CHAPTER XXIV REX BASIRE’S HUMOUR
A rough-paved village square; green-shuttered houses, sweltering in the afternoon sun; a pair of openwork spires, delicate as lace, dazzlingly white as Caen stone could make them, silhouetted against the burning sky; tattered children with mercenary hands full of wild flowers; a knot of British pilgrims, irreverently loquacious outside the church’s western door; gruesome beggars making exhibition of wounds; honest peasant people; dishonest relic sellers—such were the salient features of La Delivrande at the moment when Marjorie and Dinah descended into its closer air out of the field-smelling, wind-blown road that brought them hither from the coast.
‘We will ask Mrs. Arbuthnot’s opinion, and abide by it,’ cried Lord Rex, coming forward a few paces to meet them. ‘She will be far better versed in this kind of thing than the rest of us. Ought we to carry candles in our hands, Mrs. Arbuthnot, when we seek our cure? There is a candle-stall conveniently opposite, and Miss Verschoyle and I will head the procession as penitents-in-chief.’
‘Please help to keep Lord Rex in order, Mrs. Arbuthnot. He is really doing and saying the absurdest things!’ Rosie Verschoyle must have been, surely, at the zenith of good temper when she thus addressed that poor Mrs. Arbuthnot! ‘Now, Lord Rex, I command you to drop this talk about candles instantly. Of course the whole business is a ridiculous piece of Popish superstition, still,’ observed Rosie, with a certain largeness, ‘one has one’s ideas. A church is a church. Positively, I will not speak another word to you to-day unless you behave yourself with decorum when we are inside.’
The awfulness of the threat appeared, for the moment, to check Lord Rex Basire’s playful spirits. He made no purchase of candles. Save that he affected a sudden and very marked lameness of gait, he behaved no worse than his companions on entering the church. Guided by ragged Jean Jacques, the English people walked up to a fretted stone screen dividing the choir from the nave. In a small side altar on the left was a doll, clothed in woven gold, unlovely of face, with eyes ‘dreadfully staring,’ with a crown of paper lilies, with a score of rushlights burning before her in a row—La Delivrande.
Who that has travelled in primitive French districts can fail of knowing these little miracle chapels, their atmosphere, their votive offerings, their sincerity, their tinsel, their pathos? At least a hundred graven memorials on the wall beside the Virgin told the story of simple human hearts that had suffered, believed, of anguished human hopes that had here found fulfilment. Dinah Arbuthnot’s cheeks paled as Marjorie, in a whisper, translated the meaning of the inscriptions. Here a mother recorded her gratitude for her child, a wife for her husband, a daughter for her parent. Here the names were graven in full, here in initials. Occasionally there was one word only, ‘Reconnaissance,’ and a date. Dinah’s cheeks paled, her eyes filled. If she were alone, Dinah felt—puritan, heretic, though she were—she would gladly kneel and make her confession, lay bare her sorrow, on the spot where so many stricken and weary human souls had cast away the sad garment of repression before her!
Lord Rex Basire’s view of the place and situation continued irresistibly comic. And the faces of his companions, the rose-pink face of Miss Verschoyle not excepted, failed to condemn him for his levity.
A heap of pious gifts, testimonials, in kind, from the cured, lay, incongruously, as they had been offered, before the altar of the Virgin. There were crutches, big and small, a child’s reclining carriage, models of ships innumerable, a wooden leg—the stoutest faith might long for an explanation of that wooden leg! Well, reader, with the fair church solemn and hushed, five or six black-clad women telling their beads before the different altars, its only Catholic inmates, Lord Rex, it must be concluded, found the temptation towards practical jocularity too strong for him. Hobbling up to the altar, this humorous little lord stood, with bowed head, with contrite manner, in front of the lily-crowned figure for some minutes’ space. Slowly ascending a step, he next deposited his crutch, a silver and ebony toy, upon the heap of worn and dusty peasant offerings; then walked away with tripping, resonant step, with head joyfully erect, down the western aisle, as who should say, ‘Behold me—a believer, cured.’
Ragged Jean Jacques held his mouth between two sun-blackened hands, showily pantomiming his appreciation of the Englishman’s costly waggishness. The subalterns of the Maltshire Royals tittered aloud. Alas! in a marching regiment, as elsewhere, has not human nature its weaker side? Is not a duke’s son, with two inches of brain, and wit in proportion, a duke’s son, even when he jests? The young ladies with one exception looked about as frigid as Italian snow looks under the kisses of an April sun. The exception was Marjorie Bartrand.
Away out of the church flew Marjorie, brushing against Rex Basire’s elbow in her exit. She waited in the porch outside, eager beggars pressing forward with their wounds, children with their half-dead wild-flowers, relic-mongers with their chaplets and rosaries—blest, ay, to the last bead, blest, ‘tout bonnement,’ by his Holiness, away in Rome. By and by, when the last of the loud-talking, merry-spirited knot of idlers had issued forth from the church, Marjorie fastened upon the offender-in-chief. With luminous eyes, with drawn breath, with hands tightly clenched in her hot indignation, she scathed him, thus:
‘You have played a delicate bit of comedy, have you not, Lord Rex? It was the finest stroke of humour to scandalise a few poor peasant women, saying prayers for their dead?... For me,’ looking one by one round the group, ‘I felt ashamed—more ashamed than ever I was in my life before—of belonging to the same nation as you all! I read once,’ said Marjorie, ‘in a wise book: “Where we are ignorant, let us show reverence.” The ignorance only has been shown to-day.’
Dinah Arbuthnot and Geoffrey, who had lingered behind the others in the church, arrived on the scene just in time to hear the last accents of this denunciation. Then, ere the culprits could utter a word in self-defence, away shot Marjorie’s arrowy figure along a shadowed by-street, away, neither stopping nor hesitating, along the old chaussée that leads from La Delivrande Paris-wards, in an exactly opposite direction to the Langrune road.
