The door was opened by a French serving-man, who bestowed on Geoffrey a bow such as valets used to copy from their masters in days when the first country in Europe possessed a manner. Had not Sylvestre made the Grand Tour with the Reverend Andros Bartrand more than half a century before the present time! He was clad in a faded livery of puce and silver, wore long white locks that in this uncertain light gave Geoffrey the notion of a pigtail and hair powder, and had a wrinkled astute face, in which official decorum and a certain thin twinkle of humour, if not of malice, contended together agreeably for precedence.
‘Monsieur demands these ladies?’—from her earliest years Marjorie Bartrand had received a kind of spurious chaperonage through this plural phrase of Sylvestre’s. ‘Will Monsieur give himself then the trouble to enter?’
The look of the old manoir was cheery; its atmosphere was sun-warmed. And still the prospect of his approaching ordeal chilled Geoffrey’s courage. The thought of standing before Miss Bartrand on approval caused him to pass a bad five minutes, as he paused in the drawing-room, whether Sylvestre had ushered him, for her coming.
Could the initial letters of his terrible pupil’s character be deciphered, as one constantly hears it asserted of women, through the outward and visible presence of the house she inhabited?
The Tintajeux drawing-room was over-vast for its height. It opened towards the south, upon the cedar-shaded lawn; it communicated through a double row of fluted pillars with a smaller apartment towards the west. The uncarpeted floors were of oak, black from age, fragrantly and honestly beeswaxed, as floors used to be when Sylvestre was a boy. Nothing like your gray-headed butler for keeping up conservative habits of industry among the servants of a younger generation! Over the chimneypiece and doors were half moons, those graceful ‘lunettes’ of a hundred years ago, carved in bas-relief and tinted in flesh colour. The lace window draperies, looking as though they must fall to pieces at a touch, were relieved by an occasional fold of rich-hued crimson silk. Venetian mirrors hung at all available points along the tarnished white and gold walls. On either side the mantelpiece were miniatures of eighteenth-century Bartrands in velvets and brocades, no prefiguring of destiny looking out from their unconcerned, half-closed patrician eyes. In the centre stood a grand buhl clock, its design a band of Cupids hurling down rose leaves on some unseen object (the guillotine, perhaps) behind the dial.
In each of the deeply bowed windows stood a Petit Trianon gilt basket. They were full of odorous roses, pressed close together, as cunningly set roses ought to be, and showing no green between their damask and pink and faintly yellow petals.
As Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s eyes took in one after another of these details, the room seemed to him a piece of special pleading for the whole past Bartrand race. He stood here in a world that knew no better! He was amidst the shades of a generation which had heroically paid the price of its misdeeds. And the fancy, true or false, predisposed him towards the present owners of Tintajeux. They had at least, he felt, the fascination of a pathetic background. Rare charm to an imaginative man whose business has led him among the dusty tracks of our modern, low-horizoned English life!
Moving to a window, Geff looked forth across lawn, garden, orchard, upon as fair a sweep of sapphire as ever gladdened human eyes; for here in the heart of the Channel you got beyond the North Sea’s yellowish green, and have real deep ocean blue. In the foreground, so near indeed that Geff instinctively stepped back within shelter of the window’s embrasure, a clerically-dressed tall man was slowly pacing to and fro on the grass. Somewhat rakishly placed on one side his head was a black velvet skull-cap. An after-dinner glow shone on Andros Bartrand’s bronzed four-score-year-old face; between his lips was a cigar. A couple of excellently-bred brindled terriers slunk at his heels.
‘Ho, Œdipus,
Why thus delay our going?’
Taking his cigar from his mouth, the Seigneur of Tintajeux recited a passage from Sophocles in the Oxford Greek accents of sixty years ago, looking about him with the leisurely physical enjoyment of the moment that was more common, probably, at the time of his own youth—a time when Göthe still walked upon the face of the earth—than it is now.
