‘Nous irons aux bois,Les lauriers sont coupés.’
‘Nous irons aux bois,Les lauriers sont coupés.’
‘Nous irons aux bois,Les lauriers sont coupés.’
‘Nous irons aux bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés.’
Their shrill voices rang across the dunes. Gaston Arbuthnot could descry his friends, Hortense and Eulalie, wildly circling around the red flames with the rest. As he did so, he thought involuntarily of his sketch-book, forgotten from the moment when the children laid violent hands upon him, hours ago, until this instant.
‘Oh, I know! Your sketch-book is gone,’ cried Linda, as he felt in pocket after pocket. ‘This is the Nemesis that falls on creatures of impulse, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘But it is no joking matter. Every memorandum I have made during the last month—gone!’
For once Gaston’s voice was tragic. He knew full well the market value of those rough notes of his.
‘Every memorandum—from your first bit of Sarnian still life, an old market-woman dozing, knitting-pins in hand, at her stall, down to our fisher-girl of the Boulevards. Taking into account the studies of Rahnee and of myself, there must be literally scores of valuable jottings in that book.’
‘You are laughing at me? No, I divine! You have taken care of my book, Mrs. Thorne, like the dear good——’
Fortunately, Gaston Arbuthnot broke off. Would Mrs. Thorne, would any woman, still conscious of youth and charm, forgive the man who, in exuberance of gratitude, should say to her, ‘like the dear good creature I know you to be’?
‘I have taken care of your sketches,’ she answered, drawing the book forth from beneath her cachemire. ‘Ihave done more. You ask sometimes why I always carry a housewife in my pocket. You shall see the part my housewife has played to-day. While I sat quietly with Robbie and Mrs. Verschoyle (the young people,very rightly, enjoying themselves elsewhere) I sewed all your ragged leaves together for you—thus.’
Linda Thorne was a notably clever worker. Perhaps the length of her stitches, the breadth of her hems, were not always in accordance with the orthodox feminine standard. She could effect things with her needle—such as fine-drawing a rent in cloth, or improvising an anchorage for a buttonless collar—which might be the despair of many a mistress of the craft. She did her stitching with brains.
At an out-of-the way Indian station, so the legend ran, Mrs. Linda, under stress of some unlooked-for gaiety, once manufactured an evening waistcoat for her Robbie, and a pair of neat white satin boots for herself at a sitting.
‘This is capital!’ cried Arbuthnot, joyfully recovering possession of his sketches. ‘Each page hinged on with a splendid contrivance of red silk to the dislocated remains of back. I have often wanted Dinah to devise some sort of surgery for my veteran sketch-books. She must take a lesson by this.’
‘Oh, no, no! Mrs. Arbuthnot is a far better needlewoman than I am. When I sew anything tolerably,’ said Linda, ‘it is by accident. I must have a motive for what I do. If I lived with—I mean, now, if dear Robbie were an artist, it would be my passion to help him in all the mechanical part of his work. If I were staying with you—and Mrs. Arbuthnot—you would discover that I can, really, in my way be useful. Michael Angelo himself must have had a poor obscure some one to grind his paints for him.’
The pathetic image of Robbie as an artist made Gaston laugh inwardly. He was not struck by the humour of hearing his own name coupled with Michael Angelo’s.Nay, it might be well, he thought, if Dinah felt this passion of unselfish helpfulness; well, if Dinah occasionally gave him the kind of praise he got from Linda Thorne. For Dinah never flattered. Her words of encouragement, unlettered country girl though she was, were full of soundest criticism. There was no honey in them. True love has its intuitions. Dinah knew that to feed this man on constantly sugared words was to poison him. She would gladly have seen in Gaston a noble discontent, gladly have listened to less frank avowals that he had found his level, and got on pretty well, there! Dinah, in short, was not a delightful acquaintance, but a steadfast, loyal wife. And her praise, in common with that of other steadfast wives, was apt to take the wholesome bitterness, the slightly sub-acid flavour of a tonic.
‘Michael Angelo! My dear Mrs. Thorne, how much, how very much you over-estimate me! If you spoke of me as imitating, from afar, the little affected prettinesses of a Greuze, the compliment would be too high.’
‘I fixed my standard for you, years ago, Mr. Arbuthnot. In the days when you used to thank me—me, a governess—for playing dance-music at Madame Benjamin’s, I had my convictions as to the place you would one day occupy in Art.’
At other times—on the morning, for instance, when we first saw the Arbuthnot trio in the garden of Miller’s Hotel—Linda remembered her aspirations as to the place her friend would, one day, hold in the House of Commons. But Gaston, if he noted the discrepancy, passed it generously over. Hard for a man to believe a charming woman insincere simply because she a little over-estimates his own genius!
‘Those light-hearted salad days! When I was with de Camors this afternoon——’
‘The effusive little Frenchman who so nearly kissed you?’
‘As long as I forgot the children, and the twelve stoneof mamma, and the fact that de Camors himself is growing bald, I could have believed he and I were six-and-thirty again. Six-and-thirty used to be the sum of our joint ages.’
‘Do not talk of age. It is a subject about which a man may jest, while a woman just breaks her heart.’
And Linda extended towards him her thin adroit hands, clasped in a pose that she had studied, not unsuccessfully, as one of pained entreaty.
‘Women are younger, relatively, than men,’ answered Gaston, with the sincerity of his sex. ‘When I was two-and-twenty, Dinah’s age, I knew more of the world than I know now. Whereas my wife——’
‘Ah! your wife,’ interrupted Linda Thorne, the mask for a moment dropping, the voice hardening. ‘I was thinking of living, palpitating, flesh-and-blood women—inhabitants of a world where nothing is faultless save over-faultless perfection. I—I mean,’ she went on, rapidly recovering her self-control, ‘that at thirty (and I am past thirty, alas! who looks at me under broad daylight but must see it?)—at thirty a man is scarcely in the noonday sun—a woman already feels the breath of evening. Her one chill hope is—to grow old gracefully. Mrs. Arbuthnot is a girl still.’
‘And you—were a child when I first knew you in Paris,’ observed Gaston, cleverly quitting the dangerous territory across whose borders he has been betrayed. ‘How natural it seems, Mrs. Thorne, that we should be walking together, you and I, in the old country, with the old language round us again! Do you hear what the children are singing down on the sands yonder?’
Linda set herself to listen, her expressive hands clasped, her face bowed.
‘Nous irons aux bois,Les lauriers sont coupés’—
‘Nous irons aux bois,Les lauriers sont coupés’—
‘Nous irons aux bois,Les lauriers sont coupés’—
‘Nous irons aux bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés’—
shouted the shrill young Gallican voices in the distance.
Mr. Arbuthnot repeated the nursery rhyme as Murger wove it into his delightful ‘Letter to a Cousin.’
‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’
‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’
‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’
‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.
Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’
The lady at his side bowed her face lower, and believed, in all integrity, that she was about to be overtaken by tears. Mrs. Linda, to do her justice, was not of a lachrymose temperament. At the zenith of their boy and girl flirtation, years ago, she had never shed a tear for Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot; until he appeared with his beautiful wife, had, indeed, clean forgotten her youthful weakness and his existence. But she possessed considerable imagination, a gloss of surface sentiment. She was also an insatiate novel reader, and had fallen into the habit of perennial strong emotion, leading nowhere. She could realise how a woman who had loved ought to feel, as she recalled past happiness with the lover of the past—both married, and one, alas! fast nearing an age when the most pathetic drama turns, without help from the burlesque writers, into parody.
