The strength, the delicacy of Geff Arbuthnot’s character were never better shown than in his present relations to Dinah.
Weaker men pay allegiance readily enough to the passion under whose sway they happen to rest. Geff was loyal, with a fine, a rare fidelity to the love that had passed away. He was Dinah’s brother always. And the story of Saturday’s rose-show told him, late that evening, by Dinah’s lips, sufficed to fill him with a more than vague misgiving.
He had wished often, thinking over the difficult question of her welfare in his rough-and-ready way, that Dinah could be forcibly saved from solitude and cross-stitch. Lo! the rescuer was at hand. But that rescuer, Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s common sense informed him, should be a very different Galahad to Lord Rex Basire. Acting on the moment’s impulse, Marjorie Bartrand had made a tentative effort at lifting Gaston’s wife into the fellowship of her kind. And the experiment was too successful. Dinah, so Geff divined, had scarcely taken one step in public, before the little hero of a lesser hour, the most popular man in his regiment, the most sought-after partner at the island balls, thought fit, the world looking on, to throw himself at her feet.
‘And did you find pleasure in it all? Did you for a single moment feel amused to-day?’
Something in Geoffrey’s voice suggested a sharper note of interrogation than was supplied by his words.
Dinah and Geff stood together on the same spot of lawn where we first heard the Arbuthnot trio talking of sentiment while they breakfasted. Gaston was dining out, whether at the Fort-William mess or at Doctor Thorne’s house Dinah had not sought to know. Of what avail to ask for truth when you have once been answered with a fable, no matter how prettily that fable was illustrated?
‘I was pleased for a time. Gaston showed no anger at my coming. It amused me to hear Lord Rex Basire talking down, as he thought, to my rustic understanding. Then without warning,’ Dinah turned away; she looked at the pale horizon line of sea, ‘I had a few moments’ horrible pain.’
‘You were ill!’ exclaimed Geoffrey, uncertain of her drift.
‘No, Geff, no. I don’t mean such pain as people consult the doctors for. The pain was at my heart—a sickening doubt of every one—a feeling that I stood on one side and all the rest of the world on the other—a sudden despair of life! Geoffrey,’ she went on, ‘with the gay people walking about, and the flowers smelling sweet, and the music playing, it did seem to me for a few seconds’ space that my heart must break.’
‘And on which side did you range me in your thoughts? Was I with you or with all the rest of the world?’ asked Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
These half confessions of Dinah’s were no new experience to him. She never uttered an ungenerous suspicion of Gaston, never made a complaint as to her own neglected life. And still a kind of moral moan had of late been constantly in poor Dinah’s talk. The warm woman’s heart, ill at rest, jealous, with no wholesome work or interest to keep emotion subordinate, was always, unconsciously, on the brink of betraying its secret.
He looked with pity that could never tire at her averted face.
‘You, Geff?’ she cried, putting on a brighter tone. ‘Why, you were on my side, of course. You do everything good that is done for me in this world. Through you, for certain, Miss Bartrand came all the way from Tintajeux to call on me.’
‘Don’t give me credit on that score. Marjorie Bartrand’s doings are guided by no living person save Marjorie Bartrand. She had made up her mind to know you; had heard, doubtless, about you and Gaston among the islanders, and of her own free will sought you out. Count me for nothing,’ said Geoffrey Arbuthnot, ‘in any action or caprice of Marjorie Bartrand’s.’
‘Had heard about me and Gaston!’ Dinah repeated his words with the preoccupation of morbidly strained feeling. ‘I think one may know pretty well what that means. No wonder so many people turned round to look at me at Saturday’s rose-show.’
‘People turn to look at you generally, do they not, Mrs. Arbuthnot? There is as much human nature, depend upon it, in the heart of the Channel as in Hyde Park or Piccadilly.’
‘That is more like a speech of Lord Rex Basire’s than of yours!’ cried Dinah, with a laugh unlike her own. ‘Throw in a lisp, varnished shoes, a waistcoat, and a double eyeglass, and I could believe it was his lordship, not Geff Arbuthnot, who was condescending to talk to me.’
‘You must have put forth all your charity, have exercised a great deal of wasted patience, in allowing his lordship to condescend at all.’
Chiefly through Gaston’s spirited character sketches over the breakfast table, Geoffrey had long ago known with certainty what manner of man Lord Rex Basire was. Instead of answering, Dinah stooped above a head of garden lilies, the dense white of whose petals showed waxen and spotless through the gloom.
‘I like the smell of lilies better than of all other flowers that blow,’ so after a minute her rich low voice came to Geoffrey; ‘I can never smell them, nor yet lavender, without thinking of Aunt Susan’s garden at Lesser Cheriton.’
Where Geff first saw her! The garden amidst whose crowding summer verdure he stood at the moment when his youth went from him, when Dinah and Gaston, hand clasped in hand, bent towards each other in the level sunlight. At this hour, with the whispers of a new love stirring in his heart, Geoffrey Arbuthnot could not hear that distant time spoken of, above all by Dinah’s lips, without a thrill of the old passion, the old maddened, blinding sense of loss overcoming him.
‘It might have been well for some of us,’ he began, ‘if we had never heard the name of Lesser Cheriton——’
But Dinah interrupted him quickly:
‘No, Geoffrey, I can never believe that. If it means anything, it must mean I had better not have married Gaston. I should have no hope, no religion—I should be a woman ready for any desperate action—if I thought that my life, just as I have it, was not the one God had cut out for me as best. The fact is, you know, I have been too narrow,’ she went on hurriedly. ‘Something has been running in my mind all this evening—some idle talk of Lord Rex Basire’s that I may repeat to you another time; and I begin to see my conduct in a new light. From the day Gaston married me I have been too narrow, far.’
‘In what way? Give me one or two specimens of your overnarrowness.’
‘I have tried to make the sayings of one class fit in with the doings of another. I have thought that right and wrong must be the same everywhere. This was my ignorance. If I had taken up—well, with Gaston’s sort of opinions,’ she added, making an unsuccessful attempt at gaiety, ‘it might be better for me and for him, too, now.’
‘I differ from you,’ said Geff, somewhat coldly. ‘Right and wrong are the same in every class. It would be an excellent thing for your health and spirits to get more change, more society. Stop there! Remain for ever,’ added Geff warmly, ‘in such ignorance as yours.’ And indeed the thought crossed him that, at this hour, what Dinah needed was safer anchorage, not wider ship-room. ‘Your happiness and Gaston’s would be wrecked if you attempted to rule life by any other “sayings” than your own.’
But there was a goodly alloy of mild obstinacy in Dinah Arbuthnot’s character. A given idea started, and she was slow to part with it. The recesses of her mind would seem to shut, with pertinacious closeness, over any decided impression, once made, and the key for opening these recesses could not always be found, even by Dinah herself.
From whatever source the sudden conviction of her narrowness arose, another four-and-twenty hours showed Geoffrey that the conviction was genuine. Dinah had made some kind of compact with herself, not only in the matter of opinions but of conduct. On the following day, Sunday, it happened that Lord Rex walked home with Mrs. Arbuthnot from morning service at the town church. Invited by Gaston, whose easy hospitality extended itself to most men, Lord Rex remained to lunch. He stayed on, long after Gaston’s afternoon engagements had taken him elsewhere. And Dinah, although her cheeks flushed, her spirit chafed, endured this, her first experience in the difficult duties of a hostess, without complaint.
