The speech was really the best chosen, prettiest thing that a somewhat errant husband could have found to say. In every moral encounter that befel Gaston Arbuthnot, and whether his antagonist floundered in the mud or no, Gaston seemed invariably to find himself, at the last, in a graceful attitude. But Dinah’s heart was no more warmed by honeyed little phrases than by the reconciliatory kiss her husband bestowed on her ere he started to his dinner-party. She was reaching—nay, had reached—the miserable stage when honeyed phrases and reconciliatory kisses are in themselves matters of distrust? How, her lonely dinner over, would she get through the evening hours—long counted-on hours—when she was to have walked, her hand within Gaston’s arm, to distant Roscoff Common for her briar roses.
For a space Dinah looked listlessly forth at the garden. It was full of people who knew each other, who talked together in friendly voices—the boarders of the hotel, with whom Gaston mixed, with whom Gaston was popular. Then she seated herself before her embroidery frame. But recollections of Lord Rex Basire, of the effaced stitches, of Gaston’s commentaries on her ‘patience,’ made the thought of work repugnant to her. If she could only read, she thought! Not after her dull, country pattern, repeating each word to herself as a child cons his task ere he can take in its meaning. If she could read for pleasure, as she had watched Geoffrey read—quickly, easily, with hearty human interest, like one bent on receiving counsel from some well-beloved friend!
A book of Geff’s lay on the mantelshelf. Dinah rose, crossed the room with languid steps, and took it in her hand. Then, as readers invariably do, to whom the shell of a book matters more than the kernel, she fell to a careful examination of the text, binding, title-page.
‘The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Vol. VI. Dramatis Personæ.’
Well, four years ago, during the brief fortnight of Geoffrey’s madness, it chanced one evening that he walked out to Lesser Cheriton with this very book in his pocket. (Did some ineffaceable rose odour of that dead June cling to the pages still, rendering Vol. VI. dearer in Geff’s imagination than its fellows?) He read ‘James Lee’s Wife’ aloud to Dinah Thurston—a poem totally outside the girl’s comprehension—and during the recital of which her decently suppressed yawns must have rebuffed any man less blindly in love than was Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
At ‘James Lee’s Wife’ the book opened now.
Dinah read through the first stanzas untouched. Pretty love-warblings, the cry of a happy woman’s heart,—what had they to say to her, Dinah Arbuthnot? In the last stanza of ‘By the Fireside’ her pulse gave a leap.
Dinah went back to the window, the volume in her hand. She returned to the beginning of the poem, pored over it, line by line, stanza by stanza, in the fading light.
And when she had got thus far, the clouds of her ignorance lightened. She began to understand.
Shortly before ten o’clock, entered Geoffrey. The parlour lamps were not lit. Dinah’s figure was in dense shadow as she leaned, absorbed in her own thoughts, beside the open window. Geoffrey, believing the room empty, sang under his breath, as he groped his way across to the mantelshelf; no very distinguishable tune—an ear for music was not among Geff’s gifts—but with sufficient of a quick, triplet measure in it to recall a Spanish Barcadero that Marjorie Bartrand was fond of singing to herself.
To Dinah’s sick heart the song was consciously wounding.
She had been so long used to Geff’s undivided homage, that sense of power had, little by little, grown into tyranny, gentle rose-leaf tyranny, whose weight Geoffrey’s broad shoulders bore without effort, and yet having in its nature one of tyranny’s inalienable qualities, lack of justice.
‘Always in spirits, Geoffrey!’ The reproach came to him through the gloom. ‘It is good to think, whether the day is dark or shining, our cousin Geoffrey can always sing.’
Geoffrey was at her side in a moment.
‘It is cruel to speak of my horrible groanings as singing, Mrs. Arbuthnot; crueller still to hint of them as betokening good spirits. Where is Gaston? You are back earlier than I expected from your walk to Roscoff.’
‘The walk fell through. I shall have to border my work with a rose pattern bought in the shops. Gaston was obliged to dine at Dr. Thorne’s. He made the engagement, of course, without thinking of our walk. I ought never to have counted on those Roscoff wild roses. I——’
Dinah’s voice lapsed, brokenly, into silence.
‘If you would like the roses, you can have them by breakfast to-morrow,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Few things I should enjoy better than a six-mile trudge in the early morning.’
‘No, Geoffrey, no. Gaston always tells me that my bought patterns are atrocious, and the walk was planned by him, and he was to have sketched from the fresh briars by lamplight. My heart in it all is over. The Roscoff roses may go!’
As so much of weightier delight had been allowed to go, negligently, irrevocably, out of Dinah Arbuthnot’s life. Dinah herself might not suggest the thought, but to Geoffrey’s mind it was a vivid, a pathetic one.
‘And why should you not take my escort? You know I am never burthened with engagements. Let us go to Roscoff to-morrow. You owe Miss Bartrand a visit. Well, we will take Tintajeux on our road, and make Marjorie show us the way to Roscoff Common.’
‘Miss Bartrand will not expect me to return her visit. She came here because—because you, dear Geff, with or without words, bade her come! I should never have courage to face the grandfather. Gaston would be the right person to call on the Seigneur of Tintajeux.’
‘The Seigneur of Tintajeux might think otherwise,’ Geoffrey laughed. ‘Old Andros Bartrand made minute inquiries about Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot the last time I saw him.’
‘About me—always the same story!’ cried Dinah, uneasily. ‘Why should people talk of us? What is there in my life, or in Gaston’s, that need arouse so much curiosity?’
‘Shall I answer as your friend, Lord Rex, would do?’
‘Answer truly, Geff, not like Lord Rex Basire, but like yourself.’
‘Why should the good people of Guernsey talk about you, do you ask? Because, Mrs. Arbuthnot, even in this country of fair faces, yours may have gained the reputation of being the fairest.’
The speech would have fitted Lord Rex better. Geff was sensible in the darkness that his cheek reddened.
‘The fairest!’ echoed poor Dinah, petulantly. ‘Oh, I sicken of the very word “fair.” Shades of hair or of eyes, a white skin, a straight profile, how can people think twice of these trivial things? The woman best worth speaking about in Guernsey or elsewhere should be she, not with the fairest, but the happiest face.’
