CHAPTER XXXVII
A STONE FOR BREAD
The kiss cost him dear. A fledgling girl is not, finally, to be captured without a struggle, save by a master hand; and Geoffrey’s was the hand of a prentice.
Marjorie’s heart leaped with novel tenderness at the contact of his lips. She suffered him to hold her in his arms. She watched him with shy pride, with a child’s delight in the new sense of ownership, as he walked away, along the accustomed path, from Tintajeux. Then, later, when she found herself in her own little white-draped realm, when, later still, she had slept and awakened and dressed herself for a fresh day, the current of feeling swerved. She shivered at realising how absolutely her life had become entangled with his. She was assailed by reminiscences, all uncomfortable ones, of Major Tredennis. She was sensible of a longing, that had almost passion in it, for the liberty she had been betrayed into relinquishing.
‘I mean, if you will give me breathing space, to love you now.’ Here, surely, was what she needed—time for becoming used to the new phenomenon of a lover.
During the past fortnight, Geoffrey had filled every thought of her waking hours; a haunting sense of his nearness had touched her dreams. At this point she had fain stood still—six months—a year—tacitly engaged, if need be, but on the same fraternal footing as when they walked together yesterday among the Langrune cornfields. Why hurry into commonplace? The Bartrands were not a kissing race. Geff ought to have divined their likes and dislikes, thought the poor child petulantly. And yet, pleaded another voice in this conscience of seventeen, the kiss was sweet! It seemed that she had become, suddenly and distinctly, two persons—one a girl weakly contented, as our grandmothers used to be, at the prospect of husband and home and fireside; the other, a strong-headed, Minerva-like young woman coolly criticising the question of love and marriage from a vantage ground, and liking it ill. Which of the two,—she asked herself this pretty often throughout the sunny tedium of the long day,—which was the real, which the artificial Marjorie Bartrand?
It had been settled between them that Geoffrey should walk out to Tintajeux before the Seigneur’s supper-hour that evening. When the time came, when Geff approached the Manoir, treading lightly, as befits a man whose heart wells over with hope, he found the friendly schoolroom window bolted. No youthful flitting figure was to be seen among the growing shadows of the garden; Arcadia was empty. Andros Bartrand, leisurely pacing, a cigar between his lips, his terriers at his heels, possessed the lawn.
With a dim sensation of chill Geoffrey rang at the front door, and was ushered in by Sylvestre, a whole lever de rideau in the old butler’s expressive Norman smile, to the drawing-room. Here Marjorie, mutinous of spirit, but with a tenderly blushing face, awaited him. The western lights filtered through the half-closed Venetians. Above the cedar-shade gleamed as unstained a sweep of Atlantic as on the first evening that Geoffrey visited Tintajeux. The Petit Trianon baskets were filled with glorious Ducs de Rohan. The Cupids were hurling rose leaves at the guillotine. The miniature Bartrands, imperturbable as becomes mortals who have proved the nothingness of love as of life, seemed to glance with rather more philosophic amiability than usual from their frames.
Well, all that Geoffrey saw or thought of was Marjorie. She looked prettier than he had ever seen her look, as she moved forward to greet him—softer, more womanly. For the girl, while she chafed, in imagination, under her new yoke, had spent a good hour before her glass ere her lover came. She had put on her one white dress of regulation length, had clasped an old-fashioned Spanish necklace round her throat, had pinned a little bunch of heliotrope and sweetbriar, mindful of the morning’s dominant odours, in her breast.
A sense of his immense good fortune in having won her filled Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s heart. He took both her hands, looking down at their slender carving, with the connoisseurship of possession. He raised them within an inch of his lips.
‘I hope, Mr. Arbuthnot, you will pardon me for receiving you here?’ Marjorie asked him this with forced composure. ‘But I thought—I was not sure whether we were to read to-night or not.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot involuntarily drew back. The glance which met him from his new sweetheart’s eyes was, he felt, cold. During an instant’s space, mastered by one of those shadowy infidelities of which we repent ere they take substance, Geff bethought him of eyes that never could look cold, in happiness or in trouble—English-coloured eyes from which, perhaps, the fire, the mind of Marjorie’s sapphire glance, were wanting.
‘I thought,’ she went on, with almost defiant ease, ‘that after yesterday’s idleness, our reading to-night must be a sham, so it would be unnecessary to see you in the schoolroom.’
‘I can guess what that means,’ said Geoffrey, without letting loose her hands. ‘You have no work ready for me.’
‘I have done some Virgil, fuller, I know, of faults than ever, but I thought, for one evening, sir, we might let Greek and Latin go.’