‘Lord Rex Basire kept his Sabbath, it seems, in Miller’s Hotel,’ observed Geff, when the Arbuthnot cousins were smoking, one his short briar pipe, the other a delicately-flavoured cigarette after dinner. Geoffrey’s own Sabbath had been kept in the wards of the hospital, full to overflowing with the survivors of the quarry accident. ‘Nowonder Dinah confesses to a headache. That lad’s talk, a nice mixture of slang and assurance, judging from the specimens he gave us at lunch, would scarcely be of the nature Dinah loves.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Basire can be very fair company when he likes,’ said Gaston, with philosophic optimism. ‘He is not a giant, intellectually. But in their heart of hearts, Geff, however unflattering this may be to you and me, women don’t care a straw for intellectual men—until they have been authoritatively labelled. The island ladies, from Madame the Archdeaconess downwards, delight in Lord Rex, title, disabled arm, slang, assurance—all.’
‘Imagine five hours of him at a stretch. That is about what your wife had to live through to-day.’
‘Dinah is rousing herself, I hope and believe. It will do her all the good in the world to live through being bored.’ This was said with amiable imperturbability by Dinah’s husband. ‘I trust, for her own sake, poor girl, she is learning reason, beginning to discover there may be other music in the spheres besides that of the eternal domestic duo without accompaniment.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot puffed away at his pipe in silence.
‘It was a great thing getting her to the rose-show. For that, Geff, I suspect, I must thank you.’ Gaston gave a penetrating glance at his cousin’s face. ‘Miss Bartrand would certainly not have called on us but at your instigation, and through Miss Bartrand my poor Dinah has been introduced—well, to Lord Rex Basire, an Open Sesame! let us trust, to the strictly guarded gates of insular society.’
Rex Basire showed no disposition to let his newly-made acquaintance with Dinah Arbuthnot cool. Long before the hour for visitors on Monday afternoon, Louise, the French waitress, entered the Arbuthnots’ parlour. She placed before Dinah a card, also a bouquet made up entirely of white and costly hothouse flowers. Just like the bouquet Gaston gave her on her wedding morning! thought Dinah, with a rush of bitter-sweet recollection.
‘The Monsieur who was here yesterday, le petit Milor au moustache blond, demanded news of Madame. Was Madame visible? Should she, Louise, pray Milor to enter?’
Dinah glanced with indifference at card and flowers alike, then she rose from her work-table. Gaston Arbuthnot, it happened, was at home, putting the finishing touches to ‘Dodo’s Despair’ in his improvised studio. Walking quickly to the open window, Dinah, in a whisper, appealed to her husband.
‘Gaston, how shall I get rid of Lord Rex Basire? He has sent in his card and some flowers, as if flowers from a stranger could give one pleasure! He demands news of me, the French girl says, but that is too senseless. Tell me the civil way to—to——’
‘Shut the door in his face,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot,looking up from his model as Dinah hesitated. ‘Why shut the door at all? The poor boy will be better off talking to you than he would be making useless purchases for young ladies in the Petersport shops.’
‘But I am at work. I am counting off stitches for the forget-me-nots round Aunt Susan’s ottoman, and then I shall come outside. I want no company but yours.’
‘Basire will help you to count forget-me-nots. The very employment he would delight in!’
And, raising his voice, Gaston Arbuthnot called cheerily to the servant that Madame was visible. There was no time for Dinah to escape. In another minute Lord Rex had followed his hothouse bouquet, his card, and the French waitress into her presence.
She suffered him to possess her hand for one chill, unwilling instant. Determined, after a somewhat confused and halting fashion, to amend the error of her ways, to instruct herself, as in a book, in the usages of Gaston’s world, poor Dinah shrank like a child from the initiatory chapter of her lesson. She had endured Lord Rex, yesterday, in the spirit of martyrdom. But to-day, to-morrow! Over what space between the present time and September was her endurance to last?
‘I was afraid if I waited till the afternoon you would be out, Mrs. Arbuthnot. And I have a weighty matter to put into your hands; I—I—mean an awfully great favour to ask of you.’
Rex Basire, as garrison society knew him, was a youth weighted by no undue modesty, no obsolete chivalrous deference in his manner towards Woman. He really shone, little though Dinah might appreciate such shining, as he stood, hesitating—for a moment half abashed—before the calm coldness of her face.
‘You will forgive me for calling at this unholy hour?’ he proceeded as she remained silent.
Dinah Arbuthnot glanced towards the flood of sunshine that rested on the flower-bright borders of Mr. Miller’s garden.
‘Why is the hour unholy?’ she inquired, with slow gravity.
‘I mean an hour when you were certain to be busy,’ said Lord Rex, approaching her work-table. ‘Now I can see I am interrupting you, Mrs. Arbuthnot, am I not?’
He drew forward a chair for Dinah; then, after standing for some appreciable time, and finding that she neither spoke to him nor looked at him, he seated himself, uninvited.
‘Awful shame, isn’t it, to interrupt you like this?’
‘It does not matter much, my lord. My time was occupied in nothing more important than counting stitches for a border—that dreariest form of feminine arithmetic,’ Dinah’s lips relaxed, ‘as my husband calls it.’
‘Does your husband say so really? Just what one might expect. All husbands are alike.’
Modelling his clay outside, Mr. Arbuthnot smiled good-humouredly to himself at the remark.
‘Now, to me—you mustn’t mind my saying so—lovely woman is never so lovely as when she is absolutely a woman! Dead against the higher education business—girl graduates—platform females—you know the style of thing I mean. Only one out of my tribe of sisters, Vic, the eldest, works at her needle—my favourite sister from my cradle.’
Rex Basire felt that he threw a shade of discriminative, yet unmistakable flattery into this avowal of family preference. Dinah held her peace, having in her possession none of those useful colloquial counters which less uninformed persons have agreed to accept as coin. Rex Basire’s generalisation about husbands lingered in her mind with unpleasant, with personal significance. Was it possible that Gaston’s coolness towards her had becomematter of comment in the idle little world to which Linda Thorne and Lord Rex Basire both belonged?
‘I work at my needle,’ she remarked presently, ‘because I am not gifted enough to do better things. If I had talent, a tenth part of talent like Gaston’s, I should not spend my time counting threads of canvas.’
So the discriminative flattery had fallen through. Lord Rex tapped his exceedingly white teeth with the top of his cane. He searched diligently throughout the length and breadth of his brain for subject-matter, and found the land naked. His want of inspiration must, he began to think, be Mrs. Arbuthnot’s fault. These constant allusions to the absent husband were crushingly unsuggestive; tended, indeed, towards irksomeness. Arbuthnot was a well-looking man enough, of the usual American type, clever, possibly, in his way,—could knead up clay into droll little figures, and sing French songs without accent! It was distinctly not to listen to Gaston Arbuthnot’s praises that Lord Rex had toiled under a hot sun, and at this ‘unholy hour,’ from Fort-William Barracks up to Miller’s Sarnian Hotel.
