CHAPTER XVII
THE FIRST CRUMPLED ROSE-LEAF
Rex Basire showed no disposition to let his newly-made acquaintance with Dinah Arbuthnot cool. Long before the hour for visitors on Monday afternoon, Louise, the French waitress, entered the Arbuthnots’ parlour. She placed before Dinah a card, also a bouquet made up entirely of white and costly hothouse flowers. Just like the bouquet Gaston gave her on her wedding morning! thought Dinah, with a rush of bitter-sweet recollection.
‘The Monsieur who was here yesterday, le petit Milor au moustache blond, demanded news of Madame. Was Madame visible? Should she, Louise, pray Milor to enter?’
Dinah glanced with indifference at card and flowers alike, then she rose from her work-table. Gaston Arbuthnot, it happened, was at home, putting the finishing touches to ‘Dodo’s Despair’ in his improvised studio. Walking quickly to the open window, Dinah, in a whisper, appealed to her husband.
‘Gaston, how shall I get rid of Lord Rex Basire? He has sent in his card and some flowers, as if flowers from a stranger could give one pleasure! He demands news of me, the French girl says, but that is too senseless. Tell me the civil way to—to——’
‘Shut the door in his face,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, looking up from his model as Dinah hesitated. ‘Why shut the door at all? The poor boy will be better off talking to you than he would be making useless purchases for young ladies in the Petersport shops.’
‘But I am at work. I am counting off stitches for the forget-me-nots round Aunt Susan’s ottoman, and then I shall come outside. I want no company but yours.’
‘Basire will help you to count forget-me-nots. The very employment he would delight in!’
And, raising his voice, Gaston Arbuthnot called cheerily to the servant that Madame was visible. There was no time for Dinah to escape. In another minute Lord Rex had followed his hothouse bouquet, his card, and the French waitress into her presence.
She suffered him to possess her hand for one chill, unwilling instant. Determined, after a somewhat confused and halting fashion, to amend the error of her ways, to instruct herself, as in a book, in the usages of Gaston’s world, poor Dinah shrank like a child from the initiatory chapter of her lesson. She had endured Lord Rex, yesterday, in the spirit of martyrdom. But to-day, to-morrow! Over what space between the present time and September was her endurance to last?
‘I was afraid if I waited till the afternoon you would be out, Mrs. Arbuthnot. And I have a weighty matter to put into your hands; I—I—mean an awfully great favour to ask of you.’
Rex Basire, as garrison society knew him, was a youth weighted by no undue modesty, no obsolete chivalrous deference in his manner towards Woman. He really shone, little though Dinah might appreciate such shining, as he stood, hesitating—for a moment half abashed—before the calm coldness of her face.
‘You will forgive me for calling at this unholy hour?’ he proceeded as she remained silent.
Dinah Arbuthnot glanced towards the flood of sunshine that rested on the flower-bright borders of Mr. Miller’s garden.
‘Why is the hour unholy?’ she inquired, with slow gravity.
‘I mean an hour when you were certain to be busy,’ said Lord Rex, approaching her work-table. ‘Now I can see I am interrupting you, Mrs. Arbuthnot, am I not?’
He drew forward a chair for Dinah; then, after standing for some appreciable time, and finding that she neither spoke to him nor looked at him, he seated himself, uninvited.
‘Awful shame, isn’t it, to interrupt you like this?’
‘It does not matter much, my lord. My time was occupied in nothing more important than counting stitches for a border—that dreariest form of feminine arithmetic,’ Dinah’s lips relaxed, ‘as my husband calls it.’
‘Does your husband say so really? Just what one might expect. All husbands are alike.’
Modelling his clay outside, Mr. Arbuthnot smiled good-humouredly to himself at the remark.
‘Now, to me—you mustn’t mind my saying so—lovely woman is never so lovely as when she is absolutely a woman! Dead against the higher education business—girl graduates—platform females—you know the style of thing I mean. Only one out of my tribe of sisters, Vic, the eldest, works at her needle—my favourite sister from my cradle.’
Rex Basire felt that he threw a shade of discriminative, yet unmistakable flattery into this avowal of family preference. Dinah held her peace, having in her possession none of those useful colloquial counters which less uninformed persons have agreed to accept as coin. Rex Basire’s generalisation about husbands lingered in her mind with unpleasant, with personal significance. Was it possible that Gaston’s coolness towards her had become matter of comment in the idle little world to which Linda Thorne and Lord Rex Basire both belonged?