Her own, certainly, was not happy to-night. Growing accustomed to the parlour’s darkness, fitfully broken by a reflected light from one of the garden lamps outside, Geff could note her exceeding pallor. He could note, also, that Dinah Arbuthnot’s eyes revealed no trace of tear-shedding, that a look rather of newly-stirred interest, of awakening excitement, was in their depths.
‘And you have spent your evening not only without Gaston, but without cross-stitch? It is a fresh experience,’ he told her gravely, ‘for you to be idle.’
‘I read until the light went—don’t you see—I have got hold of a book of yours? A book of verses that I did not understand when you tried to read it aloud to me at Lesser Cheriton.’
Ah, how the old name, spoken by her tongue, stabbed him always! Geoffrey Arbuthnot bent his face above the volume in Dinah’s hand.
‘“Robert Browning.” But for my bad reading, you ought to have liked these poems four years ago.’
‘I think not, Geff. Uneducated people can like only where they feel. And in those young days’—oh, unconsciously cruel Dinah!—‘I felt so little. But I have an object now in learning. I want to learn on all subjects, out of books as well as from life. That reminds me of something I had to say to you, Geff. Lord Rex Basire was calling on me this afternoon.’
‘Lord Rex Basire was calling on you the greater part of yesterday.’
‘And I took upon myself to accept an invitation for you. There will be a picnic party on Wednesday. It is some yachting expedition to the French coast, got up by the officers of the regiment, to which you will be asked——’
‘But to which I shall certainly not go. I can get as far out to sea as I like with the fisher people. Wednesday is one of my busiest days.’
‘Miss Bartrand will be invited, too, if you are thinking of her.’
‘Miss Bartrand can do as she chooses. I have more important work than my two hours’ reading at Tintajeux.’
‘If I ask you, Geff, will you refuse?’
‘I refuse, unconditionally. I hate gay parties. What mortal interest could I have in the society of men like Lord Rex Basire and his brother officers?’
‘Only that I am going, that Gaston ... I mean, I looked upon it as a matter of course you would accept, and——’
The words died on Dinah’s lips. She had an unreasoning sensation that her firmest safety ground was at this moment cut abruptly from her feet.
As she stood, faltering, uncertain, Geoffrey took the volume of Browning from her. It opened at page 58.
‘Little girl with the poor coarse hand.’
There was just sufficient light for him to make out the letters of the first line.
‘Is this the poem you have been reading, Mrs. Arbuthnot? Why, I distinctly remember your pronouncing “James Lee’s Wife” to be meaningless.’
‘I have my lesson—shall understand,’ said Dinah. ‘“James Lee’s Wife” is the story of a woman whose heart is broken.’
And she turned from him. Geoffrey could only see her face in extreme profile. The cheek with its drawn oval, the exquisite, sad lips, showed in strong relief, like a cheek, like lips of marble, against the night sky.
He first broke silence.
‘Do you care, seriously—do you care a fraction, one way or the other—about my accepting this invitation of Basire’s for Wednesday?’ he asked her. ‘Is it possible my going could be of help to you?’
A big lump in poor Dinah’s throat kept her, during some moments, from speaking. Then with trembling eagerness her answer broke forth. She cared more seriously than she could say ‘about Geoffrey’s not forsaking her.’ Gaston, of course, would be of the party, but then Gaston was so popular, so sure to be unapproachable! She would never, never want Geoffrey to martyrise himself again. It was the first great favour she had asked him. When she was once launched in the world, said Dinah, rallying with effort, she would know what to say and do and look, unhelped by a prompter.
And all Geff’s hatred for gay parties, and for men like Lord Rex Basire and his brother officers, went to the winds. That Dinah was beginning to anatomise her pain unhelped by suggestion from without, that Dinah had grasped the subtle meaning of ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ were facts that could not be lightly put aside. Her cry to himself, Geoffrey thought, was that of a child who seeks succour, from instinct, rather than from knowledge of his danger.
‘The martyrdom would not last long,’ urged Dinah, misjudging his intention. ‘To any one so fond of the sea as you, Geff, twelve or fifteen hours on board a steamer are not much. We are to leave early in the morning and be back in Guernsey the following night. If you know what a kindness you would be doing me!’
‘I mean to go,’ said Geff Arbuthnot shortly.
Twelve hours! He felt, just then, that he would pass twelve weeks, or months, on a steamer, if by so doing he could lighten one ounce of Dinah’s burthens to her!
‘And Gaston’s conscience will be at rest,’ she exclaimed. ‘The truth is, you see, Gaston was not well pleased at my accepting at all. He bade me ask you, Geoffrey, to look after me.’
To a more sophisticated mind than Geff’s it might have occurred that the most fitting man to look after Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife would be—Gaston Arbuthnot himself.
I have written that, in a softened and remorseful moment Marjorie Bartrand’s heart owned Geoffrey for its master.
In a character like Marjorie’s, softened and remorseful moods are apt, however, to be intermittent. On the evening of Saturday her pride had melted, ay, to such a point that, holding her tutor’s ‘love-letter’ between her hands, she went into a storm of penitent tears—she, Marjorie Bartrand, whose boast had been that there was one woman in Her British Majesty’s domain who would shed tears for no man while she lived!
Looking back upon these things from the cool and bracing heights of a Tintajeux Sunday, the girl’s stout spirit recoiled with derision from the image of her own weakness. The Seigneur’s after-dinner sarcasm, she felt, with tingling cheek, was true of aim. She had played a part, unknowingly, in the Arbuthnot drama: thanks to Cassandra Tighe, had no doubt treated Geoffrey with kindness not his due for the imaginary wife’s sake! Now would everything be on a frigidly proper footing. Her tutor had shown very good sense in returning property that had wrongly fallen into his keeping. Whatever small halo of romance hung around his life was dispelled. The construction of Latin prose, the working out of mathematical problems, would henceforth go on with dignified and scholarlike serenity.
But, as a first step, Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth!