‘By Jupiter! I was never so frightened in my life.’ Rex Basire’s limbs collapsed under him in well-dramatised alarm. ‘Have all Girton girls got dynamite in their eyes? Does their speech invariably bristle with torpedoes? Is Marjorie Bartrand Protestant, or Catholic, or what?’
‘Ah, what!’ repeated Rosie Verschoyle, ever ready with a little amiable platitude. ‘A hundred years ago the Bartrands were Papists, remember. It is a moot question among the people who know them best what the Tintajeux religion is at the present day.’
‘I know one thing,’ cried Geoffrey’s friend, Ada de Carteret. ‘All through Tintajeux parish the Seigneur is looked upon as more learned than canny. When the country folk come near old Andros after dark, declaiming Greek, and with a couple of black dogs at his heels, they will run a mile round sooner than meet him.’
‘The Seigneur’s term of endearment for Marjorie is witch, when they happen to be on speaking terms at all,’ said another voice. ‘Poor girl! In spite of her temper one cannot help liking her extremely. Who was it said of Marjorie that she had such an olive-like flavour?’
‘You always feel there must be a fund of goodness in the dear child—somewhere.’ This finishing note was given in Miss Verschoyle’s thin voice. ‘As to the lecture you came in for, Lord Rex, you deserved it richly. It is quite too—in saying this, I mean it—quite! to laugh at other people’s beliefs, even when they are most ridiculous.’
And then they all sauntered off to the stalls, where Lord Rex, we may be sure, found ample scope for his veiled yet poignant irony among the crosses, medals, rosaries, and relics that had been blest, ‘tout bonnement,’ away in Rome, by his Holiness!
Marjorie, meanwhile, pursued her way through shadow and sunshine, unconscious in which direction the fiery haste of her steps was bearing her. When her temper had burnt out—in the space, say, of two minutes and a half—she perceived that she was once more in open country, alone among colza stacks and fields of ripening barley, but on a less frequented road, amidst a landscape with wider horizons than the road and landscape she and Dinah had traversed in coming to Langrune from the sea.
How good it was to breathe this wild, well-oxygenised air! With what glad senses Marjorie gazed about her across the plains, rippling, as the sun lowered, in lucent amber waves, and shaded deliciously at intervals by rows of pearly, smoke-coloured poplar! A family of peasant farmers drove by in one of their old-world Norman harvest waggons—coeval, perhaps, with Andros Bartrand’s sickle! Friendly nods, gleaming smiles from sunburnt faces, were bestowed on the little girl as the homely cartload jolted on. She watched with wistful eyes until the waggon lessened, was lost to sight in the long perspective of white road. Seating herself beside a ditch, under shadow of a solitary pollard willow, a sudden vision of vines and olives and Spanish sierras arose, with all the strength of inherited nostalgia, in Marjorie’s breast. If the harvesters would only have carried her a league or two onward with them! She had nothing of value in her possession but a watch. How many francs could one raise upon a watch, Marjorie Bartrand wondered, in some primitive, unsuspecting Norman town? Enough, surely, living among peasant people, and eking means out by an occasional day’s work at onion-weeding or colza stacking, to carry one down to the frontier, the cherished land of dreams. A letter could be sent to relieve the Seigneur’s mind, and....
And then, glancing back along the chaussée, Marjorie saw a man’s figure advancing towards her with steady quickness; a figure she knew over-well, darkly outlined against the chrome yellow of the sky. So Ada de Carteret was forsaken. Her heart went pit-a-pat. She would have given a fortune to fly, yet stirred not! One minute later and her nostalgia was cured. Longings for vine and olive and Spanish sierra had vanished, all, before the unromantic English presence of Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
CHAPTER XXV YOU—AND I!
‘You have found out a right pleasant spot.’ Geff settled himself coolly into repose among the long wayside grasses that clothed the opposite or field side of the ditch. ‘Our friends, when they have bought themselves each a cross and medal, are going down to watch the Parisians return from fishing. You and I will have the best of it among the barley here.’
‘You—and I!’
‘You—and I! Does the expression displease you, Miss Bartrand?’
‘If you have any intention of remaining, you had better take out your pipe at once, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘Why?’
‘Because an idle man, his feet dangling over a ditch, and not smoking, would be a spectacle too wretched to contemplate.’
‘The description may be worse than the fact. I am idle. My feet dangle over a ditch. I am not smoking. I was never less wretched in my life.’
‘I spoke of such a person as an object of painful contemplation.’
‘Is the spectacle painful to you at this moment? Speak frankly.’
‘I—I only wished to let you know that you might smoke, if you chose.’
‘Thanks! I would rather do nothing to alter my present state of feeling.’
And then they came to a full stop: a rather marked one.
Marjorie spoke first. ‘The charm of a spot like this’—she brought out each word with incision—‘is its solitude.’
‘Solitude à deux. The French have such an expression, have they not?’
Geff Arbuthnot asked the question, pronouncing his eu vilely.
‘“Solitude a-doo!” I am hopelessly stupid,’ said Marjorie, holding her head aloft. ‘“A-doo!” Is it meant for a farewell, or what? I really do not see the drift of the idiom—a quotation, perhaps, from one of the classic authors?’
Geoffrey was sensible that she had never been more dangerous than at this juncture, mutinous pride struggling with merriment on her clear girlish face, as she turned his terrible French accent into ridicule. He was sensible, also, of a new, an unexpected pleasure in being laughed at by her.
‘Were you enjoying your solitude (without the “doo”) truly, and thoroughly, when I disturbed you?’
‘Thoroughly, no. I had not got the flavour of folly enough out of my mouth for that. You relished, I hope, the exquisite wit we English people showed in the church, Mr. Arbuthnot? You appreciated the fun of wounding simple beliefs by depositing our Oxford Street finery among the real piteous crutches before La Delivrande? And to think that young women,’ exclaimed Marjorie, waxing warm, ‘are stigmatised, in masses, as frivolous! How can they be anything but frivolous with such examples before them?’
