Dinah’s colour went and came as she traversed the corridors of the hospital beside Geoffrey. The moment they entered Ward A., the men’s accident room, she forgot her want of knowledge, of orthodoxy. ‘Explanation’ was not needed here. She saw only the rows of beds, each bed with its pallid inmate. She felt only that she was Dinah Thurston—among the poor, the simple, the suffering,—among her equals.
The patients in the ward were mostly working-men in the springtime of their strength, the majority of them victims of the late quarry accident. A few, like poor Jack, had been struck down by mishap at sea or in the harbour. Beside nearly every bed was a visitor. Here might be seen a country girl talking in whispers to her sweetheart. Here a pale wife clasped her husband’s hand, or a mother in silent anguish watched her lad’s changed face. On everypillow was a little posy of sweet-smelling cottage flowers, reminding the gaunt sufferers who lay there, patient and uncomplaining, of blue summer sky, of the freshness of fields and gardens, of home.
Number 28 had neither visitor nor posy. Poor Jack came from a remote hamlet among the Devonshire moors. His mates on board thePrincesswere afloat again. The lad had no friends, save the surgeons and nurses of the Guernsey hospital—and Geff Arbuthnot.
‘Speak to him about his own country,’ Geoffrey whispered, as his companion drew back a little; ‘Jack will dispense with any formal introduction.’
And on this, Dinah, her face overflowing with sweetest womanly compassion, stooped over the low pallet and spoke—a commonplace word or two, unworthy of raising to the dignity of print—a word or two whose homely Devonshire lilt called the blood up to Jack’s temples as though some voice from the old familiar home addressed him.
Since her marriage, Dinah had learnt to speak English, ‘with a foreign pronunciation,’ Gaston would tell her, ‘yet scarcely strong enough to be disagreeable.’ Although a tell-tale cadence was traceable, ever and again, in her speech, she had tardily succeeded in putting away the Devonshire burr that was strong on her tongue when Geoffrey met her first. Here, at Jack’s bedside, no Gaston near to be put to shame, she fell back, instinctively, upon the West Country accent, the soft, half-strange, half-familiar o’s and u’s of her childhood.
‘It’s so bad to be sick, for a young fellow like you, and away from home. We just thought you might like a talk with some one Devonshire born and bred. I wonder, now, do you and I come from the same part?’
‘I was born at Torrhill, a village out away beyond Chagford. A poor place, ma’am, on the borders of the moor—quite a poor place,’ repeated Jack apologetically.
‘Why, that is near to my own town, Tavistock!’ said Dinah. ‘We used to pass Torrhill going along the Vale of Widdicombe every autumn when we went out whortleberrying. “Torrhill, in the cold country.” I mind we children used to say, when we got snowstorms in winter, “the Widdicombe folk were picking their geese.”’
Well, and as he listened to her simple talk, to the soft West Country accent, it came to pass that Geff Arbuthnot’s heart knew a thrill of its old infatuation. No man can possibly hold two women dear at the same time. And Geoffrey was in love—the warm flesh and blood love of four-and-twenty—with an actuality, not a remembrance. But his heart thrilled at Dinah’s voice. Something in his temperament forbade him to outlive the past, wholly. It was a book that could not be clasped. A word, an accent, and the enchantment cast upon him in the long dead summer days at Lesser Cheriton would be revitalised. This was his weakness (a conscious one) always; and now he was in the dangerous state of wounded feeling when a man’s tenderness is easily arrested at rebound....
Those Devonshire o’s and u’s brought back before him in its fiery ardour the fortnight when he worshipped Dinah Thurston’s footsteps, the fortnight ending on that evening when Gaston and his friends drove past in the twilight on their return from Ely. Standing here, in the Guernsey hospital ward, Geoffrey’s senses recalled the rush of wheels down the village street, the lingering daylight in the low fields of Cambridgeshire sky. He remembered how Dinah’s head and throat stood out in waxen relief against the dusky arbutus hedge of the cottage garden.
And he decided, there and then,—yes, while she was chatting, low-voiced, smiling, to the lad about the moors, and the ‘cold country,’ and the autumn huckle-berrying—to return to England forthwith.
A French steamer was to touch at Petersport on Sundaymorning. That would give him to-morrow for winding up his small affairs, for taking leave of his patients, for visiting Tintajeux. He would kiss, in coldest fancy, the hair, the lips that should have made up to him for the unattainable heaven of his youth’s desire. He would look once again in Marjorie’s eyes, and go. It was possible—here, at least, might be a gleam of comfort—that Gaston and Dinah would steer clearer through their difficulties if left absolutely alone than they were doing now.
He told her of his intention when they were on their way back to the hotel.
‘And, remember, you know your way to the hospital,’ he added quickly, as Dinah was about to speak. ‘I hope when I am gone you will pay Jack many a kind little visit, your hands as full of fruits and flowers as they were to-day.’
‘When you are gone!’ echoed Dinah, blankly. The fear smote her that with Geoffrey’s going, such slack hold as she still had upon Gaston must be loosened. ‘I hoped you would remain here ... as long, at least, as I must. Think of all the sick people who will miss you, Geff. Think of Miss Bartrand.’
‘I shall find sick people everywhere. In the matter of doctors, Guernsey is full of better men than I.’
‘And Marjorie Bartrand?’
‘Ah! that is a different side of the question. I am conceited enough to think Miss Bartrand’s mathemathics will suffer.’
‘And you don’t care—you are not one bit sorry at giving her up? Do you know, Geoffrey, I had begun to hope——’
‘Miss Bartrand will be a Girton girl before long,’ interrupted Geoffrey. ‘Happily,’—he paused—‘she is not without self-reliance, has more than a woman’s share, perhaps, of ambition. When we see each other next it will be as fellow-students in Cambridge.’
Dinah knew the tone of his voice. It was not a tone that invited discussion.
‘Your leaving is an ill stroke of luck for me, Geff. Day by day Gaston’s engagements seem to grow upon him. My time will be emptier than ever when you are gone.’
‘You may fill it, full as time can hold. I thought as I watched you charming poor Jack out of knowledge of his pain that you had missed your vocation. You should be a nurse. Yours are the ideal face and voice and tread that we want in the hospitals. If you ever harbour thoughts of emancipation, or of a mission,’ said Geoffrey, ‘remember my hint.’
‘When Gaston has used the last line that can be modelled from my face, for instance?’
The smile was flickering with which Dinah hazarded the surmise.
‘When Gaston has got his last inspiration from your face! Unluckily for the hospitals, that day will not come quite yet. A woman with a mission should have no such vexatious encumbrance as a husband or a lover.’
For once, Geoffrey’s tone was cynical. He recalled his parting with Marjorie Bartrand over-night.
And all this time an offer of truce lay on the mantelshelf of Dinah’s parlour; an offer directed to himself in the handwriting whose Greek e’s, whose girlish assumption of scholarship, Geoffrey’s heart knew!
Can we wonder at the pagan notion that the gods must needs hold their sides for laughter when they gaze down on the ever-twisted plot of our little lives? Geoffrey and Dinah were within a hundred feet of Miller’s house. Five minutes more and Geff must have been lifted—this time into quite other than a Fool’s Paradise, when, abruptly, a new actor, jauntily floating in cobweb Indian silk, gleaming under a scarlet sunshade, with eight-buttoned gloves, with airs, with graces innumerable, made her entrance upon the scene.