Old Andros happened to give a longer sermon than usual on this Sunday morning of June 26—a sermon wearing a French garb now, but which was first preached fifty years ago before the University of Oxford, and whose polished sentences breathed the safe and sleepy theology of its day. The whole of the congregation slept, save one; the gentlemanly optimism of eighteen hundred and thirty appealing moderately to hearers who in the evening would revive beneath the burning eloquence of some neighbouring Bethesda or Zion. Marjorie, only, was awake: keen, restless, preternaturally stirred to mundane thoughts and desires as she had ever found herself, from her rebellious babyhood upward, under the inspiration of a high oak pew and monumental slabs. She thought over all her hours with Geoffrey from the first evening when she saw him in the Tintajeux drawing-room until their half quarrel on Saturday. She thought of her visit to Dinah, of the disillusionment wrought in her by the vision of French songbooks and yellow-backed novels. She thought of the moment when she rescued her letter from the Seigneur’s hands! Happily, the comedy of errors approached its finish! Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth, should have his masculine vanity soothed by no further misinterpretation of her conduct. Into a debateable land where a mature woman, her heart already touched, had shrunk from venturing, Marjorie, with the madcap courage of seventeen, resolved to rush.
As a first step, Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth!
And this resolution, formed in the dim religious light of the Tintajeux family pew, did not melt away, like too many excellent Sunday purposes, under the secular warmth of work-a-day open air. When Geoffrey walked into Marjorie’s schoolroom on Tuesday morning he found Grim Fate, in a pink chintz frock, with blossoming maidenly face, ready to place him in the outer cold for ever.
‘Good-day to you, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ The girl held herself stiffly upright, with smileless lips, with hands safely embedded in the pockets of her pinafore. ‘I was much obliged to you for returning my ribbon on Saturday, but I need not have put you to the trouble, to the expense of postage! I could have waited until to-day.’
Geoffrey, a backward interpreter always of feminine petulancy, sought for no latent meaning in her words. Marjorie Bartrand had never looked sweeter to him than now, in her fresh summer frock, with a livelier damask than usual on her cheeks, and with her hands cruelly holding back from their wonted friendly greeting. He had it not in his heart, on this June morning, to find a fault in her, inheritress of all the sins of all the Bartrands though she might be.
‘My poverty is heinous, Miss Bartrand, but I could just afford the penny stamp required for the postage of your waist-belt. After the lecture you read me on Saturday morning,’ went on Geff good humouredly, ‘I really dared not face you with that morsel of ribbon still in my possession.’
Marjorie’s lips lost their firmness. Taking her place at the schoolroom table, she cleared her throat twice. Then she pushed across a pile of copy-books in Geoffrey’s direction. She signed to him to be seated, presented him with a bundle of pens, drew forward the inkstand. Finally, intrenched, as it were, behind the implements which defined their social relationship, she delivered herself of the following singular confession:
‘When my lecture, as you please to call it, was given I did not know that you existed, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘Miss Bartrand!’
‘The lecture was meant, in good faith, for another person. If an apology is needed, there you have it! I—I had listened to idle gossip,’ said Marjorie, taking desperate courage at the sound of her own voice, ‘and so—I must say it out, little though I like such subjects—I thought you were a married man, sir. I thought so from the first evening you came here. I thought so until the hour when I saw Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot at the rose-show.’
‘And your motives—when you called on Dinah?’ exclaimed Geoffrey, thrown off his guard.
‘When I called on Mrs. Arbuthnot I believed her to be my tutor’s wife. I had heard a great deal about her goodness and her beauty. And I had almost grown to hate you,’ added Marjorie, with one of her terrible bursts of outspokenness, ‘for leaving such a woman as Dinah at home, neglected, while you amused yourself.’
Then she lifted her eyes. She was startled to see how Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s face had paled; paled under the incivility, so Marjorie supposed, of her speech.
‘As a fact, of course, I never hated you at all.’ Her voice shook a little. ‘That gentle, beautiful Mrs. Arbuthnot is not your wife.’
‘Not my wife,’ echoed poor Geoffrey absently.
His tone was chill. Dipping a pen in the ink, he began to trace meaningless curves and lines on the cover of the exercise-book nearest his hand. During a few seconds he was obviously unmindful of his pupil’s presence.
‘Her lips, with their sad expression, haunt me,’ remarked Marjorie presently. ‘Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot, I should think, must be the most beautiful woman in the world.’
‘As she is certainly the truest and best.’ Geff had got back his self-possession. He spoke his credo as valiantly as though Marjorie Bartrand’s eyes were not fixed upon him. ‘And so,’ he found voice to say, ‘you could actually believe, on hearsay evidence, that a girl like Dinah would have chosen me for her husband, and I—have neglected her?’
Geoffrey laughed, not very joyously; then, taking up another copy-book, he glanced with mechanical show of attention over a sentence or two of Marjorie’s Latin translation. He held the page upside down—a fact which her memory, in after times, might recall as significant.
‘I honestly believed you to be married. Have you forgotten the first evening you walked out to Tintajeux—that evening when I told you the Bon Espoir was a good omen for our friendship?’
‘A fortnight ago to-day. I have not forgotten it.’
‘I looked upon you as my friend before I saw you. I had heard your history—the history, it would seem, of your cousin Gaston! I honoured a man who had had the courage of his opinions. I respected, I drew to you on account of the wife you had chosen. And now, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ exclaimed Marjorie hotly, ‘the comedy of errors is finished. I have learned my mistake, you see. And I trust that my apology has been sufficient.’
This time Geoffrey broke into a fit of wholesome, unconstrained laughter.
‘I am afraid I see through everything, Miss Bartrand. Your apologies say too much. I have been treated with humanity by accident, and may count upon dark days for the future. That I am not married is my misfortune,’ he added, watching her face,—‘a misfortune which, if I could only thereby re-establish myself in your favour, I would gladly remedy.’
‘Would you?... do you mean ...’
And then, looking up into her tutor’s eyes, Marjorie knew that they were both of them talking unwisdom, were trenching as nearly on the forbidden ground of sentiment as a young man and woman who had met for the hard study of classics and mathematics could well do.
‘I believe I got through some fair work yesterday,’ she remarked, with an air of cold business. ‘As to-morrow is to be wasted on folly, we may as well lose no time now. It is your system never to praise, sir,—a good one, doubtless. Yet I hope you will think my Virgil passable. I promise you it was done without the crib.’
Geff read the halting translation aloud, no longer holding the manuscript upside down. He did not think Marjorie’s Virgil passable, and put the copy-book aside without a word of comment. He showed himself severer than usual over Greek aorists, was stringent, to cruelty, in regard of Marjorie’s shakiest point—her mathematics. But at last, when the professional work was over, when he had risen to take leave, Geoffrey Arbuthnot extended his hand to his pupil as the girl’s heart knew he had never done before.
‘You have tolerated me hitherto,’ he observed, ‘for my imaginary wife’s sake. Do you think you can tolerate me, in future, for my own?’
