Never was a man surer of tumbling into little unlooked-for sociabilities than Gaston Arbuthnot. Had he been shipwrecked on a South Sea island I believe Gaston would have chanced upon an acquaintance there, some vanished shade from London Club or Paris café would have seized him by the button-hole before the day was out!
He was button-holed in Langrune-sur-Mer. When the pilgrimage returned from La Delivrande, Linda and her Robbie were found seated with Mrs. Verschoyle on a trio of hired chairs before the hotel, taking their pleasure rather mournfully. Cassandra Tighe, her scarlet cloak conspicuous from afar, was dredging—happy Cassandra—among such rocks as the tide still left uncovered.
Gaston Arbuthnot was invisible.
‘A real case of forcible abduction,’ cried Linda Thorne, addressing herself to Dinah. ‘You are not a foolishly nervous wife, I am sure, Mrs. Arbuthnot? You could philosophically listen to a story of how two pretty French girls carried away an English artist against his will.’
Dinah assented with one of her rare smiles. The knowledge that Gaston was finding amusement otherwise than in the half-clever talk, the too ready, too flattering sympathy of Linda herself, cast retrospective brightness upon the afternoon that his absence had clouded.
From jealousy of a selfish or little kind Dinah’s heart had never bled. Earlier in their married life, when Gaston still affected dancing, and as a matter of course went to balls without his wife, it was her usual next morning’s pleasure to scan his programmes, enjoy his sketches of his partners, his repetitions of their small-talk—all without a shade of hurt feeling. Once or twice she hinted that she would fain accompany him as a looker-on. ‘Nobody looks on long in this wicked world,’ was Gaston’s answer. ‘You do not dance, you do not play whist. You have a brain under your yellow locks, and you are too young to talk scandal. Ball-room atmosphere is unwholesome. I would not hear of such a sacrifice.’ And as it was not Dinah’s habit to pose as martyr, she obeyed, trusting in him always.
Beautiful, pure of soul herself, she simply honoured the beauty, believed in the purity of soul of other women. Gaston was popular, spoilt; an artist with an artist’s—more than this, with an American temperament. A degree of youthful immaturity seemed ever to lurk amidst his astute knowledge of life and of men. He had but a half-share, as he would tell her, of the fibres derived from long lines of bored ancestors. He sought diversion for diversion’s sake. She had made no quarrel with the inexorable facts of her husband’s existence or of her own. If only she had been his equal, intellectually! If she could have supplied him with the mental companionship he needed, or interested him in his childless fireside! Ah, could she thus have risen to his level, Gaston’s heart had been in her keeping still. Hence came the morbid unrest of her present life; hence the dread, increasing daily, hourly, strive with it as she might, of Linda’s influence.
‘I am afraid one gets used to most things, Mrs. Thorne. I have seen Gaston run away with so often that I am not much moved by the thought of these pretty French girls.’
Linda Thorne rose. She rested her hand confidentially within Dinah’s arm, much to Dinah’s chagrin, and proposed that they should walk together along the sands to look for Mr. Arbuthnot.
‘Yes, I must positively tell you the whole story. Your husband had finished his sketch of the lovely fisher-girl. The young person was not at all lovely, in fact. But she was striking. She had distinct genre. Artists care for genre, you know, much more than for beauty.’
Dinah resolved to question Gaston as to the truth of this. She resolved to cultivate distinct genre in herself for the remainder of her days.
‘Striking—that word sums up all. The big cobalt-blue eyes, that say about as much, in reality, as a china tea-saucer, and are supposed by imaginative men to say everything—blonde hair worn in a pigtail, palpably not original, to her heels; complexion carefully toned to a shade one point short of freckles; bare arms, akimbo—excellently shaped arms, of course; a native prawn basket, and a fishing-dress from Worth’s. I got to know the type so well,’ said Linda, ‘in my governess days, during one summer, especially, when the Benjamin sent me to Houlgate with her children.’
Dinah, who, as we have seen, had no genius for supplying the hooks and eyes of conversation, remained chillingly silent.
‘Your husband had finished his sketch of her—an admirably idealised one. I have it here.’ And Dinah, for the first time, perceived that Mrs. Thorne held possession of Gaston’s sketch-book. ‘Let us look at it together!’ impulsively, ‘or are you—no doubt you are—blasée about sketches? Well, well, it may be natural. Married to an artist, if one has no real, strong, natural talent for art——’
‘I have no real, strong, natural talent for anything,’ interrupted poor Dinah petulantly.