Mrs. Thorne’s manner was confident to-day, as of one with whom the world goes well. She ran skittishly down the steps leading from the hotel garden. She paused, tapping a high-heeled shoe in pretty impatience on the gravel. She looked this way and that, expectantly; at length, it would seem, decided, with a little merry shake of the head, for the chances of town over country. Then, with such ease of tread as high-heeled shoes are apt to confer on ladies whose summers are increasing, she commenced the steep descent of the hill.
‘I hope Mrs. Thorne has not been calling on me. I hope, if we stop, she will make me no pretty speeches,’ said Dinah under her breath. ‘I could not bear them just now. If Mrs. Thorne makes pretty speeches, I shall say something true to her.’
Geoffrey, man-like, showed signs of instant flight on hearing the ultimatum. He was in no vein, he said, for Linda Thorne’s fine spirits (was in no vein, I fear, for the better sex at all, in its liveliness or its asperity); he had an appointment to keep, a case of life and death, at the bedside of one of the quarry workers—would not be back till late—it was time for him to be on his road and——
‘In short,’ interrupted Dinah, ‘you have not courage to meet Mrs. Thorne!’
‘If you like to say so—yes,’ was Geff’s answer. ‘But don’t tell Mrs. Thorne the truth.’ He whispered this to Dinah at parting. ‘Or tell her such truth only as affects herself, not you.’
Dinah, however, was not in a temper for advice, even Geoffrey’s. Erect of carriage, with a flush of the cheeks, a sparkle in the eyes, Dinah walked grandly up the hill, determined, at every cost, that final truth should be spoken between her and Mrs. Thorne, did opportunity offer.
‘So our philosopher shows valour’s better part,’ thought Linda, as Geff vanished down a turning to the right. ‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot positively declines to face me! We have never been rapturously fond of each other. Now it is to be war to the knife. Excellent, detestable young man! I accept the challenge.’
And Mrs. Thorne mentally kissed her pale buff finger tips in the direction taken by Geoffrey.
Dinah, meanwhile, had breasted the hill. Her head was held aloft, her fine arms were folded in one of those attitudes of natural repose that had always been the despair of Gaston’s pencil. To the artist who has no‘wood notes wild,’ the virtuoso with whom craft, workmanship, style, are all in all, is not perfect naturalness the most difficult to woo among the graces!
Linda spoke first. ‘So very glad to meet you. I have this moment called at Miller’s and found you absent. We can have our chat out of doors.’
She was serenely void of conscience. It was probably a mere physical sensation of antagonism that hindered Mrs. Thorne from offering poor magnificent Dinah her hand.
‘To begin with, I must unburthen my soul by confession.’ So she ran on gaily. ‘My visit was, really and truly, to your husband.’
Not a change of colour, not a shade of expression passed across the face of Gaston’s wife. She possessed the self-preserving instincts of many weaker creatures, and of her sex in general; could conceal, feign, dissemble—except under the eyes, and at the voice of him she loved.
‘The other night, at sea, just before the steamer stopped at Alderney, you must know that he and I made a bet, a very foolish one.’ Linda had the grace to redden as she remembered what that bet was about. ‘And Mr. Arbuthnot won. He wins in everything, it seems?’
A compliment may have been implied by the tone. It fell dead on Dinah Arbuthnot’s prejudiced ears.
‘And so I thought I would run up this afternoon to discharge my debt. I deposited the stakes on a corner of your mantelpiece. If you see Mr. Arbuthnot before I do, tell him, from me, that he has won,—that I am bankrupt! You will forgive me for invading your sitting-room, without leave, will you not?’
Still Dinah did not speak. Her eyes glowed, deepened until their soft English hazel seemed turned to black.
‘I have known you long enough—we are sufficiently intimate,’ went on Linda, feeling that she was being forced into the fencing attitude—‘for me to venture on such a liberty?’
‘You can venture where you choose.’ Forth came the reply in Dinah’s full, rounded tones. ‘The room is Gaston’s. How can I question your right of entering it? But I must ask you not to speak of intimacy. If I saw you daily, until the last day I live, I should never be intimate with you.’
Her voice was crystal clear, by reason of its low pitch. Every word was weighted by passionate, long pent-up feeling. Linda Thorne shifted about, ill at ease, on the feet that a minute ago had danced under her weight so airily.
‘We ought, positively, to see more of each other! I think it quite too charming of you to be so sincere—quite. I always say to my friends—“Mrs. Arbuthnot has that most refreshing, that rarest of gifts, sincerity.”’
‘Do you say this? Saying this, do you mean to speak well of me?’
‘Dearest Mrs. Arbuthnot! Can you doubt the honesty of my intentions?’
‘Never say it again. Be generous enough at least to spare me your praise.’
The rapier points had lost their buttons. Linda Thorne fell into position quickly. That Dinah, good Griselda-like woman, loved her careless husband to the pitch of jealous idolatry, had been patent to her long before. Still, viewing the Arbuthnot household from her own level, Linda’s judgment was—that Griselda had consolations. Mild ones, if you will: the devotion of Lord Rex Basire, impartially offered to every pink-and-white nonentity he came across; the constant society, tinged by that glamour which beautiful women confer on all their relationships, of the excellent, detestable Scotch cousin, Geoffrey Arbuthnot. But consolations, nevertheless.
And this judgment sharpened her reply.
‘If I were to refrain from praising you, my dear creature,I should lay myself open to the charge of envy, the one vice,’ observed Linda, with pathetic self-depreciation, ‘which I am free from. Every man in this island, my own good husband included, sounds your praise. You have absolutely a queue—I mean,’ considerately translating, ‘a little train of conquests! Lord Rex Basire, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘I ask you to stop! In the class of life I come from,’ exclaimed Dinah, aflame, ‘we hold it unworthy for a married woman to make conquests.’
‘Rather severe, surely! Cleopatra may never have known she had conquered, until Anthony’s peace was gone.’
‘Just as we hold it unworthy in any woman, married or single, to beguile the husband of another.’
A tiny pink-hued veil reached to the tip of Linda’s nose. We may assume that the veil concealed Linda’s usual percentage of well-applied rice powder. But a gleam of white anger showed through veil and powder alike. A nervous quiver worked around her thin lips. For a moment it seemed as though Mrs. Thorne’s vulnerable point were found, as though her antagonist’s last thrust had gone home.
Then she recovered herself without too palpable effort. She laughed good-humouredly.
‘Our strain is getting over-tragic. We live in the day of little things. Sensation is out of vogue. Nobody pushes husbands down wells. Nobody “beguiles” the husbands of worthier people. Even if it were otherwise, if Viviens were as the sands of yonder Channel, your happiness, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot, would be secure.’ It must be confessed that Linda made her counter-stroke with admirable neatness. ‘A beautiful woman married to an artist holds him in chains, rose-decked ones, of course, but chains—chains.’
