CHAPTER XXIII
A SWAGGER AND A SWORD
It was the hottest, most deserted hour of the day when the walking party reached Langrune plage, an hour when such of the young Parisians as do not follow la pêche drive donkey-carts—those wonderful, springless, seatless, Langrune carts—along the country roads, or start, by rail, to distant Trouville for toilettes and distraction. Here and there were elderly ladies at work before the doors of their canvas bathing-sheds. In the road two portly fathers of families were solemnly sending up ‘messengers’ to a very small Japanese kite some fifty or sixty feet above their heads. Two other middle-aged gentlemen played at battledore and shuttlecock. A few irrepressible boulevard lovers sat over their cards or dominoes outside the restaurant windows of the principal hotel. The shrill sounds from a fish auction, held on the monster slab of rough granite which constitutes the Langrune market-place, alone broke the stillness.
Before one had thought it possible that dress or speech could have betrayed the nationality of the new-comers, up ran a brown-legged, tattered sand-imp, holding out a bunch of shore-flowers. He announced his name, with some pride of birth, as Jean Jacques la Ferté of these parts, offering his services as cicerone to the English strangers.
‘The gentlemen, without doubt, make a pilgrimage to La Delivrande, half a league away up the country? At La Delivrande is the church and the altar where the miracles are wrought. There are the little ships of the sailors, the crutches left by the cripples who get back use of their legs. And for the ladies there are the stalls with the relics. Every one in the country,’ ran on the child, with voluble distinctness—Jean Jacques, a source of revenue to his parents, was trained to speak good French with the visitors—‘every one in the country who is sick gets cured. Every one who has a grand espoir goes to La Delivrande, and, if he has faith, attains it. Or so the curé says,’ added Jean Jacques, with a roll of his black eyes and a knowing shrug of the shoulders.
At seven years of age even sand-imps, in these advanced French days, like to show we are no longer bound by the priestly superstitions that were well enough for our grandmothers.
Lord Rex made a free paraphrase of the child’s narrative in English, and was witty thereupon. ‘Every one who is sick gets cured. Every one who has a grand espoir goes to La Delivrande, and, if he have faith, obtains it. Miss Verschoyle, what do you say? Have you a grand espoir? Have you faith? Shall we make our pilgrimage, confess our little peccadilloes, and get cured together?’
Miss Verschoyle rebuked his flippancy, but with lips less severe than her words. For Rosie’s mood was a lenient one. Had not Lord Rex throughout the day conducted himself as well, really, as though that poor Mrs. Arbuthnot were non-existent? It was decided that every one had unfulfilled hopes, that every one stood in need of cure, and that a general confession of peccadilloes would be the best possible employment of the afternoon! In another five minutes the pilgrims were on their road, ragged Jean Jacques leading the way, towards the distant white twin spires of La Delivrande.
The plage, I have said, was deserted; not so the lane, with quaint wooden houses on either side, which forms the High Street of Langrune. Here were bare-limbed, dark-faced fisher-lads, busily mending their nets; clear-starchers plying their delicate craft in the open air; housewives roasting coffee; pedlars chaffering over their outspread goods. Huge cats, with sleepy, watchful eyes, the sun shining comfortably on their ebon-barred coats, reposed on the window-sills. Lace-makers were at work, their headgear antiquated as their faces, their bobbins twirling in and out the pins, unerringly, as though they were the very threads of fate itself. Everywhere was the din of voices. Everywhere were open doors, open windows; and within, such plentitude of frugal cleanliness, such polished oak cupboards, such well-scoured cooking-pans, such snow-white bed draperies, such balsams and geraniums in brilliant scarlet pots, as might have put a Dutch village to shame.
Marjorie Bartrand and Dinah paused beside one of the lace-makers’ chairs, allowing the more ardent of the pilgrims to get on ahead. A distinct shade of constraint was holding Marjorie and Geff Arbuthnot aloof to-day. They had not met since yesterday’s friendly parting. No further misunderstanding in respect of Geff’s celibacy was possible between them. But a change had come across Marjorie’s manner towards her tutor. Geoffrey was sensible that she answered him with pungent and monosyllabic curtness during the whole of their outward voyage. And—seeing that among the knot of pretty Sarnian girls excellent temper reigned supreme, also that Geoffrey had joined the party for other motives than his own pleasure—one can scarcely wonder that this philosopher of four-and-twenty suffered himself, without over difficulty, to be consoled.
