CHAPTER VII
ON THE BRINK OF A FLIRTATION
Meanwhile the solstice night grew at each instant more purple, more mysterious. Geff felt himself in love with midsummer starlight, with Guernsey, with Tintajeux. Marjorie he would fain have engaged for a game of hide-and-seek among the neighbouring orchards, or of follow-my-leader along the beach, white in the crescent moon’s shining. For what was this poor small heiress but a child, with a child’s cold, sweet, unopened heart, a child’s quick temper, a child’s readiness for play, in whatever shape play might happen to be offered her!
‘You will not tell me your wish to-night, Miss Bartrand. Never mind. You will tell it me some day. To show you I bear no malice, you shall hear mine. My present wish, as I must leave Tintajeux, is to return to Miller’s Hotel by the longest road possible. You could point it out to me?’
‘I should rather think so!’ cried Marjorie, brusquely. ‘If you don’t mind a quarter of an hour’s nice hard scramble, your plan is to go up the Gros Nez cliffs, about a mile from this, and so back to your hotel along the edge of the steep. You are tolerably steady on the legs, I suppose?’
Tolerably! A too shallow purse, a too well endowed brain had combined to force Geoffrey Arbuthnot out of the ranks of the big and world-renowned athletes. But ask the All England football team, ask the men against whom the All England football team has played, if Arbuthnot of John’s be tolerably steady on his legs!
‘I don’t know that I am unusually feeble, Miss Bartrand. My weakness, perhaps, is more of the nerves than the limbs. Point out some path to me that you and the Seigneur are in the habit of treading, assure me, on your honour, that you think that path safe, and perhaps I shall have courage to attempt it.’
‘Well, when you get free of Tintajeux you must go straight across the corner of the moor to Les Hüets. At the end of a few hundred yards you will find four water-lanes meet. You must take the one that seems to lead away from Petersport, and follow it until you get to Tibot. You know Tibot, of course?’
‘I am shamefully ignorant, Miss Bartrand. I do not know Tibot.’
‘After that, a brisk two minutes’ walk down, down, through spongy wet earth churning at every step over your ankles, brings you to the shore. Right in face of you are the Gros Nez heights, and if you get to the top all right (even in broad day it is not considered a very safe climb for strangers), your road home will lie straight before you, along the edge of the cliffs.’
Geff Arbuthnot clasped his forehead.
‘When I get clear of Tintajeux I must go across the moor to an unpronounceable place where four water-lanes meet. Of these I must choose the one that looks least likely to lead anywhere. Then down, down, through spongy wet earth churning up to my ankles at every step, until I catch sight of the cliffs where I shall finally break my neck. Miss Bartrand, will you allow me to ask a favour?’
‘Doubtless.’ A gleam of white teeth showed the heartiness of the girl’s amusement. ‘It rests with me, though,’ she added maliciously, ‘to say “yes” or “no” to it.’
‘Unfortunately it rests always with feminine caprice to say “yes” or “no” to the proposals made by men.’
The hour, or the moonlight, or some curiously occult and unknown influence must have been telling on Arbuthnot of John’s. He stood on the brink of a flirtation.
‘As you may have proved to your cost, sir,’ thought Marjorie, not quite without a movement of pity. ‘As you may have proved in that hour—I wonder how many years ago—when the Devonshire peasant girl decided on becoming Mrs. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘And my proposal is that you come with me, at least as far as the unpronounceable meeting of the water-lanes; start me on my downward spongy way to the sea, and then, unless I descend too quickly from the Gros Nez cliffs, I shall have a fair chance of finding my road home.’
To an agonised wife! It might be—so mixed is human happiness, thought Marjorie ironically—to the least little domestic lecture on the subject of late hours.
‘Feminine caprice,’ she observed gravely, ‘is in your favour for once, Mr. Arbuthnot. I will look after your interests as far as Tibot. After that, your fate will be in your own hands. On the outside chance of your getting back alive to your hotel, I may as well present you with some rather better flowers.’
She flitted about, moth-fashion, from one garden-plot to another, ever rifling the choicest and sweetest bloom of each for her basket. Afterwards, the lodge gates passed, she accompanied Geoffrey across a strip of common land and down a few hundred yards of darksome lane to the Hüets, from which point the trickle of a little moorland stream guided them to Tibot. Here, emerging into such light as the young moon yielded, the moment came for bidding good-night. And here an exceedingly delicate question in social tactics presented itself with force to Marjorie’s attention. What decorous but strictly indirect message ought to accompany her gift of flowers to Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s wife?
‘You don’t mind carrying things, I hope, sir, as long as they are not from the butcher’s, or done up in a brown paper parcel? Guernsey is not Cambridge, you know. Grandpapa and I carry everything on the end of our walking stick, from a conger eel downwards.’
‘I will carry a conger eel for you, any day, with delight,’ said Geoffrey.
‘I shall remember that speech. I shall present you with a conger eel four feet long, in the market, and watch to see you carry him to your hotel. To-night I only want you to take these flowers for me to—to some one in the town,’ observed Marjorie, with staid composure.