‘Why not let them go for ever—as things that have had their use!’ cried Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
‘As things that have had their use? Are you speaking of my classics? You, who told me, a fortnight ago, I might come out in the third class of a tripos?’
‘A fortnight ago is not to-day.’
‘Your good opinion has had time to cool? Pray be frank, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ It was in her mood to quarrel—at least, to reach the brink of a quarrel with him, if ’twere only for sweet relenting’s sake. ‘I don’t one bit come up to your ideal of a model woman?’
‘I abhor models, irrespective of their sex. Marjorie, why are we talking in this strain?’ And now her fingers reached his lips. ‘I want you to be like nothing, to be nothing, but yourself.’
‘And I, myself, shall never alter. I may be too dull-witted to pass the entrance examination for Girton. That will be my misfortune. I shall always be athirst for knowing things, for seeing life—on its seamy side, especially—with my own eyes, for getting to the real worst of everything! And I shall always,’ added Marjorie, with a look that indubitably had in it the nature of a challenge, ‘retain my Bartrand temper.’
‘I have a temper also,’ answered Geff, drawing her a little closer to him. ‘Do not omit that item from our prospects of future joy. You are passionate. I am unforgetting. Stormy elements, these, to be brought into daily, hourly contact under the same roof.’
‘And has your ideal of life always been one of conflict?’ asked Marjorie.
At the domestic picture, quietly touched in by Geoffrey, the lines of her lips had softened against her will.
‘I have had no experience save in conflict,’ answered Geff Arbuthnot, truthfully.
‘When you were a really young man, four or five years ago, did you look forward to the Taming of a Shrew as a likely sequel to your term of happy bachelorhood?’
The question was jestingly meant, lightly spoken. But Geoffrey’s dark cheek reddened.
‘Oh, if I have said anything indiscreet, forgive me.’ Marjorie watched him with attention. ‘You must grow used, remember, to the faults of my fine qualities. One of these is inquisitiveness. It would delight me to know, precisely, what you used to think and feel when you were twenty years old. I suppose you were not so preternaturally wise, always, as you are now?’
‘I have never been wise at any period of my life,’ said Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
‘But when you were nineteen, say, what did you think, what did you hope, what did you look forward to?’
‘What I hoped, what I looked forward to, was—madness.’ The unguarded answer broke from him instantly. ‘If you would be kind to me, Marjorie,’ he added, ‘let the past rest. There is enough, a great deal more than enough, to be grateful for in the present.’
Marjorie, on this, drew herself to her full height. She looked at him with the instinct of a child who would unriddle a secret by his own close reading of another’s face. She freed her hands abruptly from his clasp.
‘What you hoped, what you looked forward to was—madness! Do you mean in regard of University laurels?’
‘We are not talking of University laurels. We are talking,’ said Geff, honestly, ‘of the happiness beyond happiness, the companionship for life of two human souls that suit each other.’
‘And your hopes of these things,’ her lips whitened as she repeated the words, ‘were madness? Singular contradiction! You have told me that yours has been a secluded student’s life, that, until a fortnight ago, you never cared for any society but that of men?’
‘Whatever I have told you has been true,’ said Geff, with firmness. Then, instantly relenting, ‘Do not let us have a quarrel,’ he pleaded, ‘on this first day that we are sweethearts.’
She turned from him, indignant, breathless.
‘If we quarrel over realities, Mr. Arbuthnot, the pity is we did not look realities in the face before becoming sweethearts.’
‘Miss Bartrand—Marjorie!’
‘Oh, I am thoroughly in earnest. This morning, when first I knew you cared for me a little, I was open with you. I told you what had to be said about Major Tredennis, and you forgave me. Bluebeard secrets, bad always, must be doubly so between people who mean to spend their lives together. I told you of my miserable weakness——’
Her frank girlish face burned so hotly that Geff came to her relief.
‘You were very open with me, Marjorie, true and straightforward, as it is your nature to be.’
‘I did not hide from you, whatever the shame of it, that I had bound myself once before.’
Geoffrey was no social diplomatist. He might, otherwise, with mournful veracity have retorted that he had been a free man always. But the statement would have implied a prevarication, and it was not in Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s upright soul to prevaricate.
‘You told me you had been engaged. You also gave an opinion as to its being impossible for people, honestly, to love twice.’
‘Most certainly I did. I never cared more for Major Tredennis than I do for this flower I wear—ask Mrs. Arbuthnot! I found courage yesterday to talk to her about that wretched time—and I do care for you,’ looking straight from her heart at her lover. ‘And it is utterly impossible for any woman or any man to love twice.’