Linda Thorne believed herself to be on the brink of tears. Gaston Arbuthnot believed so, too, and his heart could not but soften over the poor thing’s impressibility. So widely different in effect are tears shed in bitter earnest by one’s wife, and tears shed in pretty make-believe by the wife of another man.
‘Do you hear, Mr. Arbuthnot—the dancers have changed their tune?’ She asked this as the children, eddying like spirit-figures in an opera scene round the fire, broke into a new measure, ‘Marie, soak thy bread in wine!’—universal refrain of all French children from the Pyrenees to the Channel. ‘“Marie, soak thy bread!” How that foolish rhyme brings back the Benjamins’ salon, and my place behind the piano, and you, Mr. Arbuthnot, handing round refreshments with the small slave-driver, Moïse! “Marie, soak thy bread”.... Alas!’—Mrs. Thorne’s utterances grewmystic—‘We women have to soak our bread in sour enough wine, have we not?’
‘The Benjamin refreshments—sugar-water, orgeat,’ mused Gaston Arbuthnot, keeping safely to the practical. ‘Yes, those were charming evenings, especially when Papa Moïse did not sing. I remember, as though ’twere yesterday, how my poor mother used to suspect Madame Benjamin of putting bad almonds in the orgeat.’
Meantime, whilst this mature pair of sentimentalists recalled the past under the starlight, the younger people, sound of heart and limb, were making the most of the present inside the walls of Luc Casino. Fine weather for their voyage, an excellent French dinner, and now a ball, with distractingly pretty girls for partners, what further enjoyment could hearts as light as the hearts of the subaltern hosts desire?
Lord Rex, only, played spectator. While Rosie Verschoyle danced waltz, polka, American, to outward seeming in gayer spirits than her wont, Lord Rex remained fixed in his attendance on Mrs. Arbuthnot, beside one of the open ball-room doors. Dinah was curiously staunch of purpose, about trifles as about serious things. She clung to ‘first principles.’ It was a first principle with her never to enter a casino, English or French, and Rex Basire vainly expended his best special pleading in seeking to change her.
Mrs. Arbuthnot objected, perhaps, to waltz with a one-armed man? Would she give him a polka, then? Would she ‘rush’ an American quadrille? It made it ever so much more diverting if one did not know the figures of an American. Well, if she would not dance at all, would she take his arm and walk round the rooms? ‘Simply to put them in their place, Mrs. Arbuthnot. I have my Britishvanity. I want these bragging Frenchmen, accustomed to nothing handsomer than lay figures out of the pattern books, to seeyou.’
All in vain. Dinah wished neither to dance nor to dazzle. Only, if Lord Rex pleased—thus, after a space, she admonished him—it would be wise for his lordship to join the rest of his party. Miss Verschoyle was standing out; there could not be a likelier time than the present for him to secure Miss Verschoyle’s hand.
His lordship, however, did not please. And so, when Gaston and Linda Thorne returned, later on, from their walk, the first fact patent to both on entering the ball-room was Dinah’s absence. With a quick look around, Linda discerned Rosie Verschoyle standing at her mother’s side, partnerless.
‘Rosie Verschoyle a wall-flower? Oh, this is too bad! What can Lord Rex be thinking of?’ exclaimed Linda, ingenuously. ‘Mr. Arbuthnot, I insist upon your asking poor little Rosie to dance at once.’
‘I thought you and I were to take pity on each other, Mrs. Thorne, for auld lang syne?’
‘Think of Rosie, not me. It is positively wicked for old married women to monopolise the dancing men while girls stand out.’
‘Are you sure Miss Verschoyle would care to have a man with deposited affections for her partner? a veteran whose waltz step dates from the reign of Louis Philippe?’
‘Try her. In my young days girls would sooner dance with anybody than remain partnerless.’
‘That “anybody” gives me confidence. It is good to know the exact compartment in which one is pigeon-holed.’
Gaston crossed the room. He made his bow before Rosie, who moved forward graciously. Now that Mr. Arbuthnot had asked her, said the girl, in her thin staccato, she would have the enjoyment of one really good waltz.Something in Gaston’s looks made her certain that he was a splendid dancer. Louis Philippe? Mr. Arbuthnot’s step dated from the days of Louis Philippe? ‘Why, that,’ cried Rosie, ‘was before we were all born!’ She confessed to never remembering about those ‘horrid French Revolution people,’ but had a notion Louis Philippe came next to the king who got his head cut off. Or was he Egalité, the man who insisted upon dying in his boots?’
‘Louis Philippe came next to the king who got his head cut off,’ said Gaston, as his arm clasped her well-rounded waist. ‘I had no idea, Miss Verschoyle, that you were such a profound historian.’
Linda Thorne took the chair left vacant beside Rosie’s mother.
‘Your dear child is looking her best, Mrs. Verschoyle. I think our Guernsey roses do us national credit. We ought to produce an effect upon the foreign mind.’
‘The young people are too much flushed, every one of them. A day like this may lay the seeds of lifelong malady. I know, as a fact, Mrs. Thorne, that Rosie is dancing in wet shoes.’
‘Better dance than sit still in them,’ remarked Linda, cheerfully. ‘You never catch cold while you are amused.’
‘Could we not have been amused at a quarter the cost? I have been trying in my own mind to reckon up the expenses of the expedition. Putting everything at the lowest, I bring it to something fabulous—fabulous! If these young subalterns, sons, no doubt, of needy men, had only given us a tea-drinking on L’Ancresse Common! When Colonel Verschoyle was in command——’
The time when her colonel commanded a regiment in Guernsey was Mrs. Verschoyle’s one unchequered recollection, the standard by which all subsequent mortal events must be judged!
‘When poor Colonel Verschoyle was in command, that iswhat the officers used to do. Give us a tea-drinking at L’Ancresse and a dance for the young people afterwards. No show. Very little expense. Everybody pleased. Then, of course, if you got your shoes wet you could change them.’
The advantages of L’Ancresse over Langrune as a spot whereat to change your shoes seemed to touch Mrs. Verschoyle nearly. Her eyes filled.
‘The money that has gone on all this,’ she mourned; ‘not to speak of the doctors’ bills we may have to pay hereafter! When first the plan was chalked out I foresaw how everything would end. I entreated Rosie to reason with Lord Rex. Unfortunately I can never get my children to listen to me.’
‘You should have gained over Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ said Linda, with a spice of malice. ‘As the picnic was got up for her, no doubt she could have amended the programme.’
Mrs. Verschoyle looked more like a little bewildered white mouse than usual, as this newly propounded idea made its way slowly to her intelligence.
‘It is a most unprecedented thing! To get up a party of pleasure for a married lady without daughters! Mrs. Arbuthnot, I believe, has no daughters?—at all events not of an age to be introduced. Well, she is a very sweet-looking young woman,’ said the meek, motherly soul, through whose lips no breath of scandal ever passed. ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot has just that fair, placid, large look that used to be so much admired in my Flo. But the complexion is too transparent for health. Did I tell you Flo’s husband was ordered to Malta? His regiment is on this season’s reliefs, and Flo talks of coming over to me with the children—four babies, and a native nurse. I suppose I shall be able to take them all in?’
‘Easily. You have only to give up your own room and sleep in the conservatory. When Rahnee is married andoffers to come home, with four babies and a native nurse, sleeping in the conservatory,’ observed Linda, ‘is just the kind of sacrifice I shall be prepared to make.’