With his eyes fixed on her face, her small fingers crushed in his grasp, Marjorie’s cheeks turned the colour of a pomegranate.
‘You know ... you ought to have been the other Arbuthnot cousin,’ she stammered, glancing up under her long lashes, then drawing her hand away warily.
‘I ought, you think, to have been Gaston? He would never have pleaded, as I plead, for toleration. Every woman living would tolerate Gaston of her own free will.’
‘Save Marjorie Bartrand! Pray make one exception to your rule. I come of an arbitrary and stiff-necked race. We—we Tintajeux people belong to minorities. We like, in most cases dislike, where we can.’
‘Give me credit, for a short time longer, of being the other Arbuthnot cousin,’ Geoffrey whispered as he left her. ‘Dislike me only as much as you did on that first evening when you gathered roses and heliotropes—for my wife!’
Wednesday morning’s sun rose cloudless. A few persistent fog wreaths lay, even as the day advanced, to leeward of the islands. There was an undue ground-swell, although the surface of the water glistened, smooth as oil, when the high spring tide began to flow in from the Atlantic. None but an inveterate croaker could, however, prophesy actual mischief from signs so trivial. Lord Rex Basire declared aloud—certain of his guests arriving not as the time for departure drew nigh—that the day must have been manufactured expressly for the subaltern’s picnic. No wind, no sea, a nicely-tempered sun above one’s head, a favourable tide—‘What more,’ asked Lord Rex, ‘especially if one add the item of a powerful steamer, could the never satisfied heart of woman require?’
The heart of the most Venerable woman in the island required that there should be neither ground-swell nor fog-bank. At the eleventh hour came an excuse, on the score of weather, from Madame Corbie. The post of chaperon-in-chief stood vacant. Happily for the youthful hosts, Rosie Verschoyle’s mother was faithful—a little white passive lady, accustomed to the iron rule of grown-up daughters, who only stipulated that she should lie down, within reach of smelling-salts, before leaving Guernsey harbour, and neither be spoken to nor looked at until they arrived in smooth water off the coast of France. Old Cassandra, in her scarlet cloak, was to the fore, with cans for fish, with crooks for sea-weed, with a butterfly-net, with stoppered bottles—Cassandra, burthened by a sole regret—that she had left her harp behind. If these young people had wished, in mid ocean, to dance, how willingly would Cassandra have harped to them! Doctor Thorne and his Linda were punctual; so were the trio of pretty de Carteret sisters whom poor Mrs. Verschoyle, according to a trite figure of speech, was to ‘look after.’ And still Rex Basire glanced vainly along the harbour road for the only guests concerning whose advent he cared. The steam was up; the skipper stood ready on the bridge. In another ten minutes the Princess of necessity must quit her moorings, and still the sunshine of Dinah Arbuthnot’s face was wanting.
‘You look frightfully careworn, Lord Rex,’ said Rosie Verschoyle with malicious intonation, as she followed the direction of his glances. Pray, has your lobster salad not arrived? Is your ice melting? Or does some anxiety even yet more tragic disturb your peace?’
‘There they are—no, by Jove! only the men. Twelve feet two of the Arbuthnot cousins!’ exclaimed Lord Rex, with frank disrespect of Rosie’s sympathy. ‘Is it possible Mrs. Arbuthnot can have thrown us over? The thought is too atrocious!’
The tall figures of Gaston and Geoffrey—twelve feet two of the Arbuthnot cousins—were descending by quick strides the stepway that forms a short cut from the High Town of Petersport to the quay. Before Rex Basire’s disappointment had had time to formulate itself more coherently a clatter of ponies’ hoofs, a rush of wheels, made themselves heard round the corner of the adjacent harbour road. A few instants later and the welcomest sight the world could, just then, have offered to Lord Rex was before him: Marjorie Bartrand, in her pony carriage, and at Marjorie’s side, fairer than all summer mornings that ever dawned, the blushing lovely face of Dinah Arbuthnot.
‘Have we to apologise? Are we really behind our time?’ cried Gaston, as Lord Rex came forward to welcome them at the gangway. ‘It has been a case of the fox and the goose and the bunch of grapes. My wife would not start without Miss Bartrand; Geff would not start without my wife. I was not allowed to start alone. The most delightful weather!—and the most delightful party,’ added Gaston, looking at the sunlit world around him with his pleasantest expression. ‘Miss Verschoyle, the Miss de Carterets—Marjorie Bartrand! Why, all the pretty faces in Guernsey are assembled on board the Princess!’
The four or five hours that followed were hours destined to be marked with a red letter in the calendar of Dinah’s life. She felt the youth at her heart, enjoyed the salt freshness of the morning, entered into the mirth and spirit of the expedition like a child. Gaston’s conduct was unexceptionable. Before they had quitted the harbour he took his place beside his wife—jotting down each new effect of sky or wave or passing fishing-boat in his note-book. He remained beside her throughout the voyage. The pretty island girls, capital sailors all of them, chatted in picturesque twos and threes with their bachelor hosts. Lord Rex Basire devoted himself, with a show of perfect impartiality, to every one.
If this was growing used to the perils of a factitious world, the first plunge into a social vortex where more neophytes sink than swim, Dinah found the process distinctly pleasant. And I am afraid the thought of Linda, effaced for once, in grim earnestness, by all-effacing sea-sickness down below, failed to take the edge off Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot’s enjoyment.
Herm, with its fringe of shell-spangled sands, was soon left behind. The high table-land of Sark became a fairy-like vision, hanging suspended, as on Mahomet’s thread, between heaven and sea, ere it vanished out of ken. After an hour’s steady steaming Alderney’s tall cliffs were sighted through the haze; and then, shortly before one, the south-west swell gave signs of lessening. The Princess was to leeward of the Point of Barfleur, and lunch, served after a desultory and scrambling fashion, began to find hearty welcome among the watchers on deck.
At the cheery whizzing of champagne corks old Doctor Thorne aroused himself from a comfortable siesta he had been enjoying in the bows, and came aft. The sight of Linda’s husband, a tumbler of Moet in his hand, his puggareed hat pushed back from his sun-shrivelled Indian visage, brought back the thought of Linda Thorne to the general mind.