At the present moment, disappearing in the perspective of Langrune village, Geoffrey walked, to all outward seeming, well content, beside the prettiest and least wise of the three Miss de Carterets. Of which fact Marjorie took a brief and scornful note in her heart.
‘One can imagine a man’s becoming a senior wrangler.’ She made the remark to Dinah as they watched the everlasting bobbins whirl. ‘Yes, even I, with my halting Euclid and weak algebra (of which, no doubt, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot has spoken), can imagine a man’s becoming a senior wrangler. I can no more conceive of bobbin-turning than I could of a world in which two and two shall make five.’
Dinah’s slower brain needed time for reflection. ‘There could not be a world where two and two make five,’ she observed with certainty. ‘And lace-making, once you have served your time, steadily, is easy enough. Two of my cousins, down Honiton way, are lace-makers, and I learned a little of it when I was a child. The number of threads looks hard to strangers, Miss Bartrand, but it just gets to one twirl of the bobbins in time. Many of the workers keep to the same pattern for life, when they know it well. After a bit, your fingers work without your eyes.’
‘How horrible! One twirl of the bobbins, one pattern, for life! And to think that lace-makers do not commit suicide by scores!’
‘I don’t know that there’s much difference between lacework, or wool-work, or plain sewing,’ said Dinah Arbuthnot. ‘We have, all of us, to go through with our day’s task, whatever the stitch may be.’
The speech came so naturally, was so fraught with unconscious womanly humility, that Marjorie felt abashed. What real heroism, of an incomprehensible kind, must not Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife possess? This girl of two-and-twenty who worked perpetual cross-stitch, who kept her tongue and spirit calm, who loved, with soul and might, yonder débonnaire gentleman, of the handsome eyes and decorative smile, sketching charming Parisian fisher-girls on the beach—under Linda Thorne’s criticism!
‘If I speak hotly against needlework, it is that I am thinking of Spain, my mother’s country. In Spain, you must know, the miserable girls, to this hour, scarcely learn more than embroidery in their schools and convents, with reading enough, perhaps, to stumble through the announcement of a bull-fight, or decipher a love-letter. Of course,’ admitted Marjorie Bartrand coldly, ‘it is said that when a woman marries, in England or in Spain, she must do as her husband wills. I never see the force of that “must.” I think a woman should do what is right for herself, with large trust in Providence as to the rest! The question is not one that concerns me. Still, Mrs. Arbuthnot, one cannot help feeling indignant about all very crushed people. I am dead against slavery, especially when slavery puts on a domestic garb.’
By this time they had passed the last straggling houses of Langrune. Fair level country, the fields already on the edge of harvest, spread around their road. Along the wayside path was a very mosaic of brilliantly blended hues, the corn-flowers blue and purple, the scarlet poppies, the white and gold of the wild camomile making up the purest chord of colour. A slight south-west wind, dry and elastic after its transit over so many a league of sunny land, was invigorating as wine.
‘How the spirit rises the moment one treads real solid earth!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand. ‘I feel at this moment like walking straight off to Spain, the country I love and where my life will be spent! Why, with twenty francs apiece in our pockets, and camping out by night under stacks or hedges, you and I might easily reach the Peninsula on foot, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
Dinah’s geography did not embolden her to hazard a contradiction. Something in Marjorie Bartrand’s tone jarred on her reasonlessly. It were hard to believe that she considered Geff a man likely to fall in love. Had not the conditions of her life for years put speculations as to Geoffrey’s future happiness on one side? And still, a true daughter of Eve in every weakness belonging to the passion, Dinah was an inchoate match-maker. She would fain have seen the whole world blest with such fireside beatitude as constituted her own ideal of highest good. With firm and true perception she had noticed a dozen trivial things of late, all proving Geff’s imagination, if not his heart, to be in his teaching of Latin and Greek at Tintajeux Manoir. She had hoped that the notice taken of herself by Marjorie was an earnest of the pupil’s liking for her master, had furtively and with misgiving dug the foundations of many an air-castle that Marjorie and Geff, at some far-off day, might jointly inhabit.
