CHAPTER XXI
‘IS MY VIRGIL PASSABLE?’
I have written that, in a softened and remorseful moment Marjorie Bartrand’s heart owned Geoffrey for its master.
In a character like Marjorie’s, softened and remorseful moods are apt, however, to be intermittent. On the evening of Saturday her pride had melted, ay, to such a point that, holding her tutor’s ‘love-letter’ between her hands, she went into a storm of penitent tears—she, Marjorie Bartrand, whose boast had been that there was one woman in Her British Majesty’s domain who would shed tears for no man while she lived!
Looking back upon these things from the cool and bracing heights of a Tintajeux Sunday, the girl’s stout spirit recoiled with derision from the image of her own weakness. The Seigneur’s after-dinner sarcasm, she felt, with tingling cheek, was true of aim. She had played a part, unknowingly, in the Arbuthnot drama: thanks to Cassandra Tighe, had no doubt treated Geoffrey with kindness not his due for the imaginary wife’s sake! Now would everything be on a frigidly proper footing. Her tutor had shown very good sense in returning property that had wrongly fallen into his keeping. Whatever small halo of romance hung around his life was dispelled. The construction of Latin prose, the working out of mathematical problems, would henceforth go on with dignified and scholarlike serenity.
But, as a first step, Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth!
Old Andros happened to give a longer sermon than usual on this Sunday morning of June 26—a sermon wearing a French garb now, but which was first preached fifty years ago before the University of Oxford, and whose polished sentences breathed the safe and sleepy theology of its day. The whole of the congregation slept, save one; the gentlemanly optimism of eighteen hundred and thirty appealing moderately to hearers who in the evening would revive beneath the burning eloquence of some neighbouring Bethesda or Zion. Marjorie, only, was awake: keen, restless, preternaturally stirred to mundane thoughts and desires as she had ever found herself, from her rebellious babyhood upward, under the inspiration of a high oak pew and monumental slabs. She thought over all her hours with Geoffrey from the first evening when she saw him in the Tintajeux drawing-room until their half quarrel on Saturday. She thought of her visit to Dinah, of the disillusionment wrought in her by the vision of French songbooks and yellow-backed novels. She thought of the moment when she rescued her letter from the Seigneur’s hands! Happily, the comedy of errors approached its finish! Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth, should have his masculine vanity soothed by no further misinterpretation of her conduct. Into a debateable land where a mature woman, her heart already touched, had shrunk from venturing, Marjorie, with the madcap courage of seventeen, resolved to rush.
As a first step, Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth!
And this resolution, formed in the dim religious light of the Tintajeux family pew, did not melt away, like too many excellent Sunday purposes, under the secular warmth of work-a-day open air. When Geoffrey walked into Marjorie’s schoolroom on Tuesday morning he found Grim Fate, in a pink chintz frock, with blossoming maidenly face, ready to place him in the outer cold for ever.
‘Good-day to you, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ The girl held herself stiffly upright, with smileless lips, with hands safely embedded in the pockets of her pinafore. ‘I was much obliged to you for returning my ribbon on Saturday, but I need not have put you to the trouble, to the expense of postage! I could have waited until to-day.’
Geoffrey, a backward interpreter always of feminine petulancy, sought for no latent meaning in her words. Marjorie Bartrand had never looked sweeter to him than now, in her fresh summer frock, with a livelier damask than usual on her cheeks, and with her hands cruelly holding back from their wonted friendly greeting. He had it not in his heart, on this June morning, to find a fault in her, inheritress of all the sins of all the Bartrands though she might be.
‘My poverty is heinous, Miss Bartrand, but I could just afford the penny stamp required for the postage of your waist-belt. After the lecture you read me on Saturday morning,’ went on Geff good humouredly, ‘I really dared not face you with that morsel of ribbon still in my possession.’
Marjorie’s lips lost their firmness. Taking her place at the schoolroom table, she cleared her throat twice. Then she pushed across a pile of copy-books in Geoffrey’s direction. She signed to him to be seated, presented him with a bundle of pens, drew forward the inkstand. Finally, intrenched, as it were, behind the implements which defined their social relationship, she delivered herself of the following singular confession:
‘When my lecture, as you please to call it, was given I did not know that you existed, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’
‘Miss Bartrand!’
‘The lecture was meant, in good faith, for another person. If an apology is needed, there you have it! I—I had listened to idle gossip,’ said Marjorie, taking desperate courage at the sound of her own voice, ‘and so—I must say it out, little though I like such subjects—I thought you were a married man, sir. I thought so from the first evening you came here. I thought so until the hour when I saw Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot at the rose-show.’
