‘You talk about reparation.... I shall not let an hour be lost. I shall write to Miss Bartrand at once, send back her own letter, and confess—oh, Gaston, the hard word is yours—that ’twas I kidnapped it.’
‘You mean to perform this act of contrition for Geoffrey’s sake?’
‘I do.’
‘Poor Geff! After getting decently out of danger once (and his letters don’t savour of a broken heart), it seems a trifle rough on him to have the thing revived.’
‘PoorGeff!’ echoed Dinah, her eyes glistening through their tears. ‘You call a man poor who has a chance of winning Marjorie Bartrand’s love? Does our happiness make you such an egotist,’—the reader will note that Dinah’s vocabulary was enlarging,—‘such an egotist you do not care for other people to marry?’
‘Or are you like the fox in the fable, my dear child—which?’
Dinah rested her clasped hands upon her husband’s shoulder, and cogitated softly.
‘Yes, I shall write to Tintajeux to-night. If it is not too late, if the hearts of both are free, Miss Bartrand will find some way of letting Geoffrey know the truth.’
‘Of that you may be assured. If two women are to conspire together in league against him, I say “poor Geff” with still more marked emphasis.’
And rising, Gaston moved in the direction of the door. In these later days, in the confidence of established love, Dinah had thought it no grievance that her husband should join the Florentine Artists’ Club, or spend a portion of every evening in other society than hers.
‘Like all true women you are a remorselessmatch-maker,’ he told her. ‘Unless the flame between these two victims is clean burnt out, you will contrive by your letter to re-kindle it.’
‘I wish I were a better scribe—that I could put my heart between the lines! Oh, I must begin at once. Baby shall be left—for the first time—with old Giacintha, and I will run round to the Piazza, and post the letter myself.’
‘Five years hence, I hope Geoffrey will bless you for having written it. There was a flash of temper not to be forgotten in Marjorie Bartrand’s handsome eyes.’
‘And if there was! If a woman has a temper, even a jealous one, is it impossible for her husband’s life to be happy?’
Dinah had followed Gaston to the door. She held up her face—the loveliest face in Florence, said the artists who worked therein—for his kiss.
‘All men are not philosophers,’ Gaston Arbuthnot made reply. ‘I have learnt—tolerably dear the lesson cost me—not only to exist in a stormy atmosphere, but to flourish there.’
And this is what Dinah wrote, not troubling herself over possible faults of Syntax, not making a fair copy in the slanting pointed handwriting to which, after much labour, she had tediously attained. This is what Dinah wrote, straight out from her heart—
‘Florence, November 15.‘My dear Miss Bartrand,‘I have just found,with shame and remorse, that I did you grievous wrong, last July twelvemonth. You were the kindest friend, save Geff, that ever I met, and I repaid you, little meaning it, with treachery. Perhaps when yousee the enclosedyou will guess what bitter confession I have got to make.‘Dear Miss Bartrand—I found your envelope on the mantelpiece of our parlour at Miller’s Hotel, and I committed the meanest action of my life. I broke it open—and because I was blind with selfish trouble, and thought of my own suffering before all things, I kept the letter. I have had it in my possession till this hour.‘It would be poor excuse to say I mistook thepersonit was meant for, as well as thehandthat wrote it. It would be cowardice to say my heart was too hot, too miserable to reason. I sinned, and if my sin has stood between my best friends and happiness, my punishment will last me my life.‘Unless I make too bold, may I hope, some future time, you will let Geoffrey read what I now write? Ask him to think of July the 1st, the day I went with him to Guernsey hospital. It was on that day, a quarter of an hour after Geoffrey left me, at the sight ofsome one he will remember, that I found your letter.‘Dear Miss Bartrand, I am the penitent and humble well-wisher of your happiness,‘Dinah.’
‘Florence, November 15.
‘My dear Miss Bartrand,
‘I have just found,with shame and remorse, that I did you grievous wrong, last July twelvemonth. You were the kindest friend, save Geff, that ever I met, and I repaid you, little meaning it, with treachery. Perhaps when yousee the enclosedyou will guess what bitter confession I have got to make.
‘Dear Miss Bartrand—I found your envelope on the mantelpiece of our parlour at Miller’s Hotel, and I committed the meanest action of my life. I broke it open—and because I was blind with selfish trouble, and thought of my own suffering before all things, I kept the letter. I have had it in my possession till this hour.
‘It would be poor excuse to say I mistook thepersonit was meant for, as well as thehandthat wrote it. It would be cowardice to say my heart was too hot, too miserable to reason. I sinned, and if my sin has stood between my best friends and happiness, my punishment will last me my life.
‘Unless I make too bold, may I hope, some future time, you will let Geoffrey read what I now write? Ask him to think of July the 1st, the day I went with him to Guernsey hospital. It was on that day, a quarter of an hour after Geoffrey left me, at the sight ofsome one he will remember, that I found your letter.