She forced Dinah to touch fingers. She covered herretreat under a little roulade of interjections sent back, with grimace of friendliness, across an expressive shoulder. ‘So fortunate we left thePrincess! Never could dear Robbie have stood the terrors of that night! One hears whispers on all sides of heroic courage! Mrs. Arbuthnot’s name foremost!’ Then Linda Thorne tripped down the hill, by virtue of superior coolness mistress, outwardly, of the situation, but with her heart thumping uneasily, with the queerest, hottest sense experience had ever brought her of discomfiture and defeat.
That Dinah’s temper had reached the point which chemists call flashing point was certain. Another encounter like this, with sharpened memories on both sides, probably with the added element of an audience, and either Linda Thorne or Dinah Arbuthnot must become ridiculous.
It was a dilemma, thought Linda, out of which the finest tact, the cleverest self-effacement, could scarcely help one. She was like a prime minister—the presumptuous simile tickled her—a prime minister who, having lost the lead of the House, would fain transfer his power, gracefully, to the chief of the Opposition.
Dinah was that chief; and she, Linda Thorne, was genuinely ready to abdicate. There was in Linda’s nature a thin stratum of Bohemianism; the bulk of the woman was Philistine. She liked small popularities, to air her domestic excellences, her devotion to her Robbie! She liked to talk serious talk. She liked to dine with the Archdeacon! Sooner than run the risk of scandal, or go through scenes of such dimensions as this scene with Dinah, she felt that it would be well to take Robbie and the infant, pack up her portmanteau, and fly. Oh, if Mrs. Arbuthnot—a bright thought striking her—could but be made to pack uphersand go—never to return! Even if poor Dinah took the worshipped Gaston with her, Mrs. Thorne felt that the price would not be too high. She would forfeit everysentimental friendship in the world sooner than again encounter the scorn, the passion of Dinah’s girlish face. Above all—with an audience!
It was, really, this vision of an audience, of public battles-royal, of ridicule, perhaps of acknowledged defeat, which fired Linda Thorne’s conscience to the height of renunciation.
Arriving at the garden gate of The Bungalow she heard, no unfamiliar sound, the voices of Rahnee and of Gaston Arbuthnot, at high play within. Before discovering herself, the mistress of the house peeped for a minute through the ivy-covered railings. She saw Rahnee aloft on Arbuthnot’s tall shoulder, one little skinny hand clutching tight round his neck, the other beating him stoutly with a switch.
‘Faster! Missy But’not! Dallop, dallop!’ shrieked Rahnee.
The child’s vigorous kicks were testifying to her delicious sense of power over her slave, when the unwelcome gleam of a scarlet sunshade caught her eyes.
‘Rahnee—terrible infant!’ cried Linda, falling back on the tired Indian voice that had been absent during her colloquy with Dinah. ‘Come down, naughty girl. Think how you must be teasing Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘No, me not tease Missy But’not. Go away!’ The thin arms imperiously motioned Linda’s dismissal. ‘We not want nobody—Missy But’not and Rahnee!’
‘My visit is to Rahnee exclusively,’ observed Gaston. ‘Remember, Mrs. Thorne! You warned me not to come to The Bungalow. A mysterious something might happen before five o’clock converting us for ever into enemies. But I will not have Rahnee included in the feud.’
‘Did I talk such nonsense—really?’ cried Linda, with a forced laugh. ‘Well, who knows? Perhaps it will turn out that I was a prophetess, after all. Rahnee, little tyrant, come down this instant.’
At a signal from Mrs. Thorne the ayah, who had been placidly dozing on her square of carpet in the shade, arose. With a quick flank movement the black woman bore down on Rahnee. Upon this, Rahnee, clinging closer to Gaston, raised her shrill voice to its topmost limits.
‘Rahnee, I command! Oh! dear—dear, what a trial children are at a high temperature! Well, then, if you won’t be good,’—Linda drew from her pocket a little silvery packet tied with cherry-coloured ribbon—‘if Rahnee won’t be a good girl.... What does she think mamma has brought her from town?’
‘Tandy!’ cried Rahnee, with a sudden accession of repentant wisdom. ‘Rahnee not tease poor Missy But’not no more.’
And bestowing two or three resonant kisses on Gaston, the child slid down out of his arms. She gave her mother a careless caress, then vanished, hiding herself and her ‘tandy’ under the ayah’s ample cotton cloak, into The Bungalow.
‘She really is not a bad little monkey,’ said Linda, who thoroughly believed in her own system of education. ‘Touch Rahnee’s feelings and you can at once bring her to obedience. Feeling is the grand requisite in a child’s nature.’
‘Who would not be virtuous,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, ‘if virtue were always rewarded by providential sugar candy?’
‘And I so wanted to have a few minutes’ quiet talk with you. Do you know, Mr. Arbuthnot, I am ... seriously afraid’—for once Linda Thorne’s words came slow and haltingly—‘seriously afraid ... you will pardon me, I hope, for saying this—that Mrs. Arbuthnot cannot be well.’
‘Dinah!Why, she was fresh as a lily when I parted from her this morning. I have indirectly heard of her looking her best since——’
But Gaston’s face was unsmiling. The moment whenhe shuffled and re-shuffled the écarté packs, half a dozen men crowding to the verandah of Colonel de Gourmet’s drawing-room, returned upon him with significant and disagreeable clearness.
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot is looking exquisite. I thought I had never admired her so much as in her Quaker dress, her simple country hat! Still, there may be a bloom which exceeds health, a white which is too transparent. Your wife strikes me—how shall I describe her state—as low-spirited, hysterical!’
‘She eats and sleeps well. She can walk half round the island. Difficult to conceive of a young woman with Dinah’s magnificent constitution as hysterical!’
‘But she is so. I met Mrs. Arbuthnot on my way down from Miller’s Hotel. I told her about our foolish wager, and how I had honestly called to discharge my debt. A propos de bottes, you will find your gloves on a corner of the mantlepiece.’
‘And Dinah?’
‘Dinah, I was afraid, looked like weeping, under the broad light of day, in the open street.’
‘Impossible! She is little given to idle tears, even when cause exists for shedding them.’
Gaston had reddened. He made the statement in the quiet tone of a man sure of his facts.
‘I felt as though I had committed some horrible crime—and of course, when people’s nerves are unstrung, it is sheer cruelty to attempt to argue with them. Our soft Guernsey air may be at the root of the mischief. Half the disorders in these Channel places are nervous ones.’
‘My wife does not know the meaning of nerves. Your kindheartedness, dear Mrs. Thorne, for once leads you wide of the mark. Will you let me smoke a cigarette?’ asked Gaston, consulting his watch. ‘In ten minutes’ time I must be on my way to the Fort.’
They walked up and down, amicably chatting among the pleasant blue-gray shadows of the lawn. Neither was ignorant of the art by which speech can be used for the concealment of thought, and Dinah’s name was not mentioned until the moment came for Gaston’s departure. Then Linda Thorne spoke again, and to the point.
‘I meant every word I uttered, Mr. Arbuthnot, and my best advice to you is, give your wife change. Why not try Sark? It is the lightest air we have in the Archipelago. Or, better still, run over for ten days to Brittany.’ In saying this, she glanced at him through her eyelashes. ‘You must, at least, allow that I am unselfish?’
‘I allow only that you want to get rid of us,’ laughed Gaston Arbuthnot, with imperturbable neutrality. ‘Also, that your way of working the scheme out is charming. You pack up wise counsel, Mrs. Thorne, in silver paper, tied with rose-coloured ribbon, as you do Rahnee’s candy!’