‘Let us cast up both columns of the account. Would a man—no, as we are talking of Lord Rex Basire, let us say would a foolish youth—display his foolishness among a bevy of pretty girls, unless they were ready to give him smiles as an encouragement?’
‘I am sure Mrs. Arbuthnot would not be among the smilers. Her beautiful face looked so good and calm, when the rest of us stood giggling there before the altar.’
‘My cousin is serious—a little over-serious always.’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot gazed attentively at the horizon as he made this remark.
‘It would do your cousin a vast deal of good to run away from that feather-weight husband of hers. Look shocked, if you choose; I am in earnest. I consider,’ said Marjorie, displaying her worldly wisdom with gravity, ‘that Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s character is thoroughly spoilt. He is a charming fellow, doubtless. Still, everybody need not remind him of his charm to his face.’
‘And you believe in retributive morality? You think the curative treatment for a charming fellow is—that his wife should run away from him?’
‘My experience of charming fellows would incline me towards heroic treatment. As we walked up from Langrune I asked Mrs. Arbuthnot to start with me on foot for Spain. With twenty francs in our pocket, I told her, and doing a day’s work on the road whenever our resources ran low, we might get down safe to the frontier in time. But Mrs. Arbuthnot did not seem to see it.’
‘Dinah’s is not an adventurous spirit. If you would accept a substitute, Miss Bartrand, perhaps I——’
‘Go on, pray.’
‘Might be allowed to follow, with a thick stick, at a distance.’
‘Keep your stick for England! I would not be afraid on the loneliest road between this and Barcelona.’
‘Without the stick, then—shall we start?’
Marjorie shifted her posture a little. She became suddenly interested in a plant of marshmallow at her side.
‘When next I enter Spain, Mr. Arbuthnot, it shall be with dignity. When I meet my mother’s people I hope to be armed with degrees, certificates—whatever the English universities will confer on me.’
‘Don’t go until your name has been bracketed high on the list of wranglers.’
As Geoffrey made this venture on thin ice he watched his pupil narrowly. One of the storm-flashes that lit Marjorie Bartrand’s face into such frequent, such perilous beauty, was his reward.
‘You mean—never go at all! Do you feel a pleasure, Mr. Arbuthnot, in throwing cold water over my dearest hopes and ambitions?’
‘An enormous pleasure, Miss Bartrand. I have felt it from that first evening when you were good enough to hire me as your teacher at Tintajeux.’
The girl looked away from him, her colour changing.
‘That evening, when I had to receive you in state, to make formal speeches and curtsies, all my great-aunts and uncles looking on through their Bartrand eyelids! Do you remember our Bon Espoir? He was an omen of better temper, perhaps, than has prevailed between us since. Were you taken aback? Was I quite unlike what you expected?’
She asked these momentous questions with the keen curiosity characteristic of the passion in its earlier days. But all the time she shrank from encountering Geff Arbuthnot’s glance.
‘You really desire to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will tell you, on one condition. What was your wish when you curtsied under the cedars to the new moon?’
‘My wish?’ turning farther and farther away from him. ‘Why, folly unrepeatable—the sort of nonsense my nurses taught me to say when I was little. Your memory is inconveniently good.’
‘Accurate to the smallest detail! How clearly one can see the meeting of those four water-lanes, and the flowers you gave me, as I know now, alas! for Mrs. Arbuthnot, and the ribbon you tied them with—the ribbon,’ said Geff coolly, ‘which you will some day send me back for a book-marker! Yes, the fairest summer evening of my life was the one when I first saw Tintajeux Manoir—and you.’
And he believed his own words. Sure sign that the heart within him was sound—healthiest life at its core. Guessing at the confessions of that ingenuous maidenly face as Marjorie, half blushes, half wilfulness, persistently gave him her profile, Geoffrey Arbuthnot had clean forgotten Lesser Cheriton, ay, and a drama played out there in which he took a not unimportant part.
‘I think this Norman evening is to the full as fair,’ said Marjorie. ‘There are bigger sweeps of outline, there is more quality in the air than falls to our lot in the Channel Islands.’
Then, again, there came a pause, broken softly by the occasional hum of an insect on the wing, by the swaying of stalks, the whispers of the ripe and restless grain, by the chirp of the hedge crickets, by the solitary treble of a lark lost somewhere, pouring its heart out in the sea-blue vault above.
Marjorie could not be silent long.
‘To begin at the beginning, what did you think of me when you got my first note—the two lines I sent in answer to yours? Nothing very good, or you would not be so reluctant to tell it.’
‘I thought,’ said Geff, ‘that you required my services as a coach, that there was a little affectation about your Greek “e’s,” and that your name was Marjorie D. Bartrand.’
‘That terrible signature of mine—the one bearable name I possess reduced to a D! You know, Mr. Arbuthnot, I hope, what D. stands for?’
‘Dorcas?’ suggested Geoffrey, ‘or perhaps Deborah? We have a number of fine old Hebrew names beginning with D.’
‘But I am not a fine old Hebrew. I am a Spanish woman, heart and soul, and I bear my mother’s name, Dolores. Grandpapa and I met an American in Paris, when I was younger, who used to call me “Miss Dollars.” The thought of that pronunciation always makes me shy of bringing my beautiful Spanish name to the fore.’
‘Dollars is more beautiful than Dolores.’ Saying this, Geoffrey took studious care to imitate her accent. ‘Dollars is at least suggestive of human activity, of the market-place, not the graveyard. Why should a child, with all the good chances of life open, have such a name as Grief imposed upon her by worldly-wise godfathers and godmothers?’