‘Dear Miss Bartrand, I am the penitent and humble well-wisher of your happiness,
‘Dinah.’
The letter was directed to Tintajeux Manoir, Guernsey, and posted by the writer’s hand on the night of November 15. A sharp Italian night, with the swollen Arno swirling, the moonlight lying in ebon and ivory patterns along the Florentine streets, with only one person—so it seemed to Dinah’s beating heart—abroad in the sleeping city.
At the same hour Marjorie’s eager eyes looked forth, through rain and fog, through the blurred obscurity of a Great Eastern carriage window, upon the lamps of Cambridge.
Madame Pouchée’s house, the goal of the girl’s journey, belonged to history; a thatched, lozenge-windowed structure, of which the pargeted gables, the black oak joints, and plaster panels abutted, with pathetically incongruous air, as of some aged spinster at a ball, on one of the brisk, modern thoroughfares of the town.
A brass plate engraved ‘Pouchée’ was on the front door, conferring a semi-professional character upon the mouldering household. Although the fencing-master, honest man, had lain for twenty years in Père la Chaise, and Madame Pouchée had no more ostensible livelihood than such small sums as Mademoiselle gained by the teaching of her language, their plate raised them to the plane of citizens. The mother and daughter formed units in that curious gathering of poor French people which exists in our University towns, decayed families of fencing-masters, hair-dressers, or cooks, once prosperous, who shiver through English fog and cold to the end of their existence because they are ‘dans leurs meubles,’ ratepayers!
To quit her dark old home, to forego the sound of Great St. Mary’s curfew, to submit her furniture to the hammer of the auctioneer, would, to Madame Pouchée, have seemed little short of sacrilege. She passed her life with no larger pleasure than knitting, no acuter pain than rheumatism.She could go to Mass on Sundays and festivals with more security in Cambridge than in France. Pouchée’s foils and masks were suspended in the raftered entrance hall. Pouchée’s portrait, as a glossy bachelor of twenty, with black frock coat, turn-down collar, and gamboge gloves, hung in the salon. Upstairs, in one of the low-ceiled attics, were her crucifix and bénitier, just as she brought them from far Provence before her first child saw the light.
Such things to an aged woman are more than climate, more than nationality. Madame Pouchée’s lot had not been rose-coloured during the fencing-master’s life. At the time of his death, even, Monsieur was in Paris, led thither by some of the unexplained affairs which perennially drew him from his own fireside. But his widow clung to the foils and masks and portrait with as much patient fidelity as though he had loved her always. The careless husband who lay in Père la Chaise belonged to Madame Pouchée’s middle age. The foils, the masks, the glossy bachelor with gamboge gloves and turn-down collar, were relics of her youth.
Every corner of the house was burnished to that vanishing point of cleanliness which only French housewives understand, on the evening of November 15. Ere Marjorie had well alighted from her cab, an unforgotten figure rushed forth through wet and darkness to meet her, a pair of kind solid arms held her fast.
‘But you are tall—but you are fresh and vermeille!’ Mademoiselle Pouchée hurried the girl across the strip of pavement to the house. ‘I see no more the little Cendrillon of old days. Come, then, mère, leave thy kitchen. Come, that I may present thee to our future Girton girl.’
Madame Pouchée’s cheeks were swarthy as the olives of her native country. An ample checked apron was tied round her neat black dress. She wore the provincial linen head-dress of her youth. Genuine French people do notshake hands on every occasion of human life, and fifty English years had left Madame Pouchée a genuine Frenchwoman still. The old lady came forward, not with a hand outstretched, but with such natural courtesy, such charming welcome written on her Southern face as reminded Marjorie of Spain, and caused her somewhat flagging spirit to rally.
‘I feel six years old again, dear Pouchée.’ This she said when Mademoiselle had led her into the salon, a tiny panelled room where a table was cosily spread for a dinner of two before the fire. ‘Surely we had our lessons this morning! Surely I was wicked—when was I not wicked?—and you gave me a double row of spelling for my penitence.’
Throughout the evening a mysterious sense of having gone back to her childhood fell balmily on Marjorie’s heart. Madame Pouchée gave them a little dinner, as exquisitely cooked, I dare to say, as was any dinner in Trinity or Magdalen that night. For dessert were Tintajeux pears, of which a goodly hamper had come over as a present from the Seigneur. Their coffee was served in Sèvres cups, dislodged for the occasion from Madame Pouchée’s inlaid cabinet—the costliest ornament of the salon, brought with her in bridal days from Paris, when the nineteenth century was in its teens.
‘It is like a Tintajeux holiday,’ cried Marjorie, as she and Pouchée sat, hand clasped in hand, beside the fire. ‘Do you remember every 29th of May we used to eat our dinner under the big oak in honour, you said, of le martyr Protestant, Charles?’ The prayer-books in the Tintajeux family pew were of ancient date. Pouchée, honest creature, was wont to entangle herself among the various Stuart and Orange services, greatly to the Seigneur’s edification. ‘Ah, Pouchée, we are wiser now. We have learnt history from loftier historians than Lady Callcott. And I, for one, am not happier.’
