CHAPTER XXXVI
THE LAST OF ARCADIA
Never could the spot have justified its name more thoroughly than at this hour.
The syringa bloom had fallen during the past week. No odour, save the delicate, intangible freshness of sea and moor, met the sense. There was not a wrinkle on the far Atlantic, not a cloud in the arch of sky. They chose a plot of grass for their breakfast-table so small of dimensions, it was not possible to sit far apart. They had their platter of cake, their jug of milk in common. Surely no shepherd or shepherdess in real Arcadia was ever lighter of spirits than were these two!
‘I have learned the taste of nectar,’ said Geff, when the wedges of cake had vanished, when the milk-jug stood empty. ‘In repayment of your hospitality, Miss Bartrand, I am going to bring a sharp accusation against you.’
‘Which is?’ Marjorie asked, her blue eyes meeting his with steadiness.
‘The nectar you give may perhaps be poisoned, an enchanted philtre taking the taste out of all one’s future life.’
‘I should call that a cruel, an unjust accusation,’ cried the girl, her cheeks ablaze. ‘Explain yourself! I don’t like a thing of this kind said, even in jest.’
‘I was never farther from jesting. Poison is a harsh word, certainly: still—still,’ broke off Geoffrey, with the abrupt courage of a shy wooer, ‘do you think a man could ever be as well contented with the grayness and plainness of English life after an hour spent here, in Arcadia, at your side?’
Her face grew graver and graver.
‘If you mean this for nonsense talk, Mr. Arbuthnot, you offend me. I do not care for flattery.’
Marjorie Bartrand rose to her feet. As Geoffrey followed her example, he took out his watch, then replaced it in his pocket without noticing the hour. Both were a little pale; both had grown suddenly constrained. An unaccustomed mist made the familiar objects round her seem blurred in Marjorie’s sight.
‘I must go back to the house,’ she faltered. ‘The servants will have risen by this time. Of course one ought to feel tired, and to want rest.’
She stooped, under pretence of picking up the platter and jug, in reality to hide her face from the man who loved her. But her fingers were unsteady. An instant more, jug and platter both were slipping from her grasp, when Geff, quick of eye and touch, caught them, and Marjorie’s hand as well.
She did not say again that nonsense talk offended her.
‘I should like you to understand one thing, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ It was a good while later on when she told Geoffrey this. Her slight hands rested unresistingly in his, the unmistakable print of love confessed was on the faces of both. ‘Perhaps what I am going to say will make you alter your opinion of me; it must be said, all the same. There shall be no Bluebeard secrets between us to come to light hereafter. There was a fortnight’s mistake in my life, once. I—I——’ the word seemed to scorch her lips as they passed them, ‘have been engaged before.’
‘So the voice of gossip told me, long ago, Miss Bartrand.’
In an instant Marjorie rested her cheek, with a child’s rather than a woman’s gesture, against Geoffrey’s arm.
‘You ought not to say “Miss Bartrand,” now. From this day until death comes between us I must be “Marjorie” to you.’
‘Marjorie,’ repeated Geff, with quick obedience. ‘What concern of mine is it that you were engaged before you knew me? I dare say I shall be an ogre of jealousy in the future. I cannot be jealous retrospectively. The evil passion will date from this present hour, only.’
But Marjorie insisted, whatever pain it cost her, on giving him the details of her first engagement, yes, even to the ring she accepted, to the tears she shed over Jock, the setter puppy. And would Geoffrey have felt no concern, she asked him, with a flush, in conclusion, had things been different? Could he have felt no retrospective jealousy if she had happened to care for Major Tredennis?
‘I like to think you did not care for him. I like supremely to know you care for me,’ was Geoffrey’s answer.
‘Because, of course, no human being can, honestly, love twice,’ observed Marjorie Bartrand, with conviction. ‘It must be all or nothing. I wish you to know, although I was weak enough to be engaged to Major Tredennis and to take his presents, and to listen to his French songs, it was nothing. I could not look into your face as I am looking now, if I had cared the value of an old glove for him, or for any man.’
‘No human being can, honestly, love twice.’ So this was a fixed article in Marjorie Bartrand’s belief! The reflection made Geoffrey pause. Of the belief’s fallacy, his own state of feeling was pertinent evidence. Four years ago he had loved Dinah Thurston with love as ardent as was ever lavished by man on woman. And now this wayward Southern child, with her terrible classics and worse Euclid—this child, with the deep, sweet eyes that promised so much for the future, and the chiselled sun-kissed hands, and the mouth, and the hair—had filled his heart to overflowing.