The French waitress met Dinah as she entered the hotel.
Madame Thorne had called—there was scarce five minutes since. The visitor insisted ... but insisted on entering. A thousand amiabilities were to be transmitted by the tongue of Louise, and something—the Frenchwoman shrugged her shoulders vaguely—had been left in Madame’s salon for Monsieur.
‘I know all about it,’ cried Dinah, with readiness. ‘Mrs. Thorne and I have just been talking together. It is quite right, Louise.’
She assumed the lightest, most cheerful tone of which she was mistress, feeling, with inward smart, that the French shrug was over-vague, that a glimmer of suspicious knowledge showed on the serving-woman’s face. Then she walked, her step mock-elastic, a poorly counterfeited smile upon her lips, to her sitting-room. Shutting the door, with the automatic care human beings bestow on trivial actions in times when their hearts are fullest, Dinah walked straight to the fireplace. The ‘something’ left for Monsieur was evidently before her. A letter, almost amounting to a packet, stood on the mantelpiece. It was addressed in large decisive handwriting to ‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel, Guernsey.’
(Cette chère Smeet! Elle sait si bien s’effacer! A pair ofiron-gray men’s gloves, lying, modestly, on the farther corner of the shelf did not arrest Dinah Arbuthnot’s sight.)
‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel, Guernsey.’
Well, reader, if Dinah had possessed only a few grains more of worldly experience it must have been clear to her that this letter never issued from The Bungalow. In the first place, by reason of the handwriting—when did a woman of Linda’s culture affect the Greek e’s, the up and down characters of an undergraduate? In the second, by the ignorance of common English etiquette which the use of the title ‘Mr.’ betrayed.
But Dinah had no worldly experience at all, neither had she the imaginativeness which renders some equally untaught people nimble at guessing. In her mind was one engrossing thought—Gaston. In her ears rang the text of Mrs. Thorne’s message. ‘I deposited the stakes on a corner of your mantleshelf. Tell your husband from me that he has won, that I am bankrupt.’
There was no room, in her tempest of heart and brain, for doubts that could have been favourable to her own peace.
‘Mr. G. Arbuthnot, Miller’s Hotel.’ She took the letter—at first with unwillingness—in her hands. She turned it over and over. The envelope was too small for all that the sender had forced it to contain; it adhered on one side, only. A touch, Dinah thought, shrinking from her thought, and the edges must come asunder. Her hands trembled so violently that she let the letter fall, with some force, on the ground. As she picked it up she saw that the narrow edge of adhering envelope had become narrower. An instant more of dalliance—and the temptation, strong and imperious, to open it altogether, had taken hold of her.
‘Be true to yourself,’ whispered a still small voice, the voice of Dinah’s better nature, ‘loyal, upright, as you have striven to be from the day you married Gaston Arbuthnot. Go away from him to-night, to-morrow, if you have not wifely courageto live your life out at his side. But go, with head erect, looking neither to the right hand nor the left, till the last.’
Then rose another voice, bolder of tone, of strain less heroic.
‘Poor, foolish, hot-hearted woman! Is it not possible that you are brewing a thunderstorm in a tea-cup? Why these turns and twistings of conscience? Linda Thorne, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, thinking no evil, make one of the silly wagers common among idle people who inhabit an idle world. The lady is the loser, calls at her friend’s hotel to discharge her debt, and meeting the friend’s wife, confesses, playfully, that she is bankrupt! Open that quarter-inch of yawning envelope, as Linda Thorne, no doubt, intended you to do. In Gaston’s absence, you have often opened letters addressed to him, by his own desire. Where is the fancied line between former right and present wrong. How could it matter to Gaston if you did see the contents of a packet in which there is probably not a syllable of writing?’
And Dinah’s heart was vanquished by the meanness of opportunity. She opened it.
A length of folded ribbon met her sight; a tiny bouquet, odorous still with yesterday’s sweetness, of briar and of heliotrope; a sheet of notepaper upon which one word was written. Bare hints—outlines of some unknown story, which jealous passion might easily colour, fill up with vivid detail, endow with pulsating life! After the first moment’s shock, Dinah stood like a woman petrified. Her eyes were fixed on theone word—never meant for their perusal! Her face was bloodless. She felt cold, stupefied with anger. It seemed to her that she could not drag herself from the spot where this hateful, sure light had dispelled her darkness for ever. She waited—as though waiting could avail her! At last the striking of a clock caused her to start. She had got to dress, she remembered, to face men and women, to dine—for Gaston’s sake. Withan effort that almost cost her bodily pain, Dinah made her way into her bedroom. She locked, double locked the door. Then holding the envelope and its contents between her shivering hands, she tried to force herself into calmness, to resolve on conduct, if that were possible, which should be just to herself and to her husband.
He was guilty of no actual wrong-doing. This thought presented itself, in clear pure light, amidst all the dusky half-shades of her mind. Gaston was fickle, neglectful of herself, too easily led captive along the road of pleasure. Worse things than these she could never think of him. To the moment of her death he must remain her best beloved and her lord; the one man, could the hour of choosing come again, whom she would choose out of ten thousand. She did not accuse Gaston of wrong. She sought not to blacken Linda. For aught she knew, these delicately sentimental friendships, these intimacies which permitted tender expression—the yielding of a ribbon or a flower!—might, in the world above her head, be held innocent.
What she did know was that she, Dinah, belonged not to that world, desired no further education in its usages. A comedy ... an amusing drawing-room charade, perhaps ... was in course of rehearsal between a tired Indian lady, needing sensation, and her husband. She would not passively, ignobly stand by, a spectator. She would drag out her life of paltry distrust no longer. Gaston’s formal leave must be asked for, before she started; money also—enough to take her from Guernsey to the Devonshire moors. This would be all. Briefly, if Heaven would help her, honestly, she would tell Gaston what wish lay next her heart. And Gaston was not likely to thwart her! By Monday—oh, that it could be earlier—she would go back to her own people, to a life shone on by no sun, watered by no shower, a life shut out from keen pleasure as from keen humiliation for evermore.
Dinah sank into a chair and fell to examining the hue and texture of the ribbon, curiosity, for the moment, out-balancing cold repugnance. It was of foreign make, she saw; a relic, doubtless, of those days when two people,who might have suited each other, used to meet, to exchange furtive whispers in a Paris salon; a memento sufficiently precious to have survived through a decade of divided years, and to become the object of a keenly contested wager between them now.
‘Tell your husband,’ with fresh purport Linda’s message returned to her, ‘that he has won, and I am bankrupt.’
She put back the enclosures in their cover, not suffering herself to smell the flowers’ languid odour, or look again on the one word whose import her jealousy divined and magnified. Then, just as she had hidden the letter away in a secret drawer of her dressing-case, the first dinner-bell was set ringing, and Dinah bethought her that, if she would carry out Gaston’s parting request, she must go into the dining-room, alone.
No further shirking of that ‘alone’ was practicable. On former occasions she had quietly contrived to absent herself from the public table when Gaston dined abroad, pleading headaches for heartaches, preferring tea to food, ringing the changes by which neglected wives, when they have common sense, keep their own sad counsel apart from the world. The time was past for deceits now, either towards herself, or others. Dinner, to-day, like all her future dinners, for twenty or thirty years, say, must, perforce, be eaten without Gaston.
