‘Yes, yes, Marjorie!’ exclaimed a bevy of young girls,coming up and surrounding her like the chorus in an opera. ‘It is useless for you to be wise. Rosie has won the Seigneur to say Yes. Miss Tighe is ready. The piano is on its journey to the window.’
‘Will you be my partner for the first waltz, Miss Bartrand?’ pleaded Oscar Jones.
Now, at any prior moment of her life, Marjorie Bartrand, deficient neither in temper nor in courage, would, thus attacked, have held her ground stoutly. But the girl saw, or fancied she saw, that Geoffrey was eager to get away. Her spirit was charged to overflowing. The eyes of half the people in the room were fixed upon her expectantly. Easier, she thought, before Geoffrey, before them all, to give a coldly assenting bow than trust her voice to speak; so she gave it.
Oscar Jones looked radiant. ‘Thank you, awfully, Miss Bartrand. This is a victory worth scoring. I will just go and start the corps de ballet, ask the orchestra to strike up some gay old waltz tune, and return to you.’
The corps de ballet was already setting towards the lawn. Cassandra Tighe had taken her place at the piano beside an open window. Geoffrey Arbuthnot and Marjorie, with youth, with love, with the heaviness of parting at their hearts, were alone. But their good chance was gone. The thread had snapped which bound together poor Marjorie’s monosyllables. Two minutes later she would be treading a waltz measure, the arm of Mr. Oscar Jones round her waist. And Geff (the conqueror, to whomall, in whitest, girlish faith, had been conceded) felt his blood rebel. He took the reprisals of his nobler sex, offered prompt, italicised repetition of the crushing word, apology.
‘You have accepted mine, have you not, Miss Bartrand?’ He held his hand out, steadily, for a last good-bye.
‘I accept the blame you choose to force on me,’ said Marjorie, turning aside her face.
Cold, fettered, was the speech of both. Still, in this interval there was an encounter of pulses. Their hands had met; the farewell pressure was a lingering one. Propinquity—unspiritual god of youthful lovers—might, even at this supreme moment, have set things straight, had not old Andros Bartrand passed by, looked at them, smiled.
Marjorie moved away with a start. She felt as much divided from her sweetheart as though the Channel already rolled between them.
‘What is this I hear about your leaving us, Arbuthnot? The little witch has been plaguing you, I suspect, with her false quantities. My dear sir, not one in a thousand of the sex has an ear. Music is an art in which they have had more opportunities than we, and there has never been even a third-rate female composer. You are going to England next week? To-morrow! Nay, if it is to be to-morrow we must have business talk together. Come with me, Arbuthnot, to the library.’
The situation was a crucial one for Marjorie Bartrand. Scarcely had Geoffrey gone away with the Seigneur—her heart told her, ‘to be paid’—before a dapper figure tripped, alertly, across the rooms. The well satisfied voice of little Oscar Jones reminded her that the first waltz was beginning, that they were engaged to dance it together. Her cheeks tingled with the sense of her humiliation and of her helplessness.
Oscar was in high spirits. ‘Coach gone, I suppose? Dancing not much in Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s line. Confess now, Miss Bartrand’—by this time they had reached the dancers on the lawn, Mr. Jones’s arm encircled the girl’s lithe slip of a waist—‘confess, in your heart, that you rate enjoyment higher than you do Euclid and Plato?’
‘I do not understand your question. I cannot deal in generalities.’
Marjorie Bartrand held herself as stiffly at bay from her partner as was possible.
‘Well, you’ll enjoy our dance, for instance, better than being shut up in a schoolroom over musty books and figures with Arbuthnot?’
‘I shall not enjoy it at all.’ Without a second’s hesitation came the answer. ‘Hostesses do not dance. See, there is Ada de Carteret standing out. Give me my freedom, pray, and ask her.’
‘Your freedom—to go indoors, to “work a last problem, write one Latin line,” with Arbuthnot? No, no, Miss Bartrand, you are the best dancer in Guernsey, and I don’t often get the chance of a waltz with you.’
For Oscar Jones, like bigger men, had his vanities. The thought of cutting out Geoffrey Arbuthnot was tasteful to him. It may be added that, although Marjorie’s tongue had not lost its sharpness, she was at this moment the sweetest-looking girl among the little crowd of dancers. The fire of strong emotion glittered in her large eyes. Her cheeks glowed damask. Her slim, white-clad figure showed up, in exceedingly agreeable relief, against the dense background of cedar-shaded lawn.
That there was a certain dramatic interest connected with Geoffrey’s going seemed divined by all. The divination rose to a whisper among the non-dancers, elderly men and women who, gathering on the drawing-room steps, enjoyed the pleasant sensations which bright sunshine, a garden of flowers, blue sky, and the sight of young people moving to dance-music, can scarce fail of producing.
‘The child has a hectic flush that I do not like,’ observed the plaintive voice of Mrs. Verschoyle. ‘I wish any one dared ask the Seigneur if the mother died of heart-complaint. All that class of disease is hereditary, and poor Marjorie is so little cared for! Not a creature to see whether she wears a thick sole or a thin one.’
The Archdeaconess was standing close at hand, looking on at the sunshine, the flowers, the lightly moving figures,through her accustomed smoke-coloured medium. Madame Corbie turned round with slow severity on Mrs. Verschoyle.
‘Marjorie Bartrand is not a girl to die of heart disease!’ The assertion was made with such suggestive profundity that mild little Mrs. Verschoyle recoiled a step. ‘Marjorie Bartrand wants the refined observance, the scrupulous exactness, the dignified correctness of manner which can only be obtained at school. None of your Girtons. None of your Newnhams. A strictly disciplined school, such as prevailed in my young days, for the formation of character and the affections. I do not consider,’ said Madame Corbie, ‘that Marjorie’s study of Greek and mathematics has been to her advantage.’
‘And yet Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot appears so charming, so thoroughly reliable.’
Seeing her Rosie joyously dancing in the distance, Mrs. Verschoyle’s motherly heart was disposed towards optimism on most points.
‘Has a word been uttered against the reliability of any member of the Arbuthnot family?’
The question was an innocent one. And still did something in its tone, something in the added blankness of Mrs. Corbie’s smoke-coloured gaze, seem to reduce the character of each of the Arbuthnot trio to a ghostly possibility.
Marjorie and her partner floated past the window at this juncture.
‘Give us one more round, Miss Tighe,’ cried Oscar, in breathless staccato. ‘Never danced to such a splendid tune in my life!’ Cassandra was labouring, hot with her exertions, through ‘Strauss’s First Set,’ ‘Les Hirondelles,’ or some other long buried favourite of her youth. ‘Capital turf, capital music, a first-rate partner! If a dance like this,’ he proceeded, ‘could only last for ever, Miss Bartrand!’
‘Thank Heaven it draws to an end,’ said Marjorie, in a voice of steel.
A hundred yards distant, across velvet lawns and beds of flower bloom, she could discern the figure of Geoffrey Arbuthnot. He walked away, firm of tread, erect of head, from the acres of Tintajeux and from her. And her partner’s arm clasped her waist, her steps twirled lightly. She was hostess of the party, must go through other dances, must entertain the Seigneur’s guests to the end.