The girl’s diatribes against domestic slavery, her open avowal of love for Spain and of her hopes of spending her life among Spanish people, caused a troubled look to come on Dinah’s face.
‘Your plans don’t point towards an English home, Miss Bartrand. Yet I think Geoffrey has told me you mean to study at Girton?’
‘To fit myself for my future work—yes. The Spanish school-boards are just as conservative as English ones. A young woman armed with Cambridge certificates would have more chance of coming to the front than another, equally strong-minded, who should rely on her own merits.’
‘Strong-minded!’ Dinah ejaculated with horror. ‘At your age, with all the sweet happiness of life still to come, you talk, as though you approved such things, of being strong-minded?’
Marjorie swept off the heads from a cluster of wayside camomile flowers with the stick of her sunshade. An expression of will which yet was neither unlovely nor unfeminine glowed upon her girlish face.
‘Let us understand each other better, Mrs. Arbuthnot. It may well be that our notions of “sweet happiness” are not the same.’
Dinah looked uneasy, and kept silent.
‘Power—I will make a confession to you such as I never made before—power is my ideal of happiness. I want to rule, we will hope for good; in any case, to rule, to be needed on all sides, sought after, distinguished—to see my name in print! That is the truth, no matter how I may wrap truth up in fine-sounding words,’ said Marjorie Bartrand. ‘That is the secret of my enthusiasm for humanity, and of my personal ambition. To lead others, to command, is my ideal of happiness.’
‘And mine,’ exclaimed Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife unhesitatingly, ‘is—to obey. For a woman to look up to another stronger life, to be ruled by a stronger will, gladly to take all little household worries on herself—I speak badly, Miss Bartrand, but you guess my meaning—and feel more than paid by one kind look or word in return, to know that as much as she wants of the world is safe between four lowly walls, to have her hours filled with the care of others, to keep her parlour bright and cheerful, to hear the voices of the children——’
Dinah’s own voice broke; and Marjorie, who had watched her with looks of lofty compassion, softened involuntarily.
‘So far from speaking badly, Mrs. Arbuthnot, you speak with very pretty eloquence. You draw a picture of constant giving up, which, if one could believe it to be from life, would, I confess, be attractive. It is drawn from life, perhaps?’
‘Oh—no; I said only that would be my ideal of happiness,’ faltered Dinah, with a pang.
‘Fancied or real, such an existence would never do for me. I have not much taste for obedience. I have none at all for household worries. Babies I bar.’
‘Miss Bartrand!’
‘Yes, I do. Grandpapa and I visit about in our Pagan way among the Guernsey country people, and I know that I absolutely bar babies of every shade and degree. I am not sure I would go so far as to injure one,’ said Marjorie, stealing a glance at her companion’s shocked face; ‘but I feel that they are safest kept out of my sight. I tell the mothers so.’
‘You are too young to know what you feel, Miss Bartrand.’ There was a standstill of some moments ere Dinah recovered herself enough to speak. ‘Long before you are my age you’ll begin to see things differently. Young girls are a bit hard, I’ve sometimes thought, in all classes of life, until the time comes.’
‘What time, may I ask?’
‘The time for having a sweetheart and getting married,’ said Dinah Arbuthnot.
From any other lips Marjorie would have regarded such a suggestion as an indignity. Dinah was so true a woman, had a soul so whitely delicate, that the speech carried with it no possible suspicion of offence. It was homely common sense, kindly and simply uttered.
‘What you say might be true of most girls of my age. If I am hard, it is not because of my youth, or my inexperience. I have had’—Marjorie’s face flamed to the hue of the poppies in the corn—‘what the world is pleased to call a sweetheart. But for the interposition of Providence (I remember that interposition, night and morning, on my knees) I should be married now.’
‘Unless he loved you above everything, you are best as you are, Miss Bartrand. In marriage it is all or nothing. I mean—I mean,’ Dinah hesitated, ‘no wife could be happy with half a heart bestowed on her.’