A certain tacit disingenuousness seemed forced upon him. That prettily-told episode of her first engagement, of the Major’s French songs, his presents and his flatteries, was in absolute truth a challenge. But Geoffrey’s conscience smote him not as he let the challenge pass. His passion for Dinah was no ‘fortnight’s mistake.’ It was a part of himself. In losing her he got a wound that he must carry with him to the grave. He could no more have touched upon the theme, lightly, than he could have spoken lightly of his dead mother or of the childish prayers he used to repeat in the shelter of that mother’s arms.
The girl he sought as his wife was exquisitely fresh and to be desired. Already, in a brief half-hour, every hope of his future life seemed to have some silken thread of Marjorie woven in its fabric. She was unconnected with his past. The passion that had died, the regret that would never die, were his own. Their history was not to be told, save under dire necessity, of which the present rose-coloured moment gave no forewarning.
‘I knew from the first that you had been engaged to Major Tredennis, and from the first,’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot drew her towards him, tenderly, ‘I began to fall in love with you.’
‘Not quite from the first?’ Marjorie questioned, artfully ensuring a repetition of the honeyed truth. ‘Not on that evening when you put me through my intellectual paces, when you told me that my classics—save the mark!—were stronger than my mathematics?’
‘Yes, on that first evening. It was not because of your prettiness, only, or your grace. It was not, even, because you snubbed me so mercilessly. I don’t know why it was. It seemed that a new world had suddenly opened out before me. As I returned along the Gros Nez cliffs, the Tintajeux roses and heliotropes in my hand, I felt like walking right above the mire and commonness of my former life.’
‘And your thoughts?’
‘Were of Tintajeux, every yard of the road. Yes, I am clear about it,’ said Geff. ‘I began to fall in love from the first moment that I saw your sweet Spanish face.’
Marjorie shook her head at the compliment. Her looks were sceptical.
‘Your manner, I confess, did not betray you, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she remarked drily.
‘Did you condescend to notice my manner?’ Geff asked. ‘The whole of that evening, remember, except perhaps for a minute, when you had wounded yourself among the briars, you held me at arm’s-length.’
‘I thought you a married man, sir. But I liked—I respected you, brusque though you were, because I believed you had had the courage of your opinions, the strength of mind to marry Dinah. How strange,’ she went on, dreamily abandoning herself to his caress—‘how strange it will be, when we are old people, to remember that our acquaintance began in such a comedy of mistakes.’
Because he had had the strength of mind to marry Dinah! The unconscious irony of her speech smote Geff Arbuthnot’s heart. He had been credited, then, as a virtue, with the fulfilment of that mad hope whose frustration took the keenest edge off his life, the intoxication out of his youth!
‘One builds up an ideal, foolishly or wisely,’ went on Marjorie’s happy voice. ‘I had built up mine since I was eight years old. Well, when I heard of a Mr. Arbuthnot who was able enough to have taken high honours, good enough to give up his time to others, brave enough to have married a girl beneath himself in class for the excellent reason that he loved her, when I heard these things—the personal histories of the Arbuthnot cousins cleverly mixed and transposed by poor Cassandra—I felt that my ideal was clothed with flesh and blood. What could I do but care a little for my new tutor?’
‘Married though the tutor was?’
‘That is beside the question. I was thinking of his fine qualities only. I held out my hand to him in friendship before we met, even, and I—I know that I was never for one instant in love with Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot.’
Marjorie Bartrand coloured with slightly illogical vexation.
‘Are you quite sure that you are in love at all?’ asked Geoffrey.
For a few seconds an uncertain smile trembled round her lips. She drew back from him, half ignorant whether his question had been asked in earnest; then, lifting her eyes, Marjorie encountered the beseeching entreaty written on Geoffrey’s face. There came impulsive, over-quick submission.
‘I mean to love you with my whole soul some day. Does not that content you? Well, then, I mean—if you will give me breathing space—to love you now.’
The midsummer morning was young, the blackbirds called aloud for joy in the Tintajeux orchards, and Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s age was twenty-four. Before they parted, ere Marjorie could repulse him or surrender, he caught the girl in a swift embrace; he kissed her reverently, passionately on the lips.