He asked himself if Dinah were really as beautiful as during the past two days and nights she had appeared before him in his dreams? With a world full of charming women, most of them disposed, thought Lord Rex, to value one adequately, were this particular woman’s good graces high enough stakes to be worth playing for?
Was she really, if one watched her dispassionately, so beautiful?
Dinah set up her frame, and, leaning over it, began, or went through the semblance of beginning, to count her stitches. In doing so the line of down-bent golden head, the sweep of lash on the pink cheek, the outline of throat and shoulder, were given with full unconscious effect to Lord Rex. And the young man’s heresy left him. Whatever his other scepticisms, he felt, while he lived he couldnever doubt more on one subject, the flawlessness of Dinah Arbuthnot’s beauty.
‘Please let me help you in your dreary arithmetic, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Lend me a needle, at least, and give me a trial. I have only one hand to use, but I have been shown, often, how worsted-work stitches are counted.’ And, indeed, Rex Basire had had a pretty wide training in most unprofitable pursuits. ‘Each little painted square of the pattern goes for two threads, does it not?’
‘I am sure I did not know gentlemen understood about cross-stitch!’ And Dinah reluctantly surrendered her canvas to his outstretched hand. ‘Your lordship,’ she added, ‘will never make out the different shades of blue. This forget-me-not border is the most heart-breaking pattern I have worked.’
Your lordship—your lordship! Gaston’s face assumed an unwonted liveliness of colour as his wife’s voice reached him. Would Dinah never leave off talking as the young ladies talk behind the counters in glove shops, he asked himself? Would she never learn the common everyday titles by which men and women address each other in the world?
The clay was no longer plastic under Mr. Arbuthnot’s touch. He moved without sound to the window. He took a discerning glance at the two people seated beside the table—Lord Rex with masculine awkward fingers solemnly parcelling out canvas forget-me-nots, as though his commission depended on his accuracy; Dinah, a look of shy amusement on her face, demurely watching him.
Gaston Arbuthnot took one glance. Then he put aside his tools, wrapped a wet cloth hastily around ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ and with a manner not devoid of a certain impatience, prepared to quit his studio. Could it be—the question presented itself unbidden—that a shadow of coming distrust had fallen on him? The thought was absurd.He, Gaston Arbuthnot, distrustful of the gentle, home-staying girl, whose devotion to himself had at times—poor Dinah—amounted to something worse than a fault, an inconvenience! That to-morrow’s sun should rise in the east was not a surer fact than that his wife’s Griselda-like fidelity should endure to the end.
And still, in the inmost conscience of him, Gaston Arbuthnot was uncomfortable.
He had spent nearly four years of absolute trust—four golden years of youth, of love, with the sweetest companion that ever blest the lot of erring man. In this moment he realised the sensation of the first crumpled rose-leaf. Commonly jealous he could not be. His temperament, the circumstances of his lot, forbade ignoble feeling. He knew that for a man like Rex Basire toleration must be the kindliest sentiment that Dinah, with difficulty, could bring herself to entertain.
It was not jealousy, not distrust; it was simply the reversal of all past experience that disconcerted Gaston’s mind. It was the whole abnormal picture—the diverted look on Dinah’s face, her embroidery needle and canvas—hers—between Rex Basire’s fingers, that was so blankly unwelcome in his sight.
If Gaston Arbuthnot ever in his life was an actor in a similar bit of drawing-room comedy, you may be sure therôlechosen by him had been the one now played by Lord Rex. Some other fellow-mortal in a blouse, and with clay-stained hands, may have watched from the slips. It was Gaston who counted the stitches!
He was not cut out by Nature to take subordinate parts; and this his first little taste of abdicated power had a singularly insipid flavour to his palate.
Rex Basire, meanwhile, counted manfully on. A hundred-and-ten from the corner scroll to the first line of blue; and seventy-six, either way, of grounding. Emboldened by success, he insisted upon filling in the yellow heart of a single forget-me-not. ‘Just as a souvenir!’ he pleaded, contriving to get through the task cleverly enough. A twelvemonth hence, when half the world lay between them, he thought Mrs. Arbuthnot might look at the centre of this forget-me-not, and remember to-day!
‘I shall remember a length of filoselle wasted. Your lordship’s stitches must be picked out at once—they are worked the wrong way of the silk.’ Taking back the needle and canvas, Dinah began to put her threat into instant execution. ‘A twelvemonth hence,’ she added, ‘I hope to be looking at something more interesting than wool-work. Most of my pieces get stored away, for no one in particular. This ottoman is for my Aunt Susan in Cambridgeshire. It will be a great set-off to her front parlour,’—Dinah admitted this with a tinge of artist’s pride; ‘but I am not likely to see it there. We have not been to Cheriton for four years, and——’
‘Happy Aunt Susan!’ exclaimed Lord Rex, who was wont to be a little impudent without awakening anger. ‘What would I give to have—not an ottoman for my frontparlour—but something modest, a kettle-holder with an appropriate motto, say, worked for me by fair and charitable fingers!’
‘By your favourite sister’s, perhaps.’
Dinah’s voice was cold and clear as ice as she offered the suggestion.
‘You are in an unkind mood, Mrs. Arbuthnot. So unkind,’ Lord Rex took up a pair of scissors, and regarded them solemnly, as though they had been the shears of fate, ‘that I feel, beforehand, you mean to say “No” to everything I ask. I told you, did I not, that I had come to put a weighty matter into your hands?’
‘Do nothing of the kind, my lord. I am unused to receiving favours from a stranger. Your flowers are very beautiful’—with a touch Dinah placed the bouquet two or three inches farther from her—‘and I daresay your lordship meant it kindly to bring them. That is enough! I live quite retired, and——’
Stopping short, Dinah coloured violently. At this moment she heard Gaston’s tread as he ran down the outer stone staircase. She knew that she was left alone with Rex Basire for just as long as Rex Basire might think fit to stay.
‘But we hope to win a favour fromyou. The subalterns of the regiment are getting up a party for Wednesday, and we want to know if you will condescend to play hostess for us? We mean to be original,’ Lord Rex hurried on, not giving Dinah time to speak and refuse. ‘Instead of having a humdrum dance or dinner on terra-firma, we mean to charter a yacht—thePrincess, now lying in Guernsey harbour—and carry all the nicest-looking people in the island out to sea.’
Dinah’s eyes gave him a look of momentary but severe disapproval.
‘For this a hostess is imperatively needed.Chaperonage, in its most venerable form, we can command. I’ve been spending the forenoon, I give you my word I have, in paying court to old ladies. Miss Tighe smiles on our project. The Archdeaconess does not frown. Of course we have Mrs. Verschoyle. But we want a great deal more than venerable chaperons. We want a young and charming lady to do the honours for us. Mrs. Arbuthnot, we want you!’
Now Dinah’s nature held as little commonplace vanity as could well fall to woman’s share: through commonplace vanity had Lord Rex never, at this juncture, won her to say ‘Yes.’ From pleasure, so-called, she had shrunk, more than ever, since the taste she got of pleasure at the rose-show—yes, during the very hours when, with rash strategy, she had been planning to act a part in Gaston Arbuthnot’s world, among Gaston’s friends.