But she was in no courageous mood, really. She listened as though she would ask counsel of it to the familiar little black-veined moor stream, eddying away with chill clear voice to the sea.
‘You have only to command me,’ said Geoffrey, with an absurd, a reasonless sense of personal disappointment, ‘and I obey. The address of your friend is——’
‘You will have no difficulty about the address. Indeed, I am afraid,’ stammered Marjorie, ‘that at present, for another few days, I have scarcely a right to speak of the person as my friend. The difficulty is, sir, how will you carry the flowers? In your hands, you say! A man who would climb Gros Nez cliffs must pretty nearly hang on by his eyelashes, like the heroes in Jules Verne’s stories; at times he wants as firm a grip, I can tell you, as all his ten fingers can give.’
‘If I surmount these terrific perils, if I reach Petersport safely, your flowers will share my fate. Don’t be anxious about them, Miss Bartrand.’
Marjorie paused, her face set and thoughtful. After a minute or two, with the unconsciousness of self, the ignorance of possible misconstruction which rendered her actions so absolutely the actions of a child, she unloosened her waist ribbon. A length of twine lay in her basket. With this she bound the flower stalks firmly together, then knotting her ribbon, she attached it in a long loop to the bouquet.
‘Before setting foot on the cliff’s you must pass the loop round your neck—so.’ For Geffs better guidance she pantomimed her instructions round her own girlish throat. ‘By that contrivance you leave your hands free. And you must take care of my ribbon, if you please, sir, and bring it back next lesson. It is a bit of real Spanish peasant ribbon one of my cousins bought for me in Cadiz. A thing not to be replaced in these parts of the world. Good-night, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You have not said half enough. You have not even told me whom your flowers are for.’
‘My flowers are for a person I hope, before long, to know and like well.’
‘The description is tantalising. It would scarcely furnish me, I fear, with the one name and address of the person wanted, among all the narrow, twisting streets of Petersport.’
‘The flowers are, Mr. Arbuthnot, cannot you guess—for whom they are meant?’
‘I am ill at originating ideas, Miss Bartrand. I can guess nothing.’
‘Because you cannot, or will not, which?’
‘Because I cannot, because I am blankly unimaginative.’
For a few moments Marjorie stood masterfully inactive. Then she flew discreetly back into the shadow of the lane. On a slightly rising mound she stopped. What light there was touched the upper half of her face, and Geoffrey could see her eyes. He knew that her mood, for Marjorie Bartrand, was a softened one.
‘The flowers are for yourself, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ so her voice rang through the sea-scented night. ‘For your better self, you understand. Don’t lose my ribbon, and, if you can help it, don’t fall over the Gros Nez cliffs. Good-night.’
And with a wave of her hand—though he was blankly unimaginative, Geoffrey believed it might be with a wafted kiss from her finger tips—she disappeared.
Geff Arbuthnot’s first experience in snubbing had come to an end.
Pondering over many things, most of all over the cruelties and caprices of youthful woman, he ran lightly down the ankle-deep water-lane, then across a miniature bay of argent, shell-strewn sands, to the base of Gros Nez cliffs. The ridge rose sheer above his head, a dark wall of over a hundred and fifty feet, polished as glass to the limit of the breakers, but, above that line, fissured, lichened, rough.
Miss Bartrand’s sarcasm had not exaggerated the gravity of the ascent. The man who in an uncertain light should successfully scale Gros Nez must have not only his hands and feet, but his wits thoroughly under command.
And here the loop of ribbon attached to Marjorie’s flowers proved of great use.
I have tried to represent in Geoffrey a man little moved by the nicer shades of cultivated or hothouse feeling, a man more likely to be wrapped up in one grim fact of the mortuary or dissecting-room than in all the pretty uncertainties of sentiment put together. But to-night a change had certainly passed over him. Before beginning his climb he found a delicate pleasure in suspending Marjorie’s bouquet, exactly in the mode her fingers had taught him, round his neck. He found a pleasure—the cliff’s dizzy height hardly won—in unknotting her ribbon, smoothing it out from its creases with a hand unversed in millinery tasks, finally in hiding it away, jealously, in the breast-pocket of his jacket.
Concerning this jealousy he asked himself neither why nor wherefore. In transitional moments like these an old tender image fading even as a new one rises above the horizon, few of us in our inmost thoughts care to be motive-seekers. Geoffrey knew that he would not for an empire have let Dinah see that ribbon to-night, or any other night. He knew that between him and the little girl with carved sweet lips and ebon hair there existed a secret. He knew that tutoring was a far pleasanter business than he had bargained for, also that the flowers Marjorie had given him, and which he carried in his hand, smelt of Tintajeux.
But he took out his embroidered tobacco pouch, his short black briar, notwithstanding. He smoked his cavendish vigorously as he trudged back to Petersport. Arbuthnot of John’s might stand on the brink of a flirtation. He was not as yet in a state that need occasion a man’s staunchest bachelor friends anxiety.