CHAPTER XXVII
GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY
‘In two words, you have amused yourself, my dear.’ Under cover of the friendly twilight, Gaston Arbuthnot pressed his wife’s hand as it rested, a little shyly, on his arm. ‘A good sign for the future. You must enter into the world more, Dinah. You must cultivate this faculty for being amused; I desire nothing better.’
Though fog-banks and disaster might lie in ambush about the Race of Alderney, nothing could be tranquiller than the fair summer evening here, on the coast of France.
After an excellent dinner, vraie cuisine Normande, served in the quaint, red-tiled salle of the Hôtel Chateaubriand, the collected yachting party were now progressing along the pleasant sweep of road that leads to Luc. Luc alone, among this group of villages, has a jetty, and off Luc the Princess lay moored. Daylight’s last flicker was dying from the sky. Already deep fissures of shade intersected the white sand dunes bordering the shore. The sea lay motionless, a vague iridescence far away, northward, the only foreboding of coming change. Cassandra Tighe, a bold spot of colour in the gloaming, had exchanged her dredging net for some amphibious structure of green gauze and whalebone. She flitted hither and thither among the bushes that skirted the path, moth-hunting. The younger members of the expedition, in groups of two, loitered slowly along their way, for it was an hour when girlish faces look their fairest, when men’s voices are apt to soften, involuntarily!
Dinah Arbuthnot, after a good deal of strategy, had contrived not merely to get possession of her husband, but to hold him, strongly guarded, and at safe distance from the rest. Linda Thorne herself (and Linda had, at will, a longer or a shorter sight than other people) could scarce do more than guess at the outlines of the two figures. The little lover-like fact that this sober couple, this Darby and Joan of four years’ standing, walked arm in arm, could be known only to themselves.
‘Yes, Gaston, I was amused at sea, for you were there. And I was amused differently by Miss Bartrand. I wish you had been with us at La Delivrande. It was the first time I ever went inside a Popish church,’ said Dinah, gravely. ‘And yet, Popish though it was, I could scarce help saying my prayers as we stood before the altar. The tears came in my eyes as I remembered—I mean as I looked at the heap of offerings, and thought of the sad hearts that had brought their troubles there.’
‘Was the smell very detestable—a smell one could sketch? Had you beggars? Had the beggars wounds? Of course, votive churches and such things have to be done, in one’s youth. I am too old,’ said Mr. Arbuthnot; ‘my digestion is too touchy for me to run the risk of physical horrors of my own free will.’
‘I thought an artist should seek out every kind of experience.’
Gaston had so often insisted upon the duty of pursuing inspiration among all sorts and conditions of men—still more of women—that the remark from Dinah’s lips had a savour of mischief.
‘Every sort of agreeable experience, my dear child. The disgusting is for the great masters. Mine is pocket art—a branch that the critics discreetly label as decadent, although lucrative. Besides,’ said Gaston, ‘I have sold my soul to the dealers. And the dealers have sold theirs, if they have any, to a puerility-loving public. An honest manufacturer of paper weights and clock stands needs nothing but prettiness,—I won’t say beauty,—the prettiness of a Parisian, masquerading as a fisher-girl!’
‘Or of Parisian children dancing at an afternoon ball. Mrs. Thorne told me about your meeting with some old student acquaintance, and how his daughters led you away captive.’
‘Small tyrants! I had to dance four dances with each of them, and then be told I was “un Monsieur très paresseux” for my reward. And so Mrs. Thorne and you are becoming better friends,’ observed Gaston Arbuthnot, looking hard through the veil of twilight at his wife’s reluctant face. ‘She is a dear good soul, is she not? So bright, so spontaneous! Really, I think that is Mrs. Thorne’s crowning charm—her spontaneity.’
‘I am no friend of hers.’ Dinah’s voice had become cold. ‘I did not like Mrs. Thorne at first. I dislike her now.’
‘Impossible, Dinah—impossible. A woman with your face should dislike no created thing.’
‘I dislike her because her words sting even when they sound softest, because she will never look at one straight. I dislike her,’ said Dinah, feeling her cheeks burn with shame and indignation, ‘because she calls you “Gaston” when she speaks of you.’
