘You cannot mean last night. You must be thinking of some former time. Mr. Arbuthnot dined with you at mess yesterday.’
‘Of course he did. After dinner we adjourned—we, the favoured few—as our manner is, to The Bungalow.’
‘Where Mrs. Thorne played accompaniments for Gaston.’
Dinah made the observation with mechanical self-control, hardly knowing what cold repetition of words this was that escaped her.
‘Yes; we had quite a chamber concert. A lot of rehearsing that accompanying business seems to want! Hardly ever drop in at The Bungalow of an afternoon without finding them at the piano.’
Dinah knew a moment’s cruel pain. There was a proud, hurt expression on her face. She stopped short, involuntarily. Then: ‘It would take much rehearsal,’ she said, ‘before I should play well enough to accompany Mr. Arbuthnot in public. But Mrs. Thorne seems clever nearly in everything. I wish I had her talents.’
And she resumed her walk, and began to speak—the village shyness thawing fast away—about the flowers, and the music, and the people.
It became clear as daylight to Lord Rex Basire that his society was duly valued.
When Gaston and Marjorie approached the refreshment stall they saw a picture which many a genre artist, in ink or oils, might have been glad to study.
For there outside the tent stood Dinah Arbuthnot, fair and flushed. She and Lord Rex were eating ices, as Gaston, the materialist, predicted. The western light shone on Dinah’s bright hair. It touched the rose she wore, and the outline of her lips and chin. Lord Rex, dutifully attentive, held her sunshade. An Archdeaconess with surroundings of inferior female clergy loomed large on the horizon. Nearer at hand was Linda Thorne, patiently enduring long stories of the tiger-slaying Major’s, while her eyes and ears were elsewhere. Sarnian society generally, in dubious groups of twos and threes, looked on. It was Dinah’s first step across the border of a new world.
Gaston Arbuthnot seized the points of the situation at a glance. He played the part that fell to him with acumen. Towards Dinah his manner was simply irreproachable. So thought Marjorie, no over-lenient judge; so, from afar, thought Linda Thorne. It were premature to hint at any forecasting of storm in Dinah’s own hot heart! He insisted upon supporting his wife’s plate while she finished her ice. He contrived to bring her and Linda so far into friendly juxtaposition that at parting a chilly handshake wasexchanged between these ladies. But he also was true to his colours. He had come to the rose-show in Mrs. Thorne’s society; in her society he remained. The last glimpse Marjorie got of her new friends revealed a perspective of Linda with sprightly energy pointing out distant roses to Mr. Arbuthnot, while Dinah walked slowly homeward from the Arsenal gates, Lord Rex at her side.
Had the afternoon been one of unmixed good? Had her interference with the Arbuthnot trio brought about good at all? Marjorie asked herself these questions as she urged her ponies to a gallop along the Tintajeux high road. That she had discovered a foolish error appositely might be matter for congratulation so far as pride went! Had she performed a very generous or delicate action in bringing untaught Dinah from her cross-stitch, pushing her into the glare of public notice, obliging her to tolerate the attention of a man like Rex Basire? If, unprompted by the Bartrand thirst for governing, she had left destiny to itself, had been content, as in old times, to help in the hayfield, or the dairy at home, might not her day’s work have been fruitfuller?
Dinner had waited long when she reached Tintajeux, and the Seigneur was in the disposition most dreaded of Marjorie throughout the meal. He talked more than his custom, displayed a genial and grandpaternal interest in her doings at the Arsenal. Tintajeux had taken a first prize, of course. And how did the Duc de Rohan look among the baser herd? Was he well placed? In sun or in shadow? Marjorie, the Seigneursupposed, had scarce found time, among her numerous friends, to give a glance that way.
‘I looked more at our roses than at any in the show,’ said Marjorie truthfully. Were not her eyes fixed downcast on the Duc de Rohan when Gaston Arbuthnot talked to her of Geff? ‘Would you believe, sir, that the Hauterive Corbies have taken a prize? I think the Archdeaconesswould sooner have been cut out by any farmer in the island than by her husband’s cousin.’
‘No need to tell me the local tittle-tattle. On that head Cassandra Tighe has been a more than sufficient oracle. By the bye, witch,’ with the memory of over-boiled fish strong upon him the Seigneur turned his piercing old gaze towards his granddaughter, ‘Cassandra informs me that Mrs. Arbuthnot is an extraordinarily pretty woman; good, too, as she is pretty. Your tutor shows poor taste in dancing attendance on anything so vapidly commonplace as Doctor Thorne’s Indian wife.’