‘And your motives—when you called on Dinah?’ exclaimed Geoffrey, thrown off his guard.
‘When I called on Mrs. Arbuthnot I believed her to be my tutor’s wife. I had heard a great deal about her goodness and her beauty. And I had almost grown to hate you,’ added Marjorie, with one of her terrible bursts of outspokenness, ‘for leaving such a woman as Dinah at home, neglected, while you amused yourself.’
Then she lifted her eyes. She was startled to see how Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s face had paled; paled under the incivility, so Marjorie supposed, of her speech.
‘As a fact, of course, I never hated you at all.’ Her voice shook a little. ‘That gentle, beautiful Mrs. Arbuthnot is not your wife.’
‘Not my wife,’ echoed poor Geoffrey absently.
His tone was chill. Dipping a pen in the ink, he began to trace meaningless curves and lines on the cover of the exercise-book nearest his hand. During a few seconds he was obviously unmindful of his pupil’s presence.
‘Her lips, with their sad expression, haunt me,’ remarked Marjorie presently. ‘Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot, I should think, must be the most beautiful woman in the world.’
‘As she is certainly the truest and best.’ Geff had got back his self-possession. He spoke his credo as valiantly as though Marjorie Bartrand’s eyes were not fixed upon him. ‘And so,’ he found voice to say, ‘you could actually believe, on hearsay evidence, that a girl like Dinah would have chosen me for her husband, and I—have neglected her?’
Geoffrey laughed, not very joyously; then, taking up another copy-book, he glanced with mechanical show of attention over a sentence or two of Marjorie’s Latin translation. He held the page upside down—a fact which her memory, in after times, might recall as significant.
‘I honestly believed you to be married. Have you forgotten the first evening you walked out to Tintajeux—that evening when I told you the Bon Espoir was a good omen for our friendship?’
‘A fortnight ago to-day. I have not forgotten it.’
‘I looked upon you as my friend before I saw you. I had heard your history—the history, it would seem, of your cousin Gaston! I honoured a man who had had the courage of his opinions. I respected, I drew to you on account of the wife you had chosen. And now, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ exclaimed Marjorie hotly, ‘the comedy of errors is finished. I have learned my mistake, you see. And I trust that my apology has been sufficient.’
This time Geoffrey broke into a fit of wholesome, unconstrained laughter.
‘I am afraid I see through everything, Miss Bartrand. Your apologies say too much. I have been treated with humanity by accident, and may count upon dark days for the future. That I am not married is my misfortune,’ he added, watching her face,—‘a misfortune which, if I could only thereby re-establish myself in your favour, I would gladly remedy.’
‘Would you?... do you mean ...’
And then, looking up into her tutor’s eyes, Marjorie knew that they were both of them talking unwisdom, were trenching as nearly on the forbidden ground of sentiment as a young man and woman who had met for the hard study of classics and mathematics could well do.
‘I believe I got through some fair work yesterday,’ she remarked, with an air of cold business. ‘As to-morrow is to be wasted on folly, we may as well lose no time now. It is your system never to praise, sir,—a good one, doubtless. Yet I hope you will think my Virgil passable. I promise you it was done without the crib.’
Geff read the halting translation aloud, no longer holding the manuscript upside down. He did not think Marjorie’s Virgil passable, and put the copy-book aside without a word of comment. He showed himself severer than usual over Greek aorists, was stringent, to cruelty, in regard of Marjorie’s shakiest point—her mathematics. But at last, when the professional work was over, when he had risen to take leave, Geoffrey Arbuthnot extended his hand to his pupil as the girl’s heart knew he had never done before.
‘You have tolerated me hitherto,’ he observed, ‘for my imaginary wife’s sake. Do you think you can tolerate me, in future, for my own?’
With his eyes fixed on her face, her small fingers crushed in his grasp, Marjorie’s cheeks turned the colour of a pomegranate.
‘You know ... you ought to have been the other Arbuthnot cousin,’ she stammered, glancing up under her long lashes, then drawing her hand away warily.
‘I ought, you think, to have been Gaston? He would never have pleaded, as I plead, for toleration. Every woman living would tolerate Gaston of her own free will.’
‘Save Marjorie Bartrand! Pray make one exception to your rule. I come of an arbitrary and stiff-necked race. We—we Tintajeux people belong to minorities. We like, in most cases dislike, where we can.’
‘Give me credit, for a short time longer, of being the other Arbuthnot cousin,’ Geoffrey whispered as he left her. ‘Dislike me only as much as you did on that first evening when you gathered roses and heliotropes—for my wife!’