From this time forth Marjorie knew that she could never more feel as a girl feels, never enjoy with a girl’s enjoyment. She would be a woman, with the bitter taste of grown-up life in her mouth, from this hour onward till she died.
‘To a naturally industrious man these islands would be the mischief.’ The characteristic remark came from Gaston, who was entering his wife’s sitting-room just about the hour when Geoffrey quitted Tintajeux. ‘Yes, Mrs. Arbuthnot, these bachelor breakfasts, these picnics, these summer nights given up to card-playing, might well despatch many an excellent fellow along the road to ruin. Happily,’ said Gaston, ‘I have the capacity for large waste of time. I am in no sense of the word an excellent fellow.’
His tone was blithe; the fact of his calling Dinah ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot’ showed a willingness to meet contingent domestic trouble with good temper. Stooping down, Gaston Arbuthnot snatched a kiss from his wife’s pale lips; he pressed her drooping golden head between his hands. Dinah wavered not in her resolves. His caresses were sweet to her as ever. But was not the dearness of this man’s presence her danger; that which should nerve her in righteous sternness towards herself—and him?
‘No kiss for me, my darling! And pale cheeks again—swollen eyes! Dinah, you are ill. Something in the place really disagrees with you. We will leave it. You cannot stand the climate. I half believe I want a change of air myself.’
Sinking down in an American rocking-chair, the easiestlocation the room possessed, Gaston Arbuthnot propelled himself to and fro until he reached a point at which his heels were on a level with his breast. He rested the tips of his boots on the corner of an adjacent couch, he folded his arms in an attitude of leisurely repose upon his breast. Then, the primary point of comfort exhaustively seen to, he looked, with closer heed than he had yet bestowed upon her, at his wife.
Dinah was dressed in a dark travelling serge. Her hair was brushed back tightly from her temples. Her face was bloodless, the outline of her delicate features blurred by a night of tears. It was impossible for her to be unlovely, even with pink eyelids and swollen lips. (If Gaston Arbuthnot’s chisel could have compassed the tragic, how exquisite a Niobe had lain here to his hand!) It was impossible, I say, for Dinah to be unlovely. She seemed transformed, rather—a woman of harder, colder texture than her old self. When at length she raised her head slowly, the eyes that looked her husband through and through were fraught with an expression that his soul knew not.
‘I want change, you tell me, Gaston, and that’s true. We want change, both of us.’
‘Oh, I was not in earnest about myself,’ said Gaston, a little uneasily. ‘As far as health goes, the place suits me well enough. Only one positively cannot work here! Now, look how this week has gone!’ He took a note-book from his breast pocket, he turned over page after page with a marked abandonment of his first sprightly manner. ‘This week, too, when I was to have got on with your bust, to have begun I don’t know how much besides. Where are you, by the bye, Dinah—I mean, where is your model? There is a tidy look one doesn’t like about the room.’
‘The model is on the top shelf in your working place.Although you don’t like tidiness, I have been putting everything as straight as I could get it to-day.’
‘Like the good forgiving girl that you are! My dear child, I confess I have idled through this week disgracefully. Not to speak of yesterday’s dinner, of the old Colonel’s breakfast, of the best hours wasted—those wretched cards again—to-day, there was the initial mistake of being left behind in Alderney.’
‘You were left behind there, I think, for your own pleasure?’
‘I am not so sure of that. The scheme, any way, did not turn out a success. Max Grimsby is the best fellow living—but one-ideaed. You cannot get him to move, save in a circle. He is tethered to Max Grimsby’s pictures. If the sun had shone he would have taken me round, among rocks and places, to ‘verify’ his sketches, as he says, by nature. There was a most disgusting fog. I could be taken nowhere. I bored myself to extinction in Alderney. I——’
‘Gaston,’ exclaimed Dinah, fierily, ‘don’t say things of this kind, if you please. The time is past for them. I know about the wager you had with Mrs. Thorne before you left the steamer.’
‘Then you know about a very foolish matter.’ Gaston spoke with prompt self-control, although he reddened. ‘You have certainly been tidying with a vengeance, my love,’ he went on, looking round him. ‘I miss a dozen landmarks. What has become of my own priceless portraits?’ Wherever they lived poor Dinah loved to hang Gaston’s three or four latest photographs upon the walls of her sitting-room. ‘I do not see your embroidery frame, or——’
‘Yes,’ she again interrupted. ‘I know about Mrs. Thorne’s wager, about everything. It is a relief to speak plain at last. I have known, for a good long time past, that you deceived me.’
Down came Gaston Arbuthnot’s feet to their normal level. Away flew all his assumption of serenity. A couple of quick strides brought him across the room.
‘If you are bent on having one of our wretched scenes, Dinah, look, pray, to your language, as far as I am concerned. Say what you choose about Mrs. Thorne, if it gives you pleasure. Say what you like, of course, about yourself. Don’t use disagreeable expressions when you speak of me! I’m the kind of conceited fellow whose love really won’t stand rough usage. My love for you is the best possession I have. I don’t want to risk my best possession. You understand?’
No, she did not, that was the worst of it. She could not see that her strong direct nature, craving and athirst for affection, imposed a strain beyond endurance upon a temperament at once ease-loving and volatile like Gaston’s.
‘I have never deceived you, as far as I can remember, Dinah. I have not sufficient energy of character, I should imagine, to be deceitful.’
‘No? We may have different notions of deceit, perhaps.’
‘One may deviate, now and then, from veracity,’ said Gaston, recovering his good humour. ‘Suppressions of fact, in minor matters, are forced upon us all. The man would be a wretch, not fit for civilised society, who should for ever blurt out what he considered truth, regardless of the feelings he hurt, the toes he trod upon.’
‘For instance—to speak of something I understand—if you had gone to Mrs. Thorne’s house after a mess dinner it would be forced on you not to tell me of it next morning?’
‘To Mrs. Thorne’s house ... after a mess dinner! Such an unimportant thing may have happened once—twice, perhaps, during the weeks we have been here. But did I not mention it? Well, then, I do so now, and ask forgiveness,’ resting his hand upon her shoulder, ‘for the heinousness of my crime.’
‘And your wager—was that, too, unimportant? Your wager, made at a time when my heart was breaking! And the feelings with which Linda Thorne regards your winning it——’ Dinah’s voice choked.
Gaston Arbuthnot was, habitually, a man of mild speech. His most familiar men friends had never heard an English expletive escape him. When he was strongly moved his tongue went back, instinctively, to the language of his youth. And he was moved to sudden and keen anger at this moment. Three or four French expressions, fortunately not understanded of his wife, rolled from his lips.
‘You make me detest the sound of Linda Thorne’s name. But take care—take care, in this matter of hating, that you do not force me farther than you intend.’
‘I would rather you hated than tolerated me,’ cried Dinah, her tear-worn eyes looking bravely up into Arbuthnot’s face.
Some new note in her voice startled him. It was a note, Gaston Arbuthnot felt, that might well prove the prelude to dangerous self-assertion. Was atu quoquepossible?