Something towering, individual, audacious, was in the old figure. Geff watched the Reverend Andros with admiration. A man so richly vitalised that he could smoke an after-dinner cigar, declaim Greek verse for his own pleasure at eighty—a man who had so proved himself superior to the common shocks and reverses of human life—should be one worth knowing, even though his fine moral equipoise must perforce be studied in the murky and dubious atmosphere engendered by a girl’s temper.
Tintajeux Manoir with its weather-bleached walls, its courtly, faded drawing-room, its half lights, its rose scents, had already laid hold of Geoffrey’s imagination. The Seigneur with his antiquated Greek accent, his wise, subtly ironical old face, reciting Sophocles under this late sky, had for him a personal interest. If only the one jarring note need not be struck! If the capricious heiress were but a full-fledged graduate, a resident M.A. say, within the distant walls of St. Margaret’s Hall, or of Girton!
Scarcely had the thought crossed Geff Arbuthnot’s mind when he heard a door behind him open and close. Turning quickly, he saw, to his pleasure, a child dressed in a white and red cotton frock, confined by a bright-coloured ribbon round the slim waist, and who advanced to him—a pair of brown, beautifully-carved small hands, outheld.
‘You are ten minutes late, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’ The faintest un-English accent was traceable in her voice. ‘But you are welcome, a thousand times over, to Tintajeux.’
Now Geff was a veritable child lover, and if this young person had only been two years younger than she looked, he would, likelier than not, have finished several of his life’s best chances by lifting her in his arms and kissing her on the spot. With a little princess of thirteen or fourteen one must be on one’s guard—for the first five minutes, at least, of acquaintance.
He took her offered hands and held them, enjoying the arch vivacity of that upturned face, brimful of sunshine as a water lily’s cup; a face good as it was sweet.
‘Poor Cambridge B.A. Poor abashed big coach!’ thought Marjorie Bartrand. ‘The worthy man must be used to cold receptions, I should say, on his wife’s account. Now, let me set him at his ease.’
Crossing to one of the Trianon baskets she softly signed to Geoffrey to follow.
‘Do you see that “Bon Espoir,” Mr. Arbuthnot?’ A hawk moth hovered, at the moment, with poised vibrating wings above the mass of roses. ‘In Spain we have a superstition about the “Bon Espoir” when he enters a house. If he is powdered with black we say, Bad luck! If he is powdered with gold, Good! Ah,’ clapping her hands, ‘and our “Bon Espoir” is gold! We are to be lucky, sir, you and I, in our dealings. Now I shall tell you another Spanish saying. “To begin a friendship with a gift is a happy omen.” Take this rose from me.’
And with a movement of quick grace, most artless, most unconventional, one of the finest roses in the basket was transferred by the pupil’s hand to her future master’s button-hole.
‘Grazias, muy Grazias,’ said Geff, hazarding the only two words of Spanish he knew.
Marjorie clasped her hands over her ears.
‘You pronounce frightfully ill, though the words are true, Mr. Arbuthnot. Decent people say the “z” in grazias sharp. They say “mou-y.” Yes, sir,—and although you do teach me classics and mathematics—Spanish and French are my natural languages, and I shall always think myself free to give you a little lesson in pronunciation.’
‘Classics and mathematics!’ stammered Geoffrey Arbuthnot, reddening as the unwelcome image of Miss Bartrand was brought back to him. ‘I believed—I mean, my impression was——’
He stopped short.
‘English University manners are not good,’ thought Marjorie, shaking her head, pityingly. ‘But I like my poor B.A.—yes, just because he is shy and rugged, and has that ugly scar across his forehead. I respect him for his unpolished manner. I will call on his wife to-morrow! My impression was,’ she remarked aloud, showing such a gleam of ivory teeth in her smile, as rendered a large and rather square mouth lovely—‘my impression was that I advertised in the Chronique Guernésiaise for some one good enough to help me in my attempts at work, and that Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot offered to be that some one. I hope, sir, you do not repent you of the offer already?’