To drift—here, in truth, seemed that which lay before her! To drift! At the present moment to speculate on possible effects—to vacillate over a tucker, a locket, the colour of one’s dinner dress. A despairing human soul, perplexed over the rival merits of pink, white, or blue; a soul which, when love shone on it, had less than its feminineshare of toilet vanity! As poor Dinah hesitated, her thoughts travelled back, by no road she knew, to Saturday’s rose-show, her first meeting with Rex Basire, her earliest distinct doubt of Gaston’s truthfulness. She decided to put on the black dress she wore that day, to pin a white rose, Gaston’s flower by predilection, in her hair, to wear a silver bracelet, Gaston’s first present after their marriage, on her wrist.
How fair, how marvellously fair she was! The fact struck Dinah with a sense of newness as she stood, waiting for the last dinner-bell, before her glass. Surely her looks, joined to such lavish love as she had given, might have contented the heart, the pride of the most exacting husband. If she had only had more mind. There was the flaw, the fatal deficiency to a man with whom mind was all in all, like Gaston Arbuthnot.
She scrutinised the moulding of her temples, the lines of her perfectly cut head. In outward proportion she thought there was not much amiss. It must be the quality of the brain that was poor. There must be an inherited peasant slowness, a bluntness of perception or wit,somethingwhich disabled her from holding her own against the taught graces, the pliant, inexhaustible lightness of such an one as Linda Thorne. She might, if lowlier duties had fallen to her, have been clever enough to manage a house, to look after her husband’s interests, to bring up children. Amongst ladies and gentlemen—oh, the bitterness with which she uttered the titles of gentility half aloud—amongst ladies and gentlemen she had no place, no chance.
And in her nature, not thoroughly sounded as yet, but of whose depths the last few days had vaguely informed her—in her innermost nature were evil things that a constant pressure of temptation might bring to the surface. She was not like Geoffrey. No ministering to others could fill her life, at any rate not while she was young, while thecry for love had the double keenness of a physical and of a moral want. If she continued a hanger-on of the world that Gaston loved,—‘some one who must be asked, don’t you know, occasionally, on sufferance,’—she would, one day, meet with homage, differently offered, and from a different man to Rex Basire. Was she sure that gratitude would not be awakened in her, then vanity? Was she sure she might not decline, step by step, to the condition of that most pitiable among women—a wife, true to the cold letter of her fealty, who has at once outlived her husband’s affection and the stings of her own self-contempt?
Dinah started, guiltily, as the sharp clang of the dinner-bell roused her into final action. It took a good many minutes before she could recover sufficiently to face the ordeal that lay before her. At last, arming herself by the reflection that henceforth all life’s common actions must be gone through alone, and under a certain cloud of suspicion, she made her way to the dining-room. After a moment’s trembling heartsickness, she pushed back one of the double doors—entered.
A hush, an involuntary suspension of knife and fork greeted her. The light through a western window fell full upon her golden head. The whiteness of her throat and hands was thrown into brilliant relief by the sombre dress she wore.
‘A saint of Holman Hunt’s—Early manner,’ thought a high-church curate, away on his four weeks’ holiday, and who never would know more of Dinah than the large sad eyes, the lips’ carnation, the nimbus of sunlight-coloured hair.
‘Can the complexion be absolutely real?’ floated through the brain of more than one duly aged and authorised feminine critic.
Miller, with his professional little run and smile, came forward. He ushered Dinah Arbuthnot to her place.
‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot not expected, I believe?’ asked the host, as Dinah prepared to take her seat.
‘No, Mr. Arbuthnot is dining at the Fort.’
‘And Mr. Geoffrey will not return till late. Then I may be allowed to fill this vacant chair? Thank you, madam. I should not have ventured to place a stranger next Mrs. Arbuthnot without permission.’
A minute later Dinah discovered—no stranger, but her husband’s friend, Lord Rex Basire, at her side.
Dinah Arbuthnot’s face asked vividly for explanation.
‘Made sure Arbuthnot would be here—that is to say,ourArbuthnot’—Lord Rex stammered; he showed embarrassment that sat on him oddly, as he apologised for his uninvited presence. ‘The comings and goings of the Cambridge cousin are, naturally, beyond my powers of calculation.’
‘Naturally,’ echoed Dinah. She remembered, with a pang of self-reproach, what manner of errand kept Geoffrey absent.
‘Strolled round here early—by accident, you know—thought I’d ask myself to dinner with your husband. Clean forgot, till Miller or some one put it into my head, it was guest night. That was half an hour ago. Ought to have started off, instanter, to Fort-William.’
‘And why, pray, did you not do so?’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot, can you ask me!’
Rex Basire’s tone adequately supplemented his words. And Dinah’s pulse quickened. She was on the threshold, she remembered, of a new, an emancipated life. A wife who lives apart from her husband must accept her position, grow used to many things, to every complexion of whisper among the rest. That is the world’s immutable sentence. Away from Gaston, divorced from the arm which, during four years, had cradled her in warm safety—she mustlearn, like other unloved women, to rely on her own strength—her strength and the chivalry of all such knights-errant, such Rex Basires, as should cross her path!
About the chivalry more might have to be learnt, hereafter. Dinah realised, before the first step of her downward journey was taken, that her strength was weakness. She felt as though all eyes around the table must watch her with suspicion, read her secret. Rex Basire’s tone of assured admiration brought the blood miserably, shamefully to her cheeks.
He saw and misinterpreted the blush.
‘Thought, you know, as there was a rumour of the cousin’s absence, I should have a chance of getting next you.’
‘You would have been better amused elsewhere, my lord. With Geff I can talk or be silent as I like. Geff does not mind.’
Lord Rex on this made some whispered hit at the ‘model cousin’s’ excellence. As he ate his half cold soup murmured comparisons fell from him as to the men who are made of flesh and blood, poor devils! and the other men, too good for this world, who are made of ice, yes, ice, by Jove! But he was not great at covert allusion. The metaphorical ice got mixed with the metaphorical flesh and blood: his nominatives were nowhere. Breaking down, rather ignominiously, Lord Rex smothered his failure under a capacious sigh.
Dinah turned to him, with cheeks still burning. ‘I am afraid I did not understand. Men of ice! Men of flesh and blood! Were you talking of Geff or of yourself, Lord Rex?’
Despite her blush, the true eyes stopped him short, as they had so often done before. Ere Rex Basire had time to double back towards his starting-point there came an interruption—one of the trivial things not to be mentionedin heroic story, yet which do, ofttimes, determine the current of a human life. A plain little man, his large-checked suit, his open Murray proclaiming the tourist, had during the past two minutes attentively watched Lord Rex from the other side the table. Upon hearing Dinah’s mention of the name, the stranger fidgeted with his knife and fork, cleared his throat, coughed. Finally, leaning forward with a bow, it was obvious that he expected, was eager for, aristocratic recognition.
‘Lord Rex Basire, if I mistake not?’
‘Sir! You are politeness itself. But you have the better of me.’
Rex Basire accorded his interrogator a blank and frozen stare.