‘Whenever I look at Tintajeux I see a small Marjoriewith temper, with eyes, with a determined Spanish face—and whom I loved much. There are no figures in the picture. Still, whenever I look at Tintajeux——’
Mademoiselle Pouchée’s voluble tongue stopped abruptly.
‘No figures in the picture?’ Marjorie glanced round the empty walls. ‘And what picture are you talking of? Where is the photograph of the Manoir I sent you last Christmas?’
As she spoke Madame Pouchée entered, bearing a fresh-trimmed lamp—for this little household boasted of no parlour-maid. The old Frenchwoman lingered a while, her quick septuagenarian eyes watching the faces of her daughter and of their guest. She had caught Marjorie’s last words.
‘The photograph of Tintajeux Manoir? Why, it has been moved upstairs. It hangs in the salon of our gentleman, notre bon locataire—pas vrai, ma fille?’
Mademoiselle Pouchée put the interruption quietly aside.
‘Mère loses her memory. We must not always heed her,’ she observed to Marjorie, presently. ‘In bygone days, when the good papa was living, our family received undergraduates as lodgers. Mère has the old time in her heart still.’
‘Jesuitry, Pouchée! I remember your talents in that line. In bygone days, when the good papa was living, no photograph of Tintajeux Manoir existed.’
The remark was accompanied by a Bartrand look, as familiar, as smiting to poor Pouchée as though she and Marjorie had done battle over some delicate point of moral faithfulness that very morning.
‘There are accidents—contingencies—nay, times being hard, there is necessity. As well confess the truth. We do not take lodgers.’ Pouchée’s eyes dwelt fondly on the inlaid cabinet, the porcelain, the exquisite order of the little salon. ‘We are private citizens—rentières, living on our means.’
‘And there is no one in the house save yourselves?’
A flourish of Pouchée’s fingers hinted negation. ‘The old place is, in fact, two houses, as you will see by daylight. There are rooms at the back that can be entered by a flight of open-air steps—steps dating from the fourteenth century, ma mie.’
‘You promised me truth—not history, Mademoiselle.’
‘And by hazard—for the moment—we have a locataire. Not an undergraduate. We spare a room or two, on occasion, to some quiet gentleman—some resident M.A.—some student from the Art Schools. No undergraduate sets foot within our doors.We are not licensed.’
So keen a sense of distinction was conveyed by the italicised words that Marjorie forebore from further questioning. An hour later, however, when they were parting for the night in the fresh, chintz-draped attic which was the guest-chamber of the house, she ventured on a last surmise.
‘As we passed a certain baize door at the turning of the stairs I smelt the smell of a pipe. Our bon locataire must live somewhere in that neighbourhood, Mademoiselle—our quiet gentleman, who is not an undergraduate, and who has the photograph of Tintajeux Manoir on his walls?’
But Pouchée was blankly uncommunicative. The gentleman went in and out by the other staircase. Marjorie would neither see nor hear him during her stay in Cambridge. As to the photograph—it would certainly return to its place in the salon to-morrow morning.
‘If you are afraid of University ghosts,’ added the Frenchwoman, as she bade her guest a final good-night, ‘you will do wisely to bolt your door. Sleep well, ma mie, and dream that we are making cowslip balls, as we used a dozen years ago, in the woods of Tintajeux.’
The first five days of her Cambridge visit were resolutely spent by Marjorie in sight-seeing. It was well for her, she said, to come under the external influences of the AlmaMater, watch the cheerful flow of undergraduate life, look at Newnham and Girton from without, before delivering her letters of introduction.... It was well for her, while she still stood uncommitted to the future, to run a last forlorn chance of meeting the man she loved!
Here was the truth, unrecognised, perhaps, as truth, even in Marjorie Bartrand’s moments of sternest self-questioning. Day after day, however, slipped vainly by. A dozen times in each twenty-four hours her heart would leap, her pulses throb as men of Geoffrey’s height or build went past her in the crowded streets. Geoffrey Arbuthnot appeared not. She fell to quarrelling with herself over her own folly. Geoffrey might be at the other side of the world—married—contented: in every case must have learnt long ago to live his life, to do his work withouther. Happily, there were reprisals....
On the morning of the sixth day she determined to put her sweetheart away from her remembrance for ever.
‘I have come to the end of my sight-seeing.’ This she told the Pouchées at breakfast. ‘I have heard a University sermon and the services at King’s and Trinity. We have visited Trumpington churchyard and the Backs. I have seen Milton’s tree and Gray’s fire-escape, and—and the Girton girls playing tennis. When I have gone over your house, Madame Pouchée, when I know what kind of rooms reading gentlemen inhabit, my experience will be complete.’