‘Oh—naughty! You must not say such things. I will not allow you to be modest. Mr. Arbuthnot tells me your needlework is’—Linda looked about her as though an encomium were hard to find—‘most elaborate! In these days needlework ranks among the fine arts. Of course you are wild about this exquisite new stitch from Vienna?’
‘I have not seen it. The only wool-work I do is old-fashioned cross-stitch.’
‘Just fancy! And Mr. Arbuthnot, I am convinced, spends his time—half his time—in designing quite lovely patterns for you?’
Dinah’s breast swelled as a vision of the Roscoff wild roses overcame her. She made no attempt at a parry.
‘If I had married an artist I would never have gone to the shops for patterns. Or rather, if I had married an artist I would never have embroidered at all. I should have thrown myself into his ambitions, his work—have spent my life so utterly at his side.’
Dinah stooped to pick up a little pink shell from the strand, by this action freeing herself from Linda Thorne. She put the shell inside her glove, thinking she would keep it as a memento of Langrune and of this summer day that had passed so nearly without a cloud. So nearly—but the summer day was not over yet!
‘All this time I am not accounting to you for your husband’s disappearance, am I? My dear creature, it was really the drollest thing! Robbie had not as yet floated up with the tide, and Mrs. Verschoyle and I, your husband with us, had made our slippery way across the rocks to mainland. Well, just as Gast ... I mean, as Mr. Arbuthnot was putting a last touch to his sketch, up ran a little Frenchman, full dress, a rose-and-white daughter in each hand, and an enormously stout wife, with a bouquet, following. He threw his arms round your husband’s neck, and but for Mr. Arbuthnot’s presence of mind would certainly have kissed him.’
‘Kissed!’
‘Of course. Have you never lived among French people? It was some old artist companion of Gast ... of your husband’s bachelor life. You can imagine the recollections of former joyous days spent in Paris as students together, the inquiries for mutual friends, now dead or married, the history each had to give of his marriage and present happiness!’
‘I cannot. I am not imaginative.’
It must be confessed that a tinge of displeasure was audible in Dinah’s voice. Every syllable of Mrs. Thorne’s unpremeditated chatter had wounded her like a stiletto prick.
‘Ah—and I am imaginative to my finger tips. We seem the very antithesis of each other, in character, as we are in looks.’ Linda had really a very graceful way of admitting her own plainness, when occasion offered. ‘I can assure you I filled up a dozen little blanks in our Benedicts’ exchange of confidences. I traced out a full and rounded whole most satisfactorily. People may slur over half a dozen years in as many words. If nature has endowed you with imagination, you read between the lines. The barest outline suggests the finished picture.’
Something in her tone would seem to imply that Gaston Arbuthnot’s married life had been a spoiled life, or so it seemed to Dinah’s irritated heart. Dinah felt that the half dozen words must have yielded latent hints of her own intellectual shortcomings, hints which Linda Thorne’s talent for filling up blanks had developed into certainty.
‘The next part of the ceremony was the introduction to Madame de Camors and the children—two small Parisian coquettes, about the age of my Rahnee, who fell in love with Mr. Arbuthnot on the spot.’
‘Little children fall in love with Gaston always,’ said Dinah hastily.
‘The family party was taking its departure, it seemed, under the broiling sun, to a children’s ball at Luc Casino. At a word from papa the small imps seized a hand each of Gas ..., of Mr. Arbuthnot, and dragged him away nolens volens. All children are tyrants,’ generalised Linda, with a dismal yawn, occasioned probably by the recollection of her virtuously spent afternoon, ‘but these terrible French children are the worst of all. Perhaps it is in imitation of the Americans. I consider the way American infants are brought forward in public places is a disgrace to the century.’
‘You think children without exception should be kept in their nurseries’?’
Dinah called to mind a group of four that passed her window on their road to the rose-show. She remembered a small figure dancing with exultation on rainbow-hued flounces.
‘My dear soul! Fancy putting such a question to me, a mother! Of course I make an exception of my own daughter. She is a good quiet little monkey,’ added Linda; ‘although Mr. Arbuthnot is positively spoiling her fast—I hope I impose her on no one. Children, as a rule, I look upon from the governess point of view. You know how my bread was earned when I was young?’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot has told me that he first met you in Paris.’