But every human being, given a wide enough scope, must end by justifying the cynic’s aphorism. The resisting powers of the best man, of the best woman living, have their price, so far as insignificant mundane matters are concerned.
No need to seek far for poor sore-hearted Dinah’s price!
Whispers of the projected yachting party had, for several days past, reached her, chiefly in fragments of talk between her husband and the other boarders in Miller’s Hotel. She knew that Gaston was an invited guest. She had an impression, based on air, and yet, like many a jealous fear, not all foundationless, that Linda Thorne was to be the quasi-hostess, the graceful presiding influence of the hour.
‘Me!—you ask me?’ she faltered, sensible of a blinding rush of temptation, and not lifting her eyes from the canvas where she had now effaced the last trace of Lord Rex’s handiwork. ‘I should think others would be more suitable. I should think,’ the blood forsook her lips as she suggested the name, ‘that Mrs. Thorne——’
‘Oh, we have decided, all of us, against Linda,’ said Lord Rex, with his usual cool sincerity. ‘Mrs. Thorne is the nicest woman going, on shore.’
‘Of that I am convinced.’
‘And she has been kind enough to murmur an experimental “Yes,” though no one acknowledges to having asked her. (A suspicion goes about that it was Arbuthnot!) But Mrs. Thorne’s qualities are not sea-going. She has not the marine foot, as your husband would say. She and the Doctor will be of our party, of course, but Linda could never play the part of hostess for us. Oscar Jones took her and the de Carteret girls out sand-eeling—you know little Oscar, the one handsome fellow in the regiment?—and Mrs. Linda was sea-sick straight through the jolliest night of May moonlight. You like the ocean, I am sure, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
‘Yes, I like it. Years ago, when we had not long been married, Mr. Arbuthnot hired a little cutter yacht. We spent four weeks at sea off the coast of Scotland. They were the happiest weeks of my life.’
Dinah said this with her accustomed quiet reserve. Yet, had Lord Rex known her better, he might have discerned a tremor in her voice as she recalled those far-off days—days when neither mistrust nor coldness had marred the first ineffable joy of her love for Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘That is all right; I am a second Byron myself. The sea is my passion. It would have been a sort of blow—I hope you understand me when I say that it would have been a sort of blow—to hear you say you were a bad sailor.’
Dinah, who never helped out a flattering speech, direct or implied, looked away from him.
‘A suspicion goes about that it was Arbuthnot.’ The words rang in her ears; light words, heedlessly spoken, yet destined to swell the total with which Gaston Arbuthnot was already too heavily credited on the balance-sheet of his wife’s heart.
‘We may count upon you, may we not? Arbuthnot has accepted for himself. Now we want your promise. If the weather continues like this we may rely upon seeing you on board thePrincessnext Wednesday?’
‘You have not explained what seeing me on board thePrincessmeans.’ Dinah’s tone was evasive. Probably, thought Lord Rex, the puritanical conscience required time to collect itself! ‘I don’t know, at my staid age,’ she added, ‘that I should countenance you. What did you say about carrying all the nice-looking people in Guernsey out to sea?’
Upon this slight whisper of encouragement Rex Basire entered voluminously into details. The proprieties—to begin, he declared, solemn of face, with the facts of greatest significance—the proprieties were set at rest. An undeniable Archdeaconess, a Cassandra Tighe (minus nothing but her harp), were secured. The de Carteret girls, and Rosie Verschoyle, four of the Guernsey beauties regnant, had accepted. It would be a high spring tide on Wednesday, and thePrincessmust start early to reach the Race of Alderney before the ebb. Afternoon would find them anchored off Langrune, in Normandy. ‘Where we shall land, observe the manners and customs of the natives, eat a French dinner, take our little whirl, perhaps, in the casino ball-room,’ said Lord Rex, ‘and so back, à la Pepys, to our virtuous homes.’
‘The scheme is too gay for me,’ cried Dinah, with an uneasy dread of Gaston’s disapproval. ‘I never danced in my life. I hope—no, I am sure, my lord, that I shall never set foot inside the walls of a casino.’
‘Not of a French casino, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’ Lord Rex argued warily, still mindful of the puritanical note.
‘Certainly not. A French casino! Why, that only makes it worse.’
‘A French casino is an innocent kind of sea-side dancing school. Papas and mammas of families sit around. Smallboys and girls exhibit their steps. Papa drinks his little glass of absinthe, mamma her tumbler of sugar-water. We go back to our hotel, hand-in-hand with the babies, at ten o’clock. Except the Zoological Gardens on week days, I know no human form of dissipation so mild as a French casino.’
‘I should have to meet too many strangers on board. I should be alone among them all. The only lady in Guernsey who has called on me is Geff’s pupil, Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux.’
‘Who will be invited to come, under your charge.’ Lord Rex adroitly left more delicate social questions untouched. ‘Marjorie Bartrand would be rough on a chaperon, I should think. Difficult to say whom the Girtonian of the future would not be rough on! But you, Mrs. Arbuthnot, seem to have stepped into her favour.’
‘And is Geoffrey to be asked?’
‘Geoffrey? Ah, to be sure—your cousin. Senior wrangler, was he not?’
‘Geoffrey took his honours in classics.’
‘Frightfully “boss” man, any way. Does not look as if he cared about frivolous amusements in general, still——’
Lord Rex hesitated. Some finer prophetic sense informed him that Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s might be a name as well omitted from the programme of pleasure he was chalking out with such zealous trouble for next Wednesday.
‘But is the party to be frivolous? I hardly understood that. No one loves the sea better than Geff. He will go, I’m sure, if I go.’
This was said by Dinah with conviction. Through long habit she had come to regard Geoffrey’s obedience to her smallest wish as an accomplished fact.
‘Notes shall be despatched to Miss Bartrand and to your cousin without an hour’s delay. I am awfullyindebted to you, Mrs. Arbuthnot. You can’t think what a load of moral obligation you have taken off my mind by saying “Yes.”’
And when Lord Rex left Miller’s Hotel he was radiant; a possibility of Geoffrey Arbuthnot saying ‘Yes’ also, the one little shadow of a cloud that obscured next Wednesday’s horizon.
On his return to Fort-William, later on in the day, his road took him past the garden gate of Doctor Thorne’s Bungalow. The gate stood open, and Lord Rex sauntered in, as it was the habit of unoccupied insular youth to do, during the afternoon hours of tea and gossip.
Small Rahnee and her ayah were picturesquely grouped upon a bright square of Persian carpet on the lawn. A macaw and two tame parrots gave a local, or eastern, colour to the scene as they screeched from their perches among the garden shrubs. Within one of the drawing-room windows—bay windows opening to the ground—reposed Linda. Her dress was of embroidered Indian muslin, not absolutely innocent of darns, perhaps, for the Doctor retained so much of old bachelor habit as to be his own housekeeper, and poor Linda must practise many a humiliating economy in her lot offemme incomprise. Bangles, similar to Rahnee’s, concealed the outline of the lady’s thin wrists. Her black hair, worn in a single coil, revealed sharply the outline of her head, Linda’s one incontestably good point. The cunningly arranged shadow of a rose-coloured window awning, if it did not hide, at least threw possible defects of complexion, suspicions of coming crow’s-feet, into uncertainty.