The speech fell from her idly. Small curiosity in the affairs of others was never a sin to be reckoned among the Bartrand qualities.
But Mademoiselle Pouchée’s manner gave it purpose. Mademoiselle changed colour, fidgeted with her coffee-spoon, contradicted herself. ‘The rooms were the plainest rooms in Cambridge. No knowing at what time our gentleman went out or might return. For herself, she seldom entered his part of the house, and——’
‘Pouchée,’ exclaimed Marjorie, the old spirit of contradiction taking possession of her, ‘there is a mystery about our excellent lodger which I mean to solve. You seldom enter his part of the house, you say? You were in his rooms last evening. I saw you enter through the baize door, as I have seen you do pretty often already. I heard your voice as you talked to him. Explain these things.’
‘Enfin! It would be better if the truth were told,’ said old Madame Pouchée in her own language. ‘Our gentleman is an enemy of the sex. What will you have! When he heard a young lady was coming to visit us——’
‘He offered, of free will, to go in and out by the other stairs,’ interrupted Pouchée, adroitly. ‘He showed the finest, most delicate consideration. Since that first evening when Marjorie perceived his pipe our gentleman has not smoked. He goes out early. He does not return until he is worn out with work—such work as his is, too—at night!’
‘Then it is impossible we can disturb him,’ exclaimed Marjorie, rising briskly from the table. ‘As a matter of architecture I am interested in the fourteenth-century stairs. The rooms they lead to must be equally curious. You need not chaperon me.’ She looked back at Pouchée across her shoulder. ‘I shall push back the mysterious red baize, and walk straight into Bluebeard’s chamber without knocking.’
And running up the stairs, she was about to put her threat into execution when Pouchée, by a dexterous flank movement, cut off her advance.
‘There may be a litter of papers. Grand ciel! there may be the bones, the skull.’ With her hands upon the lock, Mademoiselle Pouchée barred Marjorie’s progress by her own solid person; then, opening two inches of door, she peered in, cautiously. ‘No; we are in order. We have locked up our skeleton for once. You may enter, child—Barbe-bleu is not here to eat you.’
Marjorie Bartrand stopped short upon the threshold. Something in the meagrely furnished room, the piles of books, the small fireless grate, the absence of any pretence at decoration or cheerfulness, affected her strongly. She shrank from intruding, unbidden, on such valiantly borne poverty as was here in evidence before her.
‘And you have robbed him of Tintajeux Manoir!’ She glanced round at the bare, damp-stained walls. ‘Tintajeux at least gives one a notion of quick and wholesome air, of honest sunshine!’
‘Our gentleman robbed himself. When I told him the morning after your arrival that you had asked for it, he took the photograph from his wall with his own hand.’
‘And you can give him no other picture to fill its place?’
‘He has a magnifique picture here, facing the window. See,’ Pouchée adjusted herself into a favourable light with an air of connoisseurship, ‘a magnifique portrait, just a little mildewed, of King William the Fourth. The fur on his Majesty’s cloak has been the admiration of many artists. Come in, ma mie, entrez. What are you afraid of?’
And Marjorie entered. She looked for a few seconds at the time-stained mezzotint which, with its black frame, its cheap glass, seemed but to make the wall whereon it hung more sorrowfully ugly. Then she crossed to the room’s one window—a diamond leaded casement through whose small dulled panes the side view of a crowded alley, of the corner of a still more crowded churchyard, was attainable.
A ponderous book lay on a chair beside the window. Marjorie Bartrand lifted it.
‘Marjorie, I forbid you to touch a book! Our gentleman studies for medicine. Medical works are not for the perusal of young girls.’
‘The girl of the future peruses everything! Quain’s “Elements of Anatomy,”’ cried Marjorie, holding the volume as high out of Pouchée’s reach as its weight wouldallow. ‘I wonder whether our gentleman would lend it to us, if we asked him prettily? We might study our bones together, Pouchée. Who knows, in days to come, that I may not go for a Natural Science Tripos?’
And—with the book still held aloft—her nimble fingers found their way to the title-page. In the top right-hand corner was a name, written in characters she knew:
‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot,January, 1880.’
For an instant Marjorie Bartrand turned ashen pale. Then as she recalled her position, as she realised that she had forced herself, unasked, into Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s room, the poor child crimsoned from throat to brow. She felt that the very soul within her had cause to blush over her temerity.
‘Let us come away this moment. I am taken by surprise—there has been some cruel mistake.’
The book almost fell out of her grasp. Swiftly as her limbs would carry her she made her way out of the room and down the stairs. Then, when they were safe again in the little salon, she caught Pouchée’s hand with passion.
‘I look to you, Mademoiselle, for an explanation,’ she cried with impetuous voice, with flaming eyes. ‘What right had you to conceal from me that Geoffrey Arbuthnot lived here?’