‘Yes, in the domestic service of Madame Moïse Benjamin. I got twenty pounds a year and my washing. I had to sleep under the roof, to play dance music, to remodel Madame’s dresses, to teach English to the three girl Benjamins and a boy—ah, that boy!’ said Linda, between her teeth. ‘If you think me like Becky Sharpe ... confess now, you do think me like Becky Sharpe?’
‘I do not, indeed.’ Dinah’s manner grew colder and colder. ‘I never heard of Becky Sharpe before.’
‘Well, if you had,’ said Linda, in high good humour, and storing up all the little scene against future dramatisation—‘if you had heard of Becky Sharpe, and had thought me like her, where would be the wonder? I was brought up just as Becky was, to live by my wits. My mamma—I connect her hazily with sofa cushions, much white embroidery, an Italian greyhound, doctors, and the smell of ether—my mamma died when I was four years old. She lies in Brussels cemetery,’ ran on Linda, drawing a hasty outline of a tombstone on the sand, ‘with Lady Constantia Smythe, and more than one side allusion to the peerage graven above her head. At the time she died we had not very definite daily bread. Still, my grandfather was an earl, and poor papa found one of his few consolations in making much of our nobility.’
Frankness, it would seem, was Linda Thorne’s strong point, but Dinah was unmoved by it. The earldom dazzled Gaston Arbuthnot’s lowly-born wife no more than Linda’s personal confidences propitiated her. Dinah had a child’s instinct for friends and for enemies. She liked, she disliked, unerringly, and was too transparently honest to mask her feelings.
Stooping down, she picked up another shell from the sea’s smooth edge. She sought once more to widen the space between herself and her companion. Linda Thorne’s quick brain observed the movement, divined the intention.
‘Excellent, stupid, well-meaning, ill-acting young woman. And I have not a reprehensible sentiment at all towards her!’ Thoughts like this shot through Linda’s mind—Linda who really had it not in her to know sterner passion than a drawing-room malignity. ‘With her youth, her goodness, her complexion, her upper lip, to be jealous of poor, plain, cynical, elderly me! She needs a pretty sharp lesson. Children who cry for the moon deserve to get something worth crying for.’ Then, sweetly, ‘You seem interested in shells, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ she observed aloud. ‘You study conchology as a science, perhaps, under the Platonic auspices of that severe-looking cousin of yours, Geoffrey Arbuthnot of John’s.’
‘I study nothing, unfortunately for myself. I am quite ignorant,’ said Dinah, lifting her face and meeting her tormentor’s eyes full. ‘I am picking up a shell or two,’ she added, ‘to keep as a remembrance of my day in Langrune.’
‘I should say you would remember Langrune without any tangible memento,’ remarked Linda. ‘Rather ungrateful, you know, if you did not.’
‘How, ungrateful?’
‘Well, because the picnic was given unconditionally in honour of you——’
‘I do not understand you,’ interrupted Dinah, with ill-judged warmth. ‘The party was planned before any one in Guernsey knew of my existence. I was asked accidentally—because I could be of use. Four or five girls had promised these young officers to come, and they wanted a married woman as a chaperon. This was what Lord Rex Basire said when he invited me on Monday.’
‘And you believed him? You accepted out of pure kindness to faire tapisserie! Mrs. Arbuthnot, you are too amiable.’
By this time Dinah Arbuthnot’s face blazed from brow to chin. Her conscience, over-sensitive in the lightest matter, smote her sore. Was not a selfish longing for widened experience—nay, was not a certain distrust of Gaston, a contemptible sense of triumph over Linda—at the bottom of her acquiescence?
‘What unusually correct taste Dame Nature displays in her colouring this evening.’ Mrs. Thorne gazed with decent vacuity at the sky, and away from Dinah’s face. ‘Soft primrose, fading into pearly-green, with just those few vivid touches of deep crimson. It suggests thoughts for a ball dress. And still, beautiful though the effect is, I would rather not see that sort of shimmer on the water. If we come in for fog-banks somewhere about the Race of Alderney, it will matter little whether the picnic originated for the chaperons, or the chaperons for the picnic! How atrociously hungry this sort of thing makes one! Surely dinner-time must be drawing nigh.’