‘You think so? I ought to have disagreed with you at once,’ struck in Geff, promptly. ‘I ought to have told you this morning what I hold to be truth.’
‘And this is?’
‘That women and men may love a second time honestly, although once, only, with success.’
She turned away doubtfully, with lowered lids, hesitating a few moments. Then: ‘Love twice? and why not love three, four, five times?’ she questioned, looking up at him with a glance of fire. ‘Why hold at all by constancy, or honour, or good faith? What mystic limitation is there in the number two?’
‘A woman troubled is Heaven’s fairest work spoiled.’
Geoffrey believed as devoutly as do most men in the aphorism. But Marjorie was not a woman, he remembered, only an impetuous girl, with Southern blood in her veins, with the Bartrand pride on her lips, with all sweet and modest and maidenly superstitions in her heart.
He felt he had never loved her more dearly than in this very outburst of unreasoning, childish wrath against himself.
‘I know nothing about three, four, or five times. You persisted, recollect, in making me talk of an uninteresting subject, my own past life, and——’
‘And am I to think—are you putting me to the humiliation, now too late,’ she exclaimed, the thought of his kiss returning to her, ‘the humiliation of feeling, here, under my grandfather’s roof, that I am offered your love at second-hand?’
A few instants ago Geoffrey’s impulse had been to take her in his arms, to forgive her in spite of her injustice! But her tone had changed. It was hard, suspicious. It bespoke pride, not only of race, but of money. All the inherited baser possibilities of her nature had, under the moment’s white anger, gained the ascendancy in poor Marjorie’s breast.
Geff was sensible of them and recoiled. For the first time to-day, it occurred to him that the girl he sought to marry was not only a Bartrand but an heiress, his superior in position as in purse.
‘I don’t like to hear you say “humiliation.” Such love as I feel for you,’ confessed Geoffrey Arbuthnot, nobly and simply, ‘could humiliate no woman.’
‘And if it comes at second-hand, if some one else before my time has appraised its value, and flung it aside?’
‘Miss Bartrand, you must explain to me what you mean by that question.’
‘I mean,’ flamed forth Marjorie, her whole angry soul throbbing in her voice, ‘that I must be first—first, Mr. Arbuthnot, in the heart of the man I marry.’
‘Would you not be first in mine?’
‘I should give him all. I could accept nothing short of all in return. If, afterwards, I found that I had been deceived—you understand me, if I knew that I had been chosen from other motives than love—I should make his life and my own most miserable!’
And, indeed, the passion of her voice and face gave to the prophecy only too much an air of certitude.
Geoffrey Arbuthnot walked to a neighbouring window. Pushing back the half-closed shutters he saw before him a wide expanse of the Manoir gardens; through an arch of cedar boughs he caught a goodly vista of fields and orchards beyond. And all that he looked upon would one day be Marjorie’s! With crushing force came the conviction that he had fallen into a desperate error, had walked blindfolded, a second time, into a Fool’s Paradise. Marjorie Bartrand’s youth, the intimacy into which they had been thrown, his own absolute want of premeditation might be excused. The facts were there, looking, as disagreeable facts have a knack of doing, with transparent clearness in his face. He had walked into a Fool’s Paradise. To accept the position, give Marjorie Bartrand back her freedom, unconditionally, were the moment’s immediate and exceeding bitter duties. The wilful hot-headed child of seventeen—conquered at one moment, at the next resisting—repented her, already, of her bargain. Let that bargain be cancelled.
‘Your life shall never become miserable through fault of mine, Miss Bartrand.’ Turning round, Geff looked at her gravely. ‘Pardon me whatever foolish words I spoke this morning. In a week or two forget my existence! You are bound to me by no promise——’
‘And it costs you nothing to give me up? You can talk of forgetting in this airy fashion?’ interrupted Marjorie, with vehement recollection of her own surrender. ‘Then you never sought me from liking. I have had a second experience of the same cruel story. The acres of Tintajeux, few though they be, are matters, it seems, better worth caring for than Marjorie Bartrand, herself.’
From her cradle to her grave it would be safe to aver that speech so ignoble never issued from Marjorie Bartrand’s lips. She recognised its meanness before the last word was spoken. Her cheeks crimsoned. She could have flung herself at the feet of the lover her suspicion had dishonoured.
‘I was wrong ... forgive me for speaking like this,’ she began to stammer brokenly.
But Geoffrey Arbuthnot could not condone a paltry accusation, even from her. With two strides he reached the girl’s chair. He stood before her, pale and strongly moved. She hardly recognised the expression of his face.
