Dinah was still busied over her embroidery frame when Geoffrey’s entrance brought the coolness of the night, the wholesome odour of heliotropes and roses, into the chronically dinner-oppressed atmosphere of Miller’s Hotel.
Her blonde youthful face looked weary. The lightless, far-away expression, which you may always observe as a result of unshed tears, was in the glance she lifted to Geff.
‘What, you are up still! Do you know that it is past eleven, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Four years ago, when Geoffrey first saw Gaston and Dinah in the bloom of wedded happiness not two months old, it was decreed by Gaston, least jealous of men, that his wife and cousin should call each other by their Christian names.
Upon Dinah’s joyous lips Geoffrey, without an effort, became at once a familiar household word—dear good old Geff, through whom, obliquely, her introduction to the husband she passionately loved had come about!
But Geoffrey, after a few stammering, painful efforts, abandoned the calling of Dinah by her Christian name for ever.
He could and did call her so to Gaston only. He intended to stand by her heroically, absent, or in her presence; intended, God helping him, to be the good brotherly influence of her life and of her husband’s. Looking upon the eyes that met his with such cruel self-possession, upon the lips which he had once madly coveted to press, Geoffrey Arbuthnot realised that he could never feel towards Dinah as a brother feels. He resolved that his speech, knowingly, should not play traitor to his heart. Gaston’s wife must, for him, be coldly, stiffly, conventionally, ‘Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ until his life’s end.
‘Yes, I am up still, Geff. There’s no chance of seeing Gaston till long past midnight. A lady like Mrs. Thorne, accustomed to India and Indian military society,’ said Dinah, ‘would be sure to keep late hours. So I thought I would shade my poppies straight through. I must wait for daylight to put in the pinks and scarlets.’
Crossing to the table where Dinah was laboriously stitching, Geoffrey seated himself at her side. He looked attentively down at her work with those acute, deep-browed gray eyes of his.
‘Your embroidery is very——’ he was about to say ‘beautiful,’ but checked himself. The star-strewn night, the hay-scents along the cliffs, the roses of Tintajeux were in his soul, lifting it above sympathy with poor Dinah’s wool-work. ‘Your embroidery is very delicate and smooth,’ he went on truthfully. ‘And how quick you are about it! You only began the top yellow rose when I stayed with you and Gaston, I recollect, last Easter.’
Dinah’s pieces of work were on a scale that carried one back to the female industry of the Middle Ages, yet was their ultimate use nebulous. Vast ottomans, vast cushions, yards of curtain border, imply a mansion. And the Arbuthnot’s mansion at present existed not. But on what else should a childless woman, cut off from household duties, not over fond of books, forlornly destitute of acquaintance, and with an ever-absent husband, employ herself?
Once, long ago, the poor girl made Gaston a set of shirts, as a birthday surprise. These shirts were lovingly, exquisitely stitched, as Dinah Thurston had been taught to stitch in her childhood. They were also a consummate failure. As a monument of patience, he observed, they were beyond praise. As a fit—‘Well,’ said Gaston, kissing her cheek in careless gratitude, ‘it is not a case of Eureka.’
He never wore them, never knew on what day, in what manner, his wife, fired by sharp disappointment, got them out of existence. Simply, the shirts did not adjust themselves well round his, Gaston Arbuthnot’s, shapely throat. It was not a case of Eureka. The subject interested him no farther.
Plain sewing for grown men and women, Dinah promptly decided, was fruitless labour. Of dressmaking proper Gaston would never (excusably, perhaps) suffer a trace in his rooms. And so, the sweet fashioning of tiny children’s clothes not belonging to her lot, Dinah Arbuthnot it would seem had no choice, no refuge on the planet she inhabited, but cross-stitch.
At moments of more than common loneliness she would feel that her life was being recorded—mournfully, for a life of two-and-twenty—in these large and not artistic embroideries. It seemed as though she stitched with a double thread, as though a dull strand of autobiography for ever intertwined itself among the flaunting roses, the impossible auriculas and poppies that grew beneath her hands.
The piece at which she now worked was begun in London, at a time when Gaston used to dine out regularly every night of his life, and when his days, from various art callings, were, perforce, spent apart from her. As Geoffrey spoke, she could see her St. John’s Wood lodging, her afternoon walks in the Regent’s Park, worked gloomily in with every shade of those topmost yellow roses. After London came a short stay at Weymouth. Here Gaston had a ‘convict study’ to make, on order, and with his usual good luck discovered he knew several capital fellows in the regiment quartered at Portland. The capital fellows naturally delighted in having the versatile artist at mess, and Dinah passed almost as many lonely evenings as she had done in London. It was in Weymouth, she remembered, that her auriculas, her impossible auriculas, began to take colour and shape. And now, in Guernsey....
The heavy drops gathered in Dinah Arbuthnot’s eyes; pushing her work frame away, she turned to Geoffrey. The lamp shone on her full. The delicate outlines of her cheek and throat stood out before him in startling whiteness.