‘You would have the old jungle ague back upon you in twenty-four hours if you did. Neither you nor Doctor Thorne are people who should take liberties with yourselves. Indeed, I think you have both been looking sadly this spring. Rosie, my dear, come here.’ For the waltz had ended. Gaston Arbuthnot was walking past, English fashion, his partner on his arm. ‘Come and sit down by me out of the draught. I do hope this is the last dance we shall stay for, Mr. Arbuthnot?’
‘No, indeed, mamma. We are to stay for the next. It is another waltz, and I am engaged for it to Lord Rex;’ Rosie glanced, a little ruefully, towards the door where Dinah and Lord Rex still stood. ‘Thank you so much, Mr. Arbuthnot, for our beautiful waltz. I hope,’ said Rosie Verschoyle, ‘all my partners, as long as I live, will have taken dancing lessons in the reign of Louis Philippe.’
When the opening bars of the waltz sounded, Lord Rex, with no very great alacrity, came across the room to claim Rosie’s hand. Gaston Arbuthnot bent over Linda.
‘“For auld lang syne.” Is this to be our dance, Mrs. Thorne?’
Linda Thorne was not a pretty, not by natural gift a graceful, woman. She was a perfect dancer. Poor Dinah, from her hiding-place, had found a genuine pleasure in watching Gaston waltz with dimpled, smiling Rosie Verschoyle. For Dinah, like all wholesome-minded mortals, had unmixed sympathy with the spirits and enjoyment of light-hearted girlhood. She looked with very different perceptions at Linda Thorne, looked at her with something of the feeling a true but unpopular artist might know on watching the facile successes of meretricious talent. This tinselled, pleasure-loving Linda, with her clingingdraperies, her Indian perfumes—this wife whose heart was not with her husband, this mother who contentedly could leave her child to servants—was so far below the ideal towards which, since her marriage, Dinah Arbuthnot had faithfully striven.
Below an ideal standard. And yet, in such vital points as talking amusing talk, in dancing, dressing, dinner-giving, in the all-important matter of pleasing men difficult to please like Gaston Arbuthnot, how immeasurably was Linda her superior! Dinah’s heart contracted. She was just going to shift away into deeper shadow, when a hand touched her arm with friendly purpose. Turning, she saw Marjorie Bartrand—Cassandra Tighe, laden with nets and specimen boxes, in the rear.
Marjorie’s face glowed damask. ‘A pity you were not with us, Mrs. Arbuthnot. We have been having a glorious time, moth-hunting in the Luc lanes, Miss Tighe and I, and—and—every now and then Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot condescended to join when the chase got warm. What are you all about here?’ Marjorie ascended a step; she took a smiting glance round the ball-room. ‘Well, this is as good as a sermon. Miss Tighe, come and be edified. Is it not fine to see middle-aged couples waltzing for the public good?’
With a little scornful gesture of the head Marjorie indicated Gaston and-his partner.
‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot may be doing his steps from personal motives, perhaps because he has the “artistic temperament,” whatever,’ said Marjorie, ‘that elastic term may mean. Nothing but severe principles, the determination to point a moral, could make Linda Thorne go through violent exercise on a night like this.’
‘Linda Thorne is considered the best waltzer in Guernsey,’ said Cassandra. ‘Your tongue is over-sharp. You speak before you think, Marjorie Bartrand.’
‘I feel before I do either,’ whispered the girl, her hand stealing back, with half-shy kindness, to Dinah’s arm.
‘If Mrs. Arbuthnot had been with us,’ said Cassandra, ‘she would have witnessed a sight worth laughing at. Marjorie scoffs at middle-aged partners. What would you think, Mrs. Arbuthnot, of a white-haired woman flying across hedges and ditches—breathless with excitement, over the capture of a butterfly? Scarce a dozen specimens ofPontia Daplidicehave been seen in Northern Europe during the last twenty years,’ went on old Cassandra, flushed still with victory. ‘And of these six only were netted, like mine, on the wing. Why, it would be worth staying a week here—a week, a month, on the outside chance of sighting a secondPontia Daplidice!’
All this time thePrincess, lying well outside the Luc rocks, was getting up her steam. Before the waltz had ended a red light, hung from the vessel’s bows, gave the signal for those on shore to hurry their departure. There was a flutter of airy dresses as the English party emerged from the ball-room into darkness, a ripple of talk as they filed, Indian fashion, hand steadying hand, down the narrow path that led from the casino to the little fishing slip or jetty.
And then unexpectedly came the first misadventure that had arisen to mar this day of calm and sunshine. When the party had embarked in two of the unwieldy flat-bottomed boats of the country, it occurred to Lord Rex, as commander-in-chief, that their number should be counted. And soon the cry arose that one was wanting! Seventeen human souls left Guernsey that morning—on this point all were confident. Sixteen human souls only were forthcoming now. And no efforts of memory, individual or collective, could hit upon the defaulter’s name.
Mrs. Verschoyle exclaimed in a hollow voice that it was a most uncomfortable omen. She would be sorry to depress the younger people’s spirits, but, for her part, she would sooner set sail in the teeth of a hurricane than have had this thing occur. ‘Let the counting be more systematic,’said the poor lady, jumping to her feet, and for once in her life launching into independent action. ‘Let me repeat each name slowly, beginning with the youngest of the gentlemen, and let each person answer as he is called. Mr. Smith? Brown? Jones? Lord Rex? The two Mr. Arbuthnots? Doctor Thorne?’
After Doctor Thorne’s name there was a moment’s silence. Then Linda, tragic of accent, ejaculated, ‘Robbie! Of course!’ And then, I regret to say, most of the younger people began to laugh. ‘But it may be a matter of life and death,’ cried Mrs. Thorne. ‘If you please, Lord Rex, I will go on shore at once. ThePrincessmay start, probably will start, without me. My duty is to look for Robbie. Oh, I am most uneasy! It is all my selfishness. Robbie ought never to have been brought on such an expedition. I am certain something has happened to him! I shall never forgive myself while I live.’
These amiable anxieties were the exact sentiments suited to the occasion. Mrs. Thorne expressed them with agitated dignity, and, of course, no one laughed again. Consolations, even, were forthcoming. Dr. Thorne had been seen, in the flesh, outside Luc Casino; or, if not the Doctor, some old gentleman exactly like him, with a puggaree, sand-shoes, a white umbrella, and smoking an enormous cigar, just like the cigar poor dear Doctor Thorne always used to smoke. It was the prettiest, least wise, of the De Carteret sisters who offered this bit of evidence. The gentleman was observed to look in for a while at the dancing, and then to walk away in the direction, Ada de Carteret believed, of the sea.
‘The sea! And who can tell that the sea has not surrounded him! In out-of-the-way French places the tide always swells up with a circuit.’ Tears were in Linda’s voice as she proclaimed this maritime fact. ‘I am most uneasy.’ She adjusted her Indian shawl with grace roundher shoulders, then skipped lightly to land. ‘Robbie ought never to have been brought—it was all my selfishness—I am torn in pieces by remorse.’
The young ladies, with the exception of one flint soul, cried, ‘No, no,’ in chorus. Mrs. Thorne positively must not say these dreadful things, when every one knew she had such acharacterfor unselfishness! Mrs. Verschoyle felt for her smelling-salts, then settled herself gloomily down, prepared for the worst. Mrs. Verschoyle felt within her the courage of a prophet whose own dark sayings are on the eve of fulfilment.