Marjorie Bartrand, who, three weeks ago, had never changed colour before mortal, was conscious, at this moment, of blushing furiously before the Reverend Andros. Still more did she quail under the eyes of Sylvestre, who stood, in his faded puce and silver, listening, with the unabashed frankness that characterises servants of his age and nation, to their talk. From her grandfather all she need fear was a little searching banter, directed towards herself. Let the dramatic instincts of Sylvestre be aroused, and he was capable of waylaying Geoffrey Arbuthnot—yes, and of inviting confidence respecting the most intimate family concerns at Geff’s next visit. It needs personal acquaintance with a Frenchman of Sylvestre’s type to realise how the passion for scandalettes, smouldering through long years of solitude and disuse, would be ready at the first handful of fuel supplied to break forth anew!
‘Doctor and Mrs. Thorne were at the rose-show. The proceeds of the refreshment stall go, this June, to some sort of charity, so Mrs. Thorne, of course, presided there. But Mrs. Thorne is one of the people I never can find two words to say to.’
‘Our solemn-eyed Cantab finds a great many more than two words, it would appear. Let me help you to a merry-thought, witch. You have nothing but bones on your plate.’
Marjorie picked her merry-thought, as she finished her dinner, in silence. Over dessert, however—Sylvestre’s inquisitive face fairly vanished from the scene—she plucked up courage and spoke:
‘We have been making nimble but ridiculous conjectures, sir. One could not well speak of this before Sylvestre. Miss Tighe made sure of the Arbuthnot family history, you know, and——’
‘Avoid expletives. I know nothing, until it is your pleasure to inform my ignorance.’
‘I mean Cassandra believed, from whispers she heard in Petersport, that Mrs. Arbuthnot was kept too much in the background. It would be a right and kindly thing, we thought, for me to call on her, and so—and so——’
‘Take your time, Marjorie; slur over nothing. We have a long evening before us.’
‘Well, sir,’ desperately, ‘I called. And our solemn-eyed Cantab is not a married man at all. The name of the Mr. Arbuthnot who dances attend ... who visits at Dr. Thorne’s house, is Gaston. He is a cousin of Geff’s, I—I mean of my tutor’s.’
The Seigneur looked deliberately at his granddaughter’s face. Then, as though politely reluctant to take further notice of her embarrassment, he lifted his gaze to a full-length portrait in pastels of some bewigged and powdered Bartrand on the opposite wall.
‘And why should we not speak of Miss Tighe’s mistake, of Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s celibacy, before Sylvestre? Remember the rascal’s Gallican blood—Sylvestre requires an occasional bit of comedy more than any of us. And so you have been acting a charade, my love, solemn-eyed tutor and all. A very pretty charade, upon my word!
The Reverend Andros Bartrand laughed drily. It was about the first time on record that he had addressed his granddaughter as ‘my love,’ and Marjorie was prompt torecognise latent sarcasm under the endearment. How terrible to reach old age, thought the child of seventeen—to read, to think, and yet outlive the power of loving; intellect surviving heart by many a year, as bodily strength in the end must survive all. What had she ever been to him but a plaything! From the hour she arrived at Tintajeux with her tempers, her four-year-old tongue, her foreign ways, the necessity of keeping a kitten to gambol before the Seigneur’s study fire had possibly been done away with. Just that! She had diverted him. At the present day she might be picturesque, shed the pleasing charm of youth upon his lawn and dinner-table. She understood the arrangement of his books. She could dust his library to admiration. And she was not afraid of him! (Marjorie omitted this, the leading clause, from her mental summing-up of personal virtues.) She was not afraid of him! When did fearlessness fail of carrying weight with a cold, strong nature like the Seigneur’s? Though her colour went and came, though her lips quivered under his irony, the girl was not afraid of him at this moment.
‘I might have known, sir, that if I was distressed it would furnish you with amusement. That is our amiable Bartrand spirit, our way of showing sympathy with others.’
‘Distressed? You astonish me. Distressed at finding that an intelligent, studious young man is in possession of his freedom? The charade, we may almost call it the Arbuthnot drama, grows mightily puzzling to me, a spectator. Let our worthy Cantab be bachelor or Benedict. What concern is it of ours?’
Marjorie rose from the table, with difficulty choking back her tears. ‘I love gossip as little as any one,’ she said, coldly. ‘You introduced the Arbuthnots’ name, sir, so I chose to mention that the Thornes’ friend and my tutor are two distinct persons. And I have no interest in Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s concerns! And if a drama isbeing acted, let me tell you, grandpapa, that I, for one, play no part in it. Like yourself, I am a spectator only.’