‘I speak of Dolores, not Grief, and—and you have no poetry in you, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot! You don’t know all that a word says to us southern people. Think of plain Marjorie Bartrand—nothing but “ar, ar!” If I could only change Bartrand for a name with no “ar” in it, I——’
The supposition was rushing forth with velocity. Then, in a trice, Marjorie stopped. She coloured to the roots of her hair. And then she and Geoffrey laughed so loud that the stilly air rang with their laughter. If these two young people did not actually tread the primrose path, they were within a stone’s-throw of it, ignorant though both might be of the route which lay so near them.
‘That “ar” is the worst of all your cruelties,’ said Geff presently. ‘To show my greatness of mind I will return evil for good. I will tell you what you wish to know. As I walked out for the first time to Tintajeux, I had you constantly before my mind’s eye, Miss Bartrand. I saw you, with the vision of the spirit, every inch an heiress.’
‘Every inch an heiress!’ repeated Marjorie, abashed.
‘With rigid manners, hair drawn back, Chinese fashion, and overwhelming dignity. Whenever people are of more than common volume—I fancy that is the euphemistic term, is it not?—dignity!’
‘And you found me—a scarecrow.’ She measured, mentally, and with self-abasement, the leanness of her unfledged figure. ‘What did you think when a lank country child, in a cotton gown, and without either dignity or manner, appeared before you?’
‘I felt it was my duty to accept facts as they came. I summoned up courage, and mastered my disappointment with tolerable ease,’ said Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
His face supplied a postscript to the admission which caused Marjorie’s heart to beat faster.
‘We must not stop here all day!’ she cried, springing promptly to her feet. ‘Although, if one had something to eat, it might be pleasant to do so. Yonder, to the left, is Courseulles spire. We saw it—no, you were hemmed in by sunshades—I saw it from the steamer. If we take this footpath through the cornfields, we might visit Courseulles and make a small turn round the country before going back to our company and our dinner at Langrune.’
But Geoffrey did not move.
‘I will have my bond,’ he uttered with tragic emphasis. ‘I will never stir from this spot until you tell me what your wish was when you curtsied to the moon.’
‘I would rather not say. You have the right to insist, of course—it was a bargain. But, please, let me off. Why should I repeat such puerility here, in the wise and sober light of day?’
‘I will have my bond,’ repeated Geoffrey Arbuthnot tenaciously. ‘I have made my confession in full. Now, do you make yours. What was your wish?’
A flood of shame by this time suffused Marjorie’s cheeks. But Geoffrey was stubborn. He exacted his pound of flesh to the uttermost.
‘I curtsied, as the children do, thrice ... and each time, while you were talking solemnly to grandpapa, I said, quite in a whisper——’
‘Don’t mind punctuation, Miss Bartrand. It will be the sooner over.’
‘“I like my coach—may my coach like me!”’ cried Marjorie, nearly in tears, but giving to the refrain the true sing-song of the nursery. ‘Remember, sir, when I was so inane I had only known you two hours, and—and I believed you to be the other Mr. Arbuthnot.’
Geoffrey slipped down to his feet. As Marjorie was standing on the bank, it thus happened that their faces were on a level, and very near each other. Geoffrey observed, more closely than he had done before, the texture of her skin—delicate, in spite of sunburn, as perfect health and Guernsey air could render it. He looked into the depths of her gray eyes, even in their quietest expression touched with fire. He admired the character, so superior to all mere prettiness, of her serious large mouth.
‘The wish has come true,’ he whispered, in a tone never to be forgotten by Marjorie Bartrand, ‘although I have the misfortune of being myself, not Gaston. Let me help you.’
He held out his hands, but Marjorie, with her agile young strength, had cleared the ditch almost before his assistance was proffered. They paused a moment or two irresolute, they discussed a little as to latitude and longitude, and then away the two started, in the direction of Courseulles, across the cornfields.
A third figure, dove-winged, golden-quivered, walked with them, although they might not discern his presence.
CHAPTER XXVI CUT AND THRUST
Never was a man surer of tumbling into little unlooked-for sociabilities than Gaston Arbuthnot. Had he been shipwrecked on a South Sea island I believe Gaston would have chanced upon an acquaintance there, some vanished shade from London Club or Paris café would have seized him by the button-hole before the day was out!
He was button-holed in Langrune-sur-Mer. When the pilgrimage returned from La Delivrande, Linda and her Robbie were found seated with Mrs. Verschoyle on a trio of hired chairs before the hotel, taking their pleasure rather mournfully. Cassandra Tighe, her scarlet cloak conspicuous from afar, was dredging—happy Cassandra—among such rocks as the tide still left uncovered.
Gaston Arbuthnot was invisible.
‘A real case of forcible abduction,’ cried Linda Thorne, addressing herself to Dinah. ‘You are not a foolishly nervous wife, I am sure, Mrs. Arbuthnot? You could philosophically listen to a story of how two pretty French girls carried away an English artist against his will.’
Dinah assented with one of her rare smiles. The knowledge that Gaston was finding amusement otherwise than in the half-clever talk, the too ready, too flattering sympathy of Linda herself, cast retrospective brightness upon the afternoon that his absence had clouded.
From jealousy of a selfish or little kind Dinah’s heart had never bled. Earlier in their married life, when Gaston still affected dancing, and as a matter of course went to balls without his wife, it was her usual next morning’s pleasure to scan his programmes, enjoy his sketches of his partners, his repetitions of their small-talk—all without a shade of hurt feeling. Once or twice she hinted that she would fain accompany him as a looker-on. ‘Nobody looks on long in this wicked world,’ was Gaston’s answer. ‘You do not dance, you do not play whist. You have a brain under your yellow locks, and you are too young to talk scandal. Ball-room atmosphere is unwholesome. I would not hear of such a sacrifice.’ And as it was not Dinah’s habit to pose as martyr, she obeyed, trusting in him always.