But Pouchée had the strength of conscious innocence. All further need of mystification was over now. Regarding their lodger as a shy recluse, an enemy of the sex, the two poor French ladies had striven with will to keep him and their visitor from meeting. This was the secret of their reticence, the sum of their offending. Mademoiselle Pouchée met Marjorie’s lightning glance calmly.
‘Mère and I had nothing to conceal. How could it have interested you to hear a stranger’s name?’
‘And you have never spoken of me in his presence?’
‘If we did, it was by hazard. Why should MarjorieBartrand of Tintajeux be more than any other young lady to Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘Simply,’ returned Marjorie, closely watching Pouchée’s unmoved face,—‘simply because Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot had the picture of Tintajeux hanging on his walls.’
‘By hazard, also. He took a fancy to the photograph from the first day he came to lodge with us. It had a look of Scotland,—it recalled some place where he had known good times. And so, to give him pleasure, I said that while he lodged here, Tintajeux should hang above his chimney-piece.’
‘From whence it was unhung, by his own hand, to please the caprice of an unknown visitor. Mr. Arbuthnot is very generous!’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot,’ cried Pouchée, warming on the instant, ‘is the most noble-hearted man living. Yes, and I have travelled! I have had my experiences widened. I know my world. That he should work hard at the hospital or over his books, I comprehend. A high degree is at stake. Men have their ambition. Mr. Arbuthnot goes into courts and alleys, vile places, left alone by the police, and where priests or parsons might get their throats cut. He searches out the worst outcasts in Barnwell and Chesterton, only to serve them.’
‘Now—at this present time?’ stammered Marjorie, conscience-stricken.
‘Now, while you and I, mon enfant, have been sight-seeing. His last protégé,’ went on Pouchée, ‘is a miserable bargeman, one of the worst characters on the river. This man was struck over the head by some falling timber two or three weeks ago. He was too nearly gone, so his mates thought, to be carried to hospital, and our gentleman just saved his life. He has nursed him day and night since, as one of your great London doctors would nurse a Prince of the Blood. If Mr. Arbuthnot were of our religion Icould understand it. I visit in Barnwell myself a very little.’
This was Pouchée’s account of her own charities. She visited in Barnwell a great deal. Beside fever-stricken, dying pallets, her acquaintance with Geoffrey Arbuthnot had first begun.
‘But we, Catholics, see in the poor our own sick soul. We hope, in saving them, to save ourselves.’
‘And Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘He serves them, gives them his time, his money—what do I know! his heart—simplybecausethey are castaway men and women. “Sisters and brothers in a queer disguise.” You should hear him say that, with his grave smile! It was to talk over some of the sisters and brothers, Marjorie, that I went to our gentleman’s rooms last night.’
‘Our gentleman ought to be a happy man,’ said Marjorie, with a sigh.
The Frenchwoman’s shoulders were sceptically expressive.
‘A hair-shirt is never worn for pleasure, child. It is not in nature that a man of six-and-twenty should care for other people’s lives more than for his own. Geoffrey Arbuthnot might have made a good servant of the Church,—an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier. But if one speaks about happiness—allez!’
These things sank heavily on Marjorie’s bruised heart. She felt that Geoffrey’s indifference to herself was now an ascertained fact,—nay, that his fancy for her, at no time worthy of a higher name, had turned to repugnance. He had asked her to be his wife under the glamour of a picturesque moment—a friendship, unique in its conditions from the beginning, suddenly taking upon itself a surface likeness to passion! A true lover would not have availed himself so readily of his chance of freedom, would not have magnified his mistress’s heat of temper into a crime, would not have rejected the fullest amends that woman could offer, short of falling upon her knees in the dust before an offended sweetheart!
Mademoiselle Pouchée was overjoyed when the girl announced herself ready, next day, to deliver her letters of introduction.
‘We shall see what such presentations lead to,’ exclaimed the kindly soul, her round face beaming. ‘A dinner here, a lunch there—the highest gentlemen in Cambridge to be met at each! I predict asuccès fou! Not all the world, let me tell you, brings such letters to the University. By after to-morrow you will have every evening of your week engaged.’
‘The University will keep its head, dear Pouchée. Asingularly insignificant young person from the Channel Islands runs no risk of becoming a sensation. The highest gentlemen in Cambridge will pay Marjorie Bartrand just attention enough to ask her name—and forget it.’
Nevertheless, on the score of invitations, Pouchée’s forecast proved a true one. Before night, arrived a friendly invitation bidding Marjorie to dine at the house of the Master of Matthias next day. As Miss Bartrand looked forward to studying in Cambridge, the note added, a lady high in authority at Girton had been asked to meet her.
‘Of that Girton lady I speak not,’ observed Pouchée, when the hour came on the morrow for Marjorie to dress. ‘About Newnham and Girton I am dumb.’ Imagine Pouchée dumb on any subject, earthly or terrestrial! ‘I have lived by brain work, I have been a teacher over nineteen years. See my whitening hairs, my lost illusions, my disenchantments! In that sad trade the woman’s heart breathes not. Make yourself charming, fillette! The most distinguished society of Cambridge is to be met with at the table of the Master of Matthias. For a child of eighteen there may be better things in store than coming out high in a Tripos; yes, or standing on a level with the first wrangler of them all.’