‘Mrs. Thorne! Shall Mrs. Thorne not have champagne sent to her?’ cried Gaston, who was reclining, a picture of virtuous contentment, beside his wife. ‘Or, better still, now that we have a smooth deck, Doctor, shall Mrs. Thorne not come up into the light of day?’
The old Doctor shook his head as he accepted a goodly plate of lobster salad from the steward’s boy.
‘Poor girl! My poor dear Lin! A typically severe case of mal de mer always. Stop a bit—no hurry—just give me a trifle more of the dressing. I have collected a mass of data about sea-sick persons,’ observed the Doctor, draining down his champagne, with relish, ‘and I am wholly against any attempt at nourishing them. Quite a mistake to administer stimulants. (Thank you, Lord Rex, you may give me another quarter of a tumbler of your excellent Moet.) A mistake to imagine persons as sea-sick as my poor wife can digest anything.’
‘I think you are disgracefully heartless, Doctor,’ cried Rosie Verschoyle, in her thin, gay accents. ‘Mrs. Thorne and dear mamma must require wine much more than all we well people. I declare it is positively shameful to think how we have been enjoying the voyage while they were in misery. Now, who will help me carry something to our poor martyrs below?’
‘Who,’ of course, meant Lord Rex Basire. Following the airy flutter of Rosie Verschoyle’s dress, Lord Rex dutifully assisted in conveying biscuits, champagne, and sympathetic messages to the martyrs—as far as the cabin door. Though the deck was smooth, Linda showed coyness as to returning thither. Her belief in human nature, especially in Gaston Arbuthnot’s human nature, was, I fear, frailish. The livid cheeks, pale lips, and sunken eyes of recent sea-sickness were tests to which Linda, under no conditions, would have dreamt of exposing a sentimental friendship!
‘Mrs. Thorne is quite too good—the dearest, most unselfish creature living!’ Rosie Verschoyle announced these little facts before all hearers, on her return to upper air. ‘Doctor Thorne, I hope you are listening to my praises of your wife. Mrs. Thorne is not ill, not very ill herself, but she will not leave my poor frightened mother for a moment. I call that real, quiet heroism. In glorious weather like this to remain shut up in the cabin of a steamer for another person’s sake!’
‘Our good Smeet! She knows so well to efface herself.’
There was a twinkle in Gaston Arbuthnot’s shrewd eyes. Possibly, as Rosie Verschoyle spoke, the words of Madame Benjamin’s eulogy came back to him.
A league or two beyond Barfleur a French pilot was signalled for, the pilotage from the Point to Langrune being tortuous and difficult. Does the reader know the fairness of that little-visited strip of Norman coast? Fairness at its zenith, perhaps, in April, when the orchards bordering the shore are heavy with white pear, or rose-pink apple bloom; when the black-thorn blossoms so lavishly that, if the wind be south, you may distinguish whiffs of the wild, half-bitter aroma far out at sea. But exquisite, too, on a late June day like this, the yellow colza in full harvest, the barley-fields ready for the sickle, the Caen-stone spires and homesteads standing out in white relief against the level horizon-line of sky.
A French pilot was signalled for. After his coming the Princess steamed slower and ever slower eastward. By and by—Langrune already visible across the expanse of yellowish sea—it became observable that the vessel’s movement could scarce be felt by those on board. The skipper stood consulting with the pilot on the bridge, the figures of the men at the wheel were motionless. There was a simultaneous hush in everybody’s talk, a momentary tension of the breath at the thought of something happening! And then came the blank, unmistakable order, ‘Stop her!’ Before leaving Petersport wrong reckoning had been made as to the difference between the hour of ebb in Guernsey and along the coast of France; the skipper had no choice but to anchor. Would the passengers await the turn of the tide and deeper water, or land, by help of the boats, on some rocks within easy reach, and trust to getting ashore across a tract of wide wet sand as best they might?
The stout-nerved Guernsey girls, accustomed to scores of bigger adventures at sand-eeling parties and conger expeditions, laughed at the horrors of the position. With Cassandra Tighe as leader, these young women announced their determination of reaching the shore forthwith, though not dry-footed. Among the chaperons arose murmurs of contumacy. Poor Mrs. Verschoyle, a ghastly figure, emerging tremulously from the cabin, observed that she looked on all voluntary sea-going excursions as a tempting of Providence. With a spot like L’Ancresse Common, not three miles from Petersport—L’Ancresse Common, where one could have had the society of our excellent Archdeacon and of Madame Corbie—why, said Mrs. Verschoyle, with the acerbity of mortal digestive revolt—why put one’s self at the mercy of tides and pilots at all?
Old Dr. Thorne was flatly rebellious. There was good champagne on board the Princess, thought the Doctor. There were Burmese cheroots—a warm sun. There was the ultimate certainty of floating up with the tide.
‘If any one be at a loss how to pass the afternoon hours let him take a siesta, or inquire if the skipper have a pack of cards stowed away. You see the wisdom of my remarks, I am sure, Lin, do you not?’
‘I see the wisdom of them for you and me, my dear,’ said Lin, graciously. Under cover of a doubly-folded gauze veil, protected by rice powder, a parasol, a well-adjusted Indian shawl, Linda Thorne had at length committed herself to the cruel eye of noon. ‘My own election is to abide by Mrs. Verschoyle, whatever happens. I am afraid we shall hardly win over the young ones, Robbie, to our staid philosophy.’
‘If Rosie and the Miss de Carterets land I shall land,’ said Mrs. Verschoyle, with dreary resignation.
The poor little lady’s elder daughters were married. She had three girls in the schoolroom still. She had also boys. Chaperonage at balls and picnics, nursing of measles or scarlatina, love affairs, school bills, breakages, all came to Mrs. Verschoyle as the burthens of her widowed, many childrened lot—heavy burthens to be borne under sorrowful protest. ‘If the picnic had only been at L’Ancresse Common,’ she repeated, ‘we should have the Archdeacon and Madame Corbie with us, and need never have got wet shoes at all.’
A consultation with the skipper resulted in a general lowering of the boats. A quarter of an hour later the whole of the party, save the Doctor, were landed on the Smaller Cancale, a reef of rock separated by a mile of treacherous sands from terra firma, and upon whose limited area a crowd of Parisians of both sexes were fishing—no, were following ‘la pêche’ (the terms are not convertible)—after the guise and in the vestments sacred to the Parisian heart.