‘And so you think that I, with the full use of my muscles and brain, sought to marry you for money’s sake, the poor little handful of money that goes with Tintajeux Manoir. The slight to my intelligence is severe. Had I been a fortune-hunter, Miss Bartrand, I should have struck for a larger stake.’
‘Then why did you look at me? Why did you not let me go my way?’ She clasped her hands together, piteously. ‘For you have never loved me. You confessed as much just now?’
‘Did I? I can only remember a confession in which I spoke the truth—a confession you believed this morning,’ added Geoffrey, with as much steadiness as he could muster.
‘All this is waste of time,’ she said, with a miserable little laugh. ‘We have the habit of plain speaking—you and I. Let us keep it up to the last. Your heart is not your own, Mr. Arbuthnot. You have liked some other person better than you like me. Have liked, did I say? You like her, I doubt not, to this day.’
‘This day when I have asked you, wisely or unwisely, to be my wife?’
‘If your conscience were clear you could not trifle with me like this. You would say No, or Yes.’
And, thus urged, Geoffrey Arbuthnot said ‘Yes’—with unmitigated frankness, without a hint either at penitence or remorse. Long ago, in his undergraduate days—thus the confession ran—he had fallen in love ... possibly as men do not fall in love twice during their lives! He was rough, plain, a student as Marjorie saw him now, no suitor to win a young girl’s fancy. And so——
‘And so,’ broke in Marjorie with trembling interest, ‘she was false to you?’
‘She was neither false nor true,’ he answered; ‘I had no place at all in her heart. My own best friend’—and here Geff’s voice sank, each word of his avowal seemed wrung from him with pain—‘became, unconsciously, my rival.’
‘Your best friend,’ stammered Marjorie, upon whom a first flicker of light was beginning to dawn.
‘Best, then, and I hope for ever—just as she whom he married will, I know, be my ideal of all sweet and womanly qualities till I die. Although I lost her,’ exclaimed Geff Arbuthnot, ‘I owe her everything! It is using a commonplace to say that I would at any hour start to the other side of the world, if by so starting I could confer on her the smallest service. But it is the truth.’
He was a man, ordinarily, of demeanour so reticent, of emotions so controlled, that this little outburst struck on Marjorie Bartrand with double force. Alas! there could not be room for another instant’s doubt. She recalled the morning when she had lectured her tutor on his frivolity, she remembered his embarrassment when she spoke of Dinah as his wife—his absence of mind, his pallor. The story of his past life was laid open, a clear page, for her to read. The confession of her engagement to Major Tredennis had met with an over-full equivalent.
‘At last, then,’ she murmured, ‘I have got to the truth of things. It might have been juster if I had not been deceived so long.’
‘Will you hear me out to the end?’ There was a ring of command rather than of pleading in Geoffrey’s tone. ‘Four years ago it was my fate, I can never say my misfortune, to come across a girl whom it was madness for me to love. I lost. I suffered. But many a man has met with a like overthrow, and got firmly to his feet in time. I am very firm on my feet,’ said Geff Arbuthnot. ‘I have grown young again in knowing you. If you had chosen to become my wife, I could have loved you well. Yes, I do love you—too well! Now, when it seems we are like bidding good-bye for ever.’
And Geoffrey rested his hands for an instant upon the girl’s graceful down-bent head.
‘And the dream is over—over.’ She repeated the words huskily, not so much thinking of Geff as seeking to bring home to herself the extremity of her own pain. ‘We are to be nothing to each other from this hour forth, not even friends.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot walked a few steps away. The movement was prompted by a definite and conscious weakness. This saying good-bye for ever was no easy thing, he found, so long as his hand rested upon the silken hair, so long as the slender figure palpitated close to him, the heliotrope sent its odour to his brain from Marjorie’s breast.
‘The dream is over, because you discovered it to be a dream. You must acknowledge, Miss Bartrand, that you have taken the matter wholly out of my keeping.’
‘We might see each other, as friends,’ she stammered—true to a time-worn instinct of her sex, offering a stone for bread, friendship to the man she loved, and who loved her. ‘Surely our work need not be dropped because of this I As long as you stay in the island you will come out to read with me at Tintajeux?’
‘I shall return to Tintajeux, once more, after to-night,’ was Geff Arbuthnot’s answer. ‘I shall return to shake hands with the Seigneur, and to be paid my money. Good-bye for ever are hard words to speak,’ he went on. ‘But we shall not make the hardness easier by trying to shirk them. We have, virtually, said good-bye already.’
‘And we are never to be nearer reconciliation than this? You are not a man to change?’
There came a furtive play of feeling upon her mouth. Deep in her heart lurked a formless hope that Geoffrey was not in earnest, that at a smile, a touch of hers, he must yield, if she so willed it.