Beautiful, pure of soul herself, she simply honoured the beauty, believed in the purity of soul of other women. Gaston was popular, spoilt; an artist with an artist’s—more than this, with an American temperament. A degree of youthful immaturity seemed ever to lurk amidst his astute knowledge of life and of men. He had but a half-share, as he would tell her, of the fibres derived from long lines of bored ancestors. He sought diversion for diversion’s sake. She had made no quarrel with the inexorable facts of her husband’s existence or of her own. If only she had been his equal, intellectually! If she could have supplied him with the mental companionship he needed, or interested him in his childless fireside! Ah, could she thus have risen to his level, Gaston’s heart had been in her keeping still. Hence came the morbid unrest of her present life; hence the dread, increasing daily, hourly, strive with it as she might, of Linda’s influence.
‘I am afraid one gets used to most things, Mrs. Thorne. I have seen Gaston run away with so often that I am not much moved by the thought of these pretty French girls.’
Linda Thorne rose. She rested her hand confidentially within Dinah’s arm, much to Dinah’s chagrin, and proposed that they should walk together along the sands to look for Mr. Arbuthnot.
‘Yes, I must positively tell you the whole story. Your husband had finished his sketch of the lovely fisher-girl. The young person was not at all lovely, in fact. But she was striking. She had distinct genre. Artists care for genre, you know, much more than for beauty.’
Dinah resolved to question Gaston as to the truth of this. She resolved to cultivate distinct genre in herself for the remainder of her days.
‘Striking—that word sums up all. The big cobalt-blue eyes, that say about as much, in reality, as a china tea-saucer, and are supposed by imaginative men to say everything—blonde hair worn in a pigtail, palpably not original, to her heels; complexion carefully toned to a shade one point short of freckles; bare arms, akimbo—excellently shaped arms, of course; a native prawn basket, and a fishing-dress from Worth’s. I got to know the type so well,’ said Linda, ‘in my governess days, during one summer, especially, when the Benjamin sent me to Houlgate with her children.’
Dinah, who, as we have seen, had no genius for supplying the hooks and eyes of conversation, remained chillingly silent.
‘Your husband had finished his sketch of her—an admirably idealised one. I have it here.’ And Dinah, for the first time, perceived that Mrs. Thorne held possession of Gaston’s sketch-book. ‘Let us look at it together!’ impulsively, ‘or are you—no doubt you are—blasée about sketches? Well, well, it may be natural. Married to an artist, if one has no real, strong, natural talent for art——’
‘I have no real, strong, natural talent for anything,’ interrupted poor Dinah petulantly.
‘Oh—naughty! You must not say such things. I will not allow you to be modest. Mr. Arbuthnot tells me your needlework is’—Linda looked about her as though an encomium were hard to find—‘most elaborate! In these days needlework ranks among the fine arts. Of course you are wild about this exquisite new stitch from Vienna?’
‘I have not seen it. The only wool-work I do is old-fashioned cross-stitch.’
‘Just fancy! And Mr. Arbuthnot, I am convinced, spends his time—half his time—in designing quite lovely patterns for you?’
Dinah’s breast swelled as a vision of the Roscoff wild roses overcame her. She made no attempt at a parry.
‘If I had married an artist I would never have gone to the shops for patterns. Or rather, if I had married an artist I would never have embroidered at all. I should have thrown myself into his ambitions, his work—have spent my life so utterly at his side.’
Dinah stooped to pick up a little pink shell from the strand, by this action freeing herself from Linda Thorne. She put the shell inside her glove, thinking she would keep it as a memento of Langrune and of this summer day that had passed so nearly without a cloud. So nearly—but the summer day was not over yet!
‘All this time I am not accounting to you for your husband’s disappearance, am I? My dear creature, it was really the drollest thing! Robbie had not as yet floated up with the tide, and Mrs. Verschoyle and I, your husband with us, had made our slippery way across the rocks to mainland. Well, just as Gast ... I mean, as Mr. Arbuthnot was putting a last touch to his sketch, up ran a little Frenchman, full dress, a rose-and-white daughter in each hand, and an enormously stout wife, with a bouquet, following. He threw his arms round your husband’s neck, and but for Mr. Arbuthnot’s presence of mind would certainly have kissed him.’
‘Kissed!’
‘Of course. Have you never lived among French people? It was some old artist companion of Gast ... of your husband’s bachelor life. You can imagine the recollections of former joyous days spent in Paris as students together, the inquiries for mutual friends, now dead or married, the history each had to give of his marriage and present happiness!’
‘I cannot. I am not imaginative.’
It must be confessed that a tinge of displeasure was audible in Dinah’s voice. Every syllable of Mrs. Thorne’s unpremeditated chatter had wounded her like a stiletto prick.
‘Ah—and I am imaginative to my finger tips. We seem the very antithesis of each other, in character, as we are in looks.’ Linda had really a very graceful way of admitting her own plainness, when occasion offered. ‘I can assure you I filled up a dozen little blanks in our Benedicts’ exchange of confidences. I traced out a full and rounded whole most satisfactorily. People may slur over half a dozen years in as many words. If nature has endowed you with imagination, you read between the lines. The barest outline suggests the finished picture.’
Something in her tone would seem to imply that Gaston Arbuthnot’s married life had been a spoiled life, or so it seemed to Dinah’s irritated heart. Dinah felt that the half dozen words must have yielded latent hints of her own intellectual shortcomings, hints which Linda Thorne’s talent for filling up blanks had developed into certainty.
‘The next part of the ceremony was the introduction to Madame de Camors and the children—two small Parisian coquettes, about the age of my Rahnee, who fell in love with Mr. Arbuthnot on the spot.’
‘Little children fall in love with Gaston always,’ said Dinah hastily.
‘The family party was taking its departure, it seemed, under the broiling sun, to a children’s ball at Luc Casino. At a word from papa the small imps seized a hand each of Gas ..., of Mr. Arbuthnot, and dragged him away nolens volens. All children are tyrants,’ generalised Linda, with a dismal yawn, occasioned probably by the recollection of her virtuously spent afternoon, ‘but these terrible French children are the worst of all. Perhaps it is in imitation of the Americans. I consider the way American infants are brought forward in public places is a disgrace to the century.’