Mrs. Verschoyle sank down on the first slippery point of rock that presented itself, vainly wishing, little though she loved the steamer, that her maternal duties had allowed her to remain there with the Doctor and the sailors. Cassandra Tighe started off, the lightest-hearted of the party, perhaps, to hunt for zoophytes and molluscs among the tide pools. The younger people, all, pronounced themselves in favour of an exploring walk inland before dinner—all except Mrs. Thorne.
‘I mean to look after your mother, Rosie,’ said Linda, removing her double folds of gauze, as she took her place at the elder lady’s side. ‘Please let me indulge my Indian laziness. Some one, positively, ought to stay with dear Mrs. Verschoyle, and I like to be that some one. It makes me remember my queer old governess days to find myself among Parisians.’ Linda was prone to these little bursts of retrospective humility. ‘And then, there is my husband! Robbie, no doubt, will eventually drift up with the tide. Quite too charming to leave all us, sober elders, together.’
‘Sober elders’—so Dinah realised, with a contracting heart—was a sufficiently elastic term to embrace Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot. Before landing from the boats, Gaston, with keen artistic vision, had descried some marvellously pretty fisher-girl among the crowd of French people on the rocks. Not a real red-handed, rough-haired fisher-girl, but the latest Worth idea of a duly got-up pêcheuse, the very subject, Gaston declared, for his own meretricious pencil. He must make a stealthy study of her forthwith. And indeed, at this present moment, not many paces distant from Mrs. Verschoyle and her devoted friend, Gaston Arbuthnot, sketch-book in hand, was already at work.
Dinah lingered aimlessly. The desire of her heart was to stay beside her husband. Her pleasure would have been to watch his quick, clever pencil, to hear him discourse, in his light strain, about these foreigners, whose theatrical manners and dress, overwhelming to her in her ignorance, must to him be familiar. She felt that the brightness of her day would be clouded if she left Gaston! And yet, mused Dinah, troubled of spirit, do wives, in society, hang jealously at their husband’s elbow, or watch their pencil, or listen to their talk with delight? Would she expose herself—far worse, would she expose Gaston to ridicule, by shirking the walking party?
An expressive glance, shot from Mr. Arbuthnot’s eyes, set these questionings only too sharply at rest.
‘Look carefully in through the cottage windows, Dinah.’ He bestowed on her a little valedictory wave of two fingers. ‘Capital bits of ware are still to be unearthed in these parts of the world. If you see a likely cup or saucer, get Geoffrey to talk French for you.’ Gaston Arbuthnot was a dabbler in most branches of bric-à-brac, and up to the present date had never lost money by his dealings. ‘Mrs. Thorne, when we have got rid of these young people, I want you to criticise me. My beautiful fishing-girl grows too much like a figure from the mode-books.’
Linda Thorne, promptly obedient, took up her position at the artist’s side.
It was the hottest, most deserted hour of the day when the walking party reached Langrune plage, an hour when such of the young Parisians as do not follow la pêche drive donkey-carts—those wonderful, springless, seatless, Langrune carts—along the country roads, or start, by rail, to distant Trouville for toilettes and distraction. Here and there were elderly ladies at work before the doors of their canvas bathing-sheds. In the road two portly fathers of families were solemnly sending up ‘messengers’ to a very small Japanese kite some fifty or sixty feet above their heads. Two other middle-aged gentlemen played at battledore and shuttlecock. A few irrepressible boulevard lovers sat over their cards or dominoes outside the restaurant windows of the principal hotel. The shrill sounds from a fish auction, held on the monster slab of rough granite which constitutes the Langrune market-place, alone broke the stillness.
Before one had thought it possible that dress or speech could have betrayed the nationality of the new-comers, up ran a brown-legged, tattered sand-imp, holding out a bunch of shore-flowers. He announced his name, with some pride of birth, as Jean Jacques la Ferté of these parts, offering his services as cicerone to the English strangers.
‘The gentlemen, without doubt, make a pilgrimage to La Delivrande, half a league away up the country? At La Delivrande is the church and the altar where the miracles are wrought. There are the little ships of the sailors, the crutches left by the cripples who get back use of their legs. And for the ladies there are the stalls with the relics. Every one in the country,’ ran on the child, with voluble distinctness—Jean Jacques, a source of revenue to his parents, was trained to speak good French with the visitors—‘every one in the country who is sick gets cured. Every one who has a grand espoir goes to La Delivrande, and, if he has faith, attains it. Or so the curé says,’ added Jean Jacques, with a roll of his black eyes and a knowing shrug of the shoulders.
At seven years of age even sand-imps, in these advanced French days, like to show we are no longer bound by the priestly superstitions that were well enough for our grandmothers.
Lord Rex made a free paraphrase of the child’s narrative in English, and was witty thereupon. ‘Every one who is sick gets cured. Every one who has a grand espoir goes to La Delivrande, and, if he have faith, obtains it. Miss Verschoyle, what do you say? Have you a grand espoir? Have you faith? Shall we make our pilgrimage, confess our little peccadilloes, and get cured together?’
Miss Verschoyle rebuked his flippancy, but with lips less severe than her words. For Rosie’s mood was a lenient one. Had not Lord Rex throughout the day conducted himself as well, really, as though that poor Mrs. Arbuthnot were non-existent? It was decided that every one had unfulfilled hopes, that every one stood in need of cure, and that a general confession of peccadilloes would be the best possible employment of the afternoon! In another five minutes the pilgrims were on their road, ragged Jean Jacques leading the way, towards the distant white twin spires of La Delivrande.
The plage, I have said, was deserted; not so the lane, with quaint wooden houses on either side, which forms the High Street of Langrune. Here were bare-limbed, dark-faced fisher-lads, busily mending their nets; clear-starchers plying their delicate craft in the open air; housewives roasting coffee; pedlars chaffering over their outspread goods. Huge cats, with sleepy, watchful eyes, the sun shining comfortably on their ebon-barred coats, reposed on the window-sills. Lace-makers were at work, their headgear antiquated as their faces, their bobbins twirling in and out the pins, unerringly, as though they were the very threads of fate itself. Everywhere was the din of voices. Everywhere were open doors, open windows; and within, such plentitude of frugal cleanliness, such polished oak cupboards, such well-scoured cooking-pans, such snow-white bed draperies, such balsams and geraniums in brilliant scarlet pots, as might have put a Dutch village to shame.
