CHAPTER XIX
GASTON ARBUTHNOT’S PHILOSOPHY
The first dressing-bell was ringing by the time he reached the hotel. Dinah’s parlour was empty; her embroidery frame—silver paper shrouding its impossible forget-me-nots and auriculas from the light of heaven—stood on her work-table. Passing into the adjoining room without knocking, Mr. Arbuthnot beheld a sight not new to him, save as regarded the hour of the day—Dinah on her knees beside her bed, her head bowed, her face hidden between her hands.
She rose up hurriedly at the sound of her husband’s entrance. She brushed away some tell-tale tears, not, however, before Gaston’s quick glance had had opportunity to detect them.
All men dislike the sight of a wife in tears. A small minority may dislike the sight of a wife on her knees. Gaston Arbuthnot shared both prejudices. He concealed his irritation under a kiss—cold, mechanical, the recipient felt those kisses to be—bestowed on each of Dinah’s flushing cheeks.
‘I beg a thousand pardons for disturbing you at your prayers, my dear, but——’
‘I was not praying. I wish I had been,’ interrupted Dinah promptly. ‘To pray, one’s heart must be at rest.’
Now Gaston Arbuthnot looked upon all strong and unpleasant emotion with a feeling bordering on actual repugnance. And Dinah’s voice had that in it which threatened storm. His irritation grew.
‘I beg your pardon for interrupting a mood not calm enough for prayer (although it required a prayerful attitude), yet sad enough for tears. That terrible habit of weeping will wear away even your good looks in time, Dinah.’
A time far distant, surely! Never had she been fairer in Gaston’s sight than at this moment, in her fresh cambric dinner dress, with her hair like a nimbus of gold around her forehead, with a colour vermeil as any Italian dawn on the cheeks his lips had newly touched.
‘I should like to keep my good looks till I am fifty years old, if good looks were only faithful servants, if they brought one only a taste of real happiness. As it is——’
‘My dear girl, although you chance to be a little out of temper with life, don’t forget you have a husband. I am a vain man—so you and Geff tell me—and the chief of all my vanities is, that I am blest with a handsome wife.’
‘Out of temper with life? I think not, Gaston. Life has been sent me, the rugged with the smooth, and I must learn to fit myself to both. If I had been clever I should have learnt my lesson long ago. I must shape myself to things as they are, not want to shape them according to my poor village notions. I was trying to reason about it all just now.’
‘In an attitude that I misunderstood,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘I go on my knees when I need to think, clearly and humbly. I would not dare to say at such times that I pray.’
Talk like this was beneath, or above, Gaston Arbuthnot’s level. He told her so plainly.
‘My afternoon has been passed in a thoroughly mundane and grovelling manner, Dinah. I left this house at about three, just when you were giving Lord Rex Basire a lesson in cross-stitch! Since then I have been spending my time, not in solemn thoughts that required genuflexion, but in listening to the last little version of the last little bit of island gossip. It seems you mean, after all, to go into the world where, as I have often told you, so many more sink than swim. You have accepted Rex Basire’s invitation for the picnic next Wednesday?’
The accusation, if it were one, came with a sharpness of ring foreign to Gaston Arbuthnot’s modulated voice. Dinah’s colour deepened.
‘I have accepted Lord Rex Basire’s invitation for Wednesday—yes.’
‘You cannot, I think, mean to go. The picnic will be a helter-skelter kind of affair. It was got up by these young men, in the first instance, more as a frolic than anything else, and——’
‘You are going yourself, are you not, Gaston?’
‘That is uncertain. I believe I did give a conditional consent over the dinner-table, before it was at all sure the thing would come off.’
‘And Mrs. Thorne is going?’
‘Oh, Linda goes everywhere. There is a legend that she and the Doctor dined one night at mess.’
‘And Madame Corbie? Don’t you think a party that is staid enough for an Archdeacon’s wife must be safe for me?’
It was Dinah who spoke; yet the tone, the words, were curiously unlike Dinah’s. Some other woman, surely, stood in the place of her who during four years had been as wax to every careless turn of Gaston Arbuthnot’s will!
‘I can see that you have made up your mind—confess, Dinah, you have run already to Madame Voisin’s and ordered your dress for Wednesday?’
She turned away, impatiently, at the question.
‘Well, I will not be unwise enough to argue. At least persuade Geoffrey to go too, get Geoffrey to take care of you. Had I been consulted,’ remarked Gaston drily, ‘I should have advised you to “come out” anywhere rather than on a yacht hired, in this kind of way, by Lord Rex Basire and his brother subs.’
‘Gaston!’
‘Oh, not because of the right or wrong of the thing. I don’t,’ said Gaston, ‘go in for transcendental attitudes, morally or physically. My advice would have been simply offered on a matter of taste. You, my love, are doubtless the best judge. What time is it—seven? Then I have scarcely half-an-hour left to dress.’
