The strength, the delicacy of Geff Arbuthnot’s character were never better shown than in his present relations to Dinah.
Weaker men pay allegiance readily enough to the passion under whose sway they happen to rest. Geff was loyal, with a fine, a rare fidelity to the love that had passed away. He was Dinah’s brother always. And the story of Saturday’s rose-show told him, late that evening, by Dinah’s lips, sufficed to fill him with a more than vague misgiving.
He had wished often, thinking over the difficult question of her welfare in his rough-and-ready way, that Dinah could be forcibly saved from solitude and cross-stitch. Lo! the rescuer was at hand. But that rescuer, Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s common sense informed him, should be a very different Galahad to Lord Rex Basire. Acting on the moment’s impulse, Marjorie Bartrand had made a tentative effort at lifting Gaston’s wife into the fellowship of her kind. And the experiment was too successful. Dinah, so Geff divined, had scarcely taken one step in public, before the little hero of a lesser hour, the most popular man in his regiment, the most sought-after partner at the island balls, thought fit, the world looking on, to throw himself at her feet.
‘And did you find pleasure in it all? Did you for a single moment feel amused to-day?’
Something in Geoffrey’s voice suggested a sharper note of interrogation than was supplied by his words.
Dinah and Geff stood together on the same spot of lawn where we first heard the Arbuthnot trio talking of sentiment while they breakfasted. Gaston was dining out, whether at the Fort-William mess or at Doctor Thorne’s house Dinah had not sought to know. Of what avail to ask for truth when you have once been answered with a fable, no matter how prettily that fable was illustrated?
‘I was pleased for a time. Gaston showed no anger at my coming. It amused me to hear Lord Rex Basire talking down, as he thought, to my rustic understanding. Then without warning,’ Dinah turned away; she looked at the pale horizon line of sea, ‘I had a few moments’ horrible pain.’
‘You were ill!’ exclaimed Geoffrey, uncertain of her drift.
‘No, Geff, no. I don’t mean such pain as people consult the doctors for. The pain was at my heart—a sickening doubt of every one—a feeling that I stood on one side and all the rest of the world on the other—a sudden despair of life! Geoffrey,’ she went on, ‘with the gay people walking about, and the flowers smelling sweet, and the music playing, it did seem to me for a few seconds’ space that my heart must break.’
‘And on which side did you range me in your thoughts? Was I with you or with all the rest of the world?’ asked Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
These half confessions of Dinah’s were no new experience to him. She never uttered an ungenerous suspicion of Gaston, never made a complaint as to her own neglected life. And still a kind of moral moan had of late been constantly in poor Dinah’s talk. The warm woman’s heart, ill at rest, jealous, with no wholesome work or interest to keep emotion subordinate, was always, unconsciously, on the brink of betraying its secret.
He looked with pity that could never tire at her averted face.
‘You, Geff?’ she cried, putting on a brighter tone. ‘Why, you were on my side, of course. You do everything good that is done for me in this world. Through you, for certain, Miss Bartrand came all the way from Tintajeux to call on me.’
‘Don’t give me credit on that score. Marjorie Bartrand’s doings are guided by no living person save Marjorie Bartrand. She had made up her mind to know you; had heard, doubtless, about you and Gaston among the islanders, and of her own free will sought you out. Count me for nothing,’ said Geoffrey Arbuthnot, ‘in any action or caprice of Marjorie Bartrand’s.’
‘Had heard about me and Gaston!’ Dinah repeated his words with the preoccupation of morbidly strained feeling. ‘I think one may know pretty well what that means. No wonder so many people turned round to look at me at Saturday’s rose-show.’
‘People turn to look at you generally, do they not, Mrs. Arbuthnot? There is as much human nature, depend upon it, in the heart of the Channel as in Hyde Park or Piccadilly.’
‘That is more like a speech of Lord Rex Basire’s than of yours!’ cried Dinah, with a laugh unlike her own. ‘Throw in a lisp, varnished shoes, a waistcoat, and a double eyeglass, and I could believe it was his lordship, not Geff Arbuthnot, who was condescending to talk to me.’
‘You must have put forth all your charity, have exercised a great deal of wasted patience, in allowing his lordship to condescend at all.’
Chiefly through Gaston’s spirited character sketches over the breakfast table, Geoffrey had long ago known with certainty what manner of man Lord Rex Basire was. Instead of answering, Dinah stooped above a head of garden lilies, the dense white of whose petals showed waxen and spotless through the gloom.
‘I like the smell of lilies better than of all other flowers that blow,’ so after a minute her rich low voice came to Geoffrey; ‘I can never smell them, nor yet lavender, without thinking of Aunt Susan’s garden at Lesser Cheriton.’
