CHAPTER XIII
THROUGH SMOKE-COLOURED SPECTACLES
The refreshment tent was pitched at the most conspicuous point of the Arsenal, just within the gates. Here Linda Thorne, assisted by three or four white-muslined aides-de-camp, dispensed strawberries, ices, and tea, liberal of smiles, but most illiberal in charges to the crowd.
Gaston Arbuthnot hovered near, not engaging Mrs. Thorne’s attention, but with the air of a man whose freedom is nominal—of a prisoner on parole. The ayah had vanished. Small Rahnee, in a corner, was busily laying up a week’s trouble for her tropical digestion over a plate of stolen macaroons. A swarm of well-gloved, well-set-up young gentlemen, subalterns, for the most part, of the Maltshire Royals, newly returned from Africa, clustered ornamentally around.
‘Lord Rex,’ cried Linda, in a playful voice appealing to a youth who stood behind her chair, a plain but ultra-dandified youth, with a sun-scorched face, sandy hair and eyelashes, and who wore his left arm in a sling. ‘My dear Lord Rex, where are your thoughts to-day? For the third and last time of asking, will you run across to Madame the Archdeaconess, and press her to drink a second cup of tea?’
For Linda, a clever politician, never allowed the present to divert her mindfulness from the future. Belonging—sub silentio—to the extreme left of any society in which she found herself, Mrs. Thorne kept a firm grip, here in European coteries, as formerly in Indian stations, on whatever Conservative mainstay might be within her reach. Her Guernsey mainstay was the Archdeacon’s wife. Linda was a member, under Madame Corbie, of cutting-out clubs, district-visiting corps, societies for persuading members of all denominations to change places with each other, and similar intricate philanthropies of the hour and place. If, occasionally, serious circles looked with misgiving upon some little new escapade, some unaccustomed outbreak of vivacity at The Bungalow, Linda’s usefulness floated her. There was such a fund of sterling worth in Linda Thorne! So some old lady would say at whose house Linda perhaps, on the preceding evening, demure as a mouse, had been painting Christmas cards for the Caribbee Islanders. Such energy, such zeal for the weaker brethren! Such a genius for collecting subscriptions, or organising fancy bazaars! And then one must not forget the stock she came of. One must always remember what our dear flighty Linda’s grandpapa was!
Hence, perhaps, the leniency of the judgments. The old Sarnian ladies never forgot that our dear flighty Linda’s grandpapa was an earl.
‘Madame Corbie—tea!’ echoed Lord Rex Basire, the sun-scorched dandy, absently. ‘Ah, there she goes again! The prettiest girl, yes, by Jove! the out-and-outest girl, every way, I have seen in Guernsey. Golden hair, a complexion, a figure.... Let me take the Venerable her cheering cup at once, and set me free to fly after my Dulcinea.’
‘A new Dulcinea?’ asked Linda, with a glance as sweet as the cup she had prepared for Madame Corbie. ‘I thought Lord Rex Basire had flown after every Dulcinea in the Channel Islands a long time since.’
Lord Rex broke away without reply, causing a good deal of the Venerable’s tea to overflow by reason of his impetuous movements. But he was not set free again as quickly as he desired.
Madame Corbie was what the Scottish bailie called ‘a fine respectit half-worn sort of woman.’ Her set of immediate worshippers, poorer cousins for the most part, would speak of her beneath their breath as so superior! Madame Corbie never smiled. Madame Corbie never retracted a step once taken. It was her harmless boast that she had never read a novel in her life—as one would say he had never cut a throat, or picked a pocket. She would wear no black satin that cost less than ten shillings and sixpence (Guernsey currency) per yard. And she surveyed the moral, as she did the physical, world through a pair of smoke-coloured spectacles.
Even the Archdeaconess, however, had her little stock of human vanities and foibles. Persons of title, though they exist in adequate number on the British mainland, are scarce and prized, like the pink flowering hydrangea, on these smaller islets. With the rectors’ wives from half a dozen country parishes sitting around, neglected, it was a distinctly soothing sensation for good Madame Corbie’s unworldly heart to have Lord Rex Basire, the fifth son of a very impoverished duke, in attendance upon her.