Gaston Arbuthnot, in his quiet, unmoved manner, rose. Stepping on shore, Gaston volunteered to go in search of the missing Doctor.
These were just the scenes wherein Linda so infinitely diverted him,—Frenchman as he was in three-fourths of his nature,—little scenes in which, on the boards of domestic life, she played such admirable farce without knowing it!
‘I shall walk straight back to Langrune, Mrs. Thorne. Notwithstanding your solemn tone, in spite of Miss de Carteret’s evidence, I believe the Doctor has never missed any of us, and at this moment is smoking his cigar, possibly sipping his “little glass,” at the Hotel Chateaubriand.’
‘Unless you are here in a quarter of an hour, sharp, we shall leave you behind,’ called out Lord Rex, when Gaston had proceeded some paces on his errand. ‘ThePrincessis chartered until to-morrow only. Whatever the rest of us do, the skipper will take care not to lose his tide.’
Linda Thorne, by this time, in her agitation, and her Indian shawl, was at Gaston’s side. So the exordium might be taken as addressed to them both.
‘All right,’ answered Mr. Arbuthnot leisurely. Langrune is not the end of the earth. If by the time we secure the Doctor, the steamer has weighed anchor, we must all get back to GuernseyviâCherbourg. Thatwould fit in very well. TheLady of the Islescrosses from Cherbourg to-morrow,’ went on Gaston, raising his voice as he looked back over his shoulder towards the boats. ‘We should just have time to visit the dockyard before starting.’
And then the two figures sped onward, side by side. They were watched with keen speculative interest by the occupants of the boats. No one, save simple Mrs. Verschoyle, felt disturbed as to the Doctor’s ultimate fate. Was an old gentleman who had taken admirable care of himself for forty years in India a likely subject to be spirited away on the sands, between Luc and Langrune? But the situation had a dramatic piquancy that stirred even the unimaginative minds of the Miss de Carterets and their attendant subalterns. For there was Dinah! Impossible to forget that Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot, that lowly-born young woman with the beautiful eyes, and set, sad mouth, was also watching the two figures as they disappeared in the darkness.
‘A quarter of an hour. By Jove! ten minutes of that quarter must be nearly gone.’
And taking out his watch, Lord Rex struck a vesuvian in order to learn the time. It was exactly eight minutes to nine, and at nine, sharp, thePrincesswas to weigh her anchor. The moment for action had come. Now, what was the wisest thing to do? One point seemed certain—it was useless for both boats to wait longer. Let the smaller boat, at the head of the jetty, start for the steamer at once, let the captain be told what had happened, and asked to put off his departure as long as practicable. If Gaston Arbuthnot and the Thornes arrived in time, the second boat would bring them off. If not—why, common sense could really dictate no better plan than Gaston’s own. Langrune was not the end of the world A railway to Cherbourg existed. TheLady of the Isleswould no doubt bring the lost sheep comfortably back to their respective folds to-morrow.
Dinah as it happened was, with Ada de Carteret and the elder ladies, in the boat at the head of the jetty. And soon before Dinah’s eyes, as before the eyes of one who dreams, the reflections of the Casino lamps, the children’s Chinese lanterns, were dancing with fairy-like brightness across the moving water. She realised that her day of pleasure was over, that every one—yes, she could catch the voices of Marjorie and of Geff, holding merry talk in the other boat—every one took the adventure jestingly, and that her heart felt like lead, that her hands were ice-cold, that each breath she drew was a conscious and painful effort. Well—if she had enough bodily strength to act her part out, she thought, say no word to betray her plebeian emotions, and so bring down ridicule on her husband or herself, she must be content! Once on board the steamer she could hide herself in the cabin, away from sight, and there wait, until the comedy (or tragedy) had reached its next act. This one wretched comfort remained to her. She would be able to screen herself, for a while at least, from observation—to be alone!
But a new and still more diverting incident was about to be woven into the text of the play.
‘If I were not in such a nervous state,’ cried Mrs. Verschoyle, when the boat was within three or four lengths of thePrincess, ‘if I were not so morally shaken that I distrust my own senses, I should say our good Doctor was on board. There came a flash of light just now beside the wheel, the lighting, perhaps, of a fusee, and for a second it seemed to me that I saw Doctor Thorne’s figure distinctly. A pity some reliable person was not looking!’
And Mrs. Verschoyle, to her own surprise, had seen correctly. The Doctor it proved to be—the Doctor smoking one of the ship’s best cheroots, and enjoying the summer night with unruffled innocence. He advanced gallantly to assist the ladies in their embarkation, and heard with gustothe story of his own supposed fate. Surrounded by the tide? Tut, tut! Linda might have known, had she exercised her reason, whither he had betaken himself. ‘Only you ladies never do reason,’ said the Doctor, addressing Mrs. Verschoyle. ‘It was growing damp on shore—and let me give you a bit of advice, my dear madam: whenever you feel that clinging kind of chill, after gun-fire, get on board ship, if you have the chance. Get an honest plank, instead of the abominable miasmal emanations of Mother Earth, under your feet. Yes, yes,’ went on the Doctor comfortably, ‘I hailed one of thePrincess’sboats and came on board two hours ago, have drunk my cup of coffee, and beaten Ozanne at his own game, cribbage.’
‘And your wife’s anxiety?’
‘My dear Mrs. Verschoyle, I am penitent! Only my wife, you see, might have reasoned. It would have deprived you all, no doubt, of a harmless excitement; but Linda, I think, might have reasoned. Any way, it is better to be drowned by one’s friends’ imaginations than run the risk, in earnest, of a pair of damp shoes.’
To this Mrs. Verschoyle gave a qualified assent. The mention of damp shoes affected her. Still, she was not a little shocked at Doctor Thorne’s levity—‘At his advanced age,’ thought poor Mrs. Verschoyle, perturbedly, ‘and after the awful narrowness of his escape!’
‘The fear is, Doctor, that Mrs. Thorne will be left behind,’ cried Ada de Carteret, with meaning. ‘At the first word of danger Linda started off along the Langrune road to look for you.’
‘Linda ought to have reasoned——’
‘And Lord Rex declares the captain must weigh anchor at nine, sharp! It is like a scene in a novel—the last scene but one, with everything in a delicious tangle still. Why, Doctor, you are the hero of the day!’
‘I feel enormously flattered,’ said the old Doctor. ‘Itis a very long time since a charming young lady has said anything so pretty to me.’
‘But your wife, Doctor Thorne!’ expostulated Cassandra Tighe, who with her nets and cases had been the last to leave the boat. ‘Do you realise that if Ozanne saves his tide—if we return to Guernsey to-night—Mrs. Thorne will remain in France?’
‘I cannot believe it. Ozanne would not surely be so ungallant. (Allow me, Miss Tighe, to help you with a few of your packages.) No, no. The skipper would not be so ungallant. And then my dear Linda is the most famous traveller! Surely I have told you what wonderful presence of mind she showed once in the Nilgiri Hills? Lost, actually lost, for four entire days! If, by mischance, Linda should be left alone, she will make her way home to-morrow,viâCherbourg, and enjoy the adventure.’
‘And Mrs. Thorne is not alone,’ cried Ada de Carteret, clapping her hands, and no doubt feeling that the position grew more and more deliciously tangled. ‘Mr. Arbuthnot is with her—not Marjorie Bartrand’s coach, but the other one: the singing, flirting, good-looking Mr. Arbuthnot,’ added this vivacious young lady, profoundly forgetful that the good-looking Mr. Arbuthnot’s wife stood within three yards of her elbow.