Linda Thorne was not a pretty woman. Lord Rex, his eyes still dazzled by Dinah’s wild rose face, felt more than usually cognisant of the fact. And still, with Rahnee and the turbaned ayah, with the macaws and parrots, the embroidered Indian dress, the Indian-looking bungalow,Linda ‘composed’ well. She formed the central figure of a Benjamin Constant picture, right pleasant to behold.
A hum of animated voices was in the air. Three or four young and pretty girls were distributed, spots of agreeable colour, about Linda’s sober-hued drawing-room. The prettiest of them all presided over a miniature tea-table drawn close beside the hostess at the open window. And the burthen of everybody’s talk, the clashing point of everybody’s opinions, was next Wednesday’s yachting-party.
‘We are to start at seven. Mamma heard it from Captain Ozanne himself.’
‘At midnight of Tuesday. ThePrincesswill be away twenty-four hours.’
‘A week, at least, Rosie! And Madame Corbie is to be chaperon.’
‘I heard—Cassandra Tighe.’
‘There are to be no chaperons worth speaking of, for of course—don’t be offended, Linda—we cannot look upon you as one, so——’
‘So you are quite wrong, all of you,’ exclaimed Lord Rex, his head peeping up suddenly across Linda Thorne’s shoulder. ‘Miss Verschoyle, will you give me a cup of tea if I promise to set you right in a few of your guesses? A cup of tea, and your protection, for I am certain to be well attacked.’
‘This stimulates our curiosity to the proper point,’ the young lady answered, with a doubtful smile, but making place for Lord Rex at her side. ‘At the same time, it is an admission you have been doing something rather less wise than usual. Do you take six or seven lumps of sugar in your tea, Lord Rex? I never remember the precise number.’
Rosie Verschoyle was a bright-complexioned, dimpled girl of nineteen, with an exactly proportioned waist (ofsociety), an exactly correct profile, the exact mass of nut-brown hair that fashion requires descending to her brows, and a pair of large, nut-brown, somewhat spaniel-like eyes. Until Dinah’s advent Lord Rex thought Rosie the fairest among the beauties regnant, and was openly her slave at all the picnics and garden-parties going. Miss Verschoyle had not the air of encouraging these attentions. She seldom lost a chance of making Rex Basire’s vanity smart, and had been known to say that she positively disliked that plain, forward boy who managed to scare away really pleasant partners and monopolise one’s best dances. And still, throughout the whole island society, among Rosie’s more intimate girl-friends notably, there had been a growing suspicion for some time past that Miss Verschoyle would, one day, marry Lord Rex Basire.
‘I take as many lumps as Miss Verschoyle chooses to give me.’ He received the cup with mock humility from her plump, white, inexpressive hands. ‘The sweets and bitters as they come.’
‘Bitters—in tea!’ echoed Rosie, opening her brown eyes wide. ‘Steer clear of metaphors, Lord Rex. They really do not suit your style of eloquence.’
‘Rosie, Rosie! While you two children spar, the rest of us are dying of curiosity.’ The admonition was made in Linda’s smoothest voice. ‘Lord Rex, recollect your promise. You know, you are to set us all right. What are the plans for Wednesday? Why are we certain, when we have heard these plans, to attack you? Come here, and make confession.’
Lord Rex perched himself, obediently, on a stool near Mrs. Thorne’s feet. Then, sipping the tea sweetened for him by Rosie Verschoyle, with more trepidation of spirit, so he afterwards owned, than he ever felt before the fire of an enemy, he thus began his shrift:
‘We have made due inquiry from the harbour-master,and find thePrincessmust clear out as soon as the first English steamer is signalled. Will seven o’clock be too early for you all?’
A chorus of cheerfully acquiescent voices answered, ‘No.’
‘We have also invited Madame Corbie and the Archdeacon. It seems, for an expedition of the kind, one ought to have a real substantial chaperon or two. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Thorne, but——’
‘Oh, don’t apologise,’ cried Linda, with good humour, willing, like most of her sex, to condone the accusation of over-youth.
‘And Madame Corbie accepts, conditionally. I have been paying my court to aged ladies half the morning! So, unconditionally, does Miss Tighe. As regards chaperonage, one may say really—really——’ hesitated Lord Rex, feeling in his guilty soul how red he grew, ‘one may say, Mrs. Thorne, that, in the matter of chaperons, there will be an embarrassment of riches.’
‘Especially as mamma never allows me to go anywhere without herself. Was it about the superabundance of chaperons that you knew we should attack you?’
Rosie Verschoyle asked the question in her gay, thin little voice, her unpremeditated manner, yet with a directness of aim that poor Lord Rex had not the cleverness to parry.
‘Attack me? Why, that was only a foolish joke, don’t you know! Yes, we—we have Mrs. Verschoyle and the Archdeaconess as chaperons-in-chief. Only, poor Mrs. Verschoyle, the moment thePrincessmoves, will be in the cabin, and the Archdeaconess——’
‘Try not to look so conscious. The Archdeaconess?’
‘If the wind veers between this and Wednesday, will not start at all. And so, as we must have a married lady to do hostess for us, and as you, Mrs. Thorne, are also not a first-rate sailor, I have asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
A heavy silence followed upon this announcement. Linda Thorne was the first to break it.
‘And Mrs. Arbuthnot has accepted? I need hardly ask the question.’
‘Yes,’ returned Lord Rex, staunchly enough, ‘I am glad to say that Mrs. Arbuthnot has accepted.’
Rosie Verschoyle turned over and examined a band of silver on her round white wrist.
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot? Surely that is the same person we saw with Marjorie Bartrand at the rose-show? How wonderfully handsome she is! Mamma has talked of nothing else. One will be quite too glad to see her near. In these democratic days we must all bow unquestioningly before Beauty. The capital B renders it abstract.’
Lord Rex felt the speech to be ungenerous. Vague questionings that he had once or twice held within himself, as to whether he might or might not be in danger of liking Miss Verschoyle too well, received an impromptu solution at this moment. He was in no danger at all: held the local estimate of her good looks, even, to be overstrained. As she stood before him, in her fulness of youthful grace, the delicate profile held aloft, the little cruel sentences escaping, one by one, from her pouting red lips, Rosie’s prettiness seemed changed to Rex Basire as though the wand of some malignant fairy godmother had secretly touched her.
‘My political opinions outstep democracy, Miss Verschoyle. But if I were as starched a Tory as—as my own father, by Jove! I should think Mrs. Arbuthnot’s society an honour. I don’t understand that sort of thing, the tone people put on in speaking of a woman whose only crime is her beauty.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot, if she needs a defender, is fortunate in possessing so warm a one.’
The remark was made by Rosie Verschoyle with unwise readiness.
‘But one could never imagine her, poor dear, needing anything of the kind.’ It was Linda Thorne who spoke. ‘I have been introduced to Mrs. Arbuthnot by her husband. I have heard about her, also from him, and I am sure she is quite the most harmless of individuals. Not naturally bright! Like too many other gifted creatures, Mr. Arbuthnot may know the want of household sympathy——’
‘Gets along capitally without it,’ interrupted Lord Rex. ‘Never saw any man better satisfied with himself and with his life than Arbuthnot.’