‘To dress!’ faltered Dinah. ‘And my briar roses, our walk to Roscoff Common? I have been looking forward to it for days. Did you not promise to draw me some real briar roses for the finish of my border?’
‘Of course, I promised, and of course I shall fulfil, my dear child. The Roscoff roses will keep.’
‘And you are going out to dinner again, Gaston?’
‘Only to The Bungalow.’ Mr. Arbuthnot made a move towards the door of his dressing-room. ‘Mrs. Thorne is amiable enough generally to condone a morning-coat. To-night, I believe, there will be more of a party than usual.’
Dinah rested her hand upon her husband’s shoulder, but not with the clinging, imploring touch to which Gaston Arbuthnot was accustomed.
‘If I could have an answer to one question I should be content,’ she exclaimed, almost with passion. ‘It is an answer you can give. What are Mrs. Thorne’s gifts? What is the cleverness which draws a man as difficult to please as you five days a week to her house?’
The situation had become critical. A feverish colour burned on Dinah’s face, her question was trenchant and desperately to the point. But it was just the hardest thing imaginable to get Gaston Arbuthnot into a tiptoe posture. The drama of his life, so he himself avowed, consisted, a good nine-tenths of it, of carpenter’s scenes. If he were forced to declaim some passage of high and tragic blank-verse it would inevitably sound like a bit of genteel comedy from his lips!
A husband of warmer temper, it would be unjust to say of warmer heart, must have kindled at the daring of Dinah’s words, the ardent eagerness of her face.
Gaston Arbuthnot was interested rather than moved. He answered with the chill candour of an impartial judge:
‘Linda’s gifts? First on the list we must place the cardinal one of vocal silence. Mrs. Thorne does not sing.’
‘She can accompany other people who do,’ said Dinah, with imprudent significance.
‘And can accompany them well. Have I ever told you, Dinah, how and where I first saw the lady who is now Doctor Thorne’s wife?’
‘You have not. You have never spoken to me about Mrs. Thorne’s life, past or present.’
Dinah’s tone was as nearly acrid as her full and rounded quality of voice permitted. She felt intuitively that Gaston would parry her question, as he had so often done before, by apposite narrative which yet led no whither; felt that though every word he spoke might be true to the letter, the one truth of vital moment to herself would be in the words left unspoken.
‘It was in Paris, my love, in long past days before I went to Cambridge, and when I was much less of an Englishman than I am now. My mother, with a wholesome dread of my artist friends, and of the Quartier Latin, cultivated what she called occasions of family life for me. One such occasion came to her hand. Under the same roof with us, but on a lower floor, as befitted their purse, lived a rich Jew family, with a bevy of young daughters and an English governess——’
‘Linda Thorne?’
‘At that time Linda Smythe. Yes, Linda Constantia was seated at a piano the first evening my mother forced me down to Madame Benjamin’s salon. I think I see her now, poor soul, playing accompaniments to the singing—the terrible operatic singing of Papa Benjamin. By and by we danced in a round, “Have you seen the baker’s girl?” “Mary, soak thy bread in wine,” and other mild dances of the unmarried French mees. The governess remained at the piano still. ‘Our good Smeet! she knows so well to efface herself,’ said Madame Benjamin, giving me a tumbler of sugar-water to present to my countrywoman. I might almost answer your question, Dinah, in Madame Benjamin’s words—Linda Thorne understands perfectly the difficult social art of effacing oneself.’
‘Was she effaced at Saturday’s rose-show?’
‘She was a locum tenens, good-naturedly presiding over the refreshment stall for some friend with a sprained ankle.’
‘With an affection of the throat, Gaston. So the story ran, when you first told it me.’
‘You are severe, Dinah. If a pretty woman could possibly be tempted into feeling bitterly towards a plain one, I should say that you were bitter towards Linda Thorne.’
Dinah was unsoftened by the compliment.
‘To efface oneself,’ she repeated. ‘That means—in homely, plain English, such as I talk and understand?’
‘To keep gracefully in the background while others fill the prominent parts,’ said Gaston, with a laugh. ‘If you knew Linda Thorne better, if you could see her at one of her own charming little parties, you would appreciate the knack she has of not shining. She is quite the least selfish, least self-absorbed creature in the world.’
Straight, warm, living, flew a denial from Dinah’s lips.
‘Mrs. Thorne is wrapt in selfishness! If she was a good, true woman, she must guess how the hearts of other women, other wives, bleed, only at a thought of neglect! I can’t cope with her, Gaston, for conversation. She was born and educated a lady, and I belong to the working people, less taught when I was a child than they are now. But that should make her generous. She is rich in good things—has she not got little Rahnee? And I have but the hope, weak that hope grows at times, of keeping your love.’