‘Then my fears are set at rest,’ observed the Doctor genially. ‘If my friend Arbuthnot is there my fears are set thoroughly at rest. Meanwhile, I may as well speak to the skipper. The tide, of course, must be saved. Still, it would be only right to let Ozanne know how affairs stand.’
And Dinah had listened to it all—youthful jest, aged philosophy, all! And standing among the others, with a queer sensation that she had suddenly oldened by a dozen years, some pallid ghost of a smile rose to her lips. Here was a grand opportunity, verily, of learning a lesson at first hand, a chance in a thousand for readjusting one’s standard,for observing the nicer little shades of feeling and usage which prevail in the world to which one would fain belong.
A smile, I say, rose to Dinah’s lips. Which of us does not remember how, in sharp mental stress, he has found himself looking on at the trivial accessories of his pain, as a stranger might, derisively! In the poor girl’s heart was death.
She knew that for Gaston to have set at naught her pleadings, for Gaston to have quitted her thus, might render to-night a bitter crisis in the lives of both.
But Dinah was not unobserved, not uncared for.
If Cassandra Tighe’s taste for piquant situation once in a hundred times led her astray, the ninety-nine good offices performed by the kindly old maid in the interval were sufficient, surely, to atone for the single blunder.
Cassandra’s heart went out towards Dinah at the first moment when the fair sad face passed before her in the garden of Miller’s Hotel. She had listened with regret to stories of Gaston’s fickleness—even while her talents as a narrator assisted in giving such stories wider currency—had felt remorse, sharp and hard, for her own unwitting share in the ‘Arbuthnot drama.’ At this hour of which I write, Dinah standing mute, wan, beside her, Cassandra’s breast kindled with renewed compassion towards the simple unbefriended country girl, a compassion none the less genuine in that it went somewhat wide of Dinah’s actual and present trouble.
‘You look thoroughly done up, my dear Mrs. Arbuthnot. I am afraid to-day’s gadding about has been too much for you. Let us see,’ said Cassandra, in a whisper, ‘if we cannot find some quiet corner, you and I, where we may settle down and rest.’
Dinah turned on her a look of blank, unanswering pain. She wanted neither sympathy nor support, wanted only tocreep below, out of sight, to avoid all temptation to disobedience, all possibility of bringing down ridicule—on Gaston!
‘I feel chilled—nothing, that is, to speak of. You are very good, Miss Tighe, but I had rather go down to the saloon alone, please. I am used to being alone, and—and I have a cloak which I must look for.’
A note of suppressed passion was in her voice. It betrayed emotion curiously at variance with the commonplace words, the staid reserved manner. And, in a moment, Cassandra Tighe’s valorous spirit had armed itself for action.
‘Dr. Thorne, will you stop that Luc boat, if you please? Never mind my nets, they can go anywhere. Attendez, matelots! Attendez moi,’ cried Cassandra in her own peculiar French, and signalling with her handkerchief to the boat, already a few lengths distant from the steamer. ‘It would scarcely do, Doctor, to let matters shape themselves with such very slight rough-hewing! Some one must go ashore without delay. Think of Linda’s anxiety if thePrincessshould leave before she had been assured of your safety!’
‘I think of many things,’ said Dr. Thorne, with humour, ‘the dampness of the night pre-eminently. Of course, I must go. Still, Linda might have exercised her reason—such reason as Providence bestows on the sex. Linda is not a child. What possible good could come from this kind of wild-goose chase?’
And the old Doctor moved an inch or two, exceedingly crusty of mien, in the direction of the companion ladder.
But this was not the plan of Cassandra Tighe’s campaign.
‘You will just stay comfortably where you are; you will keep a dry plank under your feet, Dr. Thorne, and give me carte blanche to look after your wife. If thePrincessstarts without us, Linda and I must find our way back to Guernsey. I have a purse in my pocket, Linda has a brain in her head. We both know how to travel. To you, Mrs. Arbuthnot, Iconfide my treasure.’ Turning round she gave Dinah a little chip box, clasping the girl’s cold hands for an instant as she did so. ‘Take care ofPontia Daplidice, my dear, and take care of yourself. Look for your cloak by all means. Doctor Thorne, do you persuade Ozanne to give us every possible moment’s law. I have a presentiment that all will come right, that your good wife’s over-anxiety will not lead her into mischief.’
The unwieldy Luc boat was by this time swaying to and fro at the bottom of the ladder. A Luc fisherman stood, with bare brawny arms extended, for Cassandra’s reception. A few seconds later Cassandra and boat, alike, had become a dark spot on the water, luminous now with the quick-moving facets of the rising tide. Dinah was alone, indeed!
She stood, for a time, mechanically watching the row of lights on shore, mechanically listening to the steam as it puffed, with energy unmistakable, from the funnels of thePrincess. Then, uncertain of tread, heavy of limb as of heart, she groped her way below, resolved, silently, to endure whatever fate the coming half-hour might have in store for her.
The cabin lamps were as yet unlighted. Dinah entered the ladies’ saloon, at hazard. She sank down on the couch nearest the door. Then, burying her face between her hands, she strove, with might, to collect her thoughts, to stifle the resentment against Gaston which conscience, sternly just, already condemned as paltry—ungenerous.
It was of her own perverse will that she accepted Rex Basire’s invitation. How often had Gaston warned her that, with her temper, her opinions, she would find ‘society’ a dangerous experiment; a game in which she would be likely to stake gold against other players’ counters! She had come here to-day to please herself. She had no right of control over her husband’s actions. Gaston lived according to the light of his own conscience, not hers. He was courteous by temperament, fond of little unforeseen deviationsfrom any laid-down programme, prompt, always, in putting his time, his energy, himself, at the service of his friends.
‘Langrune is not the end of the earth.’ She recalled his cheery, amused tone, as he was vanishing with Linda across the dunes. ‘If thePrincessshould start without us, we must get back by Cherbourg to-morrow. It will fit in very well.’ She remembered Doctor Thorne—his self-possession, his confidence in Gaston. ‘If my friend Arbuthnot is there, one’s fears are set at rest.’ She could imagine Linda’s witty reproduction of the whole too delicious accident when they should get back to Guernsey. Oh, let her gain mastery over herself—mastery! Let to-day’s lesson be a deeper one than can be gained by nice observance of tone, or look, or manner. Let her have learned to conquer small jealousies, to be wary of quick judgments, to construe the actions, the intentions of others, nobly.
Dinah resolved in the spirit to be strong. Meanwhile, she realised, with growing certitude, that she was weak, exceedingly, in the flesh. Her breath came with greater effort, her hands grew colder and more clammy. Rising with difficulty, she set herself to search for her cloak among a pyramid of wraps that lay, disordered, on a neighbouring couch, dimly discernible by aid of a newly-lighted lamp from the main cabin. Dinah Arbuthnot’s cloak lay (can Fate not be ironical even in the disposition of a heap of shawls?) immediately above a soft, long Indian scarf belonging to Mrs. Thorne. As she lifted it, the subtle Eastern perfume, associated always with Linda’s presence, seemed to Dinah, in a second, to fill the cabin. A feeling of sickness, a sudden access of keen personal repulsion, took hold of her—all-powerful hold; for, this time, it was instinct, not reason, that moved her anger. She flung down her cloak, with a childish sense of disgust at having handled it. She sank back, passively, upon the sofa....