Marjorie’s presumptive triumphs caused the whole Pouchée household to expand. Wax candles—rare extravagance—stood lit before her mirror. Flowers were on her toilette-table. Her white dinner dress, with its simple adjuncts, was lovingly laid ready for her by Mademoiselle’s hands.
But in Marjorie’s restless heart there was no place for pretty dresses, for anticipation of social success. She drew aside her curtain. She gazed down through a chink of blind upon the street, hoping against hope, as she had so often done before, to discover the face of her false sweetheart among the passers-by.
It was the most crowded hour of the short Novemberday. Athletic men were there, returning, in flannels and wrappers, from the river or the Piece; sporting men from the hunting-field; reading men from their trudge along the Wranglers’ Walk. Of ‘pifflers’ an abundance; men with terriers, men with button-holes, men in dog-carts—the whole many-coloured undergraduate world, alert, self-engrossed. Drawing together the curtain, Marjorie Bartrand moved back to her looking-glass. She stood confronting the pale, serious-eyed vision that met her there with a kind of pity. She was so young, and the years to come were so many; disappointed years under whose weight she must stand upright, give no sign she winced beneath their burthen, wear a brave countenance—work! She felt that she hated Cambridge, this ceaseless ebb and flow, this turmoil of exultant, successful, youthful life! Was not Tintajeux, with its dying woods, its still moorland, a fitter drop-scene for the little played-out drama of her personal happiness?
As Marjorie meditated, the sharp sound of the postman’s knock made her start. No letter of more vital interest than a despatch from the Seigneur was likely to reach her; and yet her breath quickened. Her mood throughout the day had been one of feverish, unreasoning expectancy. Change, for good or for evil, was, she felt, in the air. Opening the door of her room, she listened with vague impatience. Hot controversies anent over-weight and foreign postage were impending between Madame Pouchée and the postman; Madame, in the matter of extra half-pence, standing stoutly on the defensive. After a time there would seem to be a reluctant payment of coin, followed by the brisk shutting of an outer door. Then the old Frenchwoman’s slippered steps began leisurely to ascend the stair. The girl’s breath came faster. She ran out on the landing. The letter wasnotthe size or shape of the Seigneur’s letters, and it bore two postmarks: Florence, Guernsey....
‘ ... Five half-pence over-weight. I hope, mère, it may be worth its postage,’ observed Mademoiselle Pouchée, busily tying up violets in the salon for the adornment of Marjorie’s dress. ‘The child has never spoken about Italy, still—her heart is somewhere, mère, and I don’t believe that somewhere is in Newnham or Girton. Ah, when I, too, had eighteen summers, when——’
‘Pouchée! Dear, good old Pouchée!’ called out a voice, resonant, hearty, imperious, from the attic floor. ‘Leave the violets. Come upstairs, quick! I have had splendid news. Everything in the world is changed. You must send an excuse to the Master of Matthias at once.’
In a moment the Pouchées, mother and daughter, were at the bottom of the stairs. Marjorie Bartrand, her opened letter in her hand, a flush of wild excitement lighting her face up into its vivid Southern beauty, stood on the landing above.
‘An excuse! Consider what you talk about!’ exclaimed Pouchée solemnly. ‘Have your splendid news, with all my heart! But have your splendid dinner, too. The Master of Matthias keeps the best table in the University. At his house you meet——’
‘The most distinguished society of Cambridge. Oh, Pouchée, what should I find to say to distinguished society ... to any king or emperor in Europe?... Hark! There is Great St. Mary’s clock striking the quarter. We have not a minute to lose. Write a note, Mademoiselle, in your best hand, with your pretty, courteous French grace, and give it to the coachman to deliver. I must read my letter through once more.’
Seven was the appointed time of the Master’s dinner-party. At the moment when Great St. Mary’s clock boomed the hour’s first stroke, Marjorie Bartrand extinguished her candles. She descended with muffled tread tothe red baize door at the turning of the stairs. Here she paused, listened until she heard the shrill treble of French voices, knew that the Pouchées were safely talking together downstairs. Then, on tiptoe, she stole to Geoffrey’s quarters. The door stood ajar; a stray reflected flare of gaslight from some shop window in the court beneath enabled her to grope her way across the chill and comfortless room.
The girl paused, irresolute. She remembered Cassandra Tighe’s story, remembered the miniature Bartrands, the confession made in their presence of Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s first love. During a few seconds the old Bartrand pride swayed her—the happiness of her life hung by a thread. Then she took a packet from her breast. She laid it meekly, furtively, on the student’s writing-table and fled, like one who quits the scene of a committed crime, to the light and cheerfulness of the little salon below.