‘Not naturally bright, and lacking the education which, in more fortunate people, serves as a varnish to poorness of ability. If they stay here long enough I shall persuade Mr. Arbuthnot, as a duty, to make his wife take lessons—in music, riding, calisthenics, anything to beguile her from that patient, that perpetual cross-stitch.’
Lord Rex gave a searching look at Linda Thorne’s face. His was no very high or luminous character, as will be seen in the after course of this history. Yet were his failings chiefly those of his age and circumstances. When he erred it was without premeditation, walking along tracks trodden hard by others. His virtues were his own, and among these was the virtue of thorough straightforwardness. It trembled on Lord Rex’s tongue to ask Linda a crucial question relative to Gaston Arbuthnot’s ‘duty,’ when approaching footsteps made themselves heard along the gravel drive. There came a shrill shout of welcome in Rahnee’s voice, a torrent of pigeon English, presumably from the ayah, in which the words ‘Missy ’Butnot’ might be distinguished. Linda Thorne’s Indian-bleached cheeks assumed a just perceptible shade of red.
‘Talk of angels,’ she observed, raising her finger to her lips, ‘and straightway we hear the flutter of their wings! It would be wise to choose a rather less invidious theme than the demerits of cross-stitch.’
And then, almost before she finished speaking, Gaston Arbuthnot, with the quiet air of a man certain of the reception that awaits him, entered upon the scene.
Next Wednesday’s yachting expedition continued to be the subject of talk among Linda’s visitors. But it was talk with a difference; the character of Ophelia cut, by desire, from the play. Hard to bewail the lot of gifted creatures, or discuss the necessity, in these democratic days, of bowing down to Beauty, with Dinah’s husband taking part in one’s conversation! When the party had dispersed, however,—Lord Rex, in spite of his disenchantment, escorting Rosie Verschoyle home,—when Linda Thorne was left alone with Gaston Arbuthnot, she spoke her mind. And her tone was one which all her social knowledge, all her powers of self-command and self-effacement, failed to render sweet.
Now it was a peculiarity belonging to Gaston Arbuthnot’s character that he was apt to mystify every human creature, his cousin Geoffrey excepted, with whom his relations were near. The more intimate you became with this man the less firm seemed the moral grip by which you held him. Dinah’s over-diffident heart perpetually doubted the stability of his love. She was unhappy with him, dreading lest, in her society, he were not enough amused. She was unhappy away from him, dreading lest in her absence he were amused too well! Linda Thorne was equally at fault as to the texture of his friendship. Long years ago, Gaston Arbuthnot’s boyish good looks—perhaps it must be owned, Gaston Arbuthnot’s devoted attentions—won all of tender sentiment that Linda, then a neglected, overworked governess, had to give. She had been to India in the interval. She had learnt the market worth of sentiment. There was Dr. Thorne ... Rahnee! There were her duties, real and histrionic, to fill her life. And the days of her youth had reached the flickering hour before twilight.
But Linda had not forgiven Gaston Arbuthnot. Shehad not forgotten how near she once came to loving him. And she was sorely, unreasonably wounded, through vanity rather than through feeling, by Dinah’s fresh and girlish charm.
An anomalous position; perhaps, a commoner one than some young wives, morbidly sensitive as to alien influence over their husbands, may suspect.
‘So there has been a small imbroglio about Wednesday’s arrangements! I cannot tell you how glad I am to be relieved from a weight of sea-going responsibility. Mrs. Arbuthnot, I am sure, will enact hostess for our young subalterns so much more gracefully than I could. She is a good sailor, doubtless?’
Gaston had taken up a morsel of drawing-paper and some red chalk—every kind of artistic appliance had found its way, of late, into Mrs. Thorne’s drawing-room—some ideal woman’s face with beauty, with anger on it, was growing into life under his hand. He finished, in a few delicate, subtle touches, the shadow between a low Greek brow and eyelid ere he spoke.
‘Dinah is a famous sailor. We look back to a little Scottish yachting tour we made, soon after our marriage, as about the best time of our lives.’
Linda Thorne, a fair decipherer of surface feeling in general, could gather absolutely nothing from Gaston’s level tone. He raised his eyes, during a steady second or two, from his paper; he met her interrogative glance with one of strict neutrality.
‘I am relieved and at the same time stupidly inquisitive. Now, why in the name of all things truthful, did you not mention that Mrs. Arbuthnot meant to go with us on Wednesday?’
Gaston was silent; too absorbed perhaps in his creation, slight chalk sketch though it was, to give heed to matter so unimportant as this which Linda pressed upon him.
‘Possibly you were not aware that Mrs. Arbuthnotwasgoing!’
Linda Thorne hazarded the remark with a suspicion of innocent malice.
‘That really is the truth.’ Taking a folding-book from his breast, Gaston stored away his sketch carefully between its leaves. ‘You must excuse me, Mrs. Thorne. An idea struck me just now, suggested by a look I surprised on the face of Miss Verschoyle, and I hastened forthwith to make my memorandum. Dinah to enact hostess for the subalterns on Wednesday, do you say? Surely not. I could almost wish that it were to be so. But my wife, as you know, keeps to her own quiet way of life.’
‘We have Lord Rex Basire’s word for it. According to Lord Rex, Mrs. Arbuthnot has most decidedly accepted their invitation.’
‘Dinah does not mean to go. Lord Rex deceives himself.’
Gaston Arbuthnot spoke with sincerity. He had told Geoffrey, as a jest, that Dinah was turning over a new leaf, beginning to discover, poor girl, that there might be other music in the spheres besides that of the eternal domestic duo without accompaniment. Of Dinah’s profoundly changed mood, her resolve of gaining wider views by frequenting a world which as yet she knew not, he was ignorant.
Linda Thorne watched him sceptically.
‘Pray do not dash my hopes. I trust and I believe that Mrs. Arbuthnot will play hostess to us all next Wednesday. Come!’ she added, with rather forced playfulness. ‘Will you make me a bet about it? I will give you any amount of odds you like in Jouvin’s best.’
‘It is against my principles to bet on a certainty, Mrs. Thorne. I am as certain that Dinah has not pledged herself for Wednesday’s picnic as that I have pledged myself to dine with Dr. and Mrs. Thorne this evening.’
But, in spite of his assured voice, a shade of restlessness was to be traced in Gaston Arbuthnot’s manner. He would not remain, as it had become his habit to do, at The Bungalow, singing, or drawing, or chatting away the two hours between afternoon tea and dinner, in Linda’s society. Even Rahnee (to Gaston’s mind the first attraction in the house) must forego her usual game of hide-and-seek with ‘Missy ’Butnot.’ Even Rahnee threw her thin, bangled arms round her playmate’s neck in vain. Frankly, so, at last, he was brought, to make confession, he had forgotten to tell Dinah of his engagement, must hurry back, forthwith, to Miller’s Hotel to set Dinah’s heart at rest. Unnecessary? ‘Ah, Mrs. Thorne,’ and as he spoke Gaston’s eyes looked straight into the lady’s soul, ‘that question of necessity just depends upon the state of one’s domestic legislation. Regarding these small matters, my wife and I, fortunately for ourselves, are in our honeymoon stage still.’
