‘My sympathy, I believe, was rightly bestowed,’ said Marjorie frigidly. ‘I would not see the poorest wandering pedlar start for the Gros Nez cliffs without helping him to the extent I helped you. Even a pedlar might have a wife at home, sir. A foolish, fond creature, shedding tears of anxiety for him in his absence.’
The side-thrust did not seem to scathe Geoffrey’s conscience as it should have done.
‘Would you make it a special point that this married pedlar should return you your ribbon, Miss Bartrand?’
‘I make it a point that Mr. Arbuthnot shall do so.’ Marjorie delivered her ultimatum unflinchingly. ‘The ribbon is worthless, except as a memento of some happy days I spent in Cadiz once, totally worthless to any living person but me.’
‘And why should it not be a memento of happy days spent in Guernsey by myself?’
She looked him straight between the eyes, too hotly, dangerously irate to make immediate answer.
‘Suppose, leading a prosaic life in the thick of bricks and mortar, that length of ribbon could act as a kind of talisman.’
‘I don’t understand you in the least.’
‘A charm bringing back to one’s tired eyes and heart the blue summer night, the smell of moon-coloured hayfields, the whole moment when it was given to me.’
‘I will suppose nothing of the sort. It was not given. This is vapid, sentimental talk,’ said Marjorie, concentrating her thoughts firmly on absent Dinah. ‘And I abhor sentiment.’
‘On that solitary point we agree.’
‘The ribbon I lent you to tie round Mrs. Arbuthnot’s flowers is just a yard of woven, parti-coloured silk. Buy the best match you can find to it in the nearest mercer’s shop. It will be as good a talisman.’
‘Are you a materialist, Miss Bartrand? Would you say that the ragged colours of one of the Duke’s regiments, the pennants of one of Nelson’s ships, were so much woven silk, more or less stained and weather torn?’
‘I do not see that my sash ribbon can or should be of the smallest interest to Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot,’ observed Marjorie, the blood leaping, more swiftly than it had done under his praise, to her cheek.
In this moment she was a woman, the childish cotton frock, the hair hung out to dry, the slim immature figure notwithstanding. A dawning of her sex’s shame burned at her heart as she turned her looks away from him. In this moment, were it possible to assign place and date to matter so intangible, I should say that Geff Arbuthnot first, distinctly, began to fall in love.
‘And suppose I feel that your sash can and ought to be of the greatest possible interest to me?’ he urged.
Marjorie found no answer to her hand. If she had been reared under a different rule to Andros Bartrand’s, if she had associated more with girls, had frequented afternoon-teas and garden-parties, she would, doubtless, even in innocent little Sarnia, have learned the formula by which a married man, hazarding idle speeches, ought mildly and effectually to be crushed.
Marjorie knew no more of flirtation or of its dialects than she did of Sanscrit. She had gone through an engagement, once, during a brief uncomfortable fortnight; an experience which took the taste for lovers and lovers’ vows most adequately out of her young mouth. And now—oh, now she never meant to marry! She had her Greek and Latin in the present, a large outlook for herself and others in the future. Of flirtation she knew nothing, of engagements she knew too much! And she liked Geff Arbuthnot, and did not like the duties of repressing his frivolity, or of ranging herself against him in the civil wars of his home life. Yet to the utmost of her strength should both these duties be fulfilled.
‘Your interests were appropriated long before you ever saw me,’ she replied at last. ‘What hour, this afternoon, would it be convenient, pray, for me to visit Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Her tone, her look, might for a moment have suggested to Geoffrey that the secret of his youth had made unto itself wings and flown to Tintajeux. Only the very supposition were wild! Gaston, Dinah herself had never suspected the passionate madness which, in the May twilight of long ago, used to draw him night after night to the little thatched, rose-covered cottage at Lesser Cheriton.
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot? For anything I know to the contrary, Dinah will be at home between three and four o’clock.’
‘And at our next reading, sir, you will bring back my ribbon.’