‘I work at my needle,’ she remarked presently, ‘because I am not gifted enough to do better things. If I had talent, a tenth part of talent like Gaston’s, I should not spend my time counting threads of canvas.’
So the discriminative flattery had fallen through. Lord Rex tapped his exceedingly white teeth with the top of his cane. He searched diligently throughout the length and breadth of his brain for subject-matter, and found the land naked. His want of inspiration must, he began to think, be Mrs. Arbuthnot’s fault. These constant allusions to the absent husband were crushingly unsuggestive; tended, indeed, towards irksomeness. Arbuthnot was a well-looking man enough, of the usual American type, clever, possibly, in his way,—could knead up clay into droll little figures, and sing French songs without accent! It was distinctly not to listen to Gaston Arbuthnot’s praises that Lord Rex had toiled under a hot sun, and at this ‘unholy hour,’ from Fort-William Barracks up to Miller’s Sarnian Hotel.
He asked himself if Dinah were really as beautiful as during the past two days and nights she had appeared before him in his dreams? With a world full of charming women, most of them disposed, thought Lord Rex, to value one adequately, were this particular woman’s good graces high enough stakes to be worth playing for?
Was she really, if one watched her dispassionately, so beautiful?
Dinah set up her frame, and, leaning over it, began, or went through the semblance of beginning, to count her stitches. In doing so the line of down-bent golden head, the sweep of lash on the pink cheek, the outline of throat and shoulder, were given with full unconscious effect to Lord Rex. And the young man’s heresy left him. Whatever his other scepticisms, he felt, while he lived he could never doubt more on one subject, the flawlessness of Dinah Arbuthnot’s beauty.
‘Please let me help you in your dreary arithmetic, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Lend me a needle, at least, and give me a trial. I have only one hand to use, but I have been shown, often, how worsted-work stitches are counted.’ And, indeed, Rex Basire had had a pretty wide training in most unprofitable pursuits. ‘Each little painted square of the pattern goes for two threads, does it not?’
‘I am sure I did not know gentlemen understood about cross-stitch!’ And Dinah reluctantly surrendered her canvas to his outstretched hand. ‘Your lordship,’ she added, ‘will never make out the different shades of blue. This forget-me-not border is the most heart-breaking pattern I have worked.’
Your lordship—your lordship! Gaston’s face assumed an unwonted liveliness of colour as his wife’s voice reached him. Would Dinah never leave off talking as the young ladies talk behind the counters in glove shops, he asked himself? Would she never learn the common everyday titles by which men and women address each other in the world?
The clay was no longer plastic under Mr. Arbuthnot’s touch. He moved without sound to the window. He took a discerning glance at the two people seated beside the table—Lord Rex with masculine awkward fingers solemnly parcelling out canvas forget-me-nots, as though his commission depended on his accuracy; Dinah, a look of shy amusement on her face, demurely watching him.
Gaston Arbuthnot took one glance. Then he put aside his tools, wrapped a wet cloth hastily around ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ and with a manner not devoid of a certain impatience, prepared to quit his studio. Could it be—the question presented itself unbidden—that a shadow of coming distrust had fallen on him? The thought was absurd. He, Gaston Arbuthnot, distrustful of the gentle, home-staying girl, whose devotion to himself had at times—poor Dinah—amounted to something worse than a fault, an inconvenience! That to-morrow’s sun should rise in the east was not a surer fact than that his wife’s Griselda-like fidelity should endure to the end.
And still, in the inmost conscience of him, Gaston Arbuthnot was uncomfortable.
He had spent nearly four years of absolute trust—four golden years of youth, of love, with the sweetest companion that ever blest the lot of erring man. In this moment he realised the sensation of the first crumpled rose-leaf. Commonly jealous he could not be. His temperament, the circumstances of his lot, forbade ignoble feeling. He knew that for a man like Rex Basire toleration must be the kindliest sentiment that Dinah, with difficulty, could bring herself to entertain.
It was not jealousy, not distrust; it was simply the reversal of all past experience that disconcerted Gaston’s mind. It was the whole abnormal picture—the diverted look on Dinah’s face, her embroidery needle and canvas—hers—between Rex Basire’s fingers, that was so blankly unwelcome in his sight.
If Gaston Arbuthnot ever in his life was an actor in a similar bit of drawing-room comedy, you may be sure the rôle chosen by him had been the one now played by Lord Rex. Some other fellow-mortal in a blouse, and with clay-stained hands, may have watched from the slips. It was Gaston who counted the stitches!
He was not cut out by Nature to take subordinate parts; and this his first little taste of abdicated power had a singularly insipid flavour to his palate.