At this terrible climax Mr. Arbuthnot laughed, so heartily that the quiet undulating sandhills echoed again. Far ahead Mrs. Linda might perhaps have caught the ring of his voice, have marvelled what subject people who had been married four mortal years could find to laugh about.
‘This is a black accusation. Happily, whatever her sins in my absence, Mrs. Thorne does not call me “Gaston” to my face.’
Dinah was silent. Gaston’s assurances had never carried the same weight with her since Saturday’s rose-show, the occasion when she learned of midnight adjournments to Dr. Thorne’s house, and of the singing of French songs after a certain mess dinner. Her own conscience was rigid. To suppress a truth was, according to Dinah’s code, precisely the same as to utter an untruth. She allowed no margin for her husband’s offhand histories—as a woman of larger mind would possibly have done. She could not see that carelessness, a quick imagination, and an intense love of peace, were factors sufficiently strong to account for any little inconsistencies that might now and again creep into Gaston Arbuthnot’s domestic confidences.
‘Of that I cannot judge. I suppose I ought not to care what Mrs. Thorne does or says in my absence.’
‘Of course you ought not. The speech is worthy of your thorough common-sense, Dinah.’
‘But Mrs. Thorne calls you “Gaston” to me, and I think it a very wretched, unkind thing to do. I think it mean.’
‘You ought not to think of it at all. Artist people are called by the first name that comes to hand.’
‘Mrs. Thorne is not an artist.’
‘She remembers me, in the old days when I knew Camors, as a budding one.’
‘And she corrects herself with over-care. Having once said “Gaston,” it would be better not to go back to “Mr. Arbuthnot.”’
‘Ah, there, my dear girl, you are too strong. If Linda Thorne excuses she accuses herself, although I must confess I don’t see the heinousness of her crime. You are becoming a casuist, Dinah.’
‘Am I? It seems to me that I am remaining what I always was.’
They walked on, after this, mutually taciturn. The interest seemed to have gone from their talk. At last, just as they neared the first lights of Luc village, Dinah’s fingers closed with significant tightness on her husband’s arm.
‘I have an important word to say to you, Gaston. All through our walk I have been wishing to bring it out, but I had not the courage.’
‘Some one else calls me by my Christian name, perhaps? Or are we only to discuss more enormities of Linda Thorne’s?’
There was a threat of impatience in Gaston Arbuthnot’s voice. This little running accompaniment of domesticity gave a quite new character, he decided, to picnics, viewed as a means of social pleasure.
‘I was not thinking of Linda Thorne. I wanted to ask—Gaston, forgive me—if you would keep nearer to me till we get back to Guernsey?’
‘Nearer! Will not everybody be near everybody else on board the steamer? Don’t, I beg, ask me to do anything absurd,’ he added, with emphasis. ‘You have no idea how ready one’s best friends are to laugh at one under given circumstances.’
‘But if you were just to stop at my side on board—I mean, so that no one else could come near me.’
‘I will do nothing of the kind. You have no perception of the ridiculous, Dinah. It is a want in your nature. A woman with the slightest sense of humour would never wish her husband to be demonstrative before an audience.’
‘Demonstrative?’
‘Jealous might be nearer the mark. A variety of reasons could be given as to the miserable wretch’s motives in such a position. Jealous—of little Rex Basire, probably!’
Gaston Arbuthnot laughed. This time his laughter had no very hearty sound.
‘You must learn to be self-reliant,’ he went on presently. ‘Your first lesson in worldliness was to be taken to-day, remember. Well, you must go through with it! I was not especially anxious for you to join the party.’
‘You were not. I came to please myself only.’
‘And you have pleased yourself and me. You are the most charming woman present; and let me tell you these handsome Guernsey girls are formidable rivals. I am proud of you. The opening page of the lesson is a success. Don’t spoil it, Dinah, by picking a childish quarrel with me now.’
‘I am proud of you!’ The unexpected praise sent a thrill through Dinah’s heart.
Her petition to Gaston to keep near her was made in a very different spirit to that of childish quarrelling. On the road back from La Delivrande to Langrune it had come to pass that the walking party, following a natural law, broke up into couples, and that Dinah, unprotected by Marjorie or by Geff, found herself alone with Lord Rex Basire. Being, for his age, a very thorough man of the world, Lord Rex uttered no word at which Mrs. Arbuthnot, or any sensible woman, could take umbrage. But his manner, his tones, his looks, were eloquent with a feeling which, to her straightforward, rustic perception of things, constituted an offence.