‘Oh, the top of St. Gothard, Lord Rex. You were travelling with the Duchess. Her grace’s carriage broke down—something wrong with the linch-pin—and as I was in the region, botanising, I had the honour of offering her grace mine. Your lordship will recollect?’
‘Her grace’s carriage is invariably breaking down. Invariably. Besides,’ drawled Lord Rex, putting up a ferocious pince-nez, and resolute to nip renewal of acquaintance in the bud, ‘we are not on the top of the St. Gothard now. Ah, Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ he addressed Dinah in as low a tone as a man’s voice can sink to without becoming an actual whisper, ‘thismakes up to one for a great deal I have suffered at your hands.’
‘Bythis,’ said Dinah, whose courage was returning, ‘do you mean the cold soup we have eaten, or the colder fish to which they are helping us?’
‘I mean the happiness of sitting beside you, of knowing I am so much forgiven that——’
‘Her grace travelled on as far as Andermatt in the carriage it was my privilege to lend her. From Andermatt, if my memory serves me right——’
‘Your memory is certain to serve you right, sir. The incident which I, it seems, have forgotten, was more than unimportant.’
Lord Rex’s manner was brutal; no other word would adequately describe it. The poor little tourist’s eyes dropped to his plate, his face turned scarlet. Dinah leaned forward on the instant. With the gentle womanliness which washerbreeding, she addressed him in her pleasant country voice:
‘My husband and I met with just the same kind of accident once. Our carriage broke down, and we had to spend six hours, in wet and darkness, between Berne and Vevey. I should not have forgotten any one who had come to our help that night.’
‘Ah—you know Switzerland, madam? Then may I ask,’ the tourist gave a piteous glance towards Lord Rex, ‘if you take an interest in the Alpine flora? I have only time to pursue such things during my holidays.’ It is possible he pronounced the word without its aspirate. ‘But botany is my hobby; I get plants enough in my five weeks to fill my leisure for the rest of the year. Now in that very region you speak of, I have found two or three specimens that are unique. If you will allow me to enumerate the Latin names, madam——’
And so on, and so on. The poor man was one of nature’s choicest bores. His information was stale, his manner of imparting it prosy; his blindness to the suffering he inflicted, absolute. Dinah’s face wore a look of kindly interest through everything. Occasionally (Lord Rex all but groaning aloud over his wasted opportunities) she would strike in with some question calculated to start the narrator afresh on new tracks, on new prosiness, if, peradventure, he chanced to lag.
She even bowed courteously to him on leaving the table d’hôte: an example not followed by Lord Rex.
‘A charming dinner, on my word!’ So he broke forth, the moment he found himself beside Dinah in the welcome freshness of the garden. ‘May I ask, Mrs. Arbuthnot, what inhuman whim made you talk to that wretched snob?’
Rex Basire’s voice went beyond the limits of petulance.
‘Why a snob?’ asked Dinah, meekly. ‘You know I can never catch the inner meaning of these names.’
‘Why? Because he was a snob. “Her grace’s carriage broke down on the top of the St. Gothard; he had had the privilege of offering his.” What the dickens did that matter to me? “Her grace travelled as far as Andermatt in his carriage.” What the dickens did that matter to him?’
‘Only this, perhaps—that her grace’s misadventure obliged the snob to go on foot.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot!—I never expect a direct answer from any woman,’ Lord Rex exclaimed with scarcely suppressed temper; ‘still, I should like to know why during a mortal three-quarters of an hour you allowed that little wretch to talk to you?’
She paused. A shade of deepened colour touched her cheek. ‘The wretch was intelligent, Lord Rex.’ (Aye, and opportune!This was a subtle parenthesis, put in by Dinah’s conscience.) ‘I don’t understand Alpine plants, but I liked to hear a good deal our tourist said about them.’
‘The ’obby he pursues during his ’olidays,’ observed Lord Rex, humorously.
Dinah turned swiftly round. A streak of sunset goldened her hair, and the delicate outlines of her face. She gave a look of farewell sincerity at Lord Rex Basire.
‘Do you remember,’ she asked him, ‘a conversation you and I had on board the steamer? It was just after my husband and the Thornes had landed at Alderney.’
Yes, Lord Rex remembered. He was not likely—this, with a sigh—to forget any hour or place in which he hadhad the good fortune to find himself alone with Mrs. Arbuthnot.
‘We spoke about class distinctions. I believe you called me a Conservative. Certainly you told me you were the most out-and-out demagogue in England. You were all for fraternity, Lord Rex. “Gardener Adam and his wife, and that sort of thing.” Labour was the universal purchase-money. Dukes and earls had best go back to the place from whence they came. Well—you meant none of this.’
Lord Rex winced. ‘Unfair on a fellow,’ he observed, ‘to be thus taken au pied de la lettre, and——’
‘You must speak in English,’ cried Dinah. ‘I have not French enough to understand your meaning.’
‘My dear Mrs. Arbuthnot! A man may hold theories,—visions of an impracticable Utopia, don’t you know ... charming—ahem! to air in exquisite company; impossible to carry out in this rough chaos of a world we live in.’
Dinah stopped for a minute or more, sedately reflecting, before she answered.
‘I think I understand. Socialistic opinions, if one is trying to make talk for a rather stupid woman at a picnic, may be well enough, especially if the rather stupid woman does not belong to one’s own station.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot! I protest——’
‘The gardener Adam, of reality, is a snob. A wretch, bound, of course, to lend his carriage to her grace, in distress, so long as he has not the impertinence to talk of duchesses or linch-pins during the remainder of his days. I have gained a new bit of wisdom, Lord Rex Basire. It is not likely I shall meet you in England. If I do, I shall remember what you said to our poor botanist—“We are not on the St. Gothard now.” You might say, massacring me through a cruel double eye-glass, “We are not in Guernsey now.” Good-night, my lord.’
She touched his hand. She passed away out of his lifewith a smile. Her step was light. The rose-tints of the sky lent a fictitious brilliancy to her face. Wonderful how that poor young woman, Mrs. Arbuthnot, kept up her spirits! So opined feminine judges, looking mercifully down upon events from the drawing-room windows of the hotel. And under the sad circumstances—the husband’s indifference to her growing hourly more pointed—to be carried away like a girl by this foolish little lord’s attention! But that is the nature of these pink-and-white, yellow-haired marionettes. The temperament, my dear madam, is not one that feels or sorrows.
Dinah Arbuthnot walked quietly to her room, then rang the bell, and told the waiting-maid that she would require nothing further, and that no one need sit up for Mr. Arbuthnot. She changed her dress for a loose wrapper, rested herself during some minutes, and with her face hidden between her hands, strove to realise the altered condition of things which lay before her.
It had been easy, an outlet to jealous anger, to declare, in the moment’s heat, she would no longer live with Gaston Arbuthnot. During dinner, though the strain was tense, there had been a certain excitement, a sense of perilous adventure, to keep her up. Now came blank reality. She must look at her position, as a stranger would, from outside. If she purposed in good earnest to seek refuge with her Devonshire kinsfolk, she had best benefit by Geoffrey’s escort on Sunday, had best, wisely and soberly, begin to pack to-night.