This was always Gaston’s tone in speaking of Dinah at The Bungalow. He painted truth in truth’s brightest colours whenever he afforded Linda Thorne a glimpse of his own household happiness.
The first dressing-bell was ringing by the time he reached the hotel. Dinah’s parlour was empty; her embroidery frame—silver paper shrouding its impossible forget-me-nots and auriculas from the light of heaven—stood on her work-table. Passing into the adjoining room without knocking, Mr. Arbuthnot beheld a sight not new to him, save as regarded the hour of the day—Dinah on her knees beside her bed, her head bowed, her face hidden between her hands.
She rose up hurriedly at the sound of her husband’s entrance. She brushed away some tell-tale tears, not, however, before Gaston’s quick glance had had opportunity to detect them.
All men dislike the sight of a wife in tears. A small minority may dislike the sight of a wife on her knees. Gaston Arbuthnot shared both prejudices. He concealed his irritation under a kiss—cold, mechanical, the recipient felt those kisses to be—bestowed on each of Dinah’s flushing cheeks.
‘I beg a thousand pardons for disturbing you at your prayers, my dear, but——’
‘I was not praying. I wish I had been,’ interrupted Dinah promptly. ‘To pray, one’s heart must be at rest.’
Now Gaston Arbuthnot looked upon all strong andunpleasant emotion with a feeling bordering on actual repugnance. And Dinah’s voice had that in it which threatened storm. His irritation grew.
‘I beg your pardon for interrupting a mood not calm enough for prayer (although it required a prayerful attitude), yet sad enough for tears. That terrible habit of weeping will wear away even your good looks in time, Dinah.’
A time far distant, surely! Never had she been fairer in Gaston’s sight than at this moment, in her fresh cambric dinner dress, with her hair like a nimbus of gold around her forehead, with a colour vermeil as any Italian dawn on the cheeks his lips had newly touched.
‘I should like to keep my good looks till I am fifty years old, if good looks were only faithful servants, if they brought one only a taste of real happiness. As it is——’
‘My dear girl, although you chance to be a little out of temper with life, don’t forget you have a husband. I am a vain man—so you and Geff tell me—and the chief of all my vanities is, that I am blest with a handsome wife.’
‘Out of temper with life? I think not, Gaston. Life has been sent me, the rugged with the smooth, and I must learn to fit myself to both. If I had been clever I should have learnt my lesson long ago. I must shape myself to things as they are, not want to shape them according to my poor village notions. I was trying to reason about it all just now.’
‘In an attitude that I misunderstood,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘I go on my knees when I need to think, clearly and humbly. I would not dare to say at such times that I pray.’
Talk like this was beneath, or above, Gaston Arbuthnot’s level. He told her so plainly.
‘My afternoon has been passed in a thoroughly mundaneand grovelling manner, Dinah. I left this house at about three, just when you were giving Lord Rex Basire a lesson in cross-stitch! Since then I have been spending my time, not in solemn thoughts that required genuflexion, but in listening to the last little version of the last little bit of island gossip. It seems you mean, after all, to go into the world where, as I have often told you, so many more sink than swim. You have accepted Rex Basire’s invitation for the picnic next Wednesday?’
The accusation, if it were one, came with a sharpness of ring foreign to Gaston Arbuthnot’s modulated voice. Dinah’s colour deepened.
‘I have accepted Lord Rex Basire’s invitation for Wednesday—yes.’
‘You cannot, I think, mean to go. The picnic will be a helter-skelter kind of affair. It was got up by these young men, in the first instance, more as a frolic than anything else, and——’
‘You are going yourself, are you not, Gaston?’
‘That is uncertain. I believe I did give a conditional consent over the dinner-table, before it was at all sure the thing would come off.’
‘And Mrs. Thorne is going?’
‘Oh, Linda goes everywhere. There is a legend that she and the Doctor dined one night at mess.’
‘And Madame Corbie? Don’t you think a party that is staid enough for an Archdeacon’s wife must be safe for me?’
It was Dinah who spoke; yet the tone, the words, were curiously unlike Dinah’s. Some other woman, surely, stood in the place of her who during four years had been as wax to every careless turn of Gaston Arbuthnot’s will!
‘I can see that you have made up your mind—confess, Dinah, you have run already to Madame Voisin’s and ordered your dress for Wednesday?’
She turned away, impatiently, at the question.
‘Well, I will not be unwise enough to argue. At least persuade Geoffrey to go too, get Geoffrey to take care of you. Had I been consulted,’ remarked Gaston drily, ‘I should have advised you to “come out” anywhere rather than on a yacht hired, in this kind of way, by Lord Rex Basire and his brother subs.’
‘Gaston!’
‘Oh, not because of the right or wrong of the thing. I don’t,’ said Gaston, ‘go in for transcendental attitudes, morally or physically. My advice would have been simply offered on a matter of taste. You, my love, are doubtless the best judge. What time is it—seven? Then I have scarcely half-an-hour left to dress.’
‘To dress!’ faltered Dinah. ‘And my briar roses, our walk to Roscoff Common? I have been looking forward to it for days. Did you not promise to draw me some real briar roses for the finish of my border?’
‘Of course, I promised, and of course I shall fulfil, my dear child. The Roscoff roses will keep.’
‘And you are going out to dinner again, Gaston?’
‘Only to The Bungalow.’ Mr. Arbuthnot made a move towards the door of his dressing-room. ‘Mrs. Thorne is amiable enough generally to condone a morning-coat. To-night, I believe, there will be more of a party than usual.’
Dinah rested her hand upon her husband’s shoulder, but not with the clinging, imploring touch to which Gaston Arbuthnot was accustomed.
‘If I could have an answer to one question I should be content,’ she exclaimed, almost with passion. ‘It is an answer you can give. What are Mrs. Thorne’s gifts? What is the cleverness which draws a man as difficult to please as you five days a week to her house?’
The situation had become critical. A feverish colourburned on Dinah’s face, her question was trenchant and desperately to the point. But it was just the hardest thing imaginable to get Gaston Arbuthnot into a tiptoe posture. The drama of his life, so he himself avowed, consisted, a good nine-tenths of it, of carpenter’s scenes. If he were forced to declaim some passage of high and tragic blank-verse it would inevitably sound like a bit of genteel comedy from his lips!
A husband of warmer temper, it would be unjust to say of warmer heart, must have kindled at the daring of Dinah’s words, the ardent eagerness of her face.
Gaston Arbuthnot was interested rather than moved. He answered with the chill candour of an impartial judge:
‘Linda’s gifts? First on the list we must place the cardinal one of vocal silence. Mrs. Thorne does not sing.’
‘She can accompany other people who do,’ said Dinah, with imprudent significance.
‘And can accompany them well. Have I ever told you, Dinah, how and where I first saw the lady who is now Doctor Thorne’s wife?’
‘You have not. You have never spoken to me about Mrs. Thorne’s life, past or present.’
Dinah’s tone was as nearly acrid as her full and rounded quality of voice permitted. She felt intuitively that Gaston would parry her question, as he had so often done before, by apposite narrative which yet led no whither; felt that though every word he spoke might be true to the letter, the one truth of vital moment to herself would be in the words left unspoken.