‘You think children without exception should be kept in their nurseries’?’
Dinah called to mind a group of four that passed her window on their road to the rose-show. She remembered a small figure dancing with exultation on rainbow-hued flounces.
‘My dear soul! Fancy putting such a question to me, a mother! Of course I make an exception of my own daughter. She is a good quiet little monkey,’ added Linda; ‘although Mr. Arbuthnot is positively spoiling her fast—I hope I impose her on no one. Children, as a rule, I look upon from the governess point of view. You know how my bread was earned when I was young?’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot has told me that he first met you in Paris.’
‘Yes, in the domestic service of Madame Moïse Benjamin. I got twenty pounds a year and my washing. I had to sleep under the roof, to play dance music, to remodel Madame’s dresses, to teach English to the three girl Benjamins and a boy—ah, that boy!’ said Linda, between her teeth. ‘If you think me like Becky Sharpe ... confess now, you do think me like Becky Sharpe?’
‘I do not, indeed.’ Dinah’s manner grew colder and colder. ‘I never heard of Becky Sharpe before.’
‘Well, if you had,’ said Linda, in high good humour, and storing up all the little scene against future dramatisation—‘if you had heard of Becky Sharpe, and had thought me like her, where would be the wonder? I was brought up just as Becky was, to live by my wits. My mamma—I connect her hazily with sofa cushions, much white embroidery, an Italian greyhound, doctors, and the smell of ether—my mamma died when I was four years old. She lies in Brussels cemetery,’ ran on Linda, drawing a hasty outline of a tombstone on the sand, ‘with Lady Constantia Smythe, and more than one side allusion to the peerage graven above her head. At the time she died we had not very definite daily bread. Still, my grandfather was an earl, and poor papa found one of his few consolations in making much of our nobility.’
Frankness, it would seem, was Linda Thorne’s strong point, but Dinah was unmoved by it. The earldom dazzled Gaston Arbuthnot’s lowly-born wife no more than Linda’s personal confidences propitiated her. Dinah had a child’s instinct for friends and for enemies. She liked, she disliked, unerringly, and was too transparently honest to mask her feelings.
Stooping down, she picked up another shell from the sea’s smooth edge. She sought once more to widen the space between herself and her companion. Linda Thorne’s quick brain observed the movement, divined the intention.
‘Excellent, stupid, well-meaning, ill-acting young woman. And I have not a reprehensible sentiment at all towards her!’ Thoughts like this shot through Linda’s mind—Linda who really had it not in her to know sterner passion than a drawing-room malignity. ‘With her youth, her goodness, her complexion, her upper lip, to be jealous of poor, plain, cynical, elderly me! She needs a pretty sharp lesson. Children who cry for the moon deserve to get something worth crying for.’ Then, sweetly, ‘You seem interested in shells, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ she observed aloud. ‘You study conchology as a science, perhaps, under the Platonic auspices of that severe-looking cousin of yours, Geoffrey Arbuthnot of John’s.’
‘I study nothing, unfortunately for myself. I am quite ignorant,’ said Dinah, lifting her face and meeting her tormentor’s eyes full. ‘I am picking up a shell or two,’ she added, ‘to keep as a remembrance of my day in Langrune.’
‘I should say you would remember Langrune without any tangible memento,’ remarked Linda. ‘Rather ungrateful, you know, if you did not.’
‘How, ungrateful?’
‘Well, because the picnic was given unconditionally in honour of you——’
‘I do not understand you,’ interrupted Dinah, with ill-judged warmth. ‘The party was planned before any one in Guernsey knew of my existence. I was asked accidentally—because I could be of use. Four or five girls had promised these young officers to come, and they wanted a married woman as a chaperon. This was what Lord Rex Basire said when he invited me on Monday.’
‘And you believed him? You accepted out of pure kindness to faire tapisserie! Mrs. Arbuthnot, you are too amiable.’
By this time Dinah Arbuthnot’s face blazed from brow to chin. Her conscience, over-sensitive in the lightest matter, smote her sore. Was not a selfish longing for widened experience—nay, was not a certain distrust of Gaston, a contemptible sense of triumph over Linda—at the bottom of her acquiescence?
‘What unusually correct taste Dame Nature displays in her colouring this evening.’ Mrs. Thorne gazed with decent vacuity at the sky, and away from Dinah’s face. ‘Soft primrose, fading into pearly-green, with just those few vivid touches of deep crimson. It suggests thoughts for a ball dress. And still, beautiful though the effect is, I would rather not see that sort of shimmer on the water. If we come in for fog-banks somewhere about the Race of Alderney, it will matter little whether the picnic originated for the chaperons, or the chaperons for the picnic! How atrociously hungry this sort of thing makes one! Surely dinner-time must be drawing nigh.’
CHAPTER XXVII GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY
‘In two words, you have amused yourself, my dear.’ Under cover of the friendly twilight, Gaston Arbuthnot pressed his wife’s hand as it rested, a little shyly, on his arm. ‘A good sign for the future. You must enter into the world more, Dinah. You must cultivate this faculty for being amused; I desire nothing better.’
Though fog-banks and disaster might lie in ambush about the Race of Alderney, nothing could be tranquiller than the fair summer evening here, on the coast of France.