‘Half! What do you say to a quarter, a fraction?’ exclaimed Marjorie, hotly. ‘What do you say to a creature stuffed as the dolls are, with sawdust, in lieu of a human heart at all? A creature well set up as regards shoulders, six feet in measurement, with fine white teeth, blue eyes, yellow moustache, a swagger and a sword? His would scarcely be the larger soul, Mrs. Arbuthnot, the stronger will which it should be a woman’s crown of honour to obey!’
Down went another head of clustering camomile, felled by a well-aimed stroke from Marjorie’s hand. Her eyes flashed fire.
‘And yet a wayward girl, scarcely past sixteen, and with no mother to give her counsel, might for two or three weeks, you know, be hurried into thinking such a man a hero. I was that girl, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Vanity blinded me, or the love of power, or something stronger than either. At all events, when Major Tredennis asked me, one fine morning, to be engaged to him, I said “Yes.”’
‘And the Seigneur of Tintajeux?’ asked Dinah, looking round at the dimpled, indignant face of seventeen.
‘“Major Tredennis comes of a race of gentlemen,” said grandpapa. “If Major Tredennis can make adequate settlements, and my granddaughter elects to spend her life with a popinjay, she may do so.”’
‘And, with no better advice than that, you were engaged?’
‘I was engaged. Major Tredennis used to write me foolish notes. He gave me a ring I never wore. He gave me chocolate creams, and a setter puppy. He sang French songs to me in an English accent. Looking back at it all now, I think the chocolate creams were the best part of that bad time, except, of course, the setter, whom I loved. When it was all broken off—for the owner of the white teeth and the sword was a right wicked craven, and should have married a girl in England who cared for him, without once looking at me;—when it was all broken off, and I had to send Jock back, I did weep, scalding tears, at parting from him. The only tears I have ever shed, or shall shed, in connection with love-matters.’
‘Wait!’ was Dinah Arbuthnot’s answer. ‘If I see you, as I hope to do, two or three years hence, it may be you will tell a different story.’
Marjorie glanced at the yachting party, sauntering contentedly, a hundred yards or so in front, among the lights and shadows of the orchard-bordered road. There was Lord Rex, outrageously devoted in manner to Rosie Verschoyle, with whom he loitered apart. And there, a little divided also from the rest, was Geff Arbuthnot, well entertained, one must surmise, by the shallow talk, fascinated by the pink-and-white charms of Ada, the most soulless and the prettiest of the de Carteret family.
‘If such a revolution takes place, a dozen years hence, that I marry,’ she observed, after consideration, ‘the husband I choose shall be a head-and-shoulders taller than myself, morally. No singer of ballad sentiment, no popinjay, with yellow moustache, and a sword, and uniform, next time. If I take to myself a master, he shall be a man—with a temper, a will, a purpose in life, all nobler than my own.’
Such a husband as Geoffrey would be! The thought obeyed the wish in Dinah’s heart.
‘And I must be first—first in his affection. I would have no rivals, past or present. If Bayard himself walked the earth and wished to marry me, Marjorie Bartrand, I would ask him if I was first. Yes, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I would ask Chevalier Bayard himself if he had looked at any other woman before he loved me; and if he had, and though my heart broke for it, I would refuse him.’
A red light broke on Marjorie’s cheeks, her eyes dilated. The likeness to old Andros, which came out in every moment of strong emotion, was never more marked than now.
‘If we ask too much we may lose all,’ said Dinah, not perhaps without a pang of dread as visions of Geoffrey’s youth rose before her. ‘I never heard anything about this gentleman.’
‘Chevalier Bayard? the first gentleman the world has known!’
‘But if he was put upon his word, yes, and though he stood with his bride before the altar, I think Chevalier Bayard might have to confess to some foolish fancy in the past.’
‘I spoke of love, not of foolishness,’ exclaimed Marjorie Bartrand. Then, as though quickly repenting of her warmth: ‘We have talked more than enough,’ she cried, ‘about a peradventure that will never become fact. Let us forget, with all speed, that so much nonsense has been spoken.’
But the conversation was one which neither of these young women could, by any means, forget while she lived.