A second cup of tea? Why, Lord Rex and dear Linda were certainly conspiring to spoil us all! And might she, the Archdeaconess, ask if there was such a thing to be had as a macaroon?
‘Too late, Madame Corbie! Lost your chance,’ cried Lord Rex. ‘That young limb, Rahnee, has been beforehand with you. I saw her devouring the last three macaroons at a gulp just as Linda sent me off with your tea.’
Lord Rex was forced to shout these words into Madame Corbie’s ear, for the band of the Maltshire Royals were playing a forcible, much kettle-drummed polka not twenty feet distant, so his attentions, even to the obtuse perceptions of country rectors’ wives, must be unmistakably marked.
‘Sadly unwholesome diet, to be sure. But poor Linda Thorne is so indiscreet in minor matters. You agree with me, do you not, Lord Rex? Nothing more sadly indigestible for a young child’s stomach than macaroons?’
Lord Rex Basire heard her not. It may be doubted whether Lord Rex heard the horns and kettle-drums as they echoed resonantly from the Arsenal walls. He was absorbed in the vision of a distant lovely head, poised flowerlike on a white throat, its waves of amber hair set off against the soft velvet of a Rubens hat. No other interest existed on our planet at that moment for Lord Rex Basire.
He was a man who from his birth upward had followed the desire of the hour, for evil or for good; mainly, not for good. His desire now was to become acquainted with the exquisitely pretty girl whom his eyes pursued. Bluntly abandoning the question (from a physiological side) of macaroons, he addressed himself to the Archdeaconess. Did Madame Corbie—the polka by now had stopped, Lord Rex could ask his question without a shout—did Madame Corbie know the name of the girl who was walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux? ‘Golden-haired girl—straight features, the loveliest complexion in the world,’ added Lord Rex, with the frankness of a momentarily real feeling.
‘It will be my husband’s cousin once removed, Ella Corbie of La Hauterive,’ observed Madame Corbie blandly. ‘The Hauterive yellow roses are fine this year. I have not a word to say against their “Celine Forestier.” But, in my poor opinion, the Archdeacon’s “Maréchal Niel” ought to have taken the prize. Yes, yes,’—Madame Corbie gazed through her smoked spectacles into the perspective of history—‘Ella Corbie is still nice looking. I remember her, dressed for her first evening party, more than a dozen years ago, and now——’
‘My dear Madame Corbie! I beg a thousand pardons, your cup is empty—allow me to set it down,’ interrupted Lord Rex Basire.
For at this precise moment the perfect features, the lovely complexion, were again setting towards him in the crowd.
But Madame Corbie, the head of our local society, rose to the occasion, and to her feet.
‘Let me have a good look, Lord Rex, and if it is my cousin Ella, I will introduce you to her. A young lady walking, you say, with Marjorie Bartrand? That is certainly most unlike Ella! The Hauterive family keep so exclusively to themselves. Still——’
‘There they are—coming this way, by Jove!’ cried Lord Rex breathlessly. ‘You see the girl I mean? Splendid girl in black—lace ruffle—a red rose lying on her hair?’
Madame Corbie looked through her smoke-coloured glasses straight. Then she looked through her smoke-coloured glasses obliquely. Then she pushed them high away on her ample forehead, and gazed stoically upward in the broad light of the merry June day.
‘The person,’ she pronounced, with awful solemnity, ‘who is walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux does not belong to this island.’
And so speaking, and with the folds of her satin doing credit to the price paid for them, Madame Corbie there, in full presence of the inferior clergy’s wives, sat down.
‘Ah! I thought not. Thought I had never seen such a pretty woman in the place,’ observed Lord Rex, addressing his own consciousness, rather than the ill-pleased ears of the Archdeaconess. ‘What are the odds I don’t get properly introduced and properly snubbed before another quarter of an hour is over!’