‘I made no promise.’
‘Of what mortal use can a bit of ribbon be to you, Mr. Arbuthnot?’
‘I have had thoughts of turning this particular ribbon into a book-marker,’ said Geff, boldly imaginative.
‘A book-marker! I ask you—do you think it honest to keep property that belongs to other people?’
‘My conscience, I must confess, does not prick me.’
‘If I order, will you obey?’
Marjorie had turned abruptly pale. Her mouth quivered.
‘If you order, I submit,’ said Geff, watching her gravely. ‘I will never go against your smallest wish while I live. You shall have your ribbon before our next lesson, Miss Bartrand, I promise.’
The shadow of a quarrel was between them when they bade good-bye. And at the thought of this shadow Marjorie’s illogical spirit was sore vexed. But I think Geff Arbuthnot walked back to town with a lighter spirit in his breast than had reigned there since the moment when he first saw Dinah and Gaston as lovers, hand clasping hand, in the little Cambridgeshire orchard.
His knowledge of young girls, their instability, their hot and cold fits, their tempers, their fluctuating emotions, had been derived from books. So his theories on the subject were mainly worthless. But men who in after days rival neither Thackeray nor Balzac, do often, during one phase of their own experience, make keen enough guesses as to the source of female weakness. Geoffrey felt, with an instinct’s force, that Marjorie Bartrand’s blanched cheeks, her quivering lip, her passionate tones, were not the outcome of childish anger. He felt, with an instinct’s force, that the girl herself was a child no longer. Whither must this altered state of things tend?
The question was complex; and Geoffrey willingly let it rest. As he walked the warm air was briar-scented, the birds murmured lazy midday nothings to each other amidst the lush hedges, the voice of Marjorie Bartrand filled his heart. What need to hope or fear for the future when one is twenty-four years old, and the actual living hour has a hold, delicious as this, upon the senses!
Dinah and her husband were alone together, a quiet little picture of domestic still life, when Geff reached the hotel.
A vine-trellised slip of courtyard lay outside the north window of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s sitting-room. Here, during the sunny forenoons, Gaston, picturesquely bloused, found it pleasant to work, when he was sufficiently in the vein to work at all. He wore his blouse, was in the vein, now. That which two days ago was a mass of rough clay, showed the airy outlines of a baby-girl, seated on a Brobdingnagian shell, one small foot neatly shoed and socked, the other clasped, naked, between her dimpled hands, in an attitude of inimitable, three-year-old dismay.
‘We label this work of genius “The Lost Shoe,” or “Dodo’s Despair,” or some equally pathetic and unhackneyed title,’ remarked the sculptor as Geff entered upon the scene. ‘We get our so many guineas for it, from our masters, and solicit further orders, do we not, Dinah?’
‘You should have no master but your art,’ was Dinah’s answer.
‘That is easily said. My wife, as usual, Geff, is urging upon me to fulfil my mission, to deliver messages, to begin big and serious work. But I fancy I gauge my own depths justly. I have no messages whatever to deliver to anybody. These trickeries of Philistine sentiment,’ Gaston pointed with a shapely clay-stained hand to his model, ‘are always a success. In the first place, they draw tears from Mr. and Mrs. Prud’homme. In the second, the dealers approve them. What more can an artist’s heart desire?’
‘Everything,’ replied Dinah.
But she spoke in parenthesis, and under her breath.
‘Am I anatomical, Geoffrey? This must always be important, whether a man work with or without a mission. How about this bend in the left knee-joint? Are my muscles right?’
Geoffrey offered one or two strictly professional criticisms; then after admiring the grace, the charm of the little clay sketch, gave his uncompromising moral support to Dinah.
Whoever possesses genius—well, talent, no need to fight over words—lies under the behest of duty. Gaston’s duty, the one straight and unmistakable road that lay before him, was to abandon conventional prettiness, to go in for the expression of the highest thoughts that were in him.