‘You do not wish me to be tolerant. The husband of any excessively pretty woman must be so, whether he will or not. Now yesterday—suppose the medal reversed, Dinah, that I begin to cross-question you—how did you spend your afternoon, yesterday? You forget. Let me refresh your memory. With whom were you walking down the High Street, towards four o’clock, in the dove-coloured dress I invented for you, the Gainsborough hat, the cambric collar?’
‘I am not jesting, though you are.’ Dinah started to her feet, her eyes were level with her husband’s. ‘Geoffrey came in after you had gone away; I was idle and dull as usual, and Geff asked me to carry some fruit and flowers to the hospital. The walk did me good. We visited a Devonshire sailor-lad—like one of my own people, he seemedto me—and I was able to talk with him, the old country talk I love so well. And afterwards, coming back—perhaps with my heart a little lightened—I met ... your friend.’
‘Poor, ill-fated Linda Thorne?’
‘And everything went dark again. It was then I heard about your bet, how you had won, how Mrs. Thorne was bankrupt! Mrs. Thorne had made her way into the parlour while I was out. Your winnings were left for you by her own hand. Gaston, I found them!’
‘The situation, my dear girl, grows poignant. You found them!’
Gaston Arbuthnot checked himself. The dimensions of this domestic tragedy—this storm of wifely passion over a pair of iron-gray gloves—overcame him with a fatal sense of the ridiculous.
Dinah saw that he repressed a smile. Her righteous anger waxed hotter.
‘And I intend to keep them until I die. If ... I mean when you see Mrs. Thorne, you can tell her so.’
‘I will do nothing of the sort,’ said Arbuthnot, thoroughly incensed at last. ‘This constant Inquisition business grows unbearable! There will be no living with you, Dinah, if you go on nursing these puerile, these childish jealousies. I would no more offer an impertinence to Mrs. Thorne than to any other lady of my acquaintance. You must learn to be reasonable.’
‘Must I? I have tried to learn much the last few days, without success. It is because I can’t learn, because I am ignorant’—her voice had grown hoarse, her eyes dilated—‘that I shall go away.’
‘We can go as soon as you like; I have told you so already,’ said Gaston, coldly. ‘We can go the beginning of next week, if you choose. You would not object very much to my leaving cards on the few people who have been civil to me?’
‘I would like to go to-morrow, if—if you will give me money enough for the journey. Geff will be crossing. He can see me as far as Southampton. After that, I can easily make my way on to Tavistock Moor——’
‘You—alone?’
‘Why not? In the old days, before I married, I needed no looking after.’
‘And I am to follow with the luggage,’ suggested Mr. Arbuthnot. ‘You are quite sure there is room on Tavistock Moor for such luggage as ours?’
But his tone was doubtful. Less and less could he understand the look, yearning yet steadfast, that encountered him from his wife’s eyes.
‘I will take my luggage with me. As near as might be, I have tried to divide things. I have put all belonging to you in order, Gaston, as you will find.’
‘You want to visit your people without me? Say it out!’ Gaston Arbuthnot’s colour heightened. ‘This is rough—harder punishment than I deserve, and a risky experiment! Think it over twice. I’ve been in the world thirty years, Dinah, and have seen somewhat of most things. I have never seen any good come of man and wife trying their hand at these little imitation divorces.’
‘I cannot live up to your life,’ answered Dinah, unshrinkingly. ‘I cannot understand you, or your friends, or the feelings you have for each other. If I stayed, I might grow myself to be—well, something I don’t care to think of. I was meant for the ways of common working people. It suits me to be told things plain and straightforward, to keep to my duty, to find my happiness there.’
‘My poor Dinah! Have you not always kept to duty?’ For once in his life, Gaston Arbuthnot spoke from impulse.
‘Up to this time, because my heart has been full. I have loved you so much ... there has been no room for any feeling but love! This could not last for ever, andyou always away, and others—ladies born and educated—not ashamed to take you from me. I might grow hard. I might grow vain—worse! Yes, Gaston, down in my heart I feel all this is possible. And so, if you please——’
‘Don’t hesitate. Let everything he absolutely clear between us.’
‘I will go home. My father’s sisters, I know, would be willing to take me in while they live, and I can work at my trade as I used, of course, if you will give me leave.’
Gaston Arbuthnot stood for a few seconds motionless. Then, without a word, he walked to the farthest end of the room. He stood, gazing upon some local oil-painting of an impossible First Napoleon, mounted on a still more impossible charger, as intently as though he gazed upon one of Raphael’s masterpieces. Let anger, wounded pride—ah, more dreaded than either, let easy acquiescence be on her husband’s face, Dinah could see it not!
She waited for him to speak, with the tension of nerves that is a bodily pain; hoping nothing—the time for hope was past—fearing only lest, under the sting of her proposal, he shouldtellher that he no longer loved her. The truth, itself, had, in that moment, seemed small beside the possibility of his confessing it.
But Gaston Arbuthnot was not a man of coarse or cruel words.
‘I never looked for such a scene—I am not good at these high passions! Your vehemence forces me into the sort of position I detest. I have told you often, Dinah, that in everything,’—he leaned sideways, as though seeking a point whence the impossible Napoleon might be more advantageously viewed—‘in everything I am a light weight. No use asking from me the feats of an athlete. In life, I walk quietly. In art, I can produce nothing bigger or intenser than I experience in life. I am, what you would call, poor all round.’
‘Poor—in feeling, most of all,’ said Dinah with irrepressible bitterness.
‘In the constant exhibition of feeling, you mean, in reiterations of “I love you.”’ Gaston turned, having got thus far; he walked back to her with marked deliberation. ‘In the art of quarrelling about nothing—in showy expenditure of emotion on trifles ... emotion of which, I take it, only a limited quantity is dealt to each of us, and which we should store up for large occasions—in capacity of this kind I am, doubtless, poor. If I were a moral nonentity, Dinah, no human heart in my breast at all, it would seem strange, after four years’ companionship, close as ours, that you should love me still!’
There was an inflection in Gaston Arbuthnot’s voice that overstepped the line of tenderness. His face, though it was calm, wore an unwonted flush. To Dinah, burning with passionate sense of injury, the very reasonableness of his speech was an offence. To Dinah his quiet pleading seemed fine words—altogether beside the present grave issue of their lives.
‘Love! Ah, I love you, well as ever, to my misfortune! I shall love you till my death. Do we measure love out by the meagre quantity of it we get in return?’
‘And loving me, after this strong fashion, you desire that we should spend our lives apart? You tempt me to say a cutting thing,’ broke forth Gaston with warmth, ‘yet I believe it to be a true one. A man had better be loved less, Dinah, and that his wife should remain contentedly at his side.’
‘No doubt of it. If you had married an educated woman you might have been happy with her—according to your notions of happiness. But there’s no going back on that now. I exist, you see.’
‘Yes, Dinah, you exist.’