As a preliminary step Lord Rex rushed back to the refreshment tent, Madame Corbie’s tea-cup his ostensible excuse. He threw himself on Linda Thorne’s ambiguous sympathy.
‘Mrs. Thorne, you know all about every one, by fine natural discernment. I’ve heard you say so a hundred times. Who is this wonderful girl in black that Marjorie Bartrand is walking about with?’
A suppressed smile lurked round Linda Thorne’s thin lips.
‘Let us give Mr. Arbuthnot the task of learning her pedigree. It is an act of charity always to find work for idle men. Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she turned to Gaston, ‘I want you to find out something for the peace of Lord Rex Basire’s mind and of my own existence. Who is this wonderful girl in black who is walking about the Arsenal grounds with Marjorie Bartrand?’
‘If I were of a brave disposition I would go myself,’ said Lord Rex, when Gaston had sauntered placidly off on his mission. ‘But I am not. I am a coward down to the ground. Peace at any price is my motto, politically and otherwise. To-day I am feeling more than usually nervous—not half “go” enough in me to stand up under one of Marjorie Bartrand’s snubbings.’
‘I cannot say your modesty makes itself known to the world by outward and visible signs.’
‘Modesty—no! I understand you, madam. A man may have forward manners but a faint heart.’
Lord Rex Basire’s arm, in justice let it be spoken, got a bullet through it in hot warfare. This dandified boy was in the thick of more than one African fight when clouds gathered dark above the English colours, was all but drowned on a never-to-be-forgotten night while attempting to carry succour to the wounded, left with their solitary gallant surgeon, on an abandoned position.
‘I tried once, at a militia review or something, to talk to Marjorie, just in the usual way one talks, not without success you know, to girls of her age.’
‘And the result was?’ asked Linda.
‘She looked at me coolly—grand Spanish eyes of hers those are, bar the temper in them! “You are fresh from Eton, are you not?” she observed. I confessed that Eton had known me in my youth. “Talk about Eton, then,” struck out Miss Bartrand, straight from the shoulder. “Talk about cricket, football, boating, Latin grammar, if you learnt any. I will not,” with a murderous flash from her big eyes, “listen to foolishness from any man.”’
By the time Lord Rex finished this characteristic anecdote Gaston Arbuthnot, with his usual expression of genial impenetrability, had sauntered back to the refreshment tent. Picking up Rahnee, he asked the child what ailed her? For Rahnee’s face, sickly at all times, wore a look and hue forlornly out of keeping with the bravery of her attire.
‘What in the world has befallen the infant, Mrs. Thorne? Her complexion is of the lively arsenic green the doctors forbid us to use in wall papers.’
‘Rahnee! mamma’s own darling pet, what is the matter?’ cried Linda, suddenly recalled to the fact of her darling’s existence.
‘Me eat matazoons. Bad matazoons!’ whimpered Rahnee, with the tender conscience, the quick physical repentance of her age.
‘That is a wise little Rahnee,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot, kissing her. ‘Right morality. Pitch into our pleasures the moment our pleasures begin to pitch into us.’
‘Have you seen her?’ exclaimed Lord Rex. ‘This kind of trifling, remember, may be fun to all of you. It’s stretched high above a joke to me. A tall fair girl, dressed in black——’
‘With a crimson rose in her hair,’ added Linda, ‘and walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux.’
‘Well, yes,’ Gaston admitted in the lapses of whispered consolation to poor Rahnee, ‘I have seen her.’
‘And who is she?’ exclaimed Linda Thorne. ‘I am almost as curious as Lord Rex. Have you discovered this new Dulcinea’s name?’
‘Her name is Dinah Arbuthnot,’ replied Gaston cheerfully. ‘Yes, Mrs. Thorne, incredulous though I know you feel, the wonderful girl in black, and who is walking with Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux, is—my wife.’
Lord Rex sank in an attitude of despair, half mock, half genuine, upon the nearest bench.