‘And so you have come back from your coaching, Geff.’ Her tone was quiet. Long practice had taught Dinah to repress that sound detested by Gaston—as by all husbands—tears in the voice. ‘How do you like the sensation of being snubbed by an heiress?’
‘Pretty well, I thank you,’ said Geff. ‘Snubbing, as you know, Mrs. Arbuthnot, is a sensation I got used to in my youth.’
‘Was the heiress very bad? Did she make you feel miserably uncomfortable?’
‘No, I cannot go so far as that. I cannot say that I felt miserably uncomfortable.’
‘But you don’t care for her? If you keep the work on, it will not be for pleasure?’
Dinah’s heart was fuller than it could hold with love for her husband. Geoffrey was nothing to her, except the best friend that she and Gaston possessed. Yet she asked this question quickly, with interest. In her secret consciousness it was an accepted fear, perhaps, though Dinah knew it not, that Geoffrey would never care, as men care who mean to marry, for any girl.
‘Work that is to be decently done must always be done for pleasure.’
It was Geff Arbuthnot who uttered the aphorism.
‘And your evening, snubbing and all, has been passed pleasantly?’
‘I have breathed ampler air,’ Geoffrey made evasive apology, man-like. ‘I have seen more blue sea and sky than ever in my life before. Miss Bartrand’s snubbing was—not beyond my strength. The Seigneur of Tintajeux is a specimen of the old scholarly, high-and-dry parson, worth walking any number of Guernsey miles to see. Some day, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I shall take you with me to Tintajeux.’
‘To come in for my share of snubbing too?’
Dinah asked the question, faintly colouring.
‘Marjorie is a frank, generous-hearted child. You cannot think of her in the light of a grown-up woman. She is a Bartrand, with the faults and virtues of her inheritance, the faults—pride and temper—visibly on the surface. I am very sure,’ added Geff, bending his head, as though to examine the intricate shading of Dinah’s poppies, ‘that you and Marjorie Bartrand might be fast friends, if you chose.’
‘I have no friends,’ said Dinah, ‘except my own people, down home,’ of whom, in truth, Gaston allowed her to see little enough,’and—and you, Geff.’
The voice was unfaltering, the full good mouth was steady. Dinah made the admission, not as a matter of complaint, but of fact, and Geoffrey’s heart fired.
‘That “friendlessness” is the one huge mistake of your life,’ he exclaimed. ‘Gaston is not selfish, would not be selfish, unless your unselfishness forced him into being so. You should never have allowed this morbid love of solitude to grow on you. You ought to assert yourself, to go into the world at Gaston’s side, whether you like it or not.’
‘I should not like it now. When I was a girl, when we first married, my heart was light, against what it is now. It was the end of the London season, you remember. No, I don’t suppose you do?’
Did he not, though—that late July time when, after seeing the marriage ceremony over, he went back to his scholar’s attic in John’s; that Long Vacation when the skies were brazen to him, when day and night alike were one feverish pain!
‘It was the end of the London season, and when Gaston took me to the Opera and twice down to dinner at Richmond I did feel,’ confessed Dinah with humility, ‘that I had it in me to be fond of junketing,—oh, Geff, there’s one of my country words! luckily Gaston can’t hear it—of pleasure, I mean, and society. But the taste has died.’ Of what lingering, cruel death, who should know better than Geoffrey? ‘Ladies of my husband’s class have not called upon me. I have neither rank, talent, nor a million. Without these, Gaston says, no woman can make her way in the English world.’
Hot words were ready to rush from Geoffrey’s lips, but he kept them back. To remain on equal terms with husband and wife in this strange triangular friendship did sorely tax his powers of self-repression at times.
‘Gaston would rejoice in knowing that your life was cheerfuller, no matter how the cheerfulness was brought about. He has told me so, often. Now, here, in Guernsey, eight sea-going hours removed,’ said Geff lightly, ‘from English Philistinism, what should hinder you from joining in any little bit of “junketing” that may offer itself?’
‘The hindrance of having no introduction to the Guernsey ladies.’
‘Mrs. Thorne has called on you.’
‘On Gaston. He is dining with them now. He will dine with them four evenings a week. Yes,’ Dinah’s voice fell, ‘I know, at a glance, the kind of clever person who will amuse my husband. Mrs. Thorne is one of them. She is magnetic.’
‘With the magnetism that repels rather than attracts,’ remarked Geff.
‘That is your feeling about her. You and Gaston would be safe not to admire the same woman.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot was mute. Although his face was too sunburnt to admit of visible deepening in hue, it may be that just then Geoffrey Arbuthnot blushed.
‘You have no change in your character. You could be content (a happy thing for your wife, whenever Mrs. Geoffrey appears on the scene) with one mood, one voice, one face, day after day, before you for forty years. Is not that true?’