So he stood in presence of the heiress; a little country girl with sun-kissed hands, innocent of inkstains, a child’s fledgling figure, a child’s delightful boldness, and not one barleycorn’s weight of dignity in her composition. Should he, obeying first impulse, believe in her, and so incur the fate of well-snubbed predecessors? Or should he arm himself against the coquetry which this very frankness, this assumption of simplicity in dress and speech, might mask?
Long ago, in Gaston’s Cambridge rooms, Geff came across a French volume entitled, ‘The Bad Things which Men have said of Woman.’ He extracted therefrom, at more than one reading, such bitter nectar as his scanty knowledge of the tongue allowed. Several of the maxims had slumbered in his memory. They reawakened at this moment, and bade him play the philosopher, remember at what price per hour the heiress was about to hire him, and for what work. ‘Self-respect was in his keeping still,’ cried half a dozen wicked old well-chosen French cynics in a breath. ‘Let him retain it.’
And Geff followed his own impulse. He looked on Marjorie’s unblemished prettiness, and believed in her—with a circumspect belief.
‘One or two things, I know, want explaining.’ A wave of Miss Bartrand’s hand signalled to Geoffrey to take a chair. Then she seated herself opposite him, the rosy western afterglow falling directly on her clear, truth-telling face.
‘You thought my advertisement bizarre, did you not?’
‘On the contrary, I thought it sensible and to the point.’
Geff’s answer was given with stiff courtesy.
‘But too independent; for I had never consulted my grandfather, understand! I never spoke to the Seigneur till an hour ago, about my having a coach. Tell me, you don’t think the worse of me for this?’
Had he fallen asleep, lying among the blue-leaved campanulas on the moor with the waving sedges at hand, with the falcon soaring high overhead; was this drawing-room, with its mirrors and rose-scents and Cupids, a dream? Could it be possible that Marjorie Bartrand, the heiress, who never bestowed a civil word upon any man, should plead, in sober reality, for his, Geff Arbuthnot’s, good opinion?
‘I am obliged to think and act for myself. There is my defence. My grandfather, whom you will see presently, is clever—oh, cleverer than any man in Guernsey, perhaps in Spain! Mathematics, classics—you even could name no branch of learning, Mr. Arbuthnot, that grandpapa has not.’
‘Of that I am sure, Miss Bartrand.’
‘He was known in Oxford sixty years ago. The revolution so disgusted my great-grandfather with everything French that he turned Protestant out of revenge. A mean action—say?’
‘That depends upon the manner of conversion.’
‘Well, he had come to be Seigneur of Tintajeux through the inheritance of his Guernsey wife, and to be a proper Seigneur in this country you should be a Reverend. How great-grandpapa got to be ordained I don’t know. Andros, his son, was sent to Winchester and Oxford.’
‘The Seigneur I am about to see?’
‘Yes, and Andros became a fellow of his college. He was one of the three best classics in Oxford. But he stands right away out of my reach.’ Marjorie stretched up her slight arms as though pointing to the inaccessible mental plane occupied by the Reverend Andros. ‘He lives with the gifted people of sixty years ago. For me that is too old.’
‘Rather,’ said Geff, unable, though he would fain stand on his dignity, to repress a smile.
‘Grandpapa is an eighteenth-century man. He was just born early enough to be able to make that his boast. And he has eighteenth-century ideas. “Unless a woman be a Madame de Staël,” says the Seigneur, “let her keep silent. If she be a Madame de Staël, let her keep a thousandfold more silent.” Now I,’ cried small Marjorie, ‘mean to make my voice heard. I want to know nineteenth-century life straight through. I want to learn facts, at first hand. As a matter of lesser moment, I want a degree. Do you think London University would be beyond me?’