After an excellent dinner, vraie cuisine Normande, served in the quaint, red-tiled salle of the Hôtel Chateaubriand, the collected yachting party were now progressing along the pleasant sweep of road that leads to Luc. Luc alone, among this group of villages, has a jetty, and off Luc the Princess lay moored. Daylight’s last flicker was dying from the sky. Already deep fissures of shade intersected the white sand dunes bordering the shore. The sea lay motionless, a vague iridescence far away, northward, the only foreboding of coming change. Cassandra Tighe, a bold spot of colour in the gloaming, had exchanged her dredging net for some amphibious structure of green gauze and whalebone. She flitted hither and thither among the bushes that skirted the path, moth-hunting. The younger members of the expedition, in groups of two, loitered slowly along their way, for it was an hour when girlish faces look their fairest, when men’s voices are apt to soften, involuntarily!
Dinah Arbuthnot, after a good deal of strategy, had contrived not merely to get possession of her husband, but to hold him, strongly guarded, and at safe distance from the rest. Linda Thorne herself (and Linda had, at will, a longer or a shorter sight than other people) could scarce do more than guess at the outlines of the two figures. The little lover-like fact that this sober couple, this Darby and Joan of four years’ standing, walked arm in arm, could be known only to themselves.
‘Yes, Gaston, I was amused at sea, for you were there. And I was amused differently by Miss Bartrand. I wish you had been with us at La Delivrande. It was the first time I ever went inside a Popish church,’ said Dinah, gravely. ‘And yet, Popish though it was, I could scarce help saying my prayers as we stood before the altar. The tears came in my eyes as I remembered—I mean as I looked at the heap of offerings, and thought of the sad hearts that had brought their troubles there.’
‘Was the smell very detestable—a smell one could sketch? Had you beggars? Had the beggars wounds? Of course, votive churches and such things have to be done, in one’s youth. I am too old,’ said Mr. Arbuthnot; ‘my digestion is too touchy for me to run the risk of physical horrors of my own free will.’
‘I thought an artist should seek out every kind of experience.’
Gaston had so often insisted upon the duty of pursuing inspiration among all sorts and conditions of men—still more of women—that the remark from Dinah’s lips had a savour of mischief.
‘Every sort of agreeable experience, my dear child. The disgusting is for the great masters. Mine is pocket art—a branch that the critics discreetly label as decadent, although lucrative. Besides,’ said Gaston, ‘I have sold my soul to the dealers. And the dealers have sold theirs, if they have any, to a puerility-loving public. An honest manufacturer of paper weights and clock stands needs nothing but prettiness,—I won’t say beauty,—the prettiness of a Parisian, masquerading as a fisher-girl!’
‘Or of Parisian children dancing at an afternoon ball. Mrs. Thorne told me about your meeting with some old student acquaintance, and how his daughters led you away captive.’
‘Small tyrants! I had to dance four dances with each of them, and then be told I was “un Monsieur très paresseux” for my reward. And so Mrs. Thorne and you are becoming better friends,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, looking hard through the veil of twilight at his wife’s reluctant face. ‘She is a dear good soul, is she not? So bright, so spontaneous! Really, I think that is Mrs. Thorne’s crowning charm—her spontaneity.’
‘I am no friend of hers.’ Dinah’s voice had become cold. ‘I did not like Mrs. Thorne at first. I dislike her now.’
‘Impossible, Dinah—impossible. A woman with your face should dislike no created thing.’
‘I dislike her because her words sting even when they sound softest, because she will never look at one straight. I dislike her,’ said Dinah, feeling her cheeks burn with shame and indignation, ‘because she calls you “Gaston” when she speaks of you.’
At this terrible climax Mr. Arbuthnot laughed, so heartily that the quiet undulating sandhills echoed again. Far ahead Mrs. Linda might perhaps have caught the ring of his voice, have marvelled what subject people who had been married four mortal years could find to laugh about.
‘This is a black accusation. Happily, whatever her sins in my absence, Mrs. Thorne does not call me “Gaston” to my face.’
Dinah was silent. Gaston’s assurances had never carried the same weight with her since Saturday’s rose-show, the occasion when she learned of midnight adjournments to Dr. Thorne’s house, and of the singing of French songs after a certain mess dinner. Her own conscience was rigid. To suppress a truth was, according to Dinah’s code, precisely the same as to utter an untruth. She allowed no margin for her husband’s offhand histories—as a woman of larger mind would possibly have done. She could not see that carelessness, a quick imagination, and an intense love of peace, were factors sufficiently strong to account for any little inconsistencies that might now and again creep into Gaston Arbuthnot’s domestic confidences.
‘Of that I cannot judge. I suppose I ought not to care what Mrs. Thorne does or says in my absence.’
‘Of course you ought not. The speech is worthy of your thorough common-sense, Dinah.’
‘But Mrs. Thorne calls you “Gaston” to me, and I think it a very wretched, unkind thing to do. I think it mean.’
‘You ought not to think of it at all. Artist people are called by the first name that comes to hand.’
‘Mrs. Thorne is not an artist.’
‘She remembers me, in the old days when I knew Camors, as a budding one.’
‘And she corrects herself with over-care. Having once said “Gaston,” it would be better not to go back to “Mr. Arbuthnot.”’
‘Ah, there, my dear girl, you are too strong. If Linda Thorne excuses she accuses herself, although I must confess I don’t see the heinousness of her crime. You are becoming a casuist, Dinah.’
‘Am I? It seems to me that I am remaining what I always was.’
They walked on, after this, mutually taciturn. The interest seemed to have gone from their talk. At last, just as they neared the first lights of Luc village, Dinah’s fingers closed with significant tightness on her husband’s arm.
‘I have an important word to say to you, Gaston. All through our walk I have been wishing to bring it out, but I had not the courage.’
‘Some one else calls me by my Christian name, perhaps? Or are we only to discuss more enormities of Linda Thorne’s?’
There was a threat of impatience in Gaston Arbuthnot’s voice. This little running accompaniment of domesticity gave a quite new character, he decided, to picnics, viewed as a means of social pleasure.
‘I was not thinking of Linda Thorne. I wanted to ask—Gaston, forgive me—if you would keep nearer to me till we get back to Guernsey?’