‘I am destitute of high thoughts,’ said Gaston, his refined, intellectual face belying the assertion. ‘I have not the prophet’s rôle. If I tried to soar, I should immediately afterwards have to climb down. I have no original ideas to embody——’
‘Gaston!’ broke, with an accent of denial, from Dinah’s lips.
‘And the dealers, Farrago in Pall Mall especially, are my masters. Before I left town Farrago’s advice was memorable. “The market demands nothing classic in statuettes, Mr. Arbuthnot. Nothing romantic. Above all, nothing to make us think. The market demands trifles, sir, trifles. Objects for the smoke-room or boudoir. Domestic amenities, as you agreeably say, for Monsieur and Madame Prud’homme! And, for wider sections of society, ‘flavour.’ In any case, trifles. Nothing, if you please, to make us think.”’
‘Instead of obeying,’ exclaimed Dinah, ‘you ought to say, “I, Gaston Arbuthnot, must do such and such work, no other. Let Mr. Farrago take my statuettes or leave them, as he likes.”’
‘That style of talk is for giants, my dear child—putting aside the fact that I am bound to Farrago for another six months. Carlyle talked so to the Edinburgh Reviewers. Viewed by the light of after success his talk may sound grand. If Carlyle had not speedily written the “French Revolution” it would have been called “tall.”’
‘But I want you to write your “French Revolution” in clay,’ Dinah persisted. ‘Here, in Guernsey, you know, you planned to make studies, always studies, for the great work you will set about in Florence. But then,’ a piece of embroidery was between Dinah’s hands; she lifted her eyes from her wools and silks at this juncture, and fixed them, full of earnest reproach, on Gaston, ‘there have been unfortunate throw-backs.’
‘Throw-backs! As how?’ Gaston Arbuthnot applied himself to the correction of one of the points anatomically criticised by Geoffrey. ‘As long as I am bound to Farrago, even feminine morality, my love, will allow that I should be honest. Every saleable thing I do must pass, as per contract, through Farrago’s hands. Taking one day with another, I have got through rather more work than the average, here in Guernsey.’
‘Have you put your own thoughts into form, Gaston? This model, when it is finished’—she glanced somewhat coldly at ‘Dodo’s Despair’—‘will be a portrait of Rahnee Thorne simply.’
‘Rahnee Thorne idealised!’ Gaston’s rejoinder was made with the unruffled temper that characterised him. ‘My clay infant has flesh upon her bones, and an infant’s face. Rahnee, though I love the child, is but a poor little wizened Bengalee, at her best.’
‘Will the portrait of Rahnee’s mamma, the model you have on hand at The Bungalow, need to be idealised also?’
‘Dinah, you should be magnanimous.’ And with a movement that in a less composed man might have been a shrug of the shoulders, Mr. Arbuthnot prepared to clean the clay from his hands. ‘A pretty woman—well, if you shake your head, an exceedingly beautiful woman—need never utter a sarcasm about a plain one.’
At the negative compliment a colour, soft as the pure pink veining of a shell cameo, stained Dinah’s face. Her breast throbbed. And all the time the speech, delicious in sound, signified nothing. Gaston had been engaged for days past to escort plain Mrs. Linda to the rose-show, and felt not the smallest temptation to break his engagement. Dinah must be magnanimous! Dinah’s husband, after two or three hours’ facile work on ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ needed relaxation, and would have it.
‘You ought to take me to the show, Geff,’ she pleaded, turning round half jestingly, half in earnest, to Geoffrey. ‘What would Linda Thorne, what would Gaston think, if I suddenly made my appearance among all the fine ladies of Guernsey?’
‘Linda Thorne might have her own views,’ said Gaston. ‘When Dinah Arbuthnot shows her face, every fine lady, in Guernsey, or elsewhere, must be on the spot eclipsed.’
Whatever Dinah thought, Geff knew that a certain insincerity underlay the speech, and controlled a pungent remark with effort. The friendship of the Arbuthnot trio was never more sharply paradoxical than at this moment.