Well, reader, ‘to pack,’ however chaotic one’s mental condition, means—to use one’s arms, see to the folding of one’s latest intricate furbelows, make sure that one’s newest bonnet shall not be crushed. Dinah got through this part of her work well enough; nay, inasmuch as packing brought her muscles into play, felt the better for it. Then came the bitter beginning of the end. She must sorther trinkets, must decide which things it was right to take with her into exile, which leave.
Gaston was the most careless man living. The key of his dressing-case was in his wife’s hands, everything he owned of value in her keeping. It thus became needful, in looking over her own possessions, that she should take count of his. And in doing so their four years of married life returned, month by month, almost hour by hour before her.
A legacy of two hundred pounds had come to Dinah from a well-to-do farmer uncle a few days after her wedding. ‘Too much, rather, to give to the poor, not enough, certainly, to invest,’ declared Gaston—they were at the time in Paris. ‘We will go shares, my dear child. I will take one of the good uncle’s hundreds for cigarettes and you shall have the other hundred for chiffons.’
Dinah wanted no chiffons—at Gaston’s insistence, possessing more millinery already than she knew what to do with. So her hundred pounds were mainly spent in buying pretty things for her husband. Gaston was fonder of rings and pins than are most born Englishmen. He had also an innocent way of directing Dinah’s admiration to artistic trifles in the jewellers’ windows of the Palais Royal and the Boulevards—trifles which were tolerably sure to find their way to his own dressing-table before the next morning.
Ah, their good laughs when these innocent ways became too bare-faced! Ah, the golden Paris days, when each hour was sweeter than the last, when they used to jest together (little knowing) at the musty axiom which limits a pair of true lovers’ happiness to the shining of a single moon!
All the happiness—on one side, all the love—was gone now, thought Dinah, as trinket after trinket, memorials every one of them, passed through her fingers. She, who, in the bloom of hope, believed all things, trusted all things, had become harsh, unrelenting, a woman bent, of her ownfree will, though it cost her her heart’s blood, upon leaving her husband’s side. And Gaston—nay, of him she would think no further ill, to-night, at least! The proofs—little needed—of his light faith she had locked away, witnesses against him until the last hour that both should live. But she would think no new evil of him to-night. She would seek her pillow, leave the preparations for her journey as they stood. Midnight was now drawing near. To-morrow, she thought, when sleep should have renewed her strength, this beginning of her changed existence, this saying of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ instead of ‘ours’ might come easier.
To-day was still to-day. They belonged outwardly, in the world’s sight, to each other yet.
There on the bedroom mantelshelf was an unfinished model Gaston had made of her, a sketch which, had it reached marble, might some day have worked its way inside the walls of the Academy. Among the neat proprieties of her dressing-table were two of his modelling tools, not altogether innocent of clay. There lay a half-burnt cigarette ... a glove that he had worn.... Ah, heaven! And with this passionate affection at her heart, she was unloved of him, had no child with tiny tender clasp to make up to her for her husband’s coldness! And she was still only a girl in years; and life but yesterday, it seemed, was sweet.
If Gaston, with clairvoyant power, could have seen her at this moment in her extremity of pain, doubt not that the couple of hilly miles between Fort-William and Miller’s Hotel had proved an insufficient barrier to keep him from her side. Common men, however, have common lights to guide them. They reap even as they sow.
When twelve o’clock struck and Dinah’s aching head sank on its pillow, Gaston Arbuthnot, with unburthened conscience, was settling himself placidly down to poker—the little game of draw in which he had vouchsafed to act as mentor to the youngsters of the Maltshire Royals.
It was a custom, dating farther back than Andros Bartrand’s childhood, that the Seigneurs of Tintajeux should hold a stiff and formal levée on the first Saturday of every alternate month.
The ceremony, shorn of its former old-world stiffness, lingered on, and to the feminine mind was one of the most popular Sarnian entertainments. For Andros Bartrand, with his fine manner, his handsome face, his learning, his temper, was scarcely less a favourite with the sex at fourscore than he had been in the flower of his age, half a century earlier.
‘Will this generation of progress, will the coming democracy ever produce men of eighty like our Seigneur?’ the Guernsey ladies, Conservative to a woman, would ask.
And he who had argued that there may be higher ideals of an octogenarian than are comprised by culture, originality, vigorous health, an arrogant profile, and a courtly bow, would have stood poor chance of escaping without scar from their hands.
‘The Seigneur grows robuster every year,’ remarked Mrs. Verschoyle to Cassandra Tighe, on the afternoon of July 2. The ‘Tintajeux levée’ had opened. The elder ladies were ranged along the row of white and gold arm-chairs that surrounded the drawing-room. ‘Time stands still with Andros Bartrand. Look at him talking—flirting, I call it—withRosie. The child declares, if the Seigneur would only ask her, she is quite prepared to answer “Yes.”’
‘What would Lord Rex Basire say to that?’ whispered Cassandra, warming up at the faintest suggestion of a love affair.
Mrs. Verschoyle looked mournfully perplexed, the chronic state of her good, maternal, overburdened soul.
‘Lord Rex Basire? One certainly seems,’ said poor Mrs. Verschoyle inappositely, ‘to have seen less of him since the picnic. But then we have no gentleman to leave a card at the Fort! That is the worst of an unmarried colonel in a regiment. One really cannotdo the polite thing. Does any one know, I wonder,’ a faint pink blush suffused the whiteness of Mrs. Verschoyle’s cheek as some misty sequence of ideas ran through her brain—‘does any one know if there is truth in this rumour of the Arbuthnot family leaving the island?’
‘I can give reliable information about one member of the Arbuthnot family,’ cried the prettiest, least wise, of the de Carterets. This young lady, in the absence of better amusement, had been listening to the exchange of confidences between her elders. ‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot leaves Guernsey to-morrow. I am sure of my facts, because papa went to inquire at Miller’s after a room for Fred. You know, Mrs. Verschoyle, that we have had a telegram from Lloyd’s? Fred will be home on Monday.’
‘I hope your poor mother will get no shock when she sees him,’ Mrs. Verschoyle answered sadly. ‘Not one young man in fifty brings back a constitution from India.’
‘And Miller said the younger Mr. Arbuthnot’s room would be vacant to-morrow. I appreciated Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot highly at the subalterns’ picnic, and should like to have seen more of him, only Marjorie Bartrand would not let me! Yes, Miss Bartrand,’ ran on Ada de Carteret guilelessly, but putting additional meaning in hertone as Marjorie came within earshot, ‘and—although this is not meant for you to hear—I can tell by your face that you are listening, that your conscience pricks you.’
Listening! Ay, that was Marjorie Bartrand, in truth, outwardly listening, with strained sense, to the even hum of small-talk that filled the rooms, inwardly awaiting, with the keen expectancy that hardly needs the help of bodily hearing, for the step, the voice whose absence already made the world blank to her.
‘I shall certainly not leave Guernsey without calling on the Seigneur—to be paid.’
To the cruel words, to such remote and slender hope of reconciliation as they might hold forth, Marjorie’s heart clung tenaciously. She was softer of manner to-day than was her wont, played her part of hostess with studied dutifulness towards her grandfather’s visitors. The annual Sunday School treat would come on next week, said the rectoress of some remote country parish. Of course one might count on Marjorie Bartrand to lead the games? Had the great St. Laurens scandal reached Tintajeux, asked another? Maître Giroflée and his wife, the best church people in the parish, gone over to Salem because the rector had cut down their pew—good solid oak, it must be confessed, worth so much a foot—in making his chancel restorations!