‘I must know first,’ answered Geoffrey, ‘to what height of learning you can reach on tiptoes.’
A flash of indignation swept over Marjorie’s face. The possibilities of temper showed round that acute, square-cut mouth of hers.
‘It is correct masculine taste to laugh at a girl’s ambition, I know! The Seigneur, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,—all have the same fine generosity! But why do we lose time? Perhaps, if you will come to the schoolroom, you will look over my books, sir. It is too late, of course, to do any work to-night?’
‘Not too late for me,’ answered Geoffrey, in his heart liking the girl better and better. ‘I came out hoping we should begin to read at once. My time is yours.’
Miss Bartrand led the way, her face held somewhat aloft, into a room plainly furnished as a study, and strewed with books and papers, on the west side of the inner drawing-room. As Geoffrey followed, every sense tempered to a keener edge than usual, he could not help remarking with what curious grace Marjorie’s raven-black tresses were braided. He had been to a few, very few, London entertainments in his life, had glanced at most varieties of our current female ‘heads;’ none tolerable to him beside a certain recollection of soft gold worn in little waves, that way poor Dinah had with her curls, upon a Madonna forehead. But Marjorie’s ebon locks gathered high, in one thick coil, upon the summit of her head, compelled his admiration. The style was too foreign, altogether, for English taste. And the white and red dress, the gaudy waist ribbon, were too evidently got up for effect, Geoffrey decided, now that he could draw breath and criticise. The complexion, too, to a man who for years had had a living ideal of snow and rose-bloom before him, was certainly sallow. And those great black eyes....
Stopping short, Marjorie waited for her visitor on the schoolroom threshold. At the moment he overtook her, she turned, looked up at him. And behold! her eyes were blue; intensely blue as, I think, only Irish or Spanish eyes ever are; with a sweep of jetty lash, with a hidden laughter in them, although the possibilities of temper still lurked round the corner of her lips.
‘This is to be your torture chamber. From the time I was five I have worked myself up to my present state of ignorance at that inky desk you see, and under the rule of a long line of governesses, most of whom gave me and themselves up in despair. Now put me to the test, if you please, Mr. Arbuthnot. Don’t spare my feelings. Treat me as you would treat any backward schoolboy.’
And Geff Arbuthnot obeyed the command to the letter. He did not spare her feelings.
Marjory Bartrand’s attainments were to the last degree patchy and scrappy; the typical attainments to be looked for in a quick, self-willed child, indifferently taught by a succession of teachers, and whose faulty studies had been supplemented by an avid, indiscriminate consumption of good books.
‘Your classics are weak, Miss Bartrand.’
Geoffrey remarked this, pushing papers and books aside, and looking kindly across the table into his pupil’s face.
‘Oh! I never liked the subjects. I knew that you would say so.’
With an effort Marjorie Bartrand kept her voice under control.
‘But your classics are stronger than your mathematics.’
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You will have a great deal of work before you can bring either to—we will not say a high, but an ordinary level.’
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You spoke of a London degree. Let us look at London matriculation first. Children are trained at high schools for about six years, I understand, for London matriculation. And many—more than a third—of the candidates fail.’
‘I spoke of London because London gives you letters after your name. The older Universities would be more thought of in Spain. I have grandpapa’s leave to go to Newnham or Girton when I am eighteen. The first of all my governesses lives in Cambridge. So I should have one friend there.’
‘The Girton and Newnham work is on the same level as the other colleges.’
‘And you think that work beyond my reach?’
Geff Arbuthnot thought that a girl with a head so graceful, with eyes so blue, with soft brow gleaming under such a weight of dusky hair, might be content amidst the flower-scents and cedar-shades of Tintajeux Manoir, content to let Euclid and Greek particles go—to be a woman, to accept the homely, happy paths wherein women may walk unguided by exact science, or the philosophy of all the ancients.