A few minutes later came in the steward to light thecentre lamp. Seeing one of the guests alone, and deathly white, he took the commonsense, or steward’s view of the situation. Feeling queer, already? Let him get the lady a brandy-and-soda, a glass of wine, then? Settle the system before they got into rough water—though, for the matter of that, they would have a splendid passage. Sea like a millpond, tide favourable. Nothing but running into one of these here Channel fogs to be feared.
‘I will take some soda-water, if you please.’ Odd and far away Dinah’s voice sounded to herself. ‘I am a good sailor in general. I would rather have a rough sea than a smooth one. But this evening I am a little tired. I feel thirsty.’
She drank the soda-water with a sense of refreshment. ‘The wretchedest preparation, without the B., that could be made for a voyage,’ thought the steward, as he stood, salver in hand, waiting for her glass. Then, when the man had again left her alone, she crept back into her place, held her hands tight to her throat to relieve the cruel sensation that well-nigh choked her, and waited.
Waited—how long she knew not—perhaps, a short ten minutes only. In recalling the whole scene, later—the swell of the rising water, the murmur of voices in the adjacent cabin, the clinging, overpowering Indian perfume—in summing up, I say, each external detail of that miserable evening, it would afterwards seem to Dinah Arbuthnot that no year of her life ever took so much hard living through as those mortal minutes.
At length they came to an end. Doubt was to be set at rest, or turned into yet sharper certainty. For she could tell, first by the muffled thud of rowlocks, then by the splash of oar blades in the water, that the second boat was arriving. She could distinguish Geoffrey’s voice, Lord Rex Basire’s, old Doctor Thorne’s—very loud this last, and didactic, but yielding Dinah’s heart no consolation. Wouldnot Doctor Thorne talk loud and didactically whether his Linda had returned from her quest of him or not?
After a time the voices began to disperse. There came the measured yoy-a-hoy of the sailors, the shuffle of feet, the fall of cable on deck. Then Dinah heard the steward saying to one of the boys that they had weighed anchor. And not a moment too soon. With the air so thick, and the glass nohow, the skipper ought to have started, on this badly buoyed coast, a couple of hours ago. A French pilot might be all very well, but to his, the steward’s mind, English daylight was better.
Dinah knelt upon a sofa, inclined her face to the cool air of an open porthole, and watched the receding French coast. There lay the villages of Luc and Langrune, a line of lights flickering, misty and irregular, above the shimmer of the sea. Far away in the distance rose one larger light, the signal lantern in the tower of La Delivrande. Dinah watched, automatically. She noted scarcely more than a playgoer, carried away by excitement, notes the scene-painting at the most thrilling situation of a drama. To her, as to a child, the whole world was concentrated under the passion that governed herself. Had Gaston come back? She longed to know this with a longing which one must call to mind her narrow past life, her more than girlish simplicity, rightly to understand. And still she did not attempt to leave the cabin. Her strength, moral and physical, seemed paralysed. How should she make her way, alone, up on deck, search in the darkness for Gaston, ask questions, parry, with a jest, such airy explanation of her husband’s disappearance as might, on all sides, be offered her?
A voice, close at her elbow, made her start guiltily.
‘No one in the ladies’ saloon? Well, then, Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot must have tumbled overboard. Her husband and I have vainly searched thePrincessfor her.’ Oh,kindly Cassandra! Was no small bit of embroidery tacked on, just at this juncture, over the bare truth? ‘So much for trusting valuable entomological specimens out of one’s own hands!’
‘Miss Tighe, I am here. I have been trying to get a little warm. Your moth is safe,’ stammered Dinah.
She scarcely knew in what fashion the words left her dry and trembling lips.
‘Moth? A country-bred girl like you not to know that a speckled white, although, by luck, we caught him out of hours, is a butterfly! Well, I have brought back our other pair of butterflies, safe and sound.’ Before saying this Cassandra had put on her spectacles and carried her box beneath the doorway lamp. She made a great show of examining its contents, critically, thus allowing Dinah to recover her self-possession, unnoticed. ‘From certain murmurings I overheard among the sailors I believe we, all three, narrowly escaped being abandoned to our fate.’
‘Mrs. Thorne had begun to think that her husband was on board?’
Dinah’s constrained tone was one of doubt rather than inquiry.
‘My dear, nobody ever knows what Mrs. Thorne thinks. Linda is a charming woman, the pleasantest companion, when she chooses, in the world. But, as the Doctor says, Linda might reason. These electric transitions, from gay to grave, and back to gay again, are embarrassing in a world where the rest of us walk by rule. Linda Thorne is all impulse.’
‘Ah!’
‘At the first word of the Doctor’s disappearance, to run off, helter-skelter, like a schoolgirl ... yes, Linda Thorne,’ cried Cassandra, peering round at some person or persons across her shoulder, ‘I am talking of you. Come down and hear all the wicked things I have to say. At the firstword of the Doctor’s disappearance to run off like a schoolgirl, taking somebody else’s husband with her! It was atrocious! Who is that behind you, Linda? Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot. Tell Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, from me, that everything worth looking after on board thePrincessis found.’
As Cassandra Tighe scored her point, not without a little air of triumph, Linda tripped gaily down into the cabin.
‘We are to have the very finest weather, Miss Tighe, and all the world means to remain on deck. Only, of course, one wants shawls. What! Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Pausing in her search among the heap of wraps, it would seem that Linda recognised Dinah’s presence with amiable surprise. But Dinah was coldly silent.
‘Surely you, of all people, are not going to become a cabin passenger? My dear creature, I have just escaped the quaintest little adventure in the world! But for Miss Tighe’s advent, I should have eloped, yes, run clean, straight away, with your husband. We were planning it all out, from a commercial standpoint, as we flew, frantically, along the sandhills after Robbie. Were we not, Miss Tighe?’
‘I leave these matters to your own conscience,’ was the dry answer. Possibly, Cassandra recollected that the butterflies were not flying very frantically at the moment when she captured them on the starlit dunes. ‘If you had run away with Mrs. Arbuthnot’s husband, I should have taken good care to run with you. I warned the Doctor of my intentions before I left thePrincess.’
‘It was quite too unselfish, Miss Tighe, and, pecuniarily, most àpropos. I possessed five sous in copper (Guernsey currency); Mr. Arbuthnot was worth something under twenty francs. We should have had to leave our watches at the Mont de Piété, for me, alas! no novel experience, the moment we reached Cherbourg. Things have turnedout, under Providence, for the best. Only, I think, Ithink,’ admitted Linda, with arch frankness, ‘the Doctor rather regrets having to retire into insignificance. If I had not come back, Robbie would have remained the hero of the situation.’
Mrs. Thorne ran through all this in her accustomed little tired, inconsequential way of talking, winding up, finally, with a long and earnest yawn. She then danced up to a strip of mirror at the best lighted end of the cabin and settled herself to the contemplation of her own image with interest. She dabbed her cheeks first with rice powder, then with eau-de-cologne, then with powder again, producing these cosmetics without a show of disguise from a tiny gilt case that hung at her waist-belt. She arranged the folds of her cachemire scarf above her sleek head in a certain Gitana mode, which, like all good art, gave an idea of unpremeditation, and became her mightily; she pinned a knot of feathery grass, a memento, doubtless, of the starlit dunes, in her breast.