‘I am a man,’ he answered, ‘to change upon the day you bid me do so. If, at some future time, you think less vile things of me——’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot!’
‘Well, or without that. If it should be your whim, in some idle hour, to remember my existence—dare I say, to send me a flower you have worn, a bit of ribbon, a sheet of paper with a single relenting word written on it—you will have only to address your envelope to St. John’s, Cambridge.’
‘And now, for the remainder of this summer?’ asked Marjorie, drear visions rising before her of a silent schoolroom, of work laboured through without the poignant desire of Geoffrey’s praise. ‘Is it possible that you mean—that you have no other course than to leave Guernsey at once?’
Something in her manner made it seem that she referred their quarrel to him for final arbitration. But Geff Arbuthnot tried his utmost to congeal. His present temper indisposed him for compromise. He had been cut to the quick by that one scornful imputation, that one base utterance of Marjorie’s lips—‘The acres of Tintajeux, few though they be, are matters better worth caring for than Marjorie Bartrand, herself.’
He felt it impossible to forgive her.
‘I shall certainly not leave Guernsey without calling on the Seigneur—to be paid.’
Geoffrey was not superior to a feeling of pleasure in the repetition of these words. They were horribly cruel ones. It might well be, afterwards, that he remembered with remorse how the girl’s slender figure drooped, how her cheeks burned, how her hands fell listlessly upon her knee, one in the other’s palm.
‘And then—for the rest of the vacation, what are your plans?’ she repeated, presently.
‘I have no plans, now. The summer has gone out of my year! Maybe I shall follow in the footsteps of Gaston and his wife. Dinah, I know, would not be sorry to leave this place.’
He spoke without premeditation. It had, perhaps, not occurred to Geff Arbuthnot’s coarser masculine perception that his meagre outline of the past had revealed a secret of which Dinah was, herself, ignorant. To Marjorie, in her despair, the mention of Dinah’s name was a last blow: the heavier, perhaps, in that Geoffrey gave it with such calmness, was prepared, as a matter of course, to seek refuge in the friendship of the fair and gentle woman to whom, although she had never loved him, he ‘owed everything.’
‘Or I may cross at once to England. That is likeliest. In England one can always fall back on work. I have had enough of idleness. A boat calls here on Sunday morning that will suit me well enough.’
‘On Saturday, then, grandpapa and I will look for your visit. Could you not,’ suggested Marjorie, with magnanimity, ‘ask Mr. and Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot to come with you to Tintajeux?’
Geoffrey had a moment’s hesitation. There was a note in her fresh and youthful voice which he had never before distinguished, and which, I think, wrung his heart. But he would not allow himself to soften. He would not forgive her until she repented her of the thing which she had uttered.
‘Gaston has not returned, Miss Bartrand. There are heavy fog-banks still at sea. The Cherbourg boat was not signalled when I left town, and Dinah—well, Dinah, of course, will be miserable until she sees her husband’s face.’
Geff took up his hat in readiness for departure, and Marjorie rose from her chair.
‘The Cherbourg boat will be back before Saturday, but, in any case, grandpapa and I will count upon seeing you. Good-night, Mr. Arbuthnot. This is not your last visit to Tintajeux. I do not acknowledge that we are saying good-bye for ever.’
She kept herself under singular control. For a second or two she yielded her cold hand, bravely, into Geff’s keeping. As he left the drawing-room she accorded him a lofty minuet de la cour curtsey, learnt, in her babyhood, from her first French governess. Then, when he was gone, when the figure she had watched so often had rounded the last turning in the Tintajeux avenue, the poor child, with leaden steps, made her way to the schoolroom. Sinking in her place beside the ink-stained table, Marjorie Bartrand rested her face upon a heap of books, then burst into a very thunder-shower of tears.
Her scene with Geoffrey had swept away all sense of the dual personality that troubled her before his coming. The strong-minded Minerva, criticising love and marriage with acerbity, had vanished, and in her place was a commonplace little girl sobbing her heart out, as Rosie Verschoyle, as Ada de Carteret might have done, for the sweetheart her own unruly tongue had estranged.
If Geoffrey would but come back, take her in his arms, kiss and forgive her! So, dumbly, cried Marjorie’s heart.
But supper-time came and went. The sun dipped under the fading sea line, the twilight waned, the yellow stars stole forth, one by one, from the gray: Geoffrey Arbuthnot returned not.
She had acted with family pride, perhaps from virtue, conceivably from jealousy, without doubt, as became a Bartrand. These cold consolations were all that the universe, just at present, seemed likely to offer.