In the matter of admiration, Dinah, as I have said, was neither prude nor Puritan. She knew the greatness of her gift. It was an everyday experience to see heads turn wherever she walked upon the earth, and, being a quite natural and single-hearted daughter of the common Mother, such acknowledgment of her beauty had never yet been repugnant to her. But the admiration covertly expressed by Rex Basire as they sauntered slowly through chequered light and shadow back to Langrune, was of another nature. Instinct warned Dinah that, if she were an unmarried girl, she might well read on this foolish young man’s face and in his manner signs of love.
And the warning, to Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife, was, in itself, a humiliation.
She was unacquainted with the weapons by means of which differently nurtured women parry equivocal attention. Save from Linda Thorne’s lips to-night she had never heard the term ‘Platonic.’ Geoffrey was her only friend. Of men like Lord Rex Basire she knew nothing. To gaze and hint and sigh after this tormenting fashion might, she thought, be a received habit among young officers of his rank. And the torment would soon be over—if Gaston would only keep near her on board the Princess! Once safely back in Guernsey, and Dinah felt she could take absolute care of herself for the future. There should be no more lingering afternoon visits, no more instruction in wool-work for Lord Rex Basire. Of the lesson learnt to-day, one paragraph, at least, was clear, should be reduced to practice before another twenty-four hours went by. If Gaston would only keep near her in the interval!
But at Gaston’s praise she forgot everything. In the sweetness of that unlooked-for avowal, ‘I am proud of you,’ all dread of the future, all unpleasant recollections of the past, were swept clean away out of Dinah’s brain. She would not risk the moment’s happiness by another word. Her hand trembled, as though they had gone back to the old romantic days at Lesser Cheriton, as it rested on Gaston’s arm.
‘Proud of me! Ah, my love,’ she whispered, ‘I hope that you and I will never have a worse quarrel than this while we live.’
And when the pair of married sweethearts emerged into the glare of lamps outside Luc Casino, Dinah’s face was radiant. Lord Rex, devotedly attentive at the moment to pretty Rosie Verschoyle, saw, and felt mystified. Decidedly, the Methodistic heart, like the Methodistic conscience, was a book wherein Rex Basire might not read.
Linda Thorne approached at once; a tall figure, diaphanous, graceful, in the lamplight. An Indian shawl was on Linda’s arm, one of those exquisite dull-hued cachemires capable of investing the plainest woman with ephemeral poetry. Her hand held a bunch of wild flowers; a long trail of bindweed was twined, by fingers not unversed in millinery, round her hat.
‘I hope you approve my ball attire?’ She asked this with a little curtsey, her eyes addressing Gaston rather than Gaston’s wife. ‘Our hosts tell us that we have all free entrance to the Casino, the result, I suspect, of some liberal bribe to the Administration. Really, the way our subalterns have preconcerted every detail of their picnic has quite a Monte Christo flavour. You are engaged to me, remember, Mr. Arbuthnot, for your first waltz.’
‘There will be neither first nor last, Mrs. Thorne. I exhausted the very small dancing power that is in me on Hortense and Eulalie this afternoon. I have not waltzed with a partner over seven for years,’ added Gaston. ‘My step dates from the days of Louis Philippe.’
Nevertheless he moved away from Dinah; he followed whithersoever Mrs. Thorne might choose to lead.
She chose the Luc dunes—that broad belt of wind-blown sand, held together by coarse grasses or sea thistles, which stretches the entire length of the straggling village, and forms a welcome contrast to the burnt-up turf terrace, with burnt-up geraniums, mildewed urns, and peeling stucco goddesses of loftier watering-places.
This evening Luc was merry-making. There were fireworks, there was a procession of torches—one of those ever-recurring processions by which the hearts of Parisian children, big and little, are gladdened at the seaside. Tiny figures marched, two and two, with Chinese lamps along the village causeway. A band of small boys evoked martial melody from drum and fife. Catherine-wheels rotated, rockets scurried up into space. By and by an artfully constructed bonfire of colza stalks flared up in the centre of the plage. Hand linked in hand the children danced around it.