‘And I am two-and-twenty. And since we came to thisplace, I scarce know why, I have awakened. I see my ignorance. I know that I want more than I used to want in life. Gaston—I cannot fall asleep again. If you let me return among my own people I shall take to their plain country ways—in time, perhaps, shall find a little peace. At least I shall have work, real work, such as I was brought up to. I could never plod, patiently, at cross-stitch flowers for days and days together as I have done. And I can never rise to being a lady, as a week ago I thought I might.’
‘Then the only outlook would seem to be Tavistock Moor. It is not a brilliant one for either of us—for myself, in particular.’ Turning away from her, Gaston took up his hat, he moved aimlessly, and with a dull step towards the door. ‘If I do not cry “Kismet” with a better grace,’ he added, ‘you must remember this sentence of widowerhood has come upon one suddenly—as I think, without justice. But I shall not seek to stay you. I wish you to take back your freedom, unconditionally.’
And so speaking, and while the coldness of death seized Dinah’s tortured heart, he left her.
‘No argument can help us, Geff. A woman without a tithe of my poor wife’s noble qualities but possessing even a faint sense of the ridiculous, might be reached: Dinah, never! Oh, it is the absurdity of the thing which humiliates one! A French song sung after a dinner-party ... the winning of a pair of gloves!’ said Gaston Arbuthnot bitterly. ‘And to think, out of such materials, that the jealousy of the most impracticable woman living could evolve serious tragedy!’
‘Tragedy,’ returned Geff, ‘of which the fifth act is, as yet, unconditioned.’
Dinner was over; a meal at which Dinah had not appeared. The Arbuthnot cousins, side by side, were pacing a remote walk of the hotel garden. And Geoffrey, little by little, had made out the truth in respect of Dinah’s crowning misery. With his heart sore as a brave man’s heart could be over keen personal disappointment, Geoffrey knew that he must arbitrate between the two people who stood nearest to him on earth, and with whose lives his own, by some fantastic stroke of destiny, seemed, for good and for evil, to be interwoven.
‘I don’t believe in rash judgments, formed when the blood is hot,’ went on Gaston Arbuthnot. ‘When Dinah burst upon me with this new proposal I felt as if ten yearsof my youth had been taken from me. My anger was at white heat, and if I had spoken as I felt.... Well, I did not so speak. I accepted my fate with a decent show of self-command. Reviewing the position—yes, and remembering every word you have been saying, Geff—I believe it may be best for my poor Dinah to leave me, on probation. Let her stay for a couple of months with her people in Devonshire, see how things go on, and——’
‘They will go on vilely! They will go from bad to worse.’ Geoffrey was in no humour for putting ornamental polish on his words. ‘When does good come from a tentative separation between man and wife?’
‘Exactly what I said to Dinah. These little imitation divorces, I told her, are risky experiments. Impossible to make her hear me.’
‘Your eloquence must have been at fault. You have had perfect happiness, Gaston—there is the truth! You have had such a lot as does not fall to one man in a million, and you have grown careless of it.’
Geoffrey’s voice was set in a lower key than usual. Glancing round at him, Gaston surprised an expression on the strong features, a glow in the dark eyes that he remembered. Not wholly unlike this did Geff look on the late June evening when he came, four years ago, to his rooms in Jesus, and congratulated him, Gaston, on his engagement to Dinah Thurston.
‘You have always been Dinah’s friend. I thank God she will have you for her friend in the future. Towards myself, perhaps, you are a little less than kind. Some French proverb explains to us, does it not, how a man’s friendship can never be perfectly equal for a husband and for his wife?’
‘The French proverb is at fault, as far as I am concerned,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I am your friend. I am Dinah’s. At this present hour I reprobate the conduct of both with strict impartiality.’
‘My conduct is negative. I find myself placed by an outburst of the eternal feminine injustice in a ridiculous position. I must, as men have done before me, live a ridiculous position out. Whatever my wife desires in the way of money arrangements shall be hers. On the day when she is tired of Tavistock Moor I shall be at her feet.’
‘All this might be aptly said if you were in a stage-box, a critic looking on at the histrionic break-up of other people’s lives, with a view to the morning papers.’
‘I have tried, since I was a boy, to regard everything concerning myself from an indifferent person’s point of view. The habit has become second nature, and——’
‘Shake yourself free of it to-night. You are not an indifferent person. You are not criticising a scene in a mixed drama. You have to decide whether you, Gaston Arbuthnot, intend, at thirty, to be a failure or a success.’
‘A failure!’ repeated Gaston, his pride galled instantly. ‘In your office of peacemaker, Geff, don’t allow your good will to run away with you. We have a score of big examples—Byron, if you choose, at their head—to show how men of shipwrecked lives can give the world the best of their genius.’
‘When you come to genius,’ said Geff, grimly truthful, ‘we are off our lines. We are talking of common men, not of giants. For a man of your calibre, Gaston, to forfeit his domestic happiness is to forfeit all. In losing Dinah, whatever her folly in proposing the Quixotic scheme, you would lose your right hand. Up to this time, even with a good and beautiful and long-suffering woman at your side, your backslidings have been many. Do you think you are going to work onward and upward without an influence such as Dinah’s has been to hold you straight?’
‘You speak hotly, Geff.’
‘I feel hotly,’ answered Geoffrey, without an effort at a fence. ‘My own life has been spoilt—I—I would say,’ he corrected himself, ‘the happiness which men like you,Gaston, can throw away or keep as they choose, is not likely to come near me. Mine must be sought for in such commonplace daily work as I have strength to do. This gives me a selfish interest in the welfare of the people I love. Your fireside and Dinah’s,’ he attempted a lighter tone, ‘is the only one to which I can look forward in my old age.’
Again Gaston watched his face curiously. Perhaps in the moment’s keen illumination he read aright the larger nature than his own, apprehended with his balanced mixture of worldly depth and moral airiness, a page whose intricacies should never, in this life, be wholly deciphered by poor Geff himself.
‘You were right as to genius, Geoffrey. There is an ingredient wanting in me! If I had had your heart I should not at thirty be a manufacturer of third-rate prettinesses for the dealers.’
Engrossed in talk, the cousins paced to and fro among the falling shadows of the garden for another hour. It was an hour, a talk, which neither of the Arbuthnots would be likely to refer to, which neither certainly would forget this side the grave. By and by, when night had come in earnest, when the roses and jasmines that clung round the hotel verandahs smelt dewy sweet, Gaston returned to the house alone. He entered through the little court that had been fitted up as his studio. Here a flicker of starlight overhead showed him his tools, his unfinished models, his working blouse, all the implements of his craft, neatly set in order as Dinah’s hand left them. Passing on into the parlour he found himself in darkness, silence. For a moment a nameless fear—the possibility that she was gone—contracted Gaston Arbuthnot’s heart. Then, with soft, eager step he made his way to his wife’s bedroom, laid his hand on the lock, and opened the door by an inch.
A solitary light burned there.
‘May I come in, Dinah? Can I be of use to you in your packing?’
To this she answered not, or answered in so low a voice that Gaston’s ear could not catch the sound. He pushed back the door wide and entered, making fast the lock behind him. Dinah’s packing, to the smallest detail, was complete. Her boxes, labelled and corded, stood in a row; her wraps were put up; her travelling bag was strapped. Dinah herself sat in a low chair beside the curtained half-open window. The light from a hand lamp on the mantelshelf just enabled Gaston to discern the dead whiteness of her tired face.