Pouchée was decking the mantelshelf with the violets Marjorie should have worn. ‘Headstrong as ever, child! But I forbear to reason,’ she cried, ‘until you explain yourself. That big Italian letter, re-directed in the Seigneur’s hand, has brought you important news?’
‘I will answer you to-morrow, Pouchée. All I know is that I have lost my chance of distinguished society, and that my heart is the happiest heart in all Cambridge.’
‘Grand ciel! Then you have a dear friend among the Florentines!’ Poor Pouchée’s face brimmed over with curiosity. ‘I accept him, without conditions, for your sake. The Italians are ungrateful as rats. Think of all my country has done for them! Still, if a Florentine is your fate——’
But her imaginary concessions were cut short; the violets slipped through Pouchée’s fingers. There came the sudden click of a latchkey at the house door. A man’s firm step sounded in the passage.
‘It is our gentleman! Save yourself, quick, child! The curtain of the bay window will hide you.’
The words had scarce left Pouchée’s mouth when Geff Arbuthnot entered. He took a rapid glance round him, walked in the direction of the window—Marjorie’s heart thrilled as she crouched, imprisoned, out of sight—then stopped short. There was something of insecurity about his movements.
‘For a moment I was afraid to come in. The front door has become strange to one. But you are really alone, Mademoiselle? Your visitor has started to her party? Then you will let me have five minutes’ chat beside your fire? I have something good to tell you.’
‘That is right, sir. Please let me set you a chair.’
In performing this little action Pouchée artfully chose such a point that Marjorie, shadowed herself, might gain a full view of Geff Arbuthnot’s face.
‘Your fire makes one feel we are in November.’
He stretched his hands forth to the blaze. ‘How delightful your salon is to-night, Mademoiselle Pouchée.’
Coming in from the mud and darkness, the dreary prose of Cambridge thoroughfares, he might well think so. The room was redolent with the odour of Marjorie’s discarded violets; morsels of muslin embroidery, a thimble never worn by Pouchée’s finger, lay on a work-table near Geff’s elbow. The warmth, the grace, the nameless sweetness of a young girl’s presence, were everywhere.
‘How well that Guernsey photograph looks in its old place!’ Could it be that Geoffrey shrank from pronouncing the name of Tintajeux? ‘You shall not dismantle your walls again for whim of mine.’
Pouchée stirred the fire into a keener flame. She gave a discreet little cough.
‘We will settle about that another day, sir. I wait impatiently your news. Something good about yourself, I hope?’
‘Something very good.’ His face brightened. ‘You know our poor patient down in Barnwell?’
‘Our Irish bargee, O’Halloran, the dingiest character even Barnwell can show.’
‘But whom, when he was at his worst, Mademoiselle Pouchée tended like a sister.’
‘I sat up one or two nights. I helped—because the good-for-nothing is of my religion. Our priest advised an act of contrition. I had my motives.’
‘As I had mine,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Never condescend, Mademoiselle, to become a motive-monger. Do you think no experimental zeal mingles with a medical student’s attention to his pauper fellows?’
‘O’Halloran rewards you, I trust, with gratitude.That, at least,’ observed Pouchée, with a touch of cynicism, ‘would be a new experience among ces messieurs of the gutters!’
‘O’Halloran rewards me with gratitude. The bandages were off him this afternoon for the first time, as you know. Well, he was sitting, propped up in bed, looking at my face with such poor remnant of sight as remains to him, when suddenly—“Doctor! I’m darned,” he cried in his hollow voice, “if it be’ant my Varsity man, after all!”’
‘Modestly spoken! His Varsity man, indeed!’
‘I should have thought the fever had come back,’ said Geff, ‘if I had not had my finger on his pulse two minutes before. “Your Varsity man, Mike—what are you talking about?” I asked him. “What have you to do with the University or its men?” “I had to do,” he said, “with a Varsity man one accursed November night thatyoumust remember, doctor. There was a lot of chaps together, rough river chaps—you know the sort, sir—and three or four of the Varsity gentlemen came across ’em, down Petty Cury. The gentlemen wasn’t of the fighting kind, so far as I can recollect, but anyways they got into a Town andGown row—a bad one.... Doctor, I say”—the poor fellow put out his big weak hand to me—“I was the leader of the roughs. I struck a foul coward’s blow when the gentlemen was fighting honourable and unarmed. It was me give you the devil’s mark you’ll take with you into the coffin.”’
‘Scélérat—misérable!’ put in Pouchée, between her closed teeth.
‘I tried to joke him out of his fancy,’ went on Geff Arbuthnot, ‘but in vain. Mike had seen my face, before he struck the blow—and afterwards. He had never forgotten me. The scar which you, Mademoiselle, have lamented over, as marring my beauty, put my identification beyond doubt. “My Varsity man—my Varsity man,” he moaned. “I’ve thought of him many a time in the black years since.... And now, at last, I’ve found him. Doctor, you’ve saved my life—you’ve looked after me when I should have died, else, like a dog on this miserable floor, here—there’s one favour more I durstn’t, no, I durstn’t ask of you.... Give me your hand in token of forgiveness.”’