‘Nous irons aux bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés.’
Their shrill voices rang across the dunes. Gaston Arbuthnot could descry his friends, Hortense and Eulalie, wildly circling around the red flames with the rest. As he did so, he thought involuntarily of his sketch-book, forgotten from the moment when the children laid violent hands upon him, hours ago, until this instant.
‘Oh, I know! Your sketch-book is gone,’ cried Linda, as he felt in pocket after pocket. ‘This is the Nemesis that falls on creatures of impulse, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘But it is no joking matter. Every memorandum I have made during the last month—gone!’
For once Gaston’s voice was tragic. He knew full well the market value of those rough notes of his.
‘Every memorandum—from your first bit of Sarnian still life, an old market-woman dozing, knitting-pins in hand, at her stall, down to our fisher-girl of the Boulevards. Taking into account the studies of Rahnee and of myself, there must be literally scores of valuable jottings in that book.’
‘You are laughing at me? No, I divine! You have taken care of my book, Mrs. Thorne, like the dear good——’
Fortunately, Gaston Arbuthnot broke off. Would Mrs. Thorne, would any woman, still conscious of youth and charm, forgive the man who, in exuberance of gratitude, should say to her, ‘like the dear good creature I know you to be’?
‘I have taken care of your sketches,’ she answered, drawing the book forth from beneath her cachemire. ‘I have done more. You ask sometimes why I always carry a housewife in my pocket. You shall see the part my housewife has played to-day. While I sat quietly with Robbie and Mrs. Verschoyle (the young people, very rightly, enjoying themselves elsewhere) I sewed all your ragged leaves together for you—thus.’
Linda Thorne was a notably clever worker. Perhaps the length of her stitches, the breadth of her hems, were not always in accordance with the orthodox feminine standard. She could effect things with her needle—such as fine-drawing a rent in cloth, or improvising an anchorage for a buttonless collar—which might be the despair of many a mistress of the craft. She did her stitching with brains.
At an out-of-the way Indian station, so the legend ran, Mrs. Linda, under stress of some unlooked-for gaiety, once manufactured an evening waistcoat for her Robbie, and a pair of neat white satin boots for herself at a sitting.
‘This is capital!’ cried Arbuthnot, joyfully recovering possession of his sketches. ‘Each page hinged on with a splendid contrivance of red silk to the dislocated remains of back. I have often wanted Dinah to devise some sort of surgery for my veteran sketch-books. She must take a lesson by this.’
‘Oh, no, no! Mrs. Arbuthnot is a far better needlewoman than I am. When I sew anything tolerably,’ said Linda, ‘it is by accident. I must have a motive for what I do. If I lived with—I mean, now, if dear Robbie were an artist, it would be my passion to help him in all the mechanical part of his work. If I were staying with you—and Mrs. Arbuthnot—you would discover that I can, really, in my way be useful. Michael Angelo himself must have had a poor obscure some one to grind his paints for him.’
The pathetic image of Robbie as an artist made Gaston laugh inwardly. He was not struck by the humour of hearing his own name coupled with Michael Angelo’s. Nay, it might be well, he thought, if Dinah felt this passion of unselfish helpfulness; well, if Dinah occasionally gave him the kind of praise he got from Linda Thorne. For Dinah never flattered. Her words of encouragement, unlettered country girl though she was, were full of soundest criticism. There was no honey in them. True love has its intuitions. Dinah knew that to feed this man on constantly sugared words was to poison him. She would gladly have seen in Gaston a noble discontent, gladly have listened to less frank avowals that he had found his level, and got on pretty well, there! Dinah, in short, was not a delightful acquaintance, but a steadfast, loyal wife. And her praise, in common with that of other steadfast wives, was apt to take the wholesome bitterness, the slightly sub-acid flavour of a tonic.
‘Michael Angelo! My dear Mrs. Thorne, how much, how very much you over-estimate me! If you spoke of me as imitating, from afar, the little affected prettinesses of a Greuze, the compliment would be too high.’
‘I fixed my standard for you, years ago, Mr. Arbuthnot. In the days when you used to thank me—me, a governess—for playing dance-music at Madame Benjamin’s, I had my convictions as to the place you would one day occupy in Art.’