‘Your packing done?’ he asked her. ‘And have you moved these heavy boxes by yourself?’
‘The Frenchwoman helped me. I had no need of her—my arms are strong—but when she insisted, I thought it would look strange to refuse longer. I tried to speak to her lightly—just saying that I had to go away, of a sudden, to stay with friends in England.’
‘That was wise. It were a pity that idle tongues should begin to talk of us already.’
No answer came to this. Gaston saw that her hands trembled as they lay tightly clasped together on her knee.
‘And about money, Dinah?’
Crossing the room, Mr. Arbuthnot shut down the window, then placed himself at the distance of two or three feet from his wife. He looked at her long and tenderly, looked as though on that white, strained face he saw some beauty which the dulness of his senses, the selfishness of his heart, had never during the past four years let him discover.
‘Geoffrey and I have just had a long talk. I believe, as far as Southampton, you had better let Geff be purse-holder. Then we must think of the future. We must plan as to apermanent settlement. I am a poor man, you know, Dinah, or rich only by fits and starts. If I can secure to you two hundred pounds a year, could you make it enough?’
Dinah raised her clasped hands deprecatingly. Her speech failed her. Now, in the moment when she needed strength, self-control most, they proved traitors. She could only sit, faint, cold, sick, only hear the details of her own passionate wish put into calm, reasonable—ay, and generous detail by Gaston.
‘For the first year,’ he repeated, ‘until I become a steadier worker, could you make an allowance of two hundred pounds suffice?’
‘I want nothing but a few pounds at first,’ said Dinah, with a desperate effort. ‘After that I will work—plain sewing, out-door work, anything they can find for me to do.’
‘You might get plain sewing and out-door work, too, without going as far as Tavistock Moor.’
‘But I am known there. I am not the sort of woman—I mean as yet—to make my way alone among strangers.’
‘You shall neither go to Tavistock Moor nor among strangers. You shall remain with me.’ Gaston said this with slow emphasis. ‘The law is on my side.’
Poor Dinah started up. The world seemed to float away from before her. A piteous look in which—yes, amidst all its anguish—there was a tremble of hope, went across her blanched face.
‘My sins have been grievous enough, the sins of carelessness and selfishness—they have not gone deeper. Let the future make up for them. Forgive me, Dinah!’ Arbuthnot’s arms were opened wide. ‘I could not work, I could not live without you. I love you better than my life.’
With a cry as of a child taken back, unexpectedly, to the lost shelter of home, Dinah fell upon his breast.
But no such good thing as reconciliation fell to Marjorie Bartrand.
Within a week of Geoffrey’s departure Dinah and her husband, bride and bridegroom once more, started joyously on their way to Italy. There was a little wonder among the few people who had known them, a little hypothetic gossip, an unjust suspicion, perhaps, that Linda Thorne could clear up more secrets than one, ‘as she listed.’ And then Guernsey knew the name of Arbuthnot no more. Marjorie Bartrand must take up life at its old point before love, before disappointment made acquaintance with her—must stand, chill and alone, in the same Arcadia where she stood beside Geoffrey on the morning of their one day’s engagement; must work under a new teacher in the schoolroom where every book, every window-pane, spoke to her of the past, and of the sharp irrevocableness of her loss.
Autumn faded, monotonously, into the season of soft weather which in the Channel archipelago does duty for winter. March came again with its outside show of hope; all Tintajeux busy at farm work—the Seigneur, alert of step, taking part in his potato-planting and his vraic harvest, like a man of five-and-twenty. Later on, the cuckoo flower blushed anew, the rooks vociferated from the tree-tops. And then, a little later, the roses reddened. MarjorieBartrand, conning over the entries in her last year’s pocket-book, began to know the meaning of the sombre word anniversary.
‘To-day,’ after this fashion the record ran, ‘commenced my reading with Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘Many faults in my Latin exercise. Geoffrey Arbuthnot stern and inhuman.’
‘Have resolved to lecture a certain person on his neglect of his wife. And on frivolity.’
‘This day received my first letter from Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
And so through the brief drama, until a final entry on Sunday, July the 3d—‘To-day Geoffrey Arbuthnot left Guernsey for ever.’ After which all was blank—in the pocket-book, as elsewhere.
There were sombre anniversaries, I say, for Marjorie Bartrand. For two or three of the young women who have flitted across the background of this story, summer brought the sound of jocund bells, brought a day which to each must henceforth be the one crowning anniversary, dark or sunny, of life. Rosie Verschoyle took to herself a mate, happily for Rosie, a worthier man than Rex Basire. Ada de Carteret became the wife of little Oscar Jones. Marjorie enacted bridesmaid until the sight and smell of orange blossoms were a weariness to her. She felt glad when weddings and summer were alike over, when the scents of blown syringa and heliotrope belonged definitely to the past, glad when the equinox had stript the woods, and November, grave and pale, approached, like a friend who knew her trouble, and had solace in store for her.
For Marjorie’s character had opened out rather than altered. She was a Bartrand—high-handed as ever; during the past fifteen months had worked with a courage betokening of what tough fibre her spirit was made. In November a decisive step towards the Alma Mater was to be taken.Mademoiselle Pouchée, the earliest on the Tintajeux list of governesses, had long besought Marjorie to stay with her in Cambridge, and the Seigneur, with exceeding bad grace, had tardily consented to the visit. For Cambridge meant Girton! Marjorie, of late, had been coaching with a Girton graduate who held high office in the Guernsey college, and was promised credentials to the highest feminine magnates of the University. ‘Women who, in achieving renown, had lost the fairest ornament of their sex.’ Thus spoke old Andros, stirred by the irreconcilable antipathies of his youth, antipathies which sixty subsequent years amidst a world in full progress had failed to modify.
‘The best person you could come across would be that tutor of yours—Arbuthnot.’ The Seigneur brought the blood into Marjorie’s cheeks by telling her this, one day. ‘We must conclude that I shall die some time. It is given to few men to draw breath in three centuries. When I am gone you will need a husband more than the Higher Education. I liked Arbuthnot. He was a shallowish classic and over-full of this modern “know-all, know-nothing” spirit. But he was aman—so many honest English stone, moral and physical, in him! A good make-weight for a bit of wandering thistle-down like you.’
The speech lingered in Marjorie’s penitent soul. If things had gone differently, then, Old Andros would not have said nay to Geoffrey’s suit! Her own passionate temper, the jealousy that could brook no rival, present or in the past, were alone answerable for love forfeited, for a vista of long years, out of which the sweet fulness of youth, at youth’s best, should be wanting.
And blood warm and generous ran in Marjorie’s veins. Her object in visiting Cambridge was, of course, to make personal acquaintance with Girton. Her hopes and fears must be centred on the august ladies who in future days would be her Dons. But the remembrance of her lostsweetheart plucked ever at her heart. If by accident Geoffrey crossed her path, what would be her duty? That was the thing to consider—duty. Simply as an old comrade, might she not hold out her hand, seek a final word of explanation? At what nice point should self-respect, a due sense of wounded Bartrand pride, draw the line of unforgiveness?