‘Nearer! Will not everybody be near everybody else on board the steamer? Don’t, I beg, ask me to do anything absurd,’ he added, with emphasis. ‘You have no idea how ready one’s best friends are to laugh at one under given circumstances.’
‘But if you were just to stop at my side on board—I mean, so that no one else could come near me.’
‘I will do nothing of the kind. You have no perception of the ridiculous, Dinah. It is a want in your nature. A woman with the slightest sense of humour would never wish her husband to be demonstrative before an audience.’
‘Demonstrative?’
‘Jealous might be nearer the mark. A variety of reasons could be given as to the miserable wretch’s motives in such a position. Jealous—of little Rex Basire, probably!’
Gaston Arbuthnot laughed. This time his laughter had no very hearty sound.
‘You must learn to be self-reliant,’ he went on presently. ‘Your first lesson in worldliness was to be taken to-day, remember. Well, you must go through with it! I was not especially anxious for you to join the party.’
‘You were not. I came to please myself only.’
‘And you have pleased yourself and me. You are the most charming woman present; and let me tell you these handsome Guernsey girls are formidable rivals. I am proud of you. The opening page of the lesson is a success. Don’t spoil it, Dinah, by picking a childish quarrel with me now.’
‘I am proud of you!’ The unexpected praise sent a thrill through Dinah’s heart.
Her petition to Gaston to keep near her was made in a very different spirit to that of childish quarrelling. On the road back from La Delivrande to Langrune it had come to pass that the walking party, following a natural law, broke up into couples, and that Dinah, unprotected by Marjorie or by Geff, found herself alone with Lord Rex Basire. Being, for his age, a very thorough man of the world, Lord Rex uttered no word at which Mrs. Arbuthnot, or any sensible woman, could take umbrage. But his manner, his tones, his looks, were eloquent with a feeling which, to her straightforward, rustic perception of things, constituted an offence.
In the matter of admiration, Dinah, as I have said, was neither prude nor Puritan. She knew the greatness of her gift. It was an everyday experience to see heads turn wherever she walked upon the earth, and, being a quite natural and single-hearted daughter of the common Mother, such acknowledgment of her beauty had never yet been repugnant to her. But the admiration covertly expressed by Rex Basire as they sauntered slowly through chequered light and shadow back to Langrune, was of another nature. Instinct warned Dinah that, if she were an unmarried girl, she might well read on this foolish young man’s face and in his manner signs of love.
And the warning, to Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife, was, in itself, a humiliation.
She was unacquainted with the weapons by means of which differently nurtured women parry equivocal attention. Save from Linda Thorne’s lips to-night she had never heard the term ‘Platonic.’ Geoffrey was her only friend. Of men like Lord Rex Basire she knew nothing. To gaze and hint and sigh after this tormenting fashion might, she thought, be a received habit among young officers of his rank. And the torment would soon be over—if Gaston would only keep near her on board the Princess! Once safely back in Guernsey, and Dinah felt she could take absolute care of herself for the future. There should be no more lingering afternoon visits, no more instruction in wool-work for Lord Rex Basire. Of the lesson learnt to-day, one paragraph, at least, was clear, should be reduced to practice before another twenty-four hours went by. If Gaston would only keep near her in the interval!
But at Gaston’s praise she forgot everything. In the sweetness of that unlooked-for avowal, ‘I am proud of you,’ all dread of the future, all unpleasant recollections of the past, were swept clean away out of Dinah’s brain. She would not risk the moment’s happiness by another word. Her hand trembled, as though they had gone back to the old romantic days at Lesser Cheriton, as it rested on Gaston’s arm.
‘Proud of me! Ah, my love,’ she whispered, ‘I hope that you and I will never have a worse quarrel than this while we live.’
And when the pair of married sweethearts emerged into the glare of lamps outside Luc Casino, Dinah’s face was radiant. Lord Rex, devotedly attentive at the moment to pretty Rosie Verschoyle, saw, and felt mystified. Decidedly, the Methodistic heart, like the Methodistic conscience, was a book wherein Rex Basire might not read.
Linda Thorne approached at once; a tall figure, diaphanous, graceful, in the lamplight. An Indian shawl was on Linda’s arm, one of those exquisite dull-hued cachemires capable of investing the plainest woman with ephemeral poetry. Her hand held a bunch of wild flowers; a long trail of bindweed was twined, by fingers not unversed in millinery, round her hat.
‘I hope you approve my ball attire?’ She asked this with a little curtsey, her eyes addressing Gaston rather than Gaston’s wife. ‘Our hosts tell us that we have all free entrance to the Casino, the result, I suspect, of some liberal bribe to the Administration. Really, the way our subalterns have preconcerted every detail of their picnic has quite a Monte Christo flavour. You are engaged to me, remember, Mr. Arbuthnot, for your first waltz.’
‘There will be neither first nor last, Mrs. Thorne. I exhausted the very small dancing power that is in me on Hortense and Eulalie this afternoon. I have not waltzed with a partner over seven for years,’ added Gaston. ‘My step dates from the days of Louis Philippe.’
Nevertheless he moved away from Dinah; he followed whithersoever Mrs. Thorne might choose to lead.
She chose the Luc dunes—that broad belt of wind-blown sand, held together by coarse grasses or sea thistles, which stretches the entire length of the straggling village, and forms a welcome contrast to the burnt-up turf terrace, with burnt-up geraniums, mildewed urns, and peeling stucco goddesses of loftier watering-places.
This evening Luc was merry-making. There were fireworks, there was a procession of torches—one of those ever-recurring processions by which the hearts of Parisian children, big and little, are gladdened at the seaside. Tiny figures marched, two and two, with Chinese lamps along the village causeway. A band of small boys evoked martial melody from drum and fife. Catherine-wheels rotated, rockets scurried up into space. By and by an artfully constructed bonfire of colza stalks flared up in the centre of the plage. Hand linked in hand the children danced around it.