Marjorie Bartrand and Dinah paused beside one of the lace-makers’ chairs, allowing the more ardent of the pilgrims to get on ahead. A distinct shade of constraint was holding Marjorie and Geff Arbuthnot aloof to-day. They had not met since yesterday’s friendly parting. No further misunderstanding in respect of Geff’s celibacy was possible between them. But a change had come across Marjorie’s manner towards her tutor. Geoffrey was sensible that she answered him with pungent and monosyllabic curtness during the whole of their outward voyage. And—seeing that among the knot of pretty Sarnian girls excellent temper reigned supreme, also that Geoffrey had joined the party for other motives than his own pleasure—one can scarcely wonder that this philosopher of four-and-twenty suffered himself, without over difficulty, to be consoled.
At the present moment, disappearing in the perspective of Langrune village, Geoffrey walked, to all outward seeming, well content, beside the prettiest and least wise of the three Miss de Carterets. Of which fact Marjorie took a brief and scornful note in her heart.
‘One can imagine a man’s becoming a senior wrangler.’ She made the remark to Dinah as they watched the everlasting bobbins whirl. ‘Yes, even I, with my halting Euclid and weak algebra (of which, no doubt, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot has spoken), can imagine a man’s becoming a senior wrangler. I can no more conceive of bobbin-turning than I could of a world in which two and two shall make five.’
Dinah’s slower brain needed time for reflection. ‘There could not be a world where two and two make five,’ she observed with certainty. ‘And lace-making, once you have served your time, steadily, is easy enough. Two of my cousins, down Honiton way, are lace-makers, and I learned a little of it when I was a child. The number of threads looks hard to strangers, Miss Bartrand, but it just gets to one twirl of the bobbins in time. Many of the workers keep to the same pattern for life, when they know it well. After a bit, your fingers work without your eyes.’
‘How horrible! One twirl of the bobbins, one pattern, for life! And to think that lace-makers do not commit suicide by scores!’
‘I don’t know that there’s much difference between lacework, or wool-work, or plain sewing,’ said Dinah Arbuthnot. ‘We have, all of us, to go through with our day’s task, whatever the stitch may be.’
The speech came so naturally, was so fraught with unconscious womanly humility, that Marjorie felt abashed. What real heroism, of an incomprehensible kind, must not Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife possess? This girl of two-and-twenty who worked perpetual cross-stitch, who kept her tongue and spirit calm, who loved, with soul and might, yonder débonnaire gentleman, of the handsome eyes and decorative smile, sketching charming Parisian fisher-girls on the beach—under Linda Thorne’s criticism!
‘If I speak hotly against needlework, it is that I am thinking of Spain, my mother’s country. In Spain, you must know, the miserable girls, to this hour, scarcely learn more than embroidery in their schools and convents, with reading enough, perhaps, to stumble through the announcement of a bull-fight, or decipher a love-letter. Of course,’ admitted Marjorie Bartrand coldly, ‘it is said that when a woman marries, in England or in Spain, she must do as her husband wills. I never see the force of that “must.” I think a woman should do what is right for herself, with large trust in Providence as to the rest! The question is not one that concerns me. Still, Mrs. Arbuthnot, one cannot help feeling indignant about all very crushed people. I am dead against slavery, especially when slavery puts on a domestic garb.’
By this time they had passed the last straggling houses of Langrune. Fair level country, the fields already on the edge of harvest, spread around their road. Along the wayside path was a very mosaic of brilliantly blended hues, the corn-flowers blue and purple, the scarlet poppies, the white and gold of the wild camomile making up the purest chord of colour. A slight south-west wind, dry and elastic after its transit over so many a league of sunny land, was invigorating as wine.
‘How the spirit rises the moment one treads real solid earth!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand. ‘I feel at this moment like walking straight off to Spain, the country I love and where my life will be spent! Why, with twenty francs apiece in our pockets, and camping out by night under stacks or hedges, you and I might easily reach the Peninsula on foot, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
Dinah’s geography did not embolden her to hazard a contradiction. Something in Marjorie Bartrand’s tone jarred on her reasonlessly. It were hard to believe that she considered Geff a man likely to fall in love. Had not the conditions of her life for years put speculations as to Geoffrey’s future happiness on one side? And still, a true daughter of Eve in every weakness belonging to the passion, Dinah was an inchoate match-maker. She would fain have seen the whole world blest with such fireside beatitude as constituted her own ideal of highest good. With firm and true perception she had noticed a dozen trivial things of late, all proving Geff’s imagination, if not his heart, to be in his teaching of Latin and Greek at Tintajeux Manoir. She had hoped that the notice taken of herself by Marjorie was an earnest of the pupil’s liking for her master, had furtively and with misgiving dug the foundations of many an air-castle that Marjorie and Geff, at some far-off day, might jointly inhabit.
The girl’s diatribes against domestic slavery, her open avowal of love for Spain and of her hopes of spending her life among Spanish people, caused a troubled look to come on Dinah’s face.
‘Your plans don’t point towards an English home, Miss Bartrand. Yet I think Geoffrey has told me you mean to study at Girton?’
‘To fit myself for my future work—yes. The Spanish school-boards are just as conservative as English ones. A young woman armed with Cambridge certificates would have more chance of coming to the front than another, equally strong-minded, who should rely on her own merits.’
‘Strong-minded!’ Dinah ejaculated with horror. ‘At your age, with all the sweet happiness of life still to come, you talk, as though you approved such things, of being strong-minded?’
Marjorie swept off the heads from a cluster of wayside camomile flowers with the stick of her sunshade. An expression of will which yet was neither unlovely nor unfeminine glowed upon her girlish face.
‘Let us understand each other better, Mrs. Arbuthnot. It may well be that our notions of “sweet happiness” are not the same.’
Dinah looked uneasy, and kept silent.
‘Power—I will make a confession to you such as I never made before—power is my ideal of happiness. I want to rule, we will hope for good; in any case, to rule, to be needed on all sides, sought after, distinguished—to see my name in print! That is the truth, no matter how I may wrap truth up in fine-sounding words,’ said Marjorie Bartrand. ‘That is the secret of my enthusiasm for humanity, and of my personal ambition. To lead others, to command, is my ideal of happiness.’