These were not questions she could propound to her Girton coach, a lady of fair exterior, young in years, but who had recently come out well in two Triposes. Cassandra Tighe, with her lowlier range of thought, stood nearer to one, Marjorie felt, her sixty winters notwithstanding, in such trivial human perplexities as belong to love and lovers. In these poor matters, ignorance would seem to possess a spurious wisdom of its own. The higher sciences assist one moderately. And so, on the vigil of her English journey, the girl started away between the lights, alone, and with an overflowing heart, to seek her old friend’s counsel.
It was a typical autumn evening of this mid-channel region. A north-west wind shivered and sobbed among the poplars that hedged the entrance way of Cassandra’s domain. The garden dahlias drooped their heads, the chrysanthemums with their thin, half-bitter odour, showed wan and ghostly in the thickening dusk. An irresistible sense of decay was conveyed by the fitful rustle of the falling leaves. The surrounding fields and copses were shrouded in vague mist. Loss and uncertainty ... these seemed the dominant notes in the pallid landscape. They suited Marjorie Bartrand’s mood. Were not loss and uncertainty the dominant notes of her own changed life?
The cottage door stood open. No sound stirred within, save the ticking of the old Dutch clock on the stairs. Unannounced, she made her way into Miss Tighe’s home-like ground-floor drawing-room. The weather was too mild for more than a pretence at fire, the hour not late enough forlamp or candle. Cassandra sat, unoccupied, beside the scarce-lighted hearth. The kindly lady jumped up at the sound of Marjorie’s step, then, almost with an air of shame, began to excuse herself for her idleness. She had had a busy gardening day, little credit though her borders did her, and after dinner meant to practise for a couple of hours at her harp. ‘But even Cassandra Tighe,’ she added, ‘must be tired, sometimes. I am an old woman, Marjorie. It is the prerogative of all old people, save the Reverend Andros Bartrand, to sit when the day draws in with hands folded. At such times we live in the past, as you young ones love to do in the future.’
‘The future,’ repeated Marjorie, in an under-breath; ‘that is what I want to speak to you about. I chose this hour on purpose. The best time to talk of difficult things is entre chien et loup, as the Guernsey folk say.’
She sat down somewhat dejectedly on the opposite side the hearth. The young woman and the old one could just discern each other’s faces by the flicker of the slow-burning fire.
‘So you start for Cambridge to-morrow! And your grandfather, I hear, gives you a letter to the Master of Matthias. Well, Marjorie, though you should fail to Girtonise the Spanish nation eventually, I must praise you for your present cleverness in Girtonising the Seigneur of Tintajeux.’
‘The Seigneur was never more obdurate. “If it pleased my granddaughter to roam the country with an organ and a monkey, she would do it; I could only see that the organ and the monkey were good of their kind.” This is his charming way of putting things—his excuse for giving me an introduction outside of Newnham or Girton.’
‘And yourcoach, Miss Travers, is to be your escort. She is comelier than one could have expected, poor thing. I have no prejudices, as everybody knows,’ said old Cassandra.‘When I heard a Girtonite was coming to our college, I held my peace. If one of these emancipated young women has regular features or a bright complexion, I acknowledge the fact. Still, one wonders——’
‘How such a girl as Miss Travers could choose the higher life, instead of marrying—some man like Lord Rex Basire, say, or Mr. Oscar Jones!’
‘Those two are not the only types of man extant,’ observed Cassandra.
To this there succeeded a sufficiently pregnant silence. Marjorie broke it with effort. Her voice had become unsteady. Her sentences were disjointed.
‘We are to stay one night in London—I don’t know whether grandpapa told you about the plans? Next day we shall see whatever sights are visible through the November fog, and late in the afternoon I shall run down to Cambridge. It is high time I learned to knock about the world alone! If I work steadily when we come back to Guernsey, very likely I may go up to Girton as a bye-term man in January.’
‘Is this the future you wanted to talk about?’ Cassandra Tighe bent forward. She looked hard at the slim girlish figure, the delicately feminine face of Marjorie Bartrand. ‘You must learn to knock about the world alone! You will go up in January as a bye-term man! These prospects may be intoxicating. We require, I think, no assistance from the friendly half-light to discuss them in.’
The remark went home. Marjorie’s ill-fated love affair had long been an open secret between her and old Cassandra Tighe, and in a few minutes’ time half confidences were over, reserve had gone to the winds. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s name, for the first time for months, was on the girl’s trembling lips.
‘I am not likely to be over forward again, Miss Tighe. But, strive as I will, the longing overcomes me to see Mr. Arbuthnot—before he marries some one else—to give hima last chance of explanation. The word—the one word—I wrote that miserable afternoon may never have reached him. When I heard Mrs. Arbuthnot was out,’ Marjorie made confession, ‘my courage went from me—I had hoped to leave my packet safe in Dinah’s hands—and I just gave it, without a message, to the servant who answered my ring. Then I drove away—fast, for fear Geoffrey should meet me and see my face.’
‘The Arbuthnot people were a singular trio.’ Cassandra made the remark with an irrelevant neutrality savouring of the serpent’s wisdom. ‘The best looking of the men, not your tutor, Marjorie, is doing good things, it seems, as an artist. Colonel de Gourmet has a correspondent in Florence, where the Gaston Arbuthnots live, and the accounts of them are favourable. You know, of course, that there is a Miss Arbuthnot?’
‘Yes, I have heard the news. It is good to think that Dinah must be a happier woman now.’
‘We shall not see such a face again on our shores. Do you remember my mistake about her, Marjorie—the lecture I made you read your tutor on his frivolity?’
‘You ask me questions instead of answering mine, Miss Tighe. If I should meet him—if through blind accident I should speak to Geoffrey again, would it be delicate, would it show proper womanly pride, for me to attempt one last explanation?’
Cassandra did not instantly reply. The sobbing of the wind had died among the poplars. The leaves fell noiselessly to the damp earth. Only the ticking of the clock on the stairs broke silence.
‘For ever—never!’
‘Never—for ever!’
And with each second, thought Marjorie, how many human loves must be laid low, how many hearts must begin to ache for all time as hers was aching now!
Miss Tighe sat calm and placid, as when the girl first entered, her hands folded on her knee. ‘And what earthly inducement had Pouchée to settle in a University town?’ she observed at length. ‘Why does the woman live alone?’
‘Her father was maître d’escrime in Cambridge. She and her mother live on in the house where he died. I rather think Mademoiselle gives French lessons still.’
‘Oh, Mademoiselle gives French lessons still, does she?’ Cassandra’s tone was absent. She rose, moved closer to the hearth. Her face was level with the miniature portrait of a lad in old-fashioned uniform that hung there. By and by, ‘I am going,’ she said very low, ‘to tell you something about which I have been silent for forty years.’