‘And you gave it him,’ cried Pouchée, whose face had turned a queer shade of colour as she listened.
‘I gave him my hand, and Mike, who I suspect has cared neither for God nor man in his life, caught it to his lips. My dear Mademoiselle, you can guess that it was a good moment. To pull one’s patient round, in body, is much. O’Halloran will have a human heart in that dark breast of his from to-day forth.’
And having told his story, Geff Arbuthnot rose. With a lingering look he took in the home-like suggestiveness of the little salon, the violets on the mantelshelf, the morsel of embroidery, the slender implements of needlework on the table. Then he bade Mademoiselle Pouchée good-night. Marjorie listened while his remembered step ran up the stairs, listened until she knew by the opening andshutting of a distant door that he had gained his study. Then she crept forth, uncertain of mien, from her hiding-place.
‘Have I committed a dishonourable action? Was there anything I should not have heard? Oh, Mademoiselle,’ she went on, incoherently, ‘is not Geoffrey Arbuthnot the noblest man in the whole world?’
And Marjorie clasped the mantelshelf, steadying herself thereby. She bent down over a cup of violets, hiding the face from which she felt all trace of colour must have vanished.
‘You look tired, ma mie. The news from Florence has not brought back your roses. Now, what shall I get for you?’ cried Pouchée, stealing a kind arm round the girl’s shoulder. ‘Thanks to your Italian letter, remember, you have been cheated out of dinner.’
‘I should like some tea,’ Marjorie answered, plausibly. ‘Tea and a plate of tartines, cut after the fashion that only you, dear Pouchée, understand.’
If the flattery were a trick of war to effect the Frenchwoman’s absence, I hold that, in a moment supreme as this, it was pardonable.
Off went Pouchée to the kitchen, unsuspecting to the last of the love story in which she had played a part, and Marjorie, her heart on fire, awaited her fate. For the first two or three minutes all was quiet. Then she heard the impetuous opening of Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s door. Her limbs well-nigh failed her, her spirit sank. Through a few seconds of suspense the past fifteen months seemed to unroll themselves, one by one, before her sight.... At last the salon door opened and closed. Marjorie moved a step forward—she held out a hand that trembled violently. A moment more and strong arms held her close, her blushes were hidden on Geff Arbuthnot’s breast.
There was a long space of silence, an interchange of suchwords, such broken attempts at explanation as pen and ink can ill put into form. Then Geoffrey led his sweetheart into the broader light of lamp and fire. He looked at her tall figure, her altered softened face, with wondering eyes.
‘You have grown several inches, Miss Bartrand. You have become beautiful. Tell me I am not asleep—dreaming, as I have done so often—that I hold your hand. Tell me my good luck is real!’
‘Don’t talk of good luck yet. I have not lost my Bartrand temper. Plenty of bad times may be in store for both of us.’
‘And when was this sent to me’ Geoffrey touched his breast-pocket, in token that Marjorie’s ribbon and letter lay there. ‘The address is an enigma. There is a faded look I cannot interpret about the handwriting.’
‘I left the packet fifteen months ago at your hotel in Guernsey.’ The girl’s face drooped. ‘You ought to have had it on the day after—after my vile temper drove you away from Tintajeux. I wrote ... one word ... as you wished; I sent you the bit of Spanish ribbon for a book-marker. But fortune was against me. I forgot that you and your cousin Gaston had the same initial.’
‘If Gaston had opened a letter wrongly he would have brought it to me on the spot.’
‘There was mistake within mistake—at that time poor Dinah’s heart was near to breaking—so she writes me now.’
‘Dinah! You have heard from Mrs. Arbuthnot? Let me see her explanation.’
‘I will read a passage or two aloud.’ Marjorie Bartrand drew the Italian letter from her pocket.
‘No. You will let me read every word of it for myself.’
And Geoffrey Arbuthnot took the letter, unfolded, and read it through.
‘Dinah was tried beyond her strength,’ said Marjorie, instinctively deciphering a pained expression on Geoffrey’sface. ‘But she has no need to feel so contrite. It will make our happiness doubly sweet to know it has come to us, in the end, from Dinah’s hand.’
The tone, the generous words, smote Geoffrey to the quick.
‘Can you give up everything for me?’ he asked her presently. ‘Your dream for years has been Girton. Do you desire still to become a Girton student, or....’
‘I desire that you shall guide me,’ was the prompt answer. ‘I need no other life, no other wisdom, no other ambition than yours.’
A finis commonplace as daylight, reader, old as the foundation of the Gogmagog Hills. Gaston’s prediction was verified—Marjorie Bartrand had proved herself a very woman after all.
THE END
G. C. & Co.Printed byR. & R. Clark,Edinburgh.