Easy to predict that Linda Thorne would not be sea-sick to-night! She was warming to the situation, intended to work up her part—everything in human life was a part to Linda Thorne—with spirit.
‘Come up on deck, Mrs. Arbuthnot, will you not? Surely, with your splendid sea-going qualities, you are not going to stop down in this Black Hole of Calcutta?’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot will come up when I do,’ cried Cassandra, who, with an added pair of spectacles on her nose, was pinning out insects under a lamp. ‘Go your ways, Linda Thorne, wise ones if you can, and leave Mrs. Arbuthnot and me to follow ours.’
‘I would not be wise if I might,’ said Linda, giving an expressive backward glance across her shoulder. ‘If I were wise ... I should see myself as other people see me.’
And having uttered this, the acutest speech that everleft her lips, away floated Mrs. Thorne, with her powdered cheeks, her cachemires, and her Indian fragrance, from the cabin.
Dinah could hear the languid accents, the little stage laugh (learnt from the stalls), for a good many seconds later. She could distinguish the voices, too, of Gaston, and of Rosie Verschoyle. How heart-whole they all seemed. How frequent was their laughter! What a light time the past hours had been to every one of the party but herself! Gaston’s philosophy, thought Dinah, taking an unconscious downward step, might be the true one after all, then. Live while we live! What had she profited by a strain of feeling too tall for the occasion, by the tiptoe attitude, by throwing away gold where a more reasonable member of society would have quietly staked counters?
‘Any admittance here?’ exclaimed a masculine voice, as an impatient hand pushed back the cabin door. ‘Why, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I have been searching for you everywhere. I want you to come up on deck at once, please, and see a comet. Not a comet really, you know,’ Lord Rex went on, looking hard at Dinah’s white face. ‘Some kind of Japanese fire balloon sent up by the French people. However, it does just as well as one.’
‘Yes, my dear Mrs. Arbuthnot, go,’ cried old Cassandra, glancing up, over her double spectacles, from her pinning. ‘It will take me an hour’s work to bring all my specimens straight. And your colour shows you want oxygen. You are right, Lord Rex. Take Mrs. Arbuthnot on deck to see this comet which is not a comet. I shall follow by and by.’
And Dinah Arbuthnot obeyed. She did more. Dinah allowed the tips of her cold fingers to rest within Rex Basire’s hand as he pioneered her up the cabin stairs into the semi-darkness of the night.
The outlook continued promising overhead. The tide was at the right ebb for making Barfleur Point. At an earlier hour than had been hoped for, the friendly Casket lights showed, at intervals, above the starboard bow of thePrincess. The skipper, cheerful of voice, promised his passengers that in forty minutes more—tide and weather remaining favourable—the vessel would be lying well to leeward of Alderney.
All this time Dinah had found no opportunity for exchanging a conciliatory word with her husband. She felt that Gaston did not so much avoid as ignore her. He always contrived to be deep in talk with some other person when his wife sought to draw near him. He did not address her, did not recognise her presence. At length, abruptly, just as Dinah was nerving herself to make some desperate first advance, Mr. Arbuthnot crossed the deck. He came up to the spot where she and Rex Basire stood together. With the pleasantest air imaginable he put his hand under Dinah’s arm.
‘Suppose you take a turn with me, wife?’ Mr. Arbuthnot made the proposal in his lightest tone, Rex Basire listening. ‘Do you see that revolving beacon? No, my dear, no! Neither aloft on the funnel, nor in my face, but away, far as you can look, to the right. That beacon marks the Casket Rocks. And there, straight ahead, butwithout any lights showing, as yet, we are to believe is Alderney. Let us make our way to the forecastle. We shall have a better view.’
The fore part of the deck was deserted, save by two or three knots of sailors, talking low together in patois French as they watched the horizon. Gaston and Dinah were practically alone. She felt the heart within her throb uneasily. An icy politeness lay beneath the surface geniality of Gaston Arbuthnot’s manner. Dinah was prompt to recognise it.
‘What a long day this has been, Gaston. I shall want no wider experience in respect of yachting picnics.’
‘You are changeable, Dinah. As we walked from Langrune to Luc, it was agreed between us that the day should be considered a success.’
‘A great deal has happened since then,’ exclaimed Dinah, under her breath.
‘Nothing very notable, surely. If I recollect right, I did my duty to the extent of two waltzes in the Luc ball-room, and you, my dear child, had a long, a most amusing and intellectual conversation, I cannot doubt, with Lord Rex Basire, in one of the doorways.’
‘Lord Rex Basire is never amusing when he talks to me.’
‘Then I congratulate you on your proficiency in seeming amused. It ranks high as a difficult social art, even among veterans.’
‘Gaston!’ she exclaimed, a new and poignant doubt making itself felt.
‘Dinah.’
‘I don’t know what to think of your tone. Why have you never said a word, never looked at me during all these hours? Are you offended?’
‘On the contrary,’ retorted Gaston. They were now out of sight, out of earshot of everybody. As he spoke, Arbuthnot withdrew his hand from his wife’s arm. ‘I amthoroughly your debtor. It was the sense of my indebtedness that made me bring you here. I wished to thank you without an audience, quietly.’
‘To thankme,’ stammered Dinah, in a sort of breathless way. ‘For—for——’ she broke off, reddening violently.
Gaston watched her. ‘For your solicitude, your kindly tact! That idea of despatching the old lady in the scarlet cloak to chaperon me was boldly original, a fine intuition of wifely vigilance——’
‘Gaston! I never——’
‘Yet scarcely the sort of vigilance that passes current in a commonplace and scoffing world. If you had the smallest spark of humour, Dinah—that missing sense! that one little flaw in your character!—you would see things as the commonplace scoffing world sees them.’
‘Should I?’
‘You would divine that, under no possible circumstances—really it would be well to remember this for the rest of our mortal lives—under no circumstances can I require an old lady, with or without a scarlet cloak, as my chaperon.’
A different woman to Dinah might here have turned the tables on Gaston Arbuthnot, have stoutly, truthfully disavowed responsibility as to Cassandra Tighe’s movements. Dinah was too transparently honest to defend herself as to the letter, knowing that she had been an accessory in the spirit.
‘When the time was so short—ten minutes more, Gaston, and thePrincesswould have started without you—I felt that my heart must stop. Miss Tighe, any one, could have seen on my face what I suffered.’
‘I have no doubt that “any one” could, and did see it,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot, with grave displeasure. ‘It would not occur to you to make an effort at decent self-control, whatever ridicule you might be bringing upon others. Does it never strike you, Dinah,’ he went on, unjustly,‘that other women have human sensibilities as well as yourself—Linda Thorne, for instance? She rushed off, poor thing, in the greatest agitation at the first whisper of the Doctor’s disappearance, fearing nothing from Mrs. Grundy, fearing all things for her husband. Was it generous, charitable, do you think, to let your disapprobation be written, so that he who ran might read, upon your face?’
‘I think,’ said Dinah, faithfully, ‘that Mrs. Thorne felt no agitation whatsoever.’
Gaston also thought so. It was a point he would not commit himself to argue out.
‘There are feelings one must take for granted. Mrs. Thorne did the right thing in refusing to start without her husband. I acted as I judged best in determining to remain by her. That ought to have been enough for you.’
‘Yes. It ought to have been enough.’
Dinah gazed before her at the purplish streak faintly dividing the sea-line from the sky. It grew blurred and tremulous. Her eyes had filled with tears.