‘Miss Tighe——’
‘Don’t be afraid of an old woman’s prosy history, or of a sermon. You will have neither. Forty years ago, child, there lived, in the far north of England, a girl, somewhere about your present age. This girl was on the eve of being married. Her wedding dress was ordered, the guests were bidden. Well, at the eleventh hour she chose, in a flame of paltry jealousy, to resent some fancied want of devotion in her lover. He was single-minded, loyal—of finer stuff, altogether, than herself. They might have been reconciled in an hour if she would have let her heart speak, have returned to the arms outheld to receive her. The girl would make not an inch of concession. She came, as you do, Marjorie, of people who look upon unforgiveness as a virtue. She heard around her the old stock phrases—delicacy, family pride—the righteousness of subordinating feeling to will! And so it came to pass that the lover, having neither wealth nor title, was allowed to go. He exchanged into a regiment under orders for India. Our troops were then in Afghanistan, engaged in hot fighting, and——’
Miss Tighe’s voice—the brave, kind voice that Marjoriehad always known—broke down. Marjorie felt herself turn chill with a vague terror. To hear of this white-haired woman’s love seemed, in her overstrained mood, like receiving a message from the world of ghosts. She awaited the sequel of the story, not speaking, not lifting her eyes to the narrator’s face.
‘The lad fell—a locket his sweetheart had once given him hidden in his breast. It came back to her, through a brother officer who knew something of the dead man’s story—and with a stain on it. That stain has marked every day of a lonely life throughout forty years. You will not speak of this again, remember.’
‘Never, Miss Tighe, I promise you.’
‘But keep my words in your memory. If you meet Geoffrey Arbuthnot, if a moment comes when happiness beckons one way, the Bartrand pride another, they may, perhaps, be of use to you.’
So human hearts can remain true to their griefs for forty years! Marjorie pondered on this fact as she walked back through the November-smelling, dark country to Tintajeux. She felt, with the certainty of morbid eighteen, that her own life would be a counterpart of Cassandra Tighe’s. She would never love any other man than Geoffrey, would never marry where she did not love. She was not likely to die. In the glow of her young health, feeling her limbs so lithe—the mere act of walking and breathing an ever renewed bodily pleasure—death lay over an horizon which she had not yet sighted. Ah, if she could hear Geff’s step approaching now, if she could feel his hand-clasp, strong, friendly as in the days of old, the collective pride of the whole Bartrand race would not long stand between them!
But the mirk lanes were forsaken; no human step save her own was to be heard. The lights were lit in thescattered cottage homesteads, the children at play round the fire, the elders resting after their day’s work. Through the low windows Marjorie could see one family group after another as she passed along, and felt her own loneliness the greater. As she came near Tintajeux the cry of the owls, than which no more freezing sound exists in nature, was all that gave her welcome.
‘That stain has marked every day of a lonely life throughout forty years.’
The moral of Miss Tighe’s story lingered in Marjorie’s heart. As she and her grandfather sat for the last time together over dessert, old Andros took not unkindly notice of her white cheeks and darkened eyes.
‘You must get back your good looks before you show yourself in Cambridge. Women are sent into the world to be graceful. When they fail in that, they fail in everything. Be a senior wrangler if you will, but keep your complexion. You have grown much more like your father of late.’ This was the highest form of praise Andros Bartrand could offer her. ‘Don’t go back to the little skinny Spanish witch of former days.’
‘I wish I could, sir,’ cried Marjorie, a flash of quickly-roused mutiny in her eyes. ‘The days when I was a little skinny Spanish witch were better than any I am likely to know again in this world.’
‘I just feel we are too happy. It makes me tremble, Gaston. I would rather see the speck of cloud no bigger than a man’s hand than for ever live in dread of it.’
‘You would rather have anything than the actual, my dear. That is a little weakness of the sex. Surely your daughter ought to fill every crevice of your dissatisfied heart!’
‘She fills it, fuller than my heart can hold—my own sweet baby. She is a wonderfully forward child, is she not? So strong of her age,—so intelligent—so beautiful!’
‘Not beautiful, Dinah. I am no amateur of infants, although I can tolerate their presence after the age of two years. As regards the particular infant sleeping in the cradle, yonder, even my knowledge of the subject enables me to say she is unornamental—as unornamental a child as could be found in Florence.’
‘She is your living portrait,’ returned the mother, unconscious of irony. ‘Yes, even to her shrewd looks, to the firm way she clasps her fingers. And already—in that,’ murmured Dinah, penitently, ‘it may be she favours me—already, Baby has a temper.’
These exceedingly domestic confidences were interchanged in a vast old Florentine room, fitted up by Gaston Arbuthnot as a studio, and on a November night, someforty-eight hours later than the gray evening when Marjorie paid her farewell visit to Cassandra Tighe.
But November in Florence is a different season to November in the English Channel. The dry nipping touch of Italian winter had already made itself felt beside the banks of the Arno, and the blaze from an up-piled heap of olive-faggots cast a ruddy glow upon the room and its occupants. Gaston Arbuthnot, his day’s work done, reclined, outstretched, in one of his favourite American chairs beside the hearth. On the other side the fire was a cradle, wickered, capacious, of the genuine Italian build that you may remember in many a sixteenth-century picture. And beside this cradle stood Dinah, serious of mien, gazing with rapt, Madonna-like devotion at the little English child who slept there.
At Gaston’s last remark she stooped and drew a muslin curtain tenderly over her daughter’s face. Then she came across to her husband, she sank on her knees beside him. Stealing a soft arm round Mr. Arbuthnot’s neck, Dinah brought his cheek within reach of her lips.
‘Honestly and without jesting, you can say you think the childugly?’
‘I think she will never be as handsome as her mother—the better for herself, perhaps. Beauty is a snare. Who should know that better than Dinah Arbuthnot?’
‘If I had been—well, plainer than I am, would you have sought me out, I wonder, in Aunt Sarah’s little cottage that summer?’
‘Difficult to speculate backwards! I had thought some plainish women charming before I heard the name of Lesser Cheriton.’
‘That is a matter of course. You had been the friend of Linda Thorne.’
‘Linda Smythe, as she was at that time. I don’t know that “cette chère Smeet” could ever be called charming.She was lively, apt, a thorough mistress of situation and inexhaustively talkative—to a boy fresh from school that gift of talkativeness goes for much! She lacked charm. I have heard her mourn over the deficiency, in her plaintive little way, poor soul, with tears.’
How calmly they spoke of Linda’s qualities—this Darby and Joan of nearly six years’ standing, to whom romance, in its earliest, sweetest bloom, would seem to have returned! From what a different standpoint Dinah could review the sentimental dilemmas of Gaston’s youth! How the renewal of their love had bettered them, man and woman alike!
‘Sometimes when I look back upon our Guernsey days, the days, I mean, which followed on that Langrune picnic, I feel a great remorse. Things ended happily ... because you would not let my jealous temper ruin both our lives.’
Possibly, thought Gaston Arbuthnot, because of Geff. He remembered their talk when the summer eve was sinking into darkness, the eve upon whose morrow Dinah would fain have quitted him for ever.
‘But I deserved the heaviest punishment that could have fallen upon me. Jealousy, such as mine was then, means selfishness, not love.’