The opinions he knew were heterodox and not to be uttered, especially by a man who, at five shillings an hour, had engaged himself to lighten the thorny road that leads to knowledge.
‘Memory will get one through most exams., Miss Bartrand. You have a good memory?’
‘For all useless things, yes. In “Don Quixote,” for instance, you would find it hard to puzzle me. You know a little Spanish?’
‘Five words at most.’
‘How deplorable! A person who has no Spanish is not quite in possession of his faculties. If one had time to spare in these long summer days, I——’
Marjorie broke off abruptly, colouring to the roots of her hair, as she remembered the existence of her tutor’s wife. A girl not ignorant of Spanish only; a girl who could just overcome the difficulties of the Prayer-book and Lessons, perhaps, or write a letter without any glaringly bad spelling, on a push.
‘If one had time to spare in these long summer days, Miss Bartrand?’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot found a pleasure it had been hard to him to account for in her confusion.
‘I was going to say I would teach you Spanish. As if Spanish mattered! As if there were not nobler, lovelier things in life than book-learning. But that was a real Bartrand idea. We Bartrands, mouldering among our owls in this old place, cannot see daylight clear. We think too much of ourselves. Our minds are as narrow as our garden paths. I teach you Spanish, indeed! I’ll tell you what I call that proposal.’ She leaned across till her sweet bud of a face was close to Geoffrey’s, and spoke with a suspension of the breath. ‘I call it a bit of devilish Bartrand pride and stiff-neckedness.’
Geff started, with a pantomime of horror, from the adjective italicised.
‘You know the meaning of Tintajeux?—Tint-à-jeu in old Norman. You English in Cornwall say Tintagel—the Devil’s castle. A fit abode for us. Look at grandpapa! He quarrelled seven years ago with M. Noirmont, the rector of our next parish, over a Latin quantity. Never in this world will grandpapa speak again to that innocent old man.’
‘A wrong quantity is no jesting matter,’ observed Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
‘Then he has three daughters, my aunts. Neither of the three has spoken to the others or to him for five-and-twenty years. No vulgar quarrel to start with. “We Bartrands wage war on a grand Napoleonic scale,” says the Seigneur. “An exchange of reproachful epithets is sheer waste of brain-power.” The marriage of each sister in succession wounded the other sisters’ pride. All wounded grandpapa’s. It was quite simple.’
‘You colour highly, Miss Bartrand.’
‘I am giving you sketches from life. No colouring could be too high for showing up our Bartrand traits, the little faults of our virtues, as the French say, prettily.’
Geoffrey felt himself on the road to disenchantment. The girl might have marvellous eyes, a wealth of dusky hair, tones of liquid music, a sunburnt hand that was a poem. The heart within her was hard to the core. Linda Thorne, by hidden affinity, perhaps, was not so very far out in her judgments. Marjorie knew too much, had learned bitter lessons in human nature, not from books, but from keen reading of the men and women nighest to herself in blood.
‘Yes, we think too highly of our small talents. I, with my shallowness, to propose teaching a Bachelor of Arts anything! I ought to be grateful to Mr. Arbuthnot for condescending to read with such a pupil. Now, which three mornings in the week could you give me?’
He could give her Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. They gravely arranged their hours. They talked over the work—say, a book of Cicero, the two first books of Euclid—to be looked over before their first lesson. Then Geoffrey Arbuthnot rose to his feet. Putting on a staid and tuitional manner, he stated that his terms in Guernsey, would be five shillings, British currency, per hour.
Marjorie’s face grew one hot blaze of shame.
‘Oh! of course—please do not speak of money. It is far too little. It is an honour, I mean, for me to learn, and I am coming——’
She was just about to commit herself, and so considerably simplify Geff’s position—just about to blurt out, ‘and I am coming to call upon your wife,’ when a footstep, alert, though it had paced the earth for more than eighty years, sounded on the garden path outside. The glass door of the schoolroom was pushed open, and old Andros Bartrand walked in.