Her tone was high, but when she reached the schoolroom—friendly sanctuary in many a dumb pain of her childhood—when she looked at the ink-stained desk, the piles of books, the window through which the China roses peeped, her humour changed. Marjorie stood a self-convicted impostor in her own sight. For she knew that she was not a spectator only in the Arbuthnot drama, that she was not unmoved by the discovery of Geoffrey’s freedom. ‘Bachelor or Benedict, what concern is it of ours?’ She knew, also, that under the Seigneur’s irony lurked wholesome truth. Pluming herself on her own strength, on the Bartrand immunity from vulgar human error, she had drifted into a position from which the pride of any simple village maiden must recoil. She remembered her airs of easy patronage towards Geoffrey, from the first evening when he walked out to Tintajeux on approval, until this morning. What could she have seemed like in his sight? Had he rated her as an over-forward Miss-in-her-teens, a hoyden wearing her heart—ah, shame!—upon her sleeve? Or had he doubted her, worse humiliation still, as every honest man must doubt a girl who, under the convenient shield of Greek and Euclid, could lend herself to the small meanness of coquetry?
She walked to the window, buried her face amongst the cold, swift-falling rose-petals, then looked out on the landscape. Something strange had crept into its familiarity. There trotted Sylvestre, rake in hand, his livery exchanged for a fustian jacket, to the clover field. There were the farm buildings, there was the row of poplars, showing distinct against the sunset. The China roses gave out their faint evanescent odour; the big vault of Northern sky was stainless. And here was Marjorie Bartrand, to all outward seeming the same Marjorie Bartrand as yesterday, but outof tune, for some queer reason, with her surroundings. The dew-smelling roses, the poplars, the farm buildings, yes, old Sylvestre himself, had been her friends through her whole span of childish life. With the new life that was awakening, with the stir of alien emotion in her breast, they were unsympathetic. Geoffrey Arbuthnot—what Geoffrey thought of her, what Geoffrey felt towards her—these were the questions burning in Marjorie’s soul, transforming her, as no lengthening of skirts or plaiting of hair had ever done, from a child to a woman.
Suddenly a man’s quick step advanced along the gravel road that led from the side lodge to the Manoir. The step stopped; Marjorie heard her grandfather’s voice. She put her head forth through the window, hoping, dreading that Geff, repentant after their half quarrel of the forenoon, might have walked out to Tintajeux—to be forgiven. In lieu of Geff’s stalwart outline, the diminutive figure of the country postman met her sight. The Seigneur, ready always as a boy for the moment’s amusement, was overlooking the contents of the village letter bag.
‘A letter for you, witch.’ Clear, resonant, rang the old voice, as Andros Bartrand caught sight of Marjorie. ‘A letter, and a bulky one. The address is written in a hand that savours of the Alma Mater. The postmark is “Local.” I am to open it for you, of course?’
‘If you do I start for Spain to-night—this moment!’ cried Marjorie, with fine, Bartrand presence of temper; her grandfather meanwhile proceeding, in pantomime, to carry out his suggestion. ‘If you do, sir——’
But the sequel of the threat remained unspoken. Away flew Marjorie through the low schoolroom window, away, without drawing breath, over flower border, over lawn, till she reached the Seigneur. A few seconds later her letter—her first love-letter, whispered a voice in the white and girlish conscience—lay with seal unbroken between her hands.
She could not read it here, under this open largeness of air and sky, with her grandfather’s searching eyes fixed on her face. She must heighten her pleasure, as not so many summers back she was wont to heighten the coveted flavour of peach or nectarine, by eked-out anticipation. Not here, not in the schoolroom, peopled by commonplace remembrances of Sophie le Patourel and all the long train of Sophie’s predecessors. In this ineffable moment (are not our mistakes the sweetest things we taste on earth?) she must be alone, must know that a bolt was drawn between her happiness and the world. She entered the house with eager limbs, sped up the stairs, light still with the brief flicker that comes between sunset and dusk. She sought the shelter of her own room; a little white-draped room, where fragrant alder-blooms, flecks of foam on a deep green sea of foliage, brushed the casement, where you could feel the coolness from the orchards, where only the tired evening call of the cuckoo, the murmur of late bees, still awork in blossom dust, broke silence.
‘Miss Marjorie Bartrand, Tintajeux Manoir, Guernsey.’
Prolonging her suspense to the utmost, Marjorie ran over aloud each syllable that Geff Arbuthnot’s hand had traced. Then, with fast-beating pulse, she opened the envelope, drew forth its contents, and prepared, delightedly, to read.
The love-letter was written upon blue, most unloverlike foolscap, and consisted of three words: ‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s compliments.’ Within, carefully folded, lay Marjorie’s waist-belt, intact, as when she looped it to his bunch of roses and heliotropes in the moonlight.
So she had won obedience. Even in the light matter of keeping or not keeping a bit of ribbon she had had her way. And her breast swelled with disappointment, the hot tears rushed to her eyes. In this moment Marjorie Bartrand’s illogical heart owned Geoffrey as its master.