‘It was in Paris, my love, in long past days before I went to Cambridge, and when I was much less of an Englishman than I am now. My mother, with a wholesome dread of my artist friends, and of the Quartier Latin, cultivated what she called occasions of family life for me. One such occasion came to her hand. Under the same roofwith us, but on a lower floor, as befitted their purse, lived a rich Jew family, with a bevy of young daughters and an English governess——’
‘Linda Thorne?’
‘At that time Linda Smythe. Yes, Linda Constantia was seated at a piano the first evening my mother forced me down to Madame Benjamin’s salon. I think I see her now, poor soul, playing accompaniments to the singing—the terrible operatic singing of Papa Benjamin. By and by we danced in a round, “Have you seen the baker’s girl?” “Mary, soak thy bread in wine,” and other mild dances of the unmarried Frenchmees. The governess remained at the piano still. ‘Our good Smeet! she knows so well to efface herself,’ said Madame Benjamin, giving me a tumbler of sugar-water to present to my countrywoman. I might almost answer your question, Dinah, in Madame Benjamin’s words—Linda Thorne understands perfectly the difficult social art of effacing oneself.’
‘Was she effaced at Saturday’s rose-show?’
‘She was alocum tenens, good-naturedly presiding over the refreshment stall for some friend with a sprained ankle.’
‘With an affection of the throat, Gaston. So the story ran, when you first told it me.’
‘You are severe, Dinah. If a pretty woman could possibly be tempted into feeling bitterly towards a plain one, I should say that you were bitter towards Linda Thorne.’
Dinah was unsoftened by the compliment.
‘To efface oneself,’ she repeated. ‘That means—in homely, plain English, such as I talk and understand?’
‘To keep gracefully in the background while others fill the prominent parts,’ said Gaston, with a laugh. ‘If you knew Linda Thorne better, if you could see her at one of her own charming little parties, you would appreciate the knack she has of not shining. She is quite the least selfish, least self-absorbed creature in the world.’
Straight, warm, living, flew a denial from Dinah’s lips.
‘Mrs. Thorne is wrapt in selfishness! If she was a good, true woman, she must guess how the hearts of other women, other wives, bleed, only at a thought of neglect! I can’t cope with her, Gaston, for conversation. She was born and educated a lady, and I belong to the working people, less taught when I was a child than they are now. But that should make her generous. She is rich in good things—has she not got little Rahnee? And I have but the hope, weak that hope grows at times, of keeping your love.’
A flush of annoyance overspread Gaston Arbuthnot’s handsome face.
‘If you would only take life in a quieter spirit, Dinah, content yourself with the moment’s common happiness, like the rest of us! I speak in kindness, my dear girl.’ Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot here fell to examining his signet-ring closely, perhaps because he did not wish to meet his wife’s eyes. ‘If you would care for any mortal thing, in addition to that somewhat unworthy person, Gaston Arbuthnot, it would be better for us both.’
Dinah turned deadly white.
‘If the child had lived!’ she uttered. ‘If we had her now, nearly the age of Rahnee, my heart would not be so athirst for love. It would come to me naturally. Just as I am, no cleverer, or brighter, or more original, you might find my company sufficient, if we had the child.’
‘We cannot cut out our lives by our own pattern,’ said Gaston, with irrefragable philosophy. ‘The disappointment, God knows, was bitterly keen to both of us at the time. Looking round the world now, I am disposed to wonder sometimes if the possession of a child be an unmixed blessing.’
‘It would have been so to me.’ The wound had never so thoroughly healed that Dinah could bear a careless touch on the cicatrice. ‘But I have no right to complain,’—shesaid this through her tears,—‘God gave, and took away. Who am I to question His wisdom?’
During several seconds Mr. Arbuthnot seemed to grow more and more absorbed in the contemplation of his ring; then, by an alert side movement, he contrived to reach the door of his dressing-room.
‘You are going? You intend really to dine with the Thornes this evening?’
Dinah brushed her hand hastily across her eyes.
‘Certainly, I intend to keep my engagement,’ answered Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘You would not break it, if I asked you?’
‘I would do any conceivable thing you asked me—with sufficient cause. I have too much opinion of your good taste to dread your ever placing yourself, or me, in a ridiculous position.’
‘If you would, I should give up all this plan for Wednesday. We would go back’—a soft far-off look stole over Dinah’s face as though for a moment she indulged in the retrospect of some too-dear dream—‘go back—ah! fool that I am—to the early days—days when you said the best dinner-party in London could not tempt you to leave me for an evening.’
While she was speaking she had followed him. Her hand rested on his sleeve. Her eyes, with piteous, imploring earnestness, sought to read his face.
‘There is no returning to old days,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot. ‘People of our age should have sense enough to realise this. The exclusive boy-and-girl idolatry of one year of life would be rank absurdity in a dignified Darby and Joan of our standing.’
Dinah shrank away from him. Perhaps it occurred to her that exclusive idolatry had never existed at all on Gaston’s side. How long, in truth, did he keep to the declaration, made in his honeymoon, of preferring quiet evenings with her to the best dinner-parties in London?
‘When I came in just now, Dinah, I interrupted you at some spiritual exercise, not high enough to be called prayer, yet that required a kneeling attitude. It is a pity,’ said Mr. Arbuthnot, looking disagreeable, ‘that the self-communings of good people so seldom lead them to charity—I don’t mean almsgiving—I mean a broader, more charitable frame of mind. If you could only recognise one fact, that there is a great variety of human nature about you in the world, it would be something gained.’
‘I know it, Gaston. What I want is to be lifted out of my own narrow ignorance.’
‘Take Geoffrey, for instance. In Geoffrey we have a man sound to the core. No caprice, no vanity in our cousin, none of the discontent and levity, and thirst for amusement which disfigure some characters that might be named. For contrast,’ Gaston Arbuthnot’s eyes rested discerningly on his wife, ‘look at Rex Basire—an empty-skulled little tailor’s block, doubtless, yet with a brave soldier’s heart in him all the same! By the bye, my dear, I need not exhort you,’ he added lightly, ‘to be charitable to Lord Rex. If women would only be as fair towards each other as they are towards us! I really admired the philosophy with which you gave that young gentleman his lesson in cross-stitch to-day.’
The careless tone of banter brought back Dinah’s accustomed self-control. Nothing so effectually checks emotion as the absence of emotion in our fellow-actors.
‘Lord Rex was bent upon working three or four stitches in my ottoman. It cost me the trouble only of unpicking them, and when he asked my leave I was ignorant—I always am ignorant—about the politeness of saying “No.” That is what I must learn.’
‘The art of saying “No,”’ observed Mr. Arbuthnot, not in a very hearty voice.
‘The art of speaking and acting—well, as Mrs. Thorne,as every woman of your world, would do! There’s no going back to old days, Gaston. You are right there. I must shape myself to things as they are, not to try to shape them to my needs. That is chiefly why I accepted the invitation for Wednesday. I mean to learn from the example of others. I mean to turn over a new leaf from to-day.’
‘Keep true to your own transparent self, child. Be what you have been always, and I, for one, shall be contented.’