At other times—on the morning, for instance, when we first saw the Arbuthnot trio in the garden of Miller’s Hotel—Linda remembered her aspirations as to the place her friend would, one day, hold in the House of Commons. But Gaston, if he noted the discrepancy, passed it generously over. Hard for a man to believe a charming woman insincere simply because she a little over-estimates his own genius!
‘Those light-hearted salad days! When I was with de Camors this afternoon——’
‘The effusive little Frenchman who so nearly kissed you?’
‘As long as I forgot the children, and the twelve stone of mamma, and the fact that de Camors himself is growing bald, I could have believed he and I were six-and-thirty again. Six-and-thirty used to be the sum of our joint ages.’
‘Do not talk of age. It is a subject about which a man may jest, while a woman just breaks her heart.’
And Linda extended towards him her thin adroit hands, clasped in a pose that she had studied, not unsuccessfully, as one of pained entreaty.
‘Women are younger, relatively, than men,’ answered Gaston, with the sincerity of his sex. ‘When I was two-and-twenty, Dinah’s age, I knew more of the world than I know now. Whereas my wife——’
‘Ah! your wife,’ interrupted Linda Thorne, the mask for a moment dropping, the voice hardening. ‘I was thinking of living, palpitating, flesh-and-blood women—inhabitants of a world where nothing is faultless save over-faultless perfection. I—I mean,’ she went on, rapidly recovering her self-control, ‘that at thirty (and I am past thirty, alas! who looks at me under broad daylight but must see it?)—at thirty a man is scarcely in the noonday sun—a woman already feels the breath of evening. Her one chill hope is—to grow old gracefully. Mrs. Arbuthnot is a girl still.’
‘And you—were a child when I first knew you in Paris,’ observed Gaston, cleverly quitting the dangerous territory across whose borders he has been betrayed. ‘How natural it seems, Mrs. Thorne, that we should be walking together, you and I, in the old country, with the old language round us again! Do you hear what the children are singing down on the sands yonder?’
Linda set herself to listen, her expressive hands clasped, her face bowed.
‘Nous irons aux bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés’—
shouted the shrill young Gallican voices in the distance.
Mr. Arbuthnot repeated the nursery rhyme as Murger wove it into his delightful ‘Letter to a Cousin.’
‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.
Nous n’irons plus aux bois, oh, ma cousine Angèle!’
The lady at his side bowed her face lower, and believed, in all integrity, that she was about to be overtaken by tears. Mrs. Linda, to do her justice, was not of a lachrymose temperament. At the zenith of their boy and girl flirtation, years ago, she had never shed a tear for Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot; until he appeared with his beautiful wife, had, indeed, clean forgotten her youthful weakness and his existence. But she possessed considerable imagination, a gloss of surface sentiment. She was also an insatiate novel reader, and had fallen into the habit of perennial strong emotion, leading nowhere. She could realise how a woman who had loved ought to feel, as she recalled past happiness with the lover of the past—both married, and one, alas! fast nearing an age when the most pathetic drama turns, without help from the burlesque writers, into parody.
Linda Thorne believed herself to be on the brink of tears. Gaston Arbuthnot believed so, too, and his heart could not but soften over the poor thing’s impressibility. So widely different in effect are tears shed in bitter earnest by one’s wife, and tears shed in pretty make-believe by the wife of another man.
‘Do you hear, Mr. Arbuthnot—the dancers have changed their tune?’ She asked this as the children, eddying like spirit-figures in an opera scene round the fire, broke into a new measure, ‘Marie, soak thy bread in wine!’—universal refrain of all French children from the Pyrenees to the Channel. ‘“Marie, soak thy bread!” How that foolish rhyme brings back the Benjamins’ salon, and my place behind the piano, and you, Mr. Arbuthnot, handing round refreshments with the small slave-driver, Moïse! “Marie, soak thy bread”.... Alas!’—Mrs. Thorne’s utterances grew mystic—‘We women have to soak our bread in sour enough wine, have we not?’
‘The Benjamin refreshments—sugar-water, orgeat,’ mused Gaston Arbuthnot, keeping safely to the practical. ‘Yes, those were charming evenings, especially when Papa Moïse did not sing. I remember, as though ’twere yesterday, how my poor mother used to suspect Madame Benjamin of putting bad almonds in the orgeat.’