‘Spoken from a fine moral height! All the same, Dinah, I think you did love me, slightly.’
‘I was unjust to Linda Thorne about your wager. When I opened the packet she left for you I was dishonourable. The whole thing may have been a jest—may have belonged to a time before you knew me at all. I recollect telling you I would keep that packet always. Well, Gaston—I wish now I had never seen it. There is a drawer in my dressing-case I have not once since had courage to open.’
Gaston Arbuthnot turned his head. Studying his wife’s face closely, some suspicion of possible mistake began to dawn upon him.
‘Are you certain as to your facts, Dinah? A drawer, you say, in your dressing-case which you never have found courage to open? And why not? I confess to being out of my depth. Linda’s gloves, honestly lost by her, honestly paid, lay on the parlour mantelshelf. Of this I am positive. From the mantelshelf I naturally transferred them to my pocket.’
‘Gloves!’
‘What else? You do not suppose poor Linda and I made bets of twenty pound notes?’
‘But the word she wrote for you—the flower, the ribbon.... Ah, Gaston,’ cried Dinah, hurriedly, ‘let us never have another misunderstanding. I was wrong—criminal, if you choose—in opening a cover that was not directed to myself. But I suffered for my wrong-doing—you should know that—and you may be frank with me now. I am not so weak that you need hide a syllable of the truth.’
‘I put the gloves in my pocket,’ Gaston Arbuthnot reasserted, ‘and to the best of my remembrance wore them out in about a fortnight. They were iron-gray. A pair of iron-gray gloves would last one ten days or a fortnight, would they not?’
On this Dinah Arbuthnot started to her feet. She remembered Gaston’s talent, of old, for calm mystification, and her heart fired.
‘I have not re-opened the subject for amusement, Gaston. To show you that I would make amends in earnest, I will fetch the packet this moment. I shall feel easier when it is in your keeping, to destroy or keep, as you choose.’
Taking up a hand-lamp, Dinah passed into a neighbouring chamber. When she returned, in three or four minutes’ time, there was a pallor about her lips, a threatening of tears (the like of which during the past fifteen months had been happily absent) in her voice.
‘Baby has moved—has she not! I thought I heard her from my room.’
‘The infant sneezed,’ answered Gaston Arbuthnot with gravity. ‘Much to my terror. Sneezing might suggest waking. And to be alone with a waking baby recalls Dr. Johnson and the tower. Bring your wonderful packet here’—she had paused for a moment beside the child’s cradle—‘and let us have the scene out.’
‘We will never have a scene again while we live.’ Poor Dinah sank into her former kneeling position; she rested her cheek against her husband’s coat-sleeve. ‘Indeed, I think it might be fairer to you, more generous to Linda Thorne, to close the matter—thus.’
She held the packet in the direction of the flames.
With a quick movement Gaston Arbuthnot’s hand stayed her. He drew the contents forth from the envelope. He read Marjorie Bartrand’s ‘one word.’ Then he glanced at the blackened flower-stalks, at the bit of tarnished Spanish ribbon.
‘And could you believe—in the full possession of your reason, wife—that this was meant for me?’
Dinah’s head drooped lower. She coloured violently.
‘Could you believe that Linda Thorne, a woman who has travelled over half the habitable globe alone, picking up experience everywhere—Linda, a woman of tact, a woman of the world—would commit herself to sentiment of doubtful application, set down in black and white?’
‘I never stopped to reason—the heart within me was too sore. I knew Linda Thorne had called. I saw that the envelope was directed to you.’
‘Or to Geoffrey—which? It is, as you see, addressed simply “Mr. G. Arbuthnot.”’
‘But Mrs. Thorne and Geff disliked each other. Do you think, even in jest, she would——’
‘My best Dinah—let a molehill which, during fifteenmonths, has been assuming gigantic size, return, forthwith, to molehill proportions? This handwriting may be Marjorie Bartrand’s. One can imagine a classico-mathematical girl making that kind of “e.” It is certainly not Linda’s.’
‘And the meaning of the solitary word “Repentance!”’
‘Ah! you must read your own riddles,’ answered Gaston, with suavity. ‘Poor Linda and myself made an innocent wager of gloves, which I won. I know no more.’
Dinah rose hastily. She turned her face away from the fire’s light. Amidst the full happiness of the last year, in her wifely rejoicing over Gaston’s progress in his art, in the flood of charity towards all men which had come upon her with the new delights of motherhood, she had always dreaded the cloud ‘no bigger than a man’s hand,’ had always remembered the secret which a jealously locked drawer of her dressing-case hid out of sight. Her moral attitude towards Gaston had perforce been a stooping one, an attitude of dumb forgiveness. Believing in the present, hoping all things for the future, it had not been possible for her wholly to forget the past. In this moment’s sharp enlightenment, this unlooked-for vindication of Gaston’s loyalty, her first sensation was one of relief. Succeeding it—so swiftly that Dinah distinguished not where relief ended and pain began—there swept across her the keenest shame which in her fair untarnished life her soul had ever known.
‘You believe that the letter came from Marjorie Bartrand?’
The question fell from her lips almost unconsciously.
‘One suspects the Greek “e’s,” and see—here, in this corner is the Bartrand crest, an eagle with a bad-tempered beak and upheld claw. Take back your own, wife, your cherishedvendetta. I will have none of it.’
‘And you think she cared, really, for poor Geff?’
‘Marjorie was seventeen years old. The season of the year was June. They bent their heads together over thesame schoolroom table. Even I—I, who have been so long out of the running, saw whither things tended as early as the rose-show. Geff, no doubt, after a Platonic mode, admired the budding Girton girl—a girl,’ said Gaston, narrow-mindedly, ‘far too pretty for her calling! There came a breeze between them,—Geoffrey hinted as much to me the night before he left Guernsey,—a threatening of storm which, if a certain letter had not been kidnapped, might have cost him his life, I mean his liberty, there and then.’
By this time the blood had gone from Dinah’s cheeks. ‘And all this was brought about through me, through my small, self-engrossed jealousy. Oh, Gaston, how sinful I was, how guilty I am still! But for me, Geoffrey might long ago have come to happiness. He was our best friend always, and I betrayed him. I am the veriest wretch on earth.’
Tears of repentance rushed to Dinah’s eyes.
‘You do not mention a slight reparation you owe to Linda Thorne,’ observed Gaston, with his shrewd smile. ‘You forget that something may be due also to me, even me, a husband.’
‘I was ill, body and mind, that miserable day. I had scarce had an hour’s sleep since I came back from Langrune without you. A flimsy excuse,’ poor Dinah faltered, ‘and yet the only one I have to offer.’
‘It is the excuse in vogue. The big social scientists put just the same plea forward for the criminal classes. Crime is an illness. A man may run a knife into another simply because his digestion, reacting on the nerve centres, happened to be out of order. Probably, like you, my dear, the poor fellow had been suffering from insomnia! Such excuses,’ added Gaston, ‘are comforting enough for the man with the knife, but scarcely so consolatory to him stabbed.’
Dinah touched the flower stalks wistfully. She folded the ribbon with care before returning it to the envelope. Her hands trembled in her excitement.