A flush of annoyance overspread Gaston Arbuthnot’s handsome face.
‘If you would only take life in a quieter spirit, Dinah, content yourself with the moment’s common happiness, like the rest of us! I speak in kindness, my dear girl.’ Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot here fell to examining his signet-ring closely, perhaps because he did not wish to meet his wife’s eyes. ‘If you would care for any mortal thing, in addition to that somewhat unworthy person, Gaston Arbuthnot, it would be better for us both.’
Dinah turned deadly white.
‘If the child had lived!’ she uttered. ‘If we had her now, nearly the age of Rahnee, my heart would not be so athirst for love. It would come to me naturally. Just as I am, no cleverer, or brighter, or more original, you might find my company sufficient, if we had the child.’
‘We cannot cut out our lives by our own pattern,’ said Gaston, with irrefragable philosophy. ‘The disappointment, God knows, was bitterly keen to both of us at the time. Looking round the world now, I am disposed to wonder sometimes if the possession of a child be an unmixed blessing.’
‘It would have been so to me.’ The wound had never so thoroughly healed that Dinah could bear a careless touch on the cicatrice. ‘But I have no right to complain,’—she said this through her tears,—‘God gave, and took away. Who am I to question His wisdom?’
During several seconds Mr. Arbuthnot seemed to grow more and more absorbed in the contemplation of his ring; then, by an alert side movement, he contrived to reach the door of his dressing-room.
‘You are going? You intend really to dine with the Thornes this evening?’
Dinah brushed her hand hastily across her eyes.
‘Certainly, I intend to keep my engagement,’ answered Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘You would not break it, if I asked you?’
‘I would do any conceivable thing you asked me—with sufficient cause. I have too much opinion of your good taste to dread your ever placing yourself, or me, in a ridiculous position.’
‘If you would, I should give up all this plan for Wednesday. We would go back’—a soft far-off look stole over Dinah’s face as though for a moment she indulged in the retrospect of some too-dear dream—‘go back—ah! fool that I am—to the early days—days when you said the best dinner-party in London could not tempt you to leave me for an evening.’
While she was speaking she had followed him. Her hand rested on his sleeve. Her eyes, with piteous, imploring earnestness, sought to read his face.
‘There is no returning to old days,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot. ‘People of our age should have sense enough to realise this. The exclusive boy-and-girl idolatry of one year of life would be rank absurdity in a dignified Darby and Joan of our standing.’
Dinah shrank away from him. Perhaps it occurred to her that exclusive idolatry had never existed at all on Gaston’s side. How long, in truth, did he keep to the declaration, made in his honeymoon, of preferring quiet evenings with her to the best dinner-parties in London?
‘When I came in just now, Dinah, I interrupted you at some spiritual exercise, not high enough to be called prayer, yet that required a kneeling attitude. It is a pity,’ said Mr. Arbuthnot, looking disagreeable, ‘that the self-communings of good people so seldom lead them to charity—I don’t mean almsgiving—I mean a broader, more charitable frame of mind. If you could only recognise one fact, that there is a great variety of human nature about you in the world, it would be something gained.’
‘I know it, Gaston. What I want is to be lifted out of my own narrow ignorance.’
‘Take Geoffrey, for instance. In Geoffrey we have a man sound to the core. No caprice, no vanity in our cousin, none of the discontent and levity, and thirst for amusement which disfigure some characters that might be named. For contrast,’ Gaston Arbuthnot’s eyes rested discerningly on his wife, ‘look at Rex Basire—an empty-skulled little tailor’s block, doubtless, yet with a brave soldier’s heart in him all the same! By the bye, my dear, I need not exhort you,’ he added lightly, ‘to be charitable to Lord Rex. If women would only be as fair towards each other as they are towards us! I really admired the philosophy with which you gave that young gentleman his lesson in cross-stitch to-day.’
The careless tone of banter brought back Dinah’s accustomed self-control. Nothing so effectually checks emotion as the absence of emotion in our fellow-actors.
‘Lord Rex was bent upon working three or four stitches in my ottoman. It cost me the trouble only of unpicking them, and when he asked my leave I was ignorant—I always am ignorant—about the politeness of saying “No.” That is what I must learn.’
‘The art of saying “No,”’ observed Mr. Arbuthnot, not in a very hearty voice.
‘The art of speaking and acting—well, as Mrs. Thorne, as every woman of your world, would do! There’s no going back to old days, Gaston. You are right there. I must shape myself to things as they are, not to try to shape them to my needs. That is chiefly why I accepted the invitation for Wednesday. I mean to learn from the example of others. I mean to turn over a new leaf from to-day.’
‘Keep true to your own transparent self, child. Be what you have been always, and I, for one, shall be contented.’