Oh, with what weary patience the poor child listened to it all, making occasional random answer, when answer was needed. How utterly had her vivid child’s life lost its interest! How flat, how dissonant was every sound on this planet to Marjorie Bartrand, so long as the footstep for whose approach she yearned was silent!
‘Why—witch! Your cheeks are as white as your gown,’ remarked the Reverend Andros, happening, presently, to come across her. ‘We must get our Cambridge Esculapius to prescribe for you. What isArbuthnot doing with himself?’ added the Seigneur, with a hard look at his granddaughter. ‘We are short of the inferior sex to-day. Why is Arbuthnot not here to make himself useful among the tea-cups?’
‘Afternoon parties are not much in my tutor’s way. But I believe—yes,’ faltered Marjorie, with one of her dark blushes, ‘I believe—at this moment—I see a figure like Mr. Arbuthnot’s crossing the moor. We will put a tea-cup in each of his hands, sir, as soon as we feel certain of having caught him.’
She fled into the recess of a window in the smaller drawing-room. Standing there, shrouded by the lace draperies, she wondered ifmorethan a dozen pair of eyes had noticed her change of colour! She clenched her hands until the nails impressed her soft palms painfully. She essayed, with will, to keep her rebel cheeks from flaming, her lips from weakness. She marvelled by what art she could render her manner passive—Marjorie Bartrand, who during her seventeen years of life had, at every pass, gone aggressively to the fore, for good or for evil—on her tutor’s entrance.
His ring came at the front-door bell. ‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ was ceremoniously announced by Sylvestre. The French windows stood open. With the occult sixth sense which, in lovers, supplements the ordinary ones of sight and hearing, Marjorie divined that Geoffrey walked at once to the lawn in search of the Seigneur. After a time she could hear his voice—excellent spirits Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot seemed to be in—as he made his way through the crowded outer room. She caught the laughter of Ada de Carteret, the thin gay tones of Rosie Verschoyle. A sharp cross fire of raillery was being levelled against Geoffrey on the subject of his abrupt departure. Marjorie could detect and misconstrue the coolness with which he turned this raillery aside. By and by came a newexcitement. The Maltshire dandies were arriving in force, and in the general flutter which ensued upon this important crisis no single voice was longer distinguishable. Marjorie’s pulse went quicker. She knew that her time had come. Three or four seconds passed breathlessly, then a hand drew back the curtain behind which she was half concealed. Geoffrey Arbuthnot stood beside her.
‘I have kept my word. I am here to wish you and the Seigneur good-bye.’ His composed speech stirred every fibre of Marjorie’s repentant, passionate heart. ‘It is a surprise,’ Geff added, ‘to find half the Guernsey world at Tintajeux Manoir. But I hope, Miss Bartrand, you can spare me five minutes’ quiet talk?’
Marjorie, on this, had no choice but to look up at him. Tears, despite pride, despite principle, were in her eyes.
‘To say good-bye!’ she repeated, holding out her hand, then, with cheeks going from rosy-red to white, shrinking back ere he could grasp it. ‘I—I never thought you could be so cruel.’
So the girl cared something for him, after all, thought Geoffrey. She would brush a tear away to-morrow, perhaps, when those who travel by land or water were courteously alluded to by old Andros in the Litany, would regret him a little, as long as this summer’s roses lasted. She would remember him until her heart, if heart she possessed, should be touched in earnest. No more than this. It was not her time to love, poor Marjorie! And he ... must part from her as a strong man ought; must say ‘this is,’ not ‘this might have been.’ There should be neither recrimination nor bitterness. A touch of the sunburnt chiselled hand, a look into the eyes which had wounded him, as children wound, from ignorance, and then a brave and loyal farewell, this time a final one.
A table on which lay books and photographs stood at hand. Geoffrey took up a photograph of the Gouliots,Sark—some glistening boulders, a fishing-net stretched on the shingle, a break of wave. How indelibly the bit of sun-etching transferred itself to his brain’s tablets! How often, in dull future hours, would those boulders, that break of wave, stand out in crisp relief before Geff’s memory?
‘Yes.’ He spoke in a key that only Marjorie could hear. ‘For just five minutes I should like to claim you. When I was at Tintajeux the day before yesterday, I was atrociously churlish to you, Miss Bartrand. I have been brought to see it since. Will you accept my apology?’
Geoffrey had ‘been brought to see’ his churlishness! Then he held at nought her offer of truce—the word it had cost her pride so dear to write! He offered her this cutting rejoinder, an apology!
‘You are hard upon me, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ There was a piteous deprecation in her voice. ‘When you were my master, I used to think you severe; but that was the worst. I believed you to behuman.’
‘I am afraid I am very human.’ Geoffrey took up a fresh photograph; he examined it at a curiously shortsighted focus. ‘So human,’ he added, softening, ‘that I have not altogether given up the hope of your some day writing to me.’
‘A formal, set letter, do you mean?’
‘A letter,’ said Geff, very low, ‘in which no thought of the Tintajeux acres has place.’
For a moment her face showed one of its old bright flashes. In the world of story books it had ever been Marjorie’s pleasure to scoff at the frail impediments, arising from the necessity of a third volume, which keep true lovers apart. Should paltry reserve—the thought came upon her abruptly—should schoolgirl cowardice divide her, as though three hundred pages of ‘copy’ depended upon the quarrel, from Geoffrey?
‘I don’t know what you would have me say. I can’t see why you should be off so quick! I tried—I hoped——’
But while the monosyllables came haltingly from Marjorie’s tongue, a stir had arisen in the larger drawing-room. It was plain that a group of people, young men and maidens taking counsel together in a corner, were bent on some kind of action. Their project matured quickly. Rosie Verschoyle shot a beseeching glance at old Andros as she went through a meaning pantomime of the waltz step. Little Oscar Jones, with the air of a man upon whom rests an onerous embassy, made his way across both rooms to Marjorie.
‘Ten thousand pardons, Miss Bartrand! Would not intrude for the world on a tête-à-tête. Fact is, you see, some of them want to get up a dance on the lawn.’
‘A dance! Absurdity!’ cried Marjorie, bestowing on him an ultra-Bartrand look. Then, recollecting their position as hostess and guest, ‘I mean, would not tennis amuse you just as well?’ she observed, with show of interest. ‘Or ask Gertrude de Carteret to sing, or——’
‘But, dear Miss Bartrand, we all of us want todance,’ persisted the handsome little lieutenant, with a smile that he had grounds for believing irresistible. ‘Miss Tighe volunteers to play for us beside an open window. Powerful backstairs interest is at this moment bearing down on the Seigneur. We only want an encouraging word from you.’
‘I never say encouraging words. It is too foolish,’ cried Marjorie, detecting, in her misery, that Geoffrey showed signs of flight. ‘To begin with, we have so few gentlemen.’
‘Few; why, there are five at least of Ours. There is Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.... Ah! going already? Then we must reckon without Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot. And it seems some of the clergy dance, a mild square dance, and——’