‘And mine,’ exclaimed Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife unhesitatingly, ‘is—to obey. For a woman to look up to another stronger life, to be ruled by a stronger will, gladly to take all little household worries on herself—I speak badly, Miss Bartrand, but you guess my meaning—and feel more than paid by one kind look or word in return, to know that as much as she wants of the world is safe between four lowly walls, to have her hours filled with the care of others, to keep her parlour bright and cheerful, to hear the voices of the children——’
Dinah’s own voice broke; and Marjorie, who had watched her with looks of lofty compassion, softened involuntarily.
‘So far from speaking badly, Mrs. Arbuthnot, you speak with very pretty eloquence. You draw a picture of constant giving up, which, if one could believe it to be from life, would, I confess, be attractive. It is drawn from life, perhaps?’
‘Oh—no; I said only that would be my ideal of happiness,’ faltered Dinah, with a pang.
‘Fancied or real, such an existence would never do for me. I have not much taste for obedience. I have none at all for household worries. Babies I bar.’
‘Miss Bartrand!’
‘Yes, I do. Grandpapa and I visit about in our Pagan way among the Guernsey country people, and I know that I absolutely bar babies of every shade and degree. I am not sure I would go so far as to injure one,’ said Marjorie, stealing a glance at her companion’s shocked face; ‘but I feel that they are safest kept out of my sight. I tell the mothers so.’
‘You are too young to know what you feel, Miss Bartrand.’ There was a standstill of some moments ere Dinah recovered herself enough to speak. ‘Long before you are my age you’ll begin to see things differently. Young girls are a bit hard, I’ve sometimes thought, in all classes of life, until the time comes.’
‘What time, may I ask?’
‘The time for having a sweetheart and getting married,’ said Dinah Arbuthnot.
From any other lips Marjorie would have regarded such a suggestion as an indignity. Dinah was so true a woman, had a soul so whitely delicate, that the speech carried with it no possible suspicion of offence. It was homely common sense, kindly and simply uttered.
‘What you say might be true of most girls of my age. If I am hard, it is not because of my youth, or my inexperience. I have had’—Marjorie’s face flamed to the hue of the poppies in the corn—‘what the world is pleased to call a sweetheart. But for the interposition of Providence (I remember that interposition, night and morning, on my knees) I should be married now.’
‘Unless he loved you above everything, you are best as you are, Miss Bartrand. In marriage it is all or nothing. I mean—I mean,’ Dinah hesitated, ‘no wife could be happy with half a heart bestowed on her.’
‘Half! What do you say to a quarter, a fraction?’ exclaimed Marjorie, hotly. ‘What do you say to a creature stuffed as the dolls are, with sawdust, in lieu of a human heart at all? A creature well set up as regards shoulders, six feet in measurement, with fine white teeth, blue eyes, yellow moustache, a swagger and a sword? His would scarcely be the larger soul, Mrs. Arbuthnot, the stronger will which it should be a woman’s crown of honour to obey!’
Down went another head of clustering camomile, felled by a well-aimed stroke from Marjorie’s hand. Her eyes flashed fire.
‘And yet a wayward girl, scarcely past sixteen, and with no mother to give her counsel, might for two or three weeks, you know, be hurried into thinking such a man a hero. I was that girl, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Vanity blinded me, or the love of power, or something stronger than either. At all events, when Major Tredennis asked me, one fine morning, to be engaged to him, I said “Yes.”’
‘And the Seigneur of Tintajeux?’ asked Dinah, looking round at the dimpled, indignant face of seventeen.
‘“Major Tredennis comes of a race of gentlemen,” said grandpapa. “If Major Tredennis can make adequate settlements, and my granddaughter elects to spend her life with a popinjay, she may do so.”’
‘And, with no better advice than that, you were engaged?’
‘I was engaged. Major Tredennis used to write me foolish notes. He gave me a ring I never wore. He gave me chocolate creams, and a setter puppy. He sang French songs to me in an English accent. Looking back at it all now, I think the chocolate creams were the best part of that bad time, except, of course, the setter, whom I loved. When it was all broken off—for the owner of the white teeth and the sword was a right wicked craven, and should have married a girl in England who cared for him, without once looking at me;—when it was all broken off, and I had to send Jock back, I did weep, scalding tears, at parting from him. The only tears I have ever shed, or shall shed, in connection with love-matters.’
‘Wait!’ was Dinah Arbuthnot’s answer. ‘If I see you, as I hope to do, two or three years hence, it may be you will tell a different story.’
Marjorie glanced at the yachting party, sauntering contentedly, a hundred yards or so in front, among the lights and shadows of the orchard-bordered road. There was Lord Rex, outrageously devoted in manner to Rosie Verschoyle, with whom he loitered apart. And there, a little divided also from the rest, was Geff Arbuthnot, well entertained, one must surmise, by the shallow talk, fascinated by the pink-and-white charms of Ada, the most soulless and the prettiest of the de Carteret family.
‘If such a revolution takes place, a dozen years hence, that I marry,’ she observed, after consideration, ‘the husband I choose shall be a head-and-shoulders taller than myself, morally. No singer of ballad sentiment, no popinjay, with yellow moustache, and a sword, and uniform, next time. If I take to myself a master, he shall be a man—with a temper, a will, a purpose in life, all nobler than my own.’
Such a husband as Geoffrey would be! The thought obeyed the wish in Dinah’s heart.
‘And I must be first—first in his affection. I would have no rivals, past or present. If Bayard himself walked the earth and wished to marry me, Marjorie Bartrand, I would ask him if I was first. Yes, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I would ask Chevalier Bayard himself if he had looked at any other woman before he loved me; and if he had, and though my heart broke for it, I would refuse him.’
A red light broke on Marjorie’s cheeks, her eyes dilated. The likeness to old Andros, which came out in every moment of strong emotion, was never more marked than now.
‘If we ask too much we may lose all,’ said Dinah, not perhaps without a pang of dread as visions of Geoffrey’s youth rose before her. ‘I never heard anything about this gentleman.’
‘Chevalier Bayard? the first gentleman the world has known!’
‘But if he was put upon his word, yes, and though he stood with his bride before the altar, I think Chevalier Bayard might have to confess to some foolish fancy in the past.’
‘I spoke of love, not of foolishness,’ exclaimed Marjorie Bartrand. Then, as though quickly repenting of her warmth: ‘We have talked more than enough,’ she cried, ‘about a peradventure that will never become fact. Let us forget, with all speed, that so much nonsense has been spoken.’
But the conversation was one which neither of these young women could, by any means, forget while she lived.