‘I am not an artist,’ said Geff, after a pause. ‘For a humdrum man, prosaically occupied, the one face, Mrs. Arbuthnot, the one voice,’—ah, fool that he was! his own voice trembled—‘might constitute as much happiness as we are likely to taste, any of us, this side death.’
‘And Gaston is an artist in every fibre.’ Poor Dinah’s estimate of Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot was invariably Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s, except that she believed in him a vast deal more than he believed in himself. ‘I ought to know that my dull days, my silent evenings, are matters of course. It is not Gaston’s fault that he can only get inspiration through change. Some day, when the world is bowing down before a really great work of his, my hour of triumph will come. Who knows, Geff, if Gaston had married in his own class, if he and his wife had led just the usual life of people in society—it may be his genius would not have fared so well!’
Dinah never looked more perilously lovely than when, with flushed cheeks and kindling eyes, she spoke aloud of her ambitions for her husband. The poor girl’s whole life lay in her one, passionate, oft-bruised affection. More than common beauty, a look of divine, all-hoping, all-forgiving love, shone on her face at this instant.
Geff Arbuthnot recollected it wanted only ten seconds to midnight, and that he must fly. Had not long habit trained him to recognise the moment when flight was his surest, his only wisdom!
‘You and Gaston understand each other, as no third person can hope to do, Mrs. Arbuthnot. I consider you the two happiest mortals alive, though perhaps you do not know the extent of your own happiness.’
‘And you are off to your pillow, to dream of the heiress who has not snubbed you,’ said Dinah, as he moved from her side. ‘Why, Geff!’ For the first time she caught sight of the bouquet, somewhat cunningly held in shadow hitherto. ‘What roses, what jasmines, what heliotropes? I have been wondering all this time what made the room so sweet.’
And speaking thus, she stretched forth her hand for Marjorie Bartrand’s flowers.
During nearly four years, a portentously large slice of life under five-and-twenty, it had been one long case of give-and-take between Geoffrey and Dinah—the ‘take’ invariably on Dinah’s side. She took his heart from him to start with. She took the happiness out of his youth. Silently, unrecognised, Geoffrey constituted himself her knight-errant in the hour of his own sharpest pain. (Till her death Dinah could never know the part played by Geoffrey at the time of her engagement and marriage.) In a hundred ways he had since steadied her husband in the path of right. By a hundred unselfish actions he had smoothed nascent domestic discontents, any one of which might have worked mortal havoc with Dinah’s peace.
She had received all his devotion—a prevalent weakness, it is to be feared, among gentle, unimaginative women of her type—as the simplest thing in the world!
If Dinah, as once there was promise, had had children, doubt not that her moral nature must have widened. But this was not to be. A tiny, dying creature held between weak arms for half a day; some yellowing, never-used baby-clothes, jealously hidden out of Gaston’s sight; a kiss stolen, when her husband was not by to see, from any fair cottage babe she might chance to come across in her walk—this much, and no more, was Dinah to know of motherhood.
And the love blindly centred on Gaston had in it an element which, although the word is hard, must in justice be called selfishness.
‘Nothing Gaston likes so well as the smell of flowers on his breakfast table.’ And Dinah still carelessly held out her hand in a receptive attitude. ‘He says his brain must be like the brains of dogs or deer—smell colours all his thoughts. You will see, Geff! Those heliotropes and roses will just set him kneading some new idea into clay to-morrow morning.’
But the heliotropes and the roses did not quit Geoffrey’s hand.
In this moment, ay, while Dinah was speaking, a current of new, keen, healthful life had swept through him. He felt more thoroughly master of himself than he had done since that May evening when he first blindly surrendered his will, with his heart, to a blonde girl watering flowers through a casement window at Lesser Cheriton. Marjorie’s roses, fresh from her pure touch, a friendly gift from the world-scorning child who, somehow, looked upon her tutor as out of the scope of scorn, were his. If Gaston needed inspiration from flower-scents, Doctor Thorne’s garden, any other garden than that of the Seigneur of Tintajeux, must supply the inspiration.
He made a dexterous exit, rushed away, boy-fashion, light of spirit, three steps at a time, to his own room. And before half a minute was over Dinah Arbuthnot had forgotten him. Poor old faithful Geff, his lesson-giving, his heiress, his bouquet—what were these, nay, what were the alien concerns of the universe to a pathetically tender soul, quick smarting under its own immediate and narrow pain!
Had Linda Thorne the power of holding an artist’s restless fancy captive, the genius of making time pass swiftly, the talent of clever talk, of giving genial little dinners, of dressing perfectly? Above all, was she a woman to expect nothing whatever in return for her devotion? A woman strong enough to be philosophical, even, towards a rival who should vanquish her, in her own world, with her own weapons? If she were thus gifted—Dinah moved to the window and looked out across the hotel garden to a point between an opening in the trees where the sea showed blue and foamless—if Linda Thorne were thus gifted, then might to-night be taken as a foretaste of what the next six weeks, the bloom and glory of a mid-Channel summer, had in store for herself.