Where Geff first saw her! The garden amidst whose crowding summer verdure he stood at the moment when his youth went from him, when Dinah and Gaston, hand clasped in hand, bent towards each other in the level sunlight. At this hour, with the whispers of a new love stirring in his heart, Geoffrey Arbuthnot could not hear that distant time spoken of, above all by Dinah’s lips, without a thrill of the old passion, the old maddened, blinding sense of loss overcoming him.
‘It might have been well for some of us,’ he began, ‘if we had never heard the name of Lesser Cheriton——’
But Dinah interrupted him quickly:
‘No, Geoffrey, I can never believe that. If it means anything, it must mean I had better not have married Gaston. I should have no hope, no religion—I should be a woman ready for any desperate action—if I thought that my life, just as I have it, was not the one God had cut out for me as best. The fact is, you know, I have been too narrow,’ she went on hurriedly. ‘Something has been running in my mind all this evening—some idle talk of Lord Rex Basire’s that I may repeat to you another time; and I begin to see my conduct in a new light. From the day Gaston married me I have been too narrow, far.’
‘In what way? Give me one or two specimens of your overnarrowness.’
‘I have tried to make the sayings of one class fit in with the doings of another. I have thought that right and wrong must be the same everywhere. This was my ignorance. If I had taken up—well, with Gaston’s sort of opinions,’ she added, making an unsuccessful attempt at gaiety, ‘it might be better for me and for him, too, now.’
‘I differ from you,’ said Geff, somewhat coldly. ‘Right and wrong are the same in every class. It would be an excellent thing for your health and spirits to get more change, more society. Stop there! Remain for ever,’ added Geff warmly, ‘in such ignorance as yours.’ And indeed the thought crossed him that, at this hour, what Dinah needed was safer anchorage, not wider ship-room. ‘Your happiness and Gaston’s would be wrecked if you attempted to rule life by any other “sayings” than your own.’
But there was a goodly alloy of mild obstinacy in Dinah Arbuthnot’s character. A given idea started, and she was slow to part with it. The recesses of her mind would seem to shut, with pertinacious closeness, over any decided impression, once made, and the key for opening these recesses could not always be found, even by Dinah herself.
From whatever source the sudden conviction of her narrowness arose, another four-and-twenty hours showed Geoffrey that the conviction was genuine. Dinah had made some kind of compact with herself, not only in the matter of opinions but of conduct. On the following day, Sunday, it happened that Lord Rex walked home with Mrs. Arbuthnot from morning service at the town church. Invited by Gaston, whose easy hospitality extended itself to most men, Lord Rex remained to lunch. He stayed on, long after Gaston’s afternoon engagements had taken him elsewhere. And Dinah, although her cheeks flushed, her spirit chafed, endured this, her first experience in the difficult duties of a hostess, without complaint.
‘Lord Rex Basire kept his Sabbath, it seems, in Miller’s Hotel,’ observed Geff, when the Arbuthnot cousins were smoking, one his short briar pipe, the other a delicately-flavoured cigarette after dinner. Geoffrey’s own Sabbath had been kept in the wards of the hospital, full to overflowing with the survivors of the quarry accident. ‘No wonder Dinah confesses to a headache. That lad’s talk, a nice mixture of slang and assurance, judging from the specimens he gave us at lunch, would scarcely be of the nature Dinah loves.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Basire can be very fair company when he likes,’ said Gaston, with philosophic optimism. ‘He is not a giant, intellectually. But in their heart of hearts, Geff, however unflattering this may be to you and me, women don’t care a straw for intellectual men—until they have been authoritatively labelled. The island ladies, from Madame the Archdeaconess downwards, delight in Lord Rex, title, disabled arm, slang, assurance—all.’
‘Imagine five hours of him at a stretch. That is about what your wife had to live through to-day.’
‘Dinah is rousing herself, I hope and believe. It will do her all the good in the world to live through being bored.’ This was said with amiable imperturbability by Dinah’s husband. ‘I trust, for her own sake, poor girl, she is learning reason, beginning to discover there may be other music in the spheres besides that of the eternal domestic duo without accompaniment.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot puffed away at his pipe in silence.
‘It was a great thing getting her to the rose-show. For that, Geff, I suspect, I must thank you.’ Gaston gave a penetrating glance at his cousin’s face. ‘Miss Bartrand would certainly not have called on us but at your instigation, and through Miss Bartrand my poor Dinah has been introduced—well, to Lord Rex Basire, an Open Sesame! let us trust, to the strictly guarded gates of insular society.’