‘You had plenty of people to bear you company—Geoffrey, Miss Bartrand. It is unbecoming in you, Dinah, to act like a wayward girl. However matters had turned out about Doctor and Mrs. Thorne, what hardship would there have been in your returning to Guernsey with Geoffrey and without me?’
‘None, none! I was wrong from first to last. All this is my lesson, remember. One cannot get a lesson by heart without a little trouble.’
‘One might learn it without making everybody else absurd,’ persisted Gaston. ‘You asked me why I had never addressed a word to you, never looked in your direction, since we put out to sea. I will tell you why, my dear. I considered you dangerous. I was afraid.’
Dinah lifted up her face. She fixed her truthful and transparent gaze full on Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘I don’t understand you, Gaston. You know I never can understand when you speak with a double meaning.’
‘Well, there was a certain electric look about you, a look prophetic of lightning or thunder showers, for neither of which I am in the mood. You ought to have chosen a husband of more heroic mould, Dinah. There is the truth. A man, like the hero of a lady’s novel,’ observed Mr. Arbuthnot, wittily, ‘always equal to a strained attitude. A man fond of the big primeval human passions—love, hatred, jealousy. But you have married me, and I am afraid you must take me as I am. You must also, as often as you can—remember this, Dinah—as often as you can, endeavour not to render me ridiculous.’
When Mr. and Mrs. Arbuthnot re-emerged out of the darkness, Gaston’s hand was resting on his wife’s shoulder, Dinah’s face had recovered its calm. It would have taken a keen observer of countenance to guess that a breeze so stiff as the one we know of had just stirred the surface of these two persons’ lives. Was Linda Thorne such an observer?
Linda was standing alone in the gangway, her attitude one of deliberation, when Gaston and his wife came aft. She kept her position, speaking to no one, until Lord Rex, companionless, like herself, had managed to find his way to Dinah’s elbow. Then Linda Thorne made a move. She crossed to the vessel’s side. Resting her hand on the bulwarks, she gazed heavenward. Such good lines as her throat and shoulders possessed were well outlined against the pallid background of sky.
Gaston Arbuthnot followed her before long.
‘We are fortunate, after all our misadventures, are we not? The mate tells me that we have sighted Alderney. It seems likely that we shall get back to Petersport without fog.’
‘And what, may I ask, do you mean by our misadventure?’
There was a ring of sharpness in Linda Thorne’s tone.
‘Ah—what! The moment,’ said Gaston, ‘when gleams of a scarlet cloak first flashed upon one along the sand-dunes seems, to my own consciousness, about the most serious of them.’
‘You are singularly insincere, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot!’
‘I cannot agree with you, Mrs. Thorne. My worst enemies, on the contrary, have the grace to credit me with a sort of brutal frankness.’
‘And, supposing no scarlet cloak had appeared? You would willingly have been left, a second Robinson Crusoe, on the desert shores of Luc?’
‘The cases are not parallel. Robinson Crusoe had only the society of his man Friday.’
‘And there were no beaux yeux to weep for him! So many years,’ observed Linda, ‘stand between me and the literature of my childhood that I am uncertain about details. But I don’t think one ever heard of a Mrs. Crusoe!’
Gaston knew that he was being laughed at. He kept his temper charmingly.
‘And there is, very decidedly, a Mrs. Arbuthnot. When I think of Dinah, I cannot call Miss Tighe’s advent a misadventure. Poor Dinah has a child’s quick capacity for unhappiness. Her imagination would have conjured up a dozen possible horrors, by sea and land, if I had not returned to her.’
‘That is all so very, very pretty, is it not?’ Linda stooped, as if watching the rush of the sea; Gaston Arbuthnot could not catch the expression of her face. ‘We professional old travellers are toughened and sun-baked out of all rose-water nervousness. Robbie has told you—whom does he not tell?—the story of my being lost, actually lost, in the Nilgiris? If I were to be mislaid for a fortnight, I really don’t believe the Doctor would suffer a moment’s uneasiness.’
‘And yet you were so cruelly upset byhisdisappearance. The superiority,’ apostrophised Gaston, ‘of the unselfish sex over ours.’
‘I was not only upset by his disappearance,’ said Linda, still taking an interest in the waves, ‘I am disturbed about him, in my conscience, still. If Doctor Thorne takes the slightest chill to-night, we shall be having the old jungle fever back upon him.’
Gaston sympathised as to this contingency, not, as yet, perceiving the drift of Linda’s alarms.
‘At Robbie’s age one cannot be too prudent. To run into one of these cold Channel fogs might end in something quite too serious. And, although the stars make a pretence at shining,’ Linda raised her head with tentative playfulness, ‘the enemy is at hand. I feel fog in the air.’
‘The air is clearer than it has been all day. In another three or four hours the sun will have risen. We shall be in Guernsey——’
‘In another twenty minutes we shall be outside Alderney harbour. I was talking matters over, some minutes ago, with Ozanne.’ Linda inspected the white hand, resting on the bulwark, with attention. ‘And he has most good-naturedly consented to let me and Robbie land. By signalling promptly for a boat we shall not detain youPrincesspeople five minutes. There is the dearest little primitive hotel in Alderney, close to Maxwell Grimsby’s diggings. You remember my telling you about it?’
Gaston remembered Mrs. Thorne’s telling him about the dearest little primitive hotel.
‘The Doctor will have a good night’s rest to recruit his strength, and to-morrow afternoon, if the day is warm, we shall make our way back to our home and infant by the Cherbourg steamer.’
Now Maxwell Grimsby, a gunner by profession, a painter by love, was one of Gaston Arbuthnot’s best artistfriends—best, too, in the higher acceptation of the elastic word. Grimsby was no manufacturer of prettiness, no amateur idler. Did not a series of beach studies bearing the well-known initials ‘M. G.’ testify to the world how diligently this very summer’s enforced imprisonment in Alderney was put to use? During the past fortnight Gaston had constantly vacillated in his intention of looking up his friend, for ever declaring how much better work a man might do on the grand old rock, yonder, than disturbed by the hundred distractions of pleasant, idle, sociable, little Sarnia—never starting, for ever wishing he were gone! Here was occasion to his hand, a chance of looking up Grimsby without even the preliminary trouble of packing one’s portmanteau!
‘Of course you could not come with us,’ asserted Linda, in her little undertone of mockery. ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot is such a child! She would conjure up a dozen possible horrors if you were to be absent from her so long.’
‘I am not sure that deserting thePrincesswould be a courteous action to our hosts,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot, hesitating under the first touch of temptation.
‘You are made of poorer stuff than your cousin,’ thought Linda, glancing, for a second, at his handsome face. ‘To gain a victory over Monsieur Geoffrey would be to gain a victory indeed.’ Then, aloud—‘If we were to carry away any of the younger people I should feel it treason to desert thePrincess,’ she observed. ‘I would not go, indeed, if Robbie and I were wanted as chaperons. Considering the existence of Mrs. Verschoyle and Miss Tighe—in talking of chaperons, Mr. Arbuthnot, you and I must never forget Miss Tighe—I think Doctor and Mrs. Thorne may very well be spared. For you it is different.’
‘In what way?’ asked Gaston, wincing inwardly under her sarcasms.
‘Oh, different, altogether. Too much depends uponyour presence. Pray do not think of such a revolutionary proceeding as taking flight. You would never be allow—I mean, I am sure you would not find it advantageous to run